#122

yes, it’s a very stupid question sorry to distract from more interesting things.
a kind person just PMd me the solution

2 Likes
#123

[Disclaimer: I think now we’re definitely in the territory of the “Quitting FB” thread as @emenel alluded – sorry about that, please feel free to move this post…]

Indeed – I admit that like Tumblr, Mastodon (the most popular Fediverse instantiation) has increasingly become the answer for “where all the interesting people on Livejournal have gone”.

While certain people are there, though, the activity has not reached any sort of critical mass, it’s mostly still a supplement to activities on other platforms. And in many cases, a direct mirror of those activities.

I used to think this was just growing pains … and yet there’s basically no change in this in the year I’ve been watching – only greater proliferation and diversification of Mastodon instances (positive on the whole, but negative as certain directories are unable to keep up…) and some weird (but, I guess, justifiable) politics concerning who federates with whom.

In other words, there’s something that still keeps people on Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, something that prevents Mastodon communities from really taking off in their own right. There’s the initial excitement about forming each Mastodon instance, but little beyond that in terms of something new that actually takes place within the instance.

1 Like
#124

I don’t think it’s a stupid question at all.

I think it’s a great illustration of how CSS can be either very simple (couple of lines to get what you want in a very direct way) to extremely complex (re-usable component abstractions that allow for design at scale in large corporations).

This spectrum makes it very difficult for newcomers (or old hands trying to remember stuff) because the web is littered with info all along the entire spectrum (and very little labeling indicating who the intended audience may be). And little to none of this info tends to be oriented towards the “indie” type who “just wants a web site”.

Honestly, I have the same criticism of a lot of the #indieweb technologies. For all their supposed “indie” audience, I feel they continue to pull in way too much complexity inherited from corporate concerns.

2 Likes
#125

yes most of my frustration is that everything i remember about CSS i learned in the 90’s and it’s all wrong now, and there are too many resources.

since there’s so many people here who are good at front-end layout / design, maybe a “stupid questions” thread would be great for people like me who suck at it and just need to make something usable every few years

anyways, i wonder about “collaborative text.” i obviously like it (i post things here) but i also kind of want to subvert it all the time (i delete things here.)

i’m interested, in an aspirational way, to try and do things (writing) in a more persistent and long-form format. just dunno if that needs a “platform.” maybe there is something in between a “platform” and just “some stuff”

my favorite people writing seem to be on Blogspot!

can this possibly really be a property of a platform?

5 Likes
#126

I’d be happy with a CSS question thread :slight_smile: Even though I have a front-end day job these simple questions are still a good exercise :slight_smile:

There’s so many things to remember in CSS, no question is truly stupid. (there was a website dedicated to “how to center image in css” a while ago :o )

2 Likes
#127

a thread is born

2 Likes
#128

I think it’s also a symptom of most any UI related interface/API. (MFC, WPF, Qt, Swing, HOOPS…)

As in, it’s designed to be easy for general use cases but reality is made of specifics, and inevitably you have to use all kinds of stupid hacks to get a thing to line up with another thing, resize the right way, make scrollbars work right, move the camera where it needs to go, scale a font to fit in the available space, still look right on Chinese installs of Windows, etc. And 80% of UI development time is fixing all those annoying edge cases.

Often, the simpler the API tries to make things, the harder they actually are …

1 Like
#129

1993 era HTML sidesteps all of this by diminishing the emphasis on aesthetics. Sometimes there is something to be said for that approach.

11 Likes
#130

I cry especially when I think of all of those lost Geocities sites and the simple webrings that linked them.

People made fun of them at the time, and I’m sure there were problematic examples.

And yet, when I think of phenomena or even entire subcultures that are most relevant to me now — the first and often strongest online expressions of these often traces back to a Geocities site —one that is dead, or is inadequately archived… if you’re lucky there might be exactly one link on archive.org, naturally with all the links dead.

[ and to be clear… in ways that are still nonspecific… I’m talking about immanence as such, the preconditions for any expression whatsoever, the most fundamental expression that begins perhaps in the home, that emerges out of conversations between childhood friends, that comes in dreams. Geocities and other sites with extremely low technical barriers to entry enabled this expression, which is now for the most part lost.]

