Showing all posts tagged: technology
Tiny Awards 2024 shortlist announced, public voting open
24 July 2024
The shortlists for the 2024 Tiny Awards have been published. Now in their second year, the Tiny Awards honour “interesting, small, craft-y internet projects and spaces which basically make the web a more fun place to be.” Think the work of small, and independent creatives.
To be eligible, websites need to be non-commercial, and launched during, or after, June 2023.
Rotating Sandwiches — a website featuring images of rotating sandwiches, go and see for yourself — won the inaugural award in 2023. The 2024 winners — there are two categories, main award, and multiplayer — will be announced on Sunday 18 August 2024.
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awards, design, IndieWeb, technology
Sometimes my personal website looks like a bad photo of me
17 July 2024
Stefan Bohacek writing on his Mastodon page:
The problem with redesigning your personal website is that it looks great for about a week, and then you start to hate it.
This is a problem of the ages. In the late 1990’s I’d redesign my websites (I had several back then) every few weeks. Or what felt like every few weeks. The need to constantly update came from the desire to look as good as the other ever-changing personal sites that were around then.
It was also necessary — you understand — to be up with the absolute latest design trends, and apply our own interpretations and variations of them to our websites.
For instance, does anyone remember, or know of, TV lines? See an example here (not my work). TV lines became de rigueur with fad-like ferocity in late 1999 I think. If you didn’t feature at least a few images with TV lines, you were no longer with the times, you were w-a-y behind them.
The notion that a website should be redesigned about every six months began to emerge, perhaps, in early 2000. The idea being some consistency in appearance was desirable, while not lasting forever. It also, mercifully, gave us time to focus on other things. Non web things, among them.
Today, the design of disassociated has barely changed in years. It’s been in a single column “note pad” format since, I don’t know 2009/2010? The “d” logo came along in around 2013. It changes colour now and then. I call the current inception the “fruit salad” logo. It’s been here for two years.
The overall site design feels a bit bare sometimes, but I like to keep things on the minimal side. Pictures — when I post them — are meant to stand out, and not be swallowed up by the design. Otherwise though, I don’t have much time presently to think about whether I like the look or not. It’s a bit busy elsewhere right now, and writing posts is really my main priority.
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blogs, design, history, technology
Webmentions, great for IndieWeb, and, unfortunately, spammers
16 July 2024
Webmentions allow you to notify the publisher of a website that you’ve mentioned, or linked to, one of their pages, from your website or blog. Webmentions are commonly used in the Indie and Small Web communities, and have existed as a W3C recommendation since 2017.
But Webmentions have also come to the attention of spammers, who have made Webmention spam a thing. It means bloggers, such as Jan-Lukas Else, might receive numerous Webmention notifications, only to find they’ve been spammed.
It doesn’t take long, sadly, for a tool designed with useful intent, to be made to serve some other, far more nefarious, purpose.
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Spellcheck, autocorrect: the end of Notepad as a simple text editor
11 July 2024
Let’s go back in time. Way back in time.
To about this time in 2000. I had, or was just about, to start my first job as a web designer, at an exciting, multidisciplinary design studio, on Sydney’s trendy urban fringe. Ok: Surry Hills. I’m pleased to say I was headhunted into the role, thanks largely to the then inception of disassociated.
My job title was “coder/designer”, and I still have a copy of my business card somewhere. I was given a large box of them at the time, and asked by one of the directors to distribute them at will. At parties, at the pub, on the bus. Everywhere. To spread word of the studio, of course.
When I went into a meeting to discuss the role, I said I wanted to work to web standards with the HTML I would be coding/marking-up. One of the people sitting in on the meeting, who worked in the development arm of the agency, and whom I’d meet previously through local web design/personal website circles, shook his head at me.
He was on the same page: he too wanted to work with standards, but many projects of the day precluded their use. “Ok,” I said, “In that case, I only want to use Notepad for the code/markup I’ll be writing.” I said that because I didn’t want a bar of the bloated, ineffectual, WYSIWYG web design editors that were then available. Fun fact: I still don’t; I never have.
To that, they agreed. Notepad is one of the few Microsoft (MS) products I really like, and will miss on Linux. It has come bundled with Windows Operating Systems since 1983, and has remained little changed. I coded my first websites in Notepad, and built the WordPress theme you’re looking at now, in Notepad. That’s because Notepad is (was) a simple text editor. Notepad gave it to you as it was.
