Journal tags: personal

I described using my feed reader like this:

I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.

Instead it’s like this:

When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book.

It also feels different to social media. Like Lucy Bellwood says:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

There’s also the blessed lack of any algorithm:

Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.

Cory Doctorow has been praising the merits of RSS:

This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface.

Like Lucy, he emphasises the lack of algorithm:

By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.

Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.

The only algorithm at work in my feed reader—or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate. Like this morning, when I read this from Alice:

There is no better feeling than walking along, lost in my own thoughts, and feeling a small hand slip into mine. There you are. Here I am. I love you, you silly goose.

And then I read this from Denise

I pass a mother and daughter, holding hands. The little girl is wearing a sequinned covered jacket. She looks up at her mother who says “…And the sun’s going to come out and you’re just going to shine and shine and shine.”

Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.

There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:

Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.

Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:

Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.

And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.

Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.

Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.

But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:

The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.

The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.

I was having a discussion with some people recently about writing. It was quite cathartic. Everyone was sharing the kinds of things that their inner critic tells them. We were all encouraging each other to ignore that voice.

I mentioned that the two reasons for not writing that I hear most often from people are variations on “I’ve got nothing to say.”

The first version is when someone says they’ve got nothing to say because they’re not qualified to write on a particualar topic. “After all, there are real experts out there who know far more than me. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

But then once you do actually understand a topic, the second version appears. “If I know about this, then everyone knows about this. It’s obvious. So I’ve got nothing to say.”

In both cases, you absolutely should be writing and sharing! In the first instance, you’ve got the beginner’s mind—a valuable perspective. In the second instance, you’ve got personal experience—another valuable perspective.

In other words, while it seems like there’s never a good time to write about something, the truth is that there’s never a bad time to write about something.

So write! Share! Publish!

Then someone in the discussion said something I always find a bit deflating. They said they had no problem writing, but they’re not so keen on publishing.

“After all”, they said, “the world doesn’t need yet another opinion.”

This gets me down because it’s hard to argue with. It’s true that the world doesn’t need another think piece. The world doesn’t need to hear your thoughts on some topic. The world doesn’t need to hear what you’ve been up to recently.

But you know what? Screw what the world needs.

If we’re going to be hardnosed about this, then the world doesn’t need any more books. The world doesn’t need any more music. The world doesn’t need art. Heck, the world doesn’t need us at all.

So don’t publish for the world.

When I write something here on my website, I’m not thinking about the world reading it. That would be paralyzing. I do sometimes imagine that one person is reading it; someone just like me who hasn’t yet had this particular thought, or come up with that particular idea.

I’m writing for myself. I write to figure out what I think. I also publish mostly for myself—a public archive for future me. But if what I publish just happens to connect with one other person, I’m glad.

So, yeah, it’s true that the world doesn’t need you to write and share and publish. Isn’t that liberating? You’re free to write and share and publish for yourself.

The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.

There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.

Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.

Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.

I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.

I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.

But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.

So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.

It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.

While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.

“It’s having your own website”, I said.

But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.

Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.

What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.

One of the first ever personal websites—long before the word “blog” was a mischievous gleam in Peter’s eye—was Justin Hall’s links.net. Linking was right there in the domain name.

I really enjoy sharing links on my website. It feels good to point to something and say, “Hey, check this out!”

Other people are doing it too.

• I really enjoy Neil’s links (RSS), always wrapped up with a quote of the day.
• Scott Boms’s Through Lines (RSS) are always packed with good stuff, along with new typeface releases.
• Jim Nielsen’s notes (RSS) are as valuable as his blog, which is to say, very.
• Then there’s Clive Thompson’s Linkfest (RSS)—it’s right there in the name.

Then there are some relatively new additions to the linking gang:

• Hidde’s links (RSS),
• Andy’s links (RSS), and
• Sophie’s links (RSS) batched into a weekly release.

There are more out there for you to discover and add to your feed reader of choice. Good link hunting!

I wrote close to a hundred entries in my journal—or blog—in 2023. Here are some entries I like:

• Blood — One hundred duck-sized Christs is better than one horse-sized Jesus.
• Tragedy — Greek tragedies are time-travel stories.
• Reaction — Weekend action, weekend reaction.
• Conduct — Kindnesses and cruelties.
• Lovers in a dangerous time — Europe, 1991.

I wrote some actually useful stuff about web design and development too.

• Three attributes for better web forms — Better UX through better HTML: inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete.
• Read-only web apps — It’s fine to require JavaScript for read/write functionality. But have you considered a read-only mode without JavaScript?
• event.target.closest — DOM scripting and event handling.
• HTML web components — Don’t replace. Augment.

That last one really resonated with people, which is very gratifying. It was so nice seeing the web mentions come in when people wrote responses on their own blogs.

It feels like there’s been a resurgence in this kind of blog-to-blog conversation since Elongate. Personal publishing is reviving as Twitter is dying (I’m not going to call it X—if he’s going to deadname his own daughter, I’m going to do the same to his company).

If you have your own website, I’m looking forward to reading your words in 2024.

I’ve been on Mastodon since 2017, but now my website is on there too. I’m @[email protected]. My website is @[email protected]—search for adactio.com in your Mastodon client of choice.

What’s the difference? Well, with my mastodon.social account, I’m syndicating stuff—most of my notes, and all of my journal—and including a link back to the original source here on my site. With the adactio.com account, it is the original source.

I thought about migrating over to my adactio.com account from my mastodon.social account, but I actually like having a separate profile. I browse Mastodon a lot more than I post, and browsing is a lot easier to do with a regular account.

If you’d like your website to be available on Mastodon, Bridgy Fed is the magic tool that makes it available. You’ll need to be able to send webmentions, and you’ll need to configure some .well-known directives. If you’ve you’ve already got webmention-sending set up, it’s all quite straightforward (though you will also need to update your HTML to include a link back to fed.brid.gy in each entry you want syndicated).

For some reason the syndication didn’t seem to be working at first, but then when I followed @[email protected] from my @[email protected] account, it started working. Maybe there needs to be at least one follower.

Also, my links don’t seem to be showing up on Mastodon even though it looks like everything is posting okay. Not sure what that is about.

Anyway, if you want to follow me on Mastodon, you now have a choice. There’s me, @[email protected], or there’s my website, @[email protected].

John Willshire has been pondering web marginilia AKA stuff you put in your sidebar.

He has a particular fondness for the good ol’ blogroll. I’ve still got my analogue equivalent on my homepage—the bedroll. It’s a list of links to people who’ve stayed over. Maybe I should also have a regular blogroll, but I suspect it would just be a reproduction of feeds I’m subscribed to.

Then there’s marginalia at the level of a blog post, rather than a whole blog. Kevin Marks points out that this is something that Vannevar Bush described his theoretical memex doing—a device I was just talking about. Kevin created a proof of concept showing outbound and inbound links.

Outbound links are annoted versions of the A elements in a blog post. Inbound links are webmentions (which should now include this post of mine).

Kevin has those links in the margins on either side of the blog post. I’ve also got links that go with my blog posts, but they’re displayed linearly:

1. the post itself,
2. any responses (webmentions),
3. related posts, something I only recently added, and
4. posts from the same day further back in time.

Do they still count as marginalia when they’re presented vertically rather than alongside? For mobile devices, I’m not sure there’s any alternative.

After two days at border:none in Nuremberg, it was time for two days at Indie Web Camp, also in Nuremberg.

I hadn’t been to an Indie Web Camp since before The Situation. It felt very good to be back. I had almost forgotten how inspiring and productive they can be.

This one had a good turnout of around twenty people. We had ourselves an excellent first day of thought-provoking sessions. Then on day two it was time to put some of those ideas into action.

A little trick I like to do on the practical day is to have two tasks to attempt: one of them quite simple, and the other more ambitious. That way, as long as I get the simpler task done, I’ll always have at least something to demo at the end of the day.

This time I attempted three bits of home improvement on my website.

Autolinking Mastodon usernames

The first problem I set myself was ostensibly the simple one. But it involved regular expressions, so then I had two problems.

I wanted to automatically link up Mastodon usernames if I mentioned one in my notes. For example, during border:none I mentioned Brian’s mastodon username in a note: @briansuda@loðfíll.is.

That turned out to be an excellent test case. Those Icelandic characters made sure I wasn’t making unwarranted assumptions about character sets.

Here’s the regular expression I came up with. It’s not foolproof by any means. Basically it looks for @[email protected].

Good enough. Ship it.

Related posts

My next task was a bit more ambitious. It involved SQL queries, something I’m slightly better at than regular expressions but that’s a very low bar.

I wanted to show related posts when you get to the end of one of my blog posts.

I’ve been tagging all my blog posts for years so that’s the mechanism I used for finding similar posts. There’s probably a clever SQL statement that could do this, but I ended up brute-forcing it a bit.

I don’t feel too bad about the hacky clunky nature of my solution, because I cache blog post pages. That means only the first person to view the blog post (usually me) will suffer any performance impacts from my clunky database queries. After that everything’s available straight from a cached file.

Let’s say you’re reading a blog post of mine that I’ve tagged with ten different keywords. I make a separate SQL query for each keyword to get all the other posts that use that tag. Then it’s a matter of sorting through all the results.

I loop through the results of each tag and apply a score to the tagged post. If the post shares one tag with the post you’re looking at, it has a score of one. If it shares two tags, it has a score of two, and so on.

I decided that for a post to be considered related, it had to share at least three tags. I also decided to limit the list of related posts to a maximum of five.

It worked out pretty well. If you scroll down on my recent post about JavaScript, you’ll see links to related posts about JavaScript. If you read through a post on accessibility testing, you’ll find other posts about accessibility testing. If you make it to the end of this post about Mars colonisation you’ll see links to more posts about exploring our solar system.

Right now I’m just doing this for my blog but I’d like to do it for my links too. A job for a future Indie Web Camp.

Link rot

I was very inspired by Remy’s recent post on how he’s tackling link rot on his site. I wanted to do the same for mine.

On the first day at Indie Web Camp I led a session on link rot to gather ideas and alternative approaches. We had a really good discussion, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’ll never be a perfect solution. There’ll always be some false positives and some false negatives.

The other Jeremy at Indie Camp Nuremberg blogged about the session. Sebastian Greger was attending remotely and the session inspired him to spend the second day also tackling linkrot.

In the end I decided to stick with Remy’s two-pronged approach:

1. a client-side script that—as a progressive enhancement—intercepts outbound links and re-routes them to
2. a server-side script that redirects to the Internet Archive if the link is broken.

Here’s the JavaScript I wrote for the first part.

It’s very similar to Remy’s but with one little addition. I check to see if the clicked link is inside an h-entry and if it is, I pass on the date from the post’s dt-published value.

Here’s the PHP I wrote for the server-side redirector. The comments tell the story of what the code is doing:

• Check that the request is coming from my site.
• There also has to be a URL provided in the query string.
• Make a very quick curl request to get the response headers from the URL. The time limit is set to 1 second.
• If there was any error (like a time out), give up and go to the URL.
• Pick the response headers apart to get the HTTP status code.
• If the response is OK, go to the URL.
• If the response is a redirect, go around again but this time use the redirect URL.
• Construct the archive.org search endpoint.
• If we have a date, provide it. Otherwise ask for the latest snapshot.
• Ping that archive.org URL. This time there’s no time limit; this might take a while.
• If there’s an archived copy, redirect to that.
• There’s no archived copy. Give up and go the URL anyway.

Not perfect by any means, but it works for the most common cases of link rot.

For the demo at the end of the day I went back into my archive of over 10,000 links and plucked out some old posts, like this one from December 2005. It takes a little while to do the rerouting but eventually you get to see the archived version from the same time period as when I linked to it.

Here’s another link from 2005. Here’s another. Those links are broken now, but with a little patience, you’ll still get to read them on the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive’s wayback machine really is a gift. I can’t imagine how would it be even remotely possible to try to address link rot on my site without archive.org.

I will continue to donate money to the Internet Archive and I encourage you to do the same.

Ben wrote a post a little while back about maybe organising his home page differently. It’s currently a stream.

That prompted Om to ask is “stream” as a design paradigm over? Mind you, he’s not talking about personal websites:

Across the web, one can see “streams” losing their preeminence. Social networks are increasingly algorithmically organized, so their stream isn’t really a free-flowing stream. It is more like a river that has been heavily dammed. It is organized around what the machine thinks we need to see based on what we have seen in the past.

Funnily enough, I’ve some recent examples of personal homepages become more like social networks, at least in terms of visual design. A lot of people I know are liking the recent redesigns from Adam and Jhey.

Here on my site, my home page is kind of a stream. I’ve got notes, links, and blog posts one after another in chronological order. The other sections of my site are ways of focusing in on the specific types of content links, short notes, blog posts in my journal.

Behind the scenes, entries those separate sections of my site are all stored in the same database table. In some ways, the separation into different sections of the site is more like tagging. So the home page is actually the simplest bit to implement: grab the latest 20 entries out of that database table.

I don’t make too much visual distinction between the different kinds of posts. My links and my notes look quite similar. And if I post a lot of commentary with a link, it looks a lot like a blog post.

Maybe I should make them more distinct, visually. Because I actually like the higgedly-piggedly nature of a stream of different kinds of stuff. I want the vibe to be less like a pristine Apple store, and more like a chaotic second-hand bookstore.

Going back to what Ben wrote about his site:

As of right now, the homepage is a mix of long-form posts, short thoughts, and links I consider interesting, presented as a stream. It’s a genuine representation of what I’m reading and thinking about, and each post’s permalink page looks fine to me, but it doesn’t quite hold together as a whole. If you look at my homepage with fresh eyes, my stream is a hodgepodge. There’s no through line.

For me, that’s a feature, not a bug. There’s no through line on my home page either. I like that.

Right now, Twitter feels like Dunkirk beach in May 1940. And look, here comes a plucky armada of web servers running Mastodon instances!

Others have written some guides to getting started on Mastodon:

• An oversimplified guide to setting up Mastodon by Sarah Higley,
• An Increasingly Less-Brief Guide to Mastodon by Noëlle Anthony,
• 10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience by Jens Oliver Meiert, and
• How to Get Started on Mastodon by Justin Pot for Wired.

There are also tools like Twitodon to help you migrate from Twitter to Mastodon.

Getting on board isn’t completely frictionless. Understanding how Mastodon works can be confusing. But then again, so was Twitter fifteen years ago.

Right now, many Mastodon instances are struggling with the influx of new sign-ups. But this is temporary. And actually, it’s also very reminiscent of the early unreliable days of Twitter.

I don’t want to go into the technical details of Mastodon and the fediverse—even though those details are fascinating and impressive. What I’m really struck by is the vibe.

In a nutshell, I’m loving it! It feels …nice.

I was fully expecting Mastodon to be full of meta-discussions about Mastodon, but in the past few weeks I’ve enjoyed people posting about stone circles, astronomy, and—obviously—cats and dogs.

The process of finding people to follow has been slow, but in a good way. I’ve enjoyed seeking people out. It’s been easier to find the techy folks, but I’ve also been finding scientists, journalists, and artists.

On the one hand, the niceness of the experience isn’t down to technical architecture; it’s all about the social norms. On the other hand, those social norms are very much directed by technical decisions. The folks working on the fediverse for the past few years have made very thoughtful design decisions to amplify niceness and discourage nastiness. It’s all very gratifying to experience!

Personally, I’m posting to Mastodon via my own website. As much as I’m really enjoying Mastodon, I still firmly believe that nothing beats having control of your own content on your domain.

But I also totally get that not everyone has the same set of priorities as me. And frankly, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to have their own domain name.

It’s like there’s a spectrum of ownership. On one end, there’s publishing on your own website. On the other end, there’s publishing on silos like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Instagram, and MySpace.

Publishing on Mastodon feels much closer to the website end of the spectrum than it does to the silo end of the spectrum. If something bad happens to the Mastodon instance you’re on, you can up and move to a different instance, taking your social graph with you.

In a way, it’s like delegating domain ownership to someone you trust. If you don’t have the time, energy, resources, or interest in having your own domain, but you trust someone who’s running a Mastodon instance, it’s the next best thing to publishing on your own website.

Simon described it well when he said Mastodon is just blogs:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

And rather than compare Mastodon to Twitter, Simon makes a comparison with RSS:

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

Lots of other folks are feeling the same excitement in the air that I’m getting:

Bastian wrote:

Real conversations. Real people. Interesting content. A feeling of a warm welcoming group. No algorithm to mess around with our timelines. No troll army to destory every tiny bit of peace. Yes, Mastodon is rough around the edges. Many parts are not intuitive. But this roughness somehow added to the positive experience for me.

This could really work!

Brent Simmons wrote:

The web is wide open again, for the first time in what feels like forever.

I concur! Though, like Paul, I love not being beholden to either Twitter or Mastodon:

I love not feeling bound to any particular social network. This website, my website, is the one true home for all the stuff I’ve felt compelled to write down or point a camera at over the years. When a social network disappears, goes out of fashion or becomes inhospitable, I can happily move on with little anguish.

But like I said, I don’t expect everyone to have the time, means, or inclination to do that. Mastodon definitely feels like it shares the same indie web spirit though.

Personally, I recommend experiencing Mastodon through the website rather than a native app. Mastodon instances are progressive web apps so you can add them to your phone’s home screen.

You can find me on Mastodon as @[email protected]

I’m not too bothered about what instance I’m on. It really only makes a difference to my local timeline. And if I do end up finding an instance I prefer, then I know that migrating will be quite straightforward, by design. Perhaps I should be on an instance with a focus on front-end development or the indie web. I still haven’t found much of an Irish traditional music community on the fediverse. I’m wondering if maybe I should start a Mastodon instance for that.

While I’m a citizen of mastodon.social, I’m doing my bit by chipping in some money to support it: sponsorship levels on Patreon start at just $1 a month. And while I can’t offer much technical assistance, I opened my first Mastodon pull request with a suggested improvement for the documentation.

I’m really impressed with the quality of the software. It isn’t perfect but considering that it’s an open source project, it’s better than most VC-backed services with more and better-paid staff. As Giles said, comparing it to Twitter:

I’m using Mastodon now and it’s not the same, but it’s not shit either. It’s different. It takes a bit of adjustment. And I’m enjoying it.

Most of all, I love, love, love that Mastodon demonstrates that things can be different. For too long we’ve been told that behavioural advertising was an intrinsic part of being online, that social networks must inevitably be monolithic centralised beasts, that we have to relinquish control to corporations in order to be online. The fediverse is showing us a better way. And this isn’t just a proof of concept either. It’s here now. It’s here to stay, if you want it.

When I wrote about democratising dev, I made brief mention of the growing “no code” movement:

Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.

But I didn’t describe what no-code is, as I understand it.

I’m taking the term at face value to mean a mechanism for creating a website—preferably on a domain you control—without having to write anything in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or any back-end programming language.

By that definition, something like WordPress.com (as opposed to WordPress itself) is a no-code tool:

Create any kind of website. No code, no manuals, no limits.

I’d also put Squarespace in the same category:

Start with a flexible template, then customize to fit your style and professional needs with our website builder.

And its competitor, Wix:

Discover the platform that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence exactly the way you want.

Webflow provides the same kind of service, but with a heavy emphasis on marketing websites:

Your website should be a marketing asset, not an engineering challenge.

Bubble is trying to cover a broader base:

Bubble lets you create interactive, multi-user apps for desktop and mobile web browsers, including all the features you need to build a site like Facebook or Airbnb.

Wheras Carrd opts for a minimalist one-page approach:

Simple, free, fully responsive one-page sites for pretty much anything.

All of those tools emphasise that don’t need to need to know how to code in order to have a professional-looking website. But there’s a parallel universe of more niche no-code tools where the emphasis is on creativity and self-expression instead of slickness and professionalism.

neocities.org:

Create your own free website. Unlimited creativity, zero ads.

mmm.page:

Make a website in 5 minutes. Messy encouraged.

hotglue.me:

unique tool for web publishing & internet samizdat

I’m kind of fascinated by these two different approaches: professional vs. expressionist.

I’ve seen people grapple with this question when they decide to have their own website. Should it be a showcase of your achievements, almost like a portfolio? Or should it be a glorious mess of imagery and poetry to reflect your creativity? Could it be both? (Is that even doable? Or desirable?)

Robin Sloan recently published his ideas—and specs—for a new internet protocol called Spring ’83:

Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a “board”, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. Boards invite publishers to use all the richness of modern HTML and CSS. Plain text and blue links are also enthusiastically supported.

It’s not a no-code tool (you need to publish in HTML), although someone could easily provide a no-code tool to sit on top of the protocol. Conceptually though, it feels like it’s an a similar space to the chaotic good of neocities.org, mmm.page, and hotglue.me with maybe a bit of tilde.town thrown in.

It feels like something might be in the air. With Spring ’83, the Block protocol, and other experiments, people are creating some interesting small pieces that could potentially be loosely joined. No code required.

When I post a link, I do it for two reasons.

First of all, it’s me pointing at something and saying “Check this out!”

Secondly, it’s a way for me to stash something away that I might want to return to. I tag all my links so when I need to find one again, I just need to think “Now what would past me have tagged it with?” Then I type the appropriate URL: adactio.com/links/tags/whatever

There are some links that I return to again and again.

Back in 2008, I linked to a document called A Few Notes on The Culture. It’s a copy of a post by Iain M Banks to a newsgroup back in 1994.

Alas, that link is dead. Linkrot, innit?

But in 2013 I linked to the same document on a different domain. That link still works even though I believe it was first published around twenty(!) years ago (view source for some pre-CSS markup nostalgia).

Anyway, A Few Notes On The Culture is a fascinating look at the world-building of Iain M Banks’s Culture novels. He talks about the in-world engineering, education, biology, and belief system of his imagined utopia. The part that sticks in my mind is when he talks about economics:

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual immaturity and — through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others — a kind of synthetic evil.

Those three paragraphs might be the most succinct critique of unfettered capitalism I’ve come across. The invisible hand as a paperclip maximiser.

Like I said, it’s a fascinating document. In fact I realised that I should probably store a copy of it for myself.

I have a section of my site called “extras” where I dump miscellaneous stuff. Most of it is unlinked. It’s mostly for my own benefit. That’s where I’ve put my copy of A Few Notes On The Culture.

Here’s a funny thing …for all the times that I’ve revisited the link, I never knew anything about the site is was hosted on—vavatch.co.uk—so this most recent time, I did a bit of clicking around. Clearly it’s the personal website of a sci-fi-loving college student from the early 2000s. But what came as a revelation to me was that the site belonged to …Adrian Hon!

I’m impressed that he kept his old website up even after moving over to the domain mssv.net, founding Six To Start, and writing A History Of The Future In 100 Objects. That’s a great snackable book, by the way. Well worth a read.

Matt wrote recently about how different writers keep notes:

I’m also reminded of how writers I love and respect maintain their own reservoirs of knowledge, complete with migratory paths down from the mountains.

I have a section of my site called “notes” but the truth is that every single thing I post on here—whether it’s a link, a blog post, or anything else—is really a “note to self.”

When it comes to retrieving information from this online memex of mine, I use tags. I’ve got search forms on my site, but usually I’ll go to the address bar in my browser instead and think “now, what would past me have tagged that with…” as I type adactio.com/tags/... (or, if I want to be more specific, adactio.com/links/tags/... or adactio.com/journal/tags/...).

It’s very satisfying to use my website as a back-up brain like this. I can get stuff out of my head and squirreled away, but still have it available for quick recall when I want it. It’s especially satisfying when I’m talking to someone else and something they say reminds me of something relevant, and I can go “Oh, let me send you this link…” as I retrieve the tagged item in question.

But I don’t think about other people when I’m adding something to my website. My audience is myself.

I know there’s lots of advice out there about considering your audience when you write, but when it comes to my personal site, I’d find that crippling. It would be one more admonishment from the inner critic whispering “no one’s interested in that”, “you have nothing new to add to this topic”, and “you’re not quailified to write about this.” If I’m writing for myself, then it’s easier to have fewer inhibitions. By treating everything as a scrappy note-to-self, I can avoid agonising about quality control …although I still spend far too long trying to come up with titles for posts.

I’ve noticed—and other bloggers have corroborated this—there’s no correlation whatsover between the amount of time you put into something and how much it’s going to resonate with people. You might spend days putting together a thoroughly-researched article only to have it met with tumbleweeds when you finally publish it. Or you might bash something out late at night after a few beers only to find it on the front page of various aggregators the next morning.

If someone else gets some value from a quick blog post that I dash off here, that’s always a pleasant surprise. It’s a bonus. But it’s not my reason for writing. My website is primarily a tool and a library for myself. It just happens to also be public.