4 Likes
#131

Somehow I knew at the time that there was something magical about those conversations that I’d never be able to repeat later in life. I was absolutely right about that.

4 Likes
#132

I guess it’s a force of habit, to dl source and build…

#133

The correct answer to a lot of old hacky old HTML/CSS layout problems is now: CSS grid and CSS flexbox. There is a learning curve, but they maybe got it mostly right this time.

1 Like
#134

Wordpress.com is pretty good. It’s free if you don’t mind having Wordpress in the url. They have great analytics built in.

1 Like
#135

To bring together what @ht73 and I were discussing and the stated purpose of this thread, has anyone here considered WriteFreely and/or write.as? It’s a federated blogging platform that publishes using ActivityPub to interconnect bloggers of many sorts who write about a variety of topics.

On the topic of flexible CSS without frameworks, @mdoudoroff is absolutely correct - CSS grid and CSS flexbox do have some unexpected behaviour (like all CSS), but they essentially pull the responsive grid functionality of Bootstrap into CSS proper, which is fantastic for web developers who want to keep everything lightweight and avoid using too many external libraries…

1 Like
#136

It happens here pretty much all of the time… Maybe I have a lower bar… I’m just thinking about the many conversations which have brought forth genuinely new ideas, or more tangible things like the LCRP projects or much of the code stuff (which I don’t get into).

So I’m thinking of the kind of interaction here could be a model for what one would expect elsewhere – and yet the default Mastodon thing is mirroring Facebook and Twitter posts… and this from people who hate Facebook and Twitter… I’m hopeful something else will result… but the process has been really slow. part of what I’m trying to do with this blogging thing, if I ever really do it (because the site I’m looking towards for hosting is tied in with a specific community and Mastodon instance) is actively try to change this situation…

4 Likes
#137

no, i gotcha…

i mean that (maybe?) in many respects (not all?) the quality of discussion is is not contingent on the platform; i’ve had similar experiences in the heyday of various BBSs or even listserves. (lines reminds me of a BBS more than anything.)

the biggest / weirdest novel feature being the ability to edit / delete / change. which i am obsessed with. that’s something you can also have when each person hosts their own content.

IOW, seems like there are meanings of “platform” beyond the technical or even socioeconomic (?)

(this really is question, not statement)

3 Likes
#138

there’s blogging, and there’s conversation. the holy grail is that the two overlap, or at least intersect… I have my doubts that there’s a single-platform, or even technical, solution, that enables both, well. we’re all “here”, but, we’re not. physical distance is (still, perhaps, always?) key.

in terms of the specific Q, all the blogs I’ve started or contributed to have been/are wordpress, which I still use. I briefly tried medium, but I found it mediumizes the content into a relatively shallow clickbaity space, to say nothing of the feature austerity.

4 Likes
#139

I dream of an internet where anywhere you’d post there would be a button “auto-delete in xxx (select the number) hours” or “Post and delete whenever”, I really have a love / hate relationship with so much of our daily conversations being archived, stored, in some way (meaning : for all to see, like here, or for big corps to see even if we can’t see it anymore, like Facebook and probably a lot of others).

#140

My favorite light CSS framework is

http://getskeleton.com

1 Like
#142

I got curious how this approach avoids issues with spam, and was pleased to find this:
https://indieweb.org/Vouch

#indieweb is definitely worth exploring, but I do so dearly wish it wasn’t so fond of its own jargon. It makes the whole scene fairly impenetrable. I know I’ve been banging on about this, but I really want to see the movement take accessibility more seriously, and I’m not talking about physical disabilities. I’m talking about the barrier to entry that comes from needing to learn about new technologies before being able to make use of them.

Part of what makes corporate social media so popular is ease of use. A child can sign up for a Facebook account. A child can even figure out that they’re supposed to check “yes” when the site asks if they’re over 13 (even if they aren’t).

Let’s make the weird web “child’s play”, in terms of ease of use. Please?

5 Likes