It doesn’t (didn’t) attempt to autocorrect or spellcheck your work. Imagine trying to markup a webpage, and have the app tell you the <IMG> tag was spelt incorrectly? Notepad left you to decide what was right and wrong. Why does any of this matter? Because I saw code/markup as a craft. I didn’t want some WYSIWYG web design app interfering with my work. If you wanted a text editor with spellcheck and autocorrect functions, there were other options.
Word among them. But now MS has decided to change the script. Autocorrect and spellcheck are coming to Notepad soon. Why, I have no idea, given the features are completely unnecessary. But MS will be MS. I’m surprised they’re not introducing the feature to WordPad, a surely (slightly) more robust word processor than Notepad.
Ironically, I read the news on Daring Fireball, a website with a distinct Apple bent. John Gruber, publisher of Daring Fireball, seems to be all in favour of the move, declaring it overdue:
Better late than never, but it’s kind of wild that Notepad is 41 years old and only getting these features now.
The whole thing is though, it’s not wild at all. The absence of these features is precisely what made Notepad so appealing in the first place. No doubt there are simple text editor alternatives for Windows. I’ve found one for Linux. Maybe the autocorrect or spellcheck functions will be a feature of Notepad only on Windows 11, which I won’t see.
Perhaps there will be a way to disable the operation of autocorrect or spellcheck in Notepad. Who knows? Of course, it’s moot point as far as I am concerned. But it is a tad sad to see so profound a change coming to an app that turned out to be quite the life changer for me all those years ago.
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Ye Old Blogroll, a trove of links to blogs, personal websites
26 June 2024
My thanks to Ray for recently adding disassociated to Ye Old Blogroll, a directory of small and independent websites and blogs. Directory websites like Ray’s are invaluable when it comes to promoting the work of Indie and Small Web writers and bloggers, which is often overshadowed by all sorts of things, including some of the search engines.
Blogrolls and links pages were once often a common feature of websites and blogs, as were web directories — similar to Ye Old Blogroll — in the past, before search engines emerged. They were one of the few ways website owners could make their work known to a wider audience.
While looking around Ye Old Blogroll, I spotted this post about Substack, by Ray. Substack, an online publishing platform, was flavour of the month about two years ago. I even opened an account myself. Bloggers and writers were drawn in by the appeal of earning real money for their work, and I believe many did, or still are, doing well.
But, it was not for me. For one thing, it would have meant “starting over” again. That is, building up a following on Substack, when I already had one, or a semblance of one, here. And why would I go diluting my online presence? It would almost be the same as setting up on something like Instagram. Plus, some other entity would have ultimate control over my page there. They could decide to pull the plug at whim. And then there is this point made by Ray:
On a related note, when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web.
The platform has also drawn the ire of some, including Jason Kottke, who is critical of the sort of content Substack allows to be published. No, stay in your own place. There’ll be ways to make it pay, if that’s what you need.
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blogs, history, IndieWeb, technology, trends
Windows 11 forces data backup to OneDrive, possible workaround
26 June 2024
Maybe it’s time to start a Windows 11 is going just great website, similar to Molly White’s Web3 is Going Just Great. I say this after reading about another instance of heavy-handedness on Microsoft’s part, at Neowin:
Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11’s initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it.
Quietly and without any announcement. What a way to treat customers/users. OneDrive is a little like Apple’s iCloud, which stores data (files, photos) according to choices made by the individual. The difference, now, between iCloud and OneDrive, is one is user configurable, the other isn’t.
This is foul. Every time OneDrive tried to open on my old Win 10 install, I promptly closed it down. No doubt Microsoft was watching my every move as it was, but there was no way I’d trust them with copies of my data files.
As a result of this move though, some inadvertent OneDrive users are apparently finding their auto-backed up data exceeds the default five gigabyte OneDrive folder limit. Any excess above five-gigs needs to be paid for. Marvellous.
But there may, possibly, be a workaround.
It involves transferring (cut/copy and paste) all files from the default data folders, e.g. Documents, and moving them to a separate folder on your hard drive. Perhaps call the new folder My Data, and then set up sub-folders inside that for your data, e.g. photos, word documents, etc, etc. This is what I’ve been doing all along, I’ve never kept anything in those default folders. I even set up my own separate downloads folder, and configured all downloads to save there.
Trying this might keep data and files out of OneDrive’s reach. For now, anyway.
Despite using Dropbox for a lot of the files I use daily, I also keep backups of everything on thumb drives (which are stowed securely elsewhere). It was a bit of work to set up, but is quick and easy to use now. Hopefully my data storage system also helps keeps my data and files a little more secure.
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security, software, technology, trends
Blogging about blogging versus adding value through your blog
21 June 2024
The majority of my posts are either platform explanations/justifications or organizational posts. Stuff like, “I’m moving the Archives here” or “I’ve added a ton of Links there.” Other times it’s simple announcements about me moving my blog someplace new. So, why do I feel the need to talk about this?
This is something I grapple with, though maybe not to the same degree. Are people really interested in my blog posts about my blog? They’re pretty far and few between here, the last meta, blogging about blogging post, was when I added (re-added) a blogroll. I don’t know, maybe they’re a bit more common. What’s meta, and what’s not meta, can be highly subjective.
Yet a concept that — supposedly — has shaped the way I write here, derives from Twitter. I’m talking about Twitter when it was Twitter back in the day, not what it is presently. Anyway, we’d all been on Twitter for a couple of years, when 2009 arrived. By then, Twitter was deemed to be a mature platform for networking and micro-blogging, and now it was time, we, the users, conducted ourselves with a little more… sophistication.
“Add value” was a term frequently bandied about at the top of 2009. Add value meant we ought to ease back on tweeting about what we had for lunch (but not completely), and start contributing to a more useful overall conversation. Maybe there were a few years when value was indeed added through our tweets, or at least those of whom I moved in the same circles with.
But I decided I needed to bring the add value mantra to disassociated. To me, that meant less posts of an introspective nature, and more, er, useful stuff. No more: “I updated to the latest version of WordPress”, or “I backed up my website database last night”. I wanted to publish articles people might find helpful. I wasn’t sure what interest people, who wanted to find out more about how the Oscar nomination process worked, or etiquette at a classical music recital, would have in stuff meta.
Some people might argue these two examples are informational, or magazine style, posts. Not the sort of thing that belongs on a personal website. But the distinction possibly lies in the definition of a personal website. One of my first websites was a personal website, but not the very first. Instead, it was a web fiction series (emphasis on fiction), a collaboration with a friend. At that point, I saw the web as, among other things, a story telling platform.
In other words, anything other than a platform for publishing diary-like posts. Who could possibly be interested in that, I thought. But after seeing others doing it, I eventually followed suit, and started publishing an online journal. By the time the web fiction series came to an end, I had two websites, one personal — which included my online journal — and the other more magazine-like, that I called Channel Static. But I’m not sure how much “value” Channel Static really added to anything.
This was all in 1997, 1998 though. I don’t think it was until 2007, when I re-invented disassociated as a WordPress website, that value really came into the equation. But not at first. There was much meta-stuff going on. WordPress version this, WordPress version that. There was a whole lot of blogging about blogging also. A lot of that may have been me channelling the zeitgeist though.
Blogging was taking off in 2007. There were people making a full time living through their blogs. It was an exciting time to be blogging alive. Despite running a magazine website that was still meant to be a personal website, in so much as it was mine, it was near nigh impossible to ignore what was happening in what we called the blogosphere.
The 2009 catch cry to “add value” was more of a wake-up call to me to get more serious about what I published here. Even if the message had been intended for the twitterati. But the next person’s interpretation of “adding value” is their call to make. If you feel you achieve that through informational, magazine style, publishing on your personal website, well that’s fine. Exactly the same goes for meta, and blogging about blogging, posts.
They’re not called personal websites for nothing: they’re there for you to do whatever you choose.
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blogs, history, technology, trends, Twitter
Easy OS, an experimental Linux distro, by Barry Kauler
21 June 2024
I’m in the process of migrating my OS away from Windows. I’ve been running Linux Mint, considered to be a user-friendly, Windows-like distribution of the Linux family of OS’s, on a backup device for almost two weeks now. It’s been a learning curve naturally, but so far, so good.
In the meantime though, the word Linux seems to jump out at me, whenever I’m going through my RSS subscriptions, or other news channels. A distribution (distro), called EasyOS, the creation of software developer Barry Kauler, caught my eye the other day, and might be one to consider, if you’re looking to change your OS, for whatever reason.
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The WWDC edition of the Talk Show, ChatGPT, tall poppy syndrome
17 June 2024
John Gruber, of Daring Fireball, presented another edition of the Talk Show, at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The live show featured usual Apple executives Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak, who were joined this year by John Giannandrea, perhaps best known for his work with Siri, Apple’s digital assistant.
I’m hardly an Apple aficionado, I only have an iPhone, but I still catch the WWDC edition of the Talk Show, just because I usually find the topics of conversation fascinating. I also read Daring Fireball daily. The website, not the RSS feed. Both experiences are essentially pretty much the same, so I opt for the website. But again, not because I’m any Apple fanboi, but mainly because a lot of what is published there is simply interesting to read.
I don’t usually watch the show in its entirety though, I listen, in podcast style, while doing other things. Two hours is a long time to sit and watch. But I took time this year to read some of the comments left on the Talk Show YouTube page. There’s a few unhappy campers out there.
A number of people were critical of what they considered to be Gruber’s rambling style of interviewing. I can’t say I’ve ever found that a problem, at least with the WWDC shows. He spends a bit of time introducing a topic, which sometimes need explanation, and then his guests respond. I suspect envy may be at the root of most of this criticism.
And a little bit of what, in Australia is referred to as, tall poppy syndrome. Some people also felt Gruber doesn’t ask hard enough questions, but I’m not sure that’s the intent of the WWDC edition.
The topic of Apple’s partnership with ChatGPT was raised, specifically the question of who is paying who for the technology that will power Apple Intelligence, their in-development AI platform. It’s been the subject of much speculation. A firm, but friendly, “no answer” was offered by Greg Joswiak, Apple’s head of worldwide marketing, however. Well, at least the question was asked.
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artificial intelligence, technology, trends
What about anti-virus apps? On going #IndieOS with Linux
14 June 2024
As I wrote a few days ago, I’m in the process of trying out Linux operating systems, specifically Linux Mint. With the release of Windows 11, I think Microsoft has (finally) jumped the shark. Others will probably argue that happened long before Win 11 came along. They’re likely right.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Mint, and what apps I might need to run the OS as smoothly as possible. Inevitably, the question of anti-virus (AV) software came up, something I posed to my search engine. I was quite surprised to read that anti-virus software isn’t (necessarily) needed on Linux OS’s.
Needless to say, I did a double take when I saw that. Isn’t going without an AV app foolhardy in this day and age? Well, yes in general, but in regards to Linux, possibly. That’s because there are a few factors at play. For one, devices with Linux OS’s are only present in relatively small numbers. As such, they’re not worth the effort for most writers of malicious code.
Targeting Linux wouldn’t cause enough disruption for them apparently. I’d say there though, disruption to even one person’s computer would be devastation in spades. But let’s hold to the hope that writing Linux viruses is, for the most part, a waste of time.
Then there’s the difficulty of running malicious code, on account of the permissions setting structure of Linux. Someone would almost knowingly need to install a virus file for one to take hold. I’ve only been using Mint a few days so far, but each time I install an app, I’ve needed to enter a password.
That might present a huddle when it comes to executing a virus. Another point is just about every Linux app is only available by way of an app store. And only vetted, safe apps, are included in the store. If apps are sourced solely through Linux stores, supposedly a system will remain safe.
I have no doubt that viruses present far less of a threat to Linux computers, but still feel nervous about being without some sort of AV protection, as useless as some Linux users claim it to be. So I’ll see how I go. But it made me wonder. Is the whole AV industry a by-product of the vulnerabilities in one family of operating systems?
Malicious code presents a problem for all platforms, so that’s unlikely to be the case, even if it might be fun to think as much. On the other hand, it seems to me the family of operating systems in question, is the virus itself, in so much as it now seeks to dominate, and control, its users.
While the jury may be out — in my mind at least — as to the question of AV apps for Linux, I’m sure that taking this step into the realm of what I’m calling #IndieOS, is the right one. And why not?
If #IndieWeb represents a move away from an internet under the control of large corporate entities, to one where individuals have more sway, then migrating to Linux is adopting an OS that likewise gives individuals similar control. #IndieOS? Yep, that’ll do me.
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