I’m pretty sure that nobody but me uses the tags I add to my links and blog posts, and that’s fine with me. It’s very much a folksonomy.

Likewise, there’s a feature I added to my blog posts recently that is probably only of interest to me. Under each blog post, there’s a heading saying “Previously on this day” followed by links to any blog posts published on the same date in previous years. I find it absolutely fascinating to spelunk down those hyperlink potholes, but I’m sure for anyone else it’s about as interesting as a slideshow of holiday photos.

Matt took this further by adding an “on this day” URL to his site. What a great idea! I’ve now done the same here:

adactio.com/archive/onthisday

That URL is almost certainly only of interest to me. And that’s fine.

A little while back, Marcus Herrmann wrote about making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page. Here’s his feeds page. Here’s Remy’s.

Seems like a good idea to me. I’ve made mine:

adactio.com/feeds

As well as linking to the usual RSS feeds (blog posts, links, notes), it’s also got an explanation of how you can subscribe to a customised RSS feed using tags.

Then, earlier today, I was chatting with Matt on Twitter and he asked:

btw do you share your blogroll anywhere?

So now I’ve added another URL:

adactio.com/feeds/subscriptions

That’s got a link to my OPML file, exported from my feed reader, and a list of the (current) RSS feeds that I’m subscribed to.

I like the idea of blogrolls making a comeback. And webrings.

We’re all hunkering down in our homes. That seems to be true of our online homes too.

People are sharing their day-to-day realities on their websites and I’m here for it. Like, I’m literally here for it. I can’t go anywhere.

On an episode of the Design Observer podcast, Jessica Helfand puts this into context:

During times of crisis, people want to make things. There’s a surge in the keeping of journals when there’s a war… it’s a response to the feeling of vulnerability, like corporeal vulnerability. My life is under attack. I am imprisoned in my house. I have to make something to say I was here, to say I mattered, to say this day happened… It’s like visual graphic reassurance.

It’s not just about crisis though. Scott Kelly talks about the value of keeping a journal during prolonged periods of repitition. And he should know—he spent a year in space:

NASA has been studying the effects of isolation on humans for decades, and one surprising finding they have made is the value of keeping a journal. Throughout my yearlong mission, I took the time to write about my experiences almost every day. If you find yourself just chronicling the days’ events (which, under the circumstances, might get repetitive) instead try describing what you are experiencing through your five senses or write about memories. Even if you don’t wind up writing a book based on your journal like I did, writing about your days will help put your experiences in perspective and let you look back later on what this unique time in history has meant.

That said, just stringing a coherent sentence together can seem like too much during The Situation. That’s okay. Your online home can also provide relief and distraction through tidying up. As Ethan puts it:

let a website be a worry stone

It can be comforting to get into the zone doing housekeeping on your website. How about a bit of a performance audit? Or maybe look into more fluid typography? Or perhaps now is the time to tinker about with that dark mode you’ve been planning?

Whatever you end up doing, my point is that your website is quite literally an outlet. While you’re stuck inside, your website is not just a place you can go to, it’s a place you can control, a place you can maintain, a place you can tidy up, a place you can expand. Most of all, it’s a place you can lose yourself in, even if it’s just for a little while.

Paul is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.

Amy is writing weeknotes. Here’s her latest.

Aegir is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.

Nat is writing weeknotes. Here’s their latest.

Alice is writing weeknotes. Here’s her latest.

Mark is writing weeknotes. Here’s his latest.

I enjoy them all.

It’s day two of An Event Apart in Boston and Val is giving a new talk about building expressive products:

The products we design today must connect with customers across different screen sizes, contexts, and even voice or chat interfaces. As such, we create emotional expressiveness in our products not only through visual design and language choices, but also through design details such as how interface elements move, or the way they sound. By using every tool at our disposal, including audio and animation, we can create more expressive products that feel cohesive across all of today’s diverse media and social contexts. In this session, Val will show how to harness the design details from different media to build overarching themes—themes that persist across all screen sizes and user and interface contexts, creating a bigger emotional impact and connection with your audience.

I’m going to attempt to live blog her talk. Here goes…

This is about products that intentionally express personality. When you know what your product’s personality is, you can line up your design choices to express that personality intentionally (as opposed to leaving it to chance).

Tunnel Bear has a theme around a giant bear that will product you from all the bad things on the internet. It makes a technical product very friendly—very different from most VPN companies.

Mailchimp have been doing this for years, but with a monkey (ape, actually, Val), not a bear—Freddie. They’ve evolved and changed it over time, but it always has personality.

But you don’t need a cute animal to express personality. Authentic Weather is a sarcastic weather app. It’s quite sweary and that stands out. They use copy, bold colours, and giant type.

Personality can be more subtle, like with Stripe. They use slick animations and clear, concise design.

Being expressive means conveying personality through design. Type, colour, copy, layout, motion, and sound can all express personality. Val is going to focus on the last two: motion and sound.

