#114

Hmm, I edited a longer response down to something unclear :slight_smile: Mostly I was thinking of LJ’s privacy settings, and the reduction in spam and anonymous harrassment. No comments without an account, and you could limit posts or comments to your friends list or to specific lists, and so on.

I don’t have a problem with comments thanks to a couple of anti-spam plugins (and simply being low profile anyway), but a blog has no privacy controls. I just have to avoid writing about things that I don’t want my in-laws, a future employer, or totally random people to see.

Also, the idea of following a bunch of blogs via RSS just seems less community-ish to me than something like LiveJournal. I think overall, I just want that proto-social media experience, without what Facebook, Twitter etc. have become.

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#116

While this is very personal, and I don’t assume my preferences are universal, this set of constraints/expectations best fits my threat model. Basically, I don’t trust technology to keep secrets (at all).

I feel like I get that proto-social media experience here. However, I’ve tried to start my own Discourse forum, and I’ve gotten no traction. It was not a “build it and they will come” situation. Getting the right audience with the right level of interaction and respect for one another, is definitely more art than science, it seems to me. I don’t claim to completely understand it.

#117

This is the basic idea of the Fediverse. It’s a fantastic idea that’s where I very much think the web should be, but it likely won’t gain any real traction until it becomes painless for non-nerds to use and set up - the inherent problem with needing to set up a personal server for online communication is that most people would rather not spend that kind of money and effort for what they can get for “free” from the social media giants.

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#118

it’s cargo simplified. I tