I had such a great chat with @mike on his Dot Social podcast, where we talked about the future of the web and why I'm a web optimist, why everyone should be a blogger, digital ownership, and decentralized social media.
I decided to rebuild my website in Kirby CMS, reprocessing 1600+ lines of content across 20 years from micro.blog. Here I talk about what I have built, how the move went, and what I still have left to do.
My motivation to get my #website back to sharing to #Mastodon & syncing replies back is due to #Eurovision. I'm finally catching up with this year's entries (overall mildly disappointing) and need to discuss them.
Question : je fais pas mal de petites notes de veille critiques sur Linkedin (dans le format du réseau, environ 3000 signes). Elles sont plutôt lues et partagées.
Histoire que ça ne tombe pas dans les limbes d'un énième réseau amené à se dégradé, diriez-vous que ce serait pertinent de les publier aussi sur mon blog maisouvaleweb.fr (moins alimenté ces temps-ci) ?
Je suis sûr qu’il y a des expert·e·s WordPress ici :
Quelle est la méthode la plus simple pour ajouter un flux JSON à un site existant, avec automatiquement dans l’attribut ˋattachments` l’image mise en avant, ou à défaut la première image du contenu ?
Integrating my website into the IndieWeb took longer than expected due to scattered resources and confusion. Should I do X or Y? Having too many options to choose from can lead to paralysis.
We don't want that, do we?
We want something simple, something that allows as many people as possible to get on board. An omakase 🍱.
Here's mine. You should start and finish everything within an hour at most!
I am continually impressed by my colleagues, friends, and acquaintances that make their own websites, whether it's design, dev, strategy, or somehow manage the entire task on their own. Regardless, get out there and make a site for yourself. Reach out for help if you need it.
I'm collecting a bunch that have recently emerged or recently found, but until I collect them up for posting, here's one to start with:
Back in the 80s before most of you were born, you could buy a word processing program, which was basically a text editor, and you could use it to write and then when it came time to send that writing to other people, you would print it. And get this the printer could take its input from any of those writing tools. There were no tiny little text boxes. The printers didn’t come with their own editors, you had choice and therefore there was lots of competition. Amazing, right?
You cannot do it anyway. Nobody on Mastodon et al. wants to read your full blog posts (#brevity has a value), so in the end you have to have at least two systems.
Yes, that textbox is horrible. Use something better.
I recently imported a decades worth of tweets on my site, and the hashtags were automatically added as regular tags. Now I want to go through and wrangle them. I know I can do a lot of this in core WordPress, but I’m hoping I can find some utilities that will make this easier.
After importing over a decade of tweets into my site, I had several improvements to offer to the import utility I used. I compiled my changes to the code, and submitted it as a pull request, detailing what I needed, and why.
WHEW what a process! I managed to get all of my tweets that I exported and deleted from Twitter two years ago, all imported into my website, including all of the photos and videos. I think I can finally say that I have centralized all of my content through alexstandiford.com now.
Huge thanks to @shawnhooper for building this importer, as it gave me a big leg up in the process.
I'll share a blog post that goes into details of the process soon.
I just finally deployed something I've been working on for a few weeks now: a feed of my writing, posting, reading, and other various activity that lives on my website at https://www.mollywhite.net/feed!
I've admired the POSSE (https://indieweb.org/POSSE; "Publish [on your] Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") model for a long time, but only finally found the time and energy to put something together that I'm actually happy with.
It's still super alpha, and I'm sure it will require a lot of bugfixes and future dev, but it's been really fun to work on some web software and move further in the indieweb direction.
The feed is built on top of the reading list software I've been running for a few years, and it ingests posts from Citation Needed.
I can also write posts in the microblog and automatically crosspost them to Twitter/Mastodon/Bluesky, while keeping the original post on my site. Like this (https://www.mollywhite.net/micro/entry/202403091817)!
@clmorgan Maybe #IndieWeb & #POSSE & the new abilities to consolidate comments may bring discussion together again?
I have been pondering the fragmentation of comments here on Mastodon (different readers see different parts of a discussion), & more importantly their impermanence (we can go to "original page" to see all, but replies may be purged). Having a copy of record on a site under personal control might be good. Fellow-historians, any thoughts or models?
I have long evangelized #POSSE as a way to work… and it is excellent to see the idea getting promotion from people like Corey Doctorow (who has been working in a POSSE way for MANY years!)