Expressing personality with motion

Animation can be used to tell your story. We can do that through:

• Easing choices (ease-in, ease-out, bounce, etc.),
• Duration values, and offsets,
• The properties we animate.

Here are four personality types…

Calm, soft, reassuring

You can use opacity, soft blurs, small movements, and easing curves with gradual changes. You can use:

• fade,
• scale + fade,
• blur + fade,
• blur + scale + fade.

Pro tip for blurs: the end of blurs always looks weird. Fade out with opacity before your blur gets weird.

You can use Penner easing equations to do your easings. See them in action on easings.net. They’re motion graphs plotting animation against time. The flatter the curve, the more linear the motion. They have a lot more range than the defaults you get with CSS keyword values.

For calm, soft, and reassuring, you could use easeInQuad, easeOutQuad, or easeInOutQuad. But that’s like saying “you could use dark blue.” These will get you close, but you need to work on the detail.

Confident, stable, strong

You can use direct movements, straight lines, symmetrical ease-in-outs. You should avoid blurs, bounces, and overshoots. You can use:

• quick fade,
• scale + fade,
• direct start and stops.

You can use Penner equations like easeInCubic, easeOutCubic and easeInOutCubic.

Lively, energetic, friendly

You can use overshoots, anticipation, and “snappy” easing curves. You can use:

• overshoot,
• overshoot + scale,
• anticipation,
• anticipation + overshoot

To get the sense of overshoots and anticipations you can use easing curves like easeInBack, easeOutBack, and easeInOutBack. Those aren’t the only ones though. Anything that sticks out the bottom of the graph will give you anticipation. Anything that sticks out the top of the graph will give you overshoot.

If cubic bezier curves don’t get you quite what you’re going for, you can add keyframes to your animation. You could have keyframes for: 0%, 90%, and 100% where the 90% point is past the 100% point.

Stripe uses a touch of overshoot on their charts and diagrams; nice and subtle. Slack uses a bit of overshoot to create a sense of friendliness in their loader.

Playful, fun, lighthearted

You can use bounces, shape morphs, squashes and stretches. This is probably not the personality for a bank. But it could be for a game, or some other playful product. You can use:

• bounce,
• elastic,
• morph,
• squash and stretch (springs.

You can use easing equations for the first two, but for the others, they’re really hard to pull off with just CSS. You probably need JavaScript.

The easing curve for elastic movement is more complicated Penner equation that can’t be done in CSS. GreenSock will help you visual your elastic easings. For springs, you probably need a dedicated library for spring motions.

Expressing personality with sound

We don’t talk about sound much in web design. There are old angry blog posts about it. And not every website should use sound. But why don’t we even consider it on the web?

We were burnt by those terrible Flash sites with sound on every single button mouseover. And yet the Facebook native app does that today …but in a much more subtle way. The volume is mixed lower, and the sound is flatter; more like a haptic feel. And there’s more variation in the sounds. Just because we did sound badly in the past doesn’t mean we can’t do it well today.

People say they don’t want their computers making sound in an office environment. But isn’t responsive design all about how we don’t just use websites on our desktop computers?

Amber Case has a terrific book about designing products with sound, and she’s all about calm technology. She points out that the larger the display, the less important auditive and tactile feedback becomes. But on smaller screens, the need increases. Maybe that’s why we’re fine with mobile apps making sound but not with our desktop computers doing it?

People say that sound is annoying. That’s like saying siblings are annoying. Sound is annoying when it’s:

• not appropriate for the situation,
• played at the wrong time,
• too loud,
• lacks user control.

But all of those are design decisions that we can control.

So what can we do with sound?

Sound can enhance what we perceive from animation. The “breathe” mode in the Calm meditation app has some lovely animation, and some great sound to go with it. The animation is just a circle getting smaller and bigger—if you took the sound away, it wouldn’t be very impressive.

Sound can also set a mood. Sirin Labs has an extreme example for the Solarin device with futuristic sounds. It’s quite reminiscent of the Flash days, but now it’s all done with browser technologies.

Sound is a powerful brand differentiator. Val now plays sounds (without visuals) from:

• Slack,
• Outlook Calendar.

They have strong associations for us. These are earcons: icons for the ears. They can be designed to provoke specific emotions. There was a great explanation on the Blackberry website, of all places (they had a whole design system around their earcons).

Here are some uses of sounds…

Alerts and notifications

You have a new message. You have new email. Your timer is up. You might not be looking at the screen, waiting for those events.

Navigating space

Apple TV has layers of menus. You go “in” and “out” of the layers. As you travel “in” and “out”, the animation is reinforced with sound—an “in” sound and an “out” sound.

Confirming actions

When you buy with Apple Pay, you get auditory feedback. Twitter uses sound for the “pull to refresh” action. It gives you confirmation in a tactile way.

Marking positive moments

This is a great way of making a positive impact in your user’s minds—celebrate the accomplishments. Clear—by Realmac software—gives lovely rising auditory feedback as you tick things off your to-do list. Compare that to hardware products that only make sounds when something goes wrong—they don’t celebrate your accomplishments.

