Tags: blogging

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

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.”

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

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.

The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.

How to Monetize a Blog

This is a masterpiece.

Notes – David Bushell

David is on board. Who else?

I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.

A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since it got bought out by Digital Ocean. A List Apart goes through fallow periods. Even the Mozilla Developer Network is looking to squander its trust by adding inaccurate “content” generated by a large language model.

The most obvious solution is to start up a brand new resource for front-end developers. But there are two probems with that:

1. It’s really, really, really hard work, and
2. It feels a bit 927.

I actually think there are plenty of good articles and resources on front-end development being published. But they’re not being published in any one specific place. People are publishing them on their own websites.

Ahmed, Josh, Stephanie, Andy, Lea, Rachel, Robin, Michelle …I could go on, but you get the picture.

All this wonderful stuff is distributed across the web. If you have a well-stocked RSS reader, you’re all set. But if you’re new to front-end development, how do you know where to find this stuff? I don’t think you can rely on search, unless you have a taste for slop.

I think the solution lies not with some hand-wavey “AI” algorithm that burns a forest for every query. I think the solution lies with human curation.

I take inspiration from Phil’s fantastic project, ooh.directory. Imagine taking that idea of categorisation and applying it to front-end dev resources.

Whether it’s a post on web.dev, Smashing Magazine, or someone’s personal site, it could be included and categorised appropriately.

Now, there would still be a lot of work involved, especially in listing and categorising the articles that are already out there, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much work as trying to create those articles from scratch.

I don’t know what the categories should be. Does it make sense to have top-level categories for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with sub-directories within them? Or does it make more sense to categorise by topics like accessibility, animation, and so on?

And this being the web, there’s no reason why one article couldn’t be tagged to simultaneously live in multiple categories.

There’s plenty of meaty information architecture work to be done. And there’d be no shortage of ongoing work to handle new submissions.

A stretch goal could be the creation of “playlists” of hand-picked articles. “Want to get started with CSS grid layout? Read that article over there, watch this YouTube video, and study this page on MDN.”

What do you think? Does this one-stop shop of hyperlinks sound like it would be useful? Does it sound feasible?

I’m just throwing this out there. I’d love it if someone were to run with it.

Blogs and longevity | James’ Coffee Blog

When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.

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.

Terence Eden’s Blog

A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.

Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.

No one is policing this.

Robin Rendle — Good and useful writing

The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.

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.

Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again | The Internet Review

You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.

We’ve been waiting 20 years for this - The History of the Web

Blogging isn’t one thing and that’s kind of the point. It exists fractured by intention and it can be many things to many people. And now, 20 years after the last blogging revolution, something like a fractured digital presence is once again appealing.

Click Around, Find Out – Dirty Feed

If you care about the indie web growing, by all means write, by all means create, by all means curate. But most of all, just read. Or listen, or experience. Spend an afternoon clicking around, like everybody used to. The more people who do that, the more everything else will slot into place without even having to think much about it.

Permanence · Indie Microblogging

One of the reasons to own your content is to make it last. When you have control of the text you write or the photos you post, it’s up to you whether that content stays on the internet. When you post to someone else’s platform, you’ve given up that control. It’s not up to you whether the company that hosts your content will stay in business or change everything to break your content.

I posted 947 times on my website in 2023.

That’s a bit less than 2022.

March was the busiest month with 98 posts.

August was the quietest month with 57 posts. That’s probably because I spent a week of that month travelling across the Atlantic ocean on a ship, cut off from the internet.

I published 2 long-form articles in 2023—transcripts of talks.

I wrote 96 entries in my journal (or blog, if you prefer).

I shared 393 links.

I wrote 456 short notes.

In those notes, I posted 247 photos during the year.

I travelled to 20 destinations.

Press “play” on my Indy map for the year to see those travels.

Sometimes the travel was for work—speaking, hosting, or attending conferences. Sometimes the travel was to see family. Sometimes the travel was to spend a week working from a different country—Italy and Spain in 2023; I’d like to do more of that in 2024.

I played mandolin in a lot of sessions in 2023. I plan to play just as much in 2024.

I’ll never stop blogging: it’s an itch I have to scratch – and I don’t care if it’s an outdated format | Simon Reynolds | The Guardian

It me:

I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules about structure or consistency of tone. A blogpost can be half-baked and barely proved: I feel zero responsibility to “do my research” before pontificating. Purely for my own pleasure, I do often go deep. But it’s nearer the truth to say that some posts are outcomes of rambles across the archives of the internet, byproducts of the odd information trawled up and the lateral connections created.

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.

HTML Web Components Are Having a Moment – Cloud Four

I suspect that in a few years’ time, we’ll look back at this month, and especially Jeremy and Eric’s articles as an inflection point. Similar to how Ethan managed to make responsive web design accessible to more people, I think we’re looking at the same thing happening right now for web components.

A great summary (with links) of all the recent buzz around HTML web components:

I don’t know about you, but I read every one of those articles, and for the first time, web components “clicked” for me. Suddenly, I understood how they could fit into our workflow, and where they’d be a good addition. I was excited about web components in a way I’d never been before.