Tag: IndieWeb

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Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, and I don’t plan on returning.

Mastodon has filled Twitter’s niche for me over the last few years (obviously different people have different use cases, so it may not fit yours), and you can still find me there at @KelsonV@Wandering.shop.

As for the archive, I’m slowly going through and looking for threads (and occasional single posts) that I think are worth keeping, importing them where they seem to fit best on this website, whether on the blog or another section.

It may be time to do the same with Facebook and Instagram* too. I haven’t been active on either of them in ages, and I’d rather own my data IndieWeb style than wait for Meta to go the way of LiveJournal.

*I’ve already trimmed a lot of my Instagram history.

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In response to girrodocus’s question: #PersonalWebsite creators… what’s your rationale for deciding when to use a subdomain or a subdirectory?

I usually prefer to put sections in subdirectories. That makes it possible to make the entire site portable (depending on authoring tools, anyway). Ideally, I want something that could be zipped up and moved. Or sent to Archive Team. (One of the downsides of dynamic site generators is that you can’t do this.)

When I use subdomains, it’s typically because I want some sort of isolation between the content, or the server apps, etc. But in those cases I’m as likely to use another domain entirely.

I put my main blog in a subdirectory (/journal), but if I set up my own git repository or something like that, I’d probably put it in a subdomain.

That said, I’m currently trying to sort out what I want to keep at the domain I’ve had for the last 20 years and what to move to my IndieWeb identity site.

IndieWeb and Identity

It took 4 or 5 years from me discovering IndieWeb to actually building support into my website(s), because Hyperborea.org, named after a fictional place, felt like a digital home, but not an identity. So I set up KVibber.com as my digital identity instead.

I’ve been considering several approaches:

  • New stuff on KVibber, leave old stuff where it is.
  • Professional stuff on KVibber, fun stuff on Hyperborea.
  • Original work on KVibber, fandom stuff on Hyperborea.

I might move my scenic and nature photos over to KVibber but leave the funny and comic-con photos on Hyperborea, or move my tech articles over but leave the personal posts.

I’m also planning to put together a light microblog, probably on KVibber, to be the canonical location for short posts on Mastodon/Twitter/etc that I want to keep, but don’t feel big enough for a full blog entry. That’ll probably go on KVibber, even though it’ll blur the pro/fun and original/fan distinctions.

Originally on Wandering.shop (and a followup post).

Update September 2022: I guess I’ve tabled the whole question at this point. For now, I’m just using KVibber as a profile page and putting everything else on Hyperborea, like I was doing before.

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For human-readable HTML, I can write:

<a href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

For machine-readable HTML:

<a rel="author" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

For IndieWeb microformats:

<a class="p-author h-card" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

But for inline Schema.org I have to write:

<span property="author" typeof="person"><a property="url" href="https://example.com"><span property="name">Lois Lane</span></a>

I’ve been grumbling about all the redundancy in putting multiple sets of metadata on a page: classic meta tags, OpenGraph, Twitter cards, Schema.org, microformats2. So I’ve been looking to consolidate as much as I can.

I thought, Hey, Schema.org has inline markup implementations! I can probably just tag the same elements I used for microformats2!

But there are so many things like author where it wants a multi-part hierarchy when you could easily use a single tag.

At this point the added complexity to the code isn’t worth it. I may as well stick with the JSON-LD lump of text in the header. Heck, the extra spans and divs might actually add up to more bytes than the no-longer-duplicated content.

It’s not actually that much extra space, though, and the site in question generates all the markup from one set of markdown front matter. It just bugs me that to fill in all of them I need multiple copies of everything.

Though it is kind of funny to compare design decisions:

Facebook: We want a single block that can be copied and pasted and all looks the same. We don’t want to reuse existing tags and we don’t care about DRY.

IndieWeb: Invisible metadata inevitably gets out of date, and all this stuff that should already be on the page or in the head anyway, so let’s use what’s there and make it simple to mark up the actual page content.

Schema.org: CATEGORIZE ALLLLL THE THINGS!!!!!

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Over the years I’ve written a lot of troubleshooting posts on my blog, describing problems I’ve run into and how I solved them in hopes that other people with the same problems might find it helpful.

I’m starting to collect them on a mini-site that’s not a blog: Hyperborea Tech Tips.

Several things came together to inspire me to reorganize those posts:

  • Tinkering with IndieWeb.
  • Building a Gemini capsule.
  • Opening the developer tools on one of my WordPress-powered blog pages. There’s no reason a 500-word article should need 400KB and a dozen connections!
  • Keeping multiple WordPress blogs up to date with security fixes.
  • Reading about the garden and stream metaphor. (via)

The essence of the garden and stream is that we’ve gotten used to a constant, time-based stream of information, but some things are better handled as an idea-based, organically-growing and cultivated collection. Sometimes you want to post a status update to social media (into the stream), but sometimes you want to update a Wiki page (taking care of the garden).

A lot of stuff isn’t here because it belongs in a stream. It’s here because it became more convenient than copying a template, writing the page, adding links and uploading everything over FTP.

I’d already mirrored some of these troubleshooting posts on my Gemini capsule, so I figured they’d be a good place to start.

My goals with the sub-site:

  • Deeper dive into Eleventy, the static site generator I’d used to archive my Les Misérables commentary.
  • Dig into IndieWeb.
  • Light as possible. One CSS file, images only for content, system fonts, no JavaScript unless I have a specific thing that needs it. (And if I do have to add JavaScript, only include the parts I need, not half a megabyte of some framework or another.)
  • Look somewhat decent (and legible!) on screens from cell phone up to widescreen desktops.
  • Create a reusable template, both for my own projects and for other people.
  • Be at least as useful as the original blog posts, if not more!