Here are some best practices for user interface sounds:

• UI sounds be short, less than 400ms.
• End on an ascending interval for positive feedback or beginnings.
• End on a descending interval for negative feedback, ending, or closing.
• Give the user controls to top or customise the sound.

When it comes to being expressive with sounds, different intervals can evoke different emotions:

• Consonant intervals feel pleasant and positive.
• Dissonant intervals feel strong, active, or negative.
• Large intervals feel powerful.
• Octaves convey lightheartedness.

People have made sounds for you if you don’t want to design your own. Octave is a free library of UI sounds. You can buy sounds from motionsound.io, targetted specifically at sounds to go with motions.

Let’s wrap up by exploring where to find your product’s personality:

• What is it trying to help users accomplish?
• What is it like? (its mood and disposition)

You can workshops to answer these questions. You can also do research with your users. You might have one idea about your product’s personality that’s different to your customer’s. You need to project a believable personality. Talk to your customers.

Designing for Emotion has some great exercises for finding personality. Conversational Design also has some great exercises in it. Once you have the words to describe your personality, it gets easier to design for it.

So have a think about using motion and sound to express your product’s personality. Be intentional about it. It will also make the web a more interesting place.

There’s nothing quite so tedious as blogging about blogging, but I came across a few heart-warming thoughts recently that it would be remiss of me to let go unremarked, so please indulge me for a moment as I wallow in some meta-blogging.

Marco Arment talks about the trend that many others have noticed, of personal publishing dying out in favour of tweeting:

Too much of my writing in the last few years has gone exclusively into Twitter. I need to find a better balance.

As he rightly points out:

Twitter is a complementary medium to blogging, but it’s not a replacement.

Andy noticed a similar trend in his own writing:

Twitter and Waxy Links cannibalized all the smaller posts, and as my reach grew, I started reserving blogging for more “serious” stuff — mostly longer-form research and investigative writing.

Well, fuck that.

Amber Hewitt also talks about reviving the personal blog:

Someone made an analogy that describes social networks very well. Facebook is your neighborhood, Twitter is your local bar, and your blog is your home. (I guess Instagram is the cafe? “Look what I’m eating!”)

This made me realized I’m neglecting my home. My posts and photos are spread out on different networks and there is no centralized hub.

That reminds me of what Frank said about his site:

In light of the noisy, fragmented internet, I want a unified place for myself—the internet version of a quiet, cluttered cottage in the country.

The wonderful Gina Trapani—who has has publishing on her own site for years now—follows Andy’s lead with some guidelines for short-form blogging:

• If it’s a paragraph, it’s a post.
• Negotiate a comfort zone.
• Traffic is irrelevant.
• Simplify, simplify.
• Ask for trusted collaborator feedback.
• Have fun.

Good advice.

Indie Web Camp UK took place here in Brighton right after this year’s dConstruct. I was organising dConstruct. I was also organising Indie Web Camp. This was a problem.

It was a problem because I’m no good at multi-tasking, and I focused all my energy on dConstruct (it more or less dominated my time for the past few months). That meant that something had to give and that something was the organising of Indie Web Camp.

The event itself went perfectly smoothly. All the basics were there: a great venue, a solid internet connection, and a plan of action. But because I was so focused on dConstruct, I didn’t put any time into trying to get the word out about Indie Web Camp. Worse, I didn’t put any time into making sure that a diverse range of people knew about the event.

So in the end, Indie Web Camp UK 2014 was quite a homogenous gathering. That’s a real shame, and it’s my fault. My excuse is that I was busy with all things dConstruct, but that’s just that; an excuse. On the plus side, the effort I put into making dConstruct a diverse event paid off, but I’ll know better in future than to try to organise two back-to-back events. I need to learn to delegate and ask for help.

But I don’t want to cast Indie Web Camp in a totally negative light (I just want to acknowledge how it could have been better). It was actually pretty great. As with previous events, it was remarkably productive. The format of one day of talks, followed by one day of hacking is spot on.

I hadn’t planned to originally, but I spent the second day getting adactio.com switched over to https. Just a couple of weeks ago I wrote:

I’m looking forward to switching my website over to https:// but I’m not going to do it until the potential pain level drops.

Well, I’m afraid that potential pain level has not dropped. In fact, I can confirm that get TLS working is massive pain in the behind. But on the first day of Indie Web Camp, Tim Retout led a session on security and offered up his expertise for day two. I took full advantage of his generous offer.

With Tim’s help, I was able to get adactio.com all set. If I hadn’t had his help, it probably would’ve taken me days …or I simply would’ve given up. I took plenty of notes so I could document the process. I’ll write it up soon, but alas, it will only be useful to people with the same kind of hosting set up as I have.

By the end of Indie Web Camp, thanks to Tim’s patient assistance, quite a few people has switched on TSL for their sites. The https page on the Indie Web Camp wiki is turning into quite a handy resource.

There was lots of progress in other areas too, particularly with webactions. Some of that progress relates to what I’ve been saying about Web Components. More on that later…

Throw in some Transmat action, location-based hacks, and communication tools; all-in-all a very productive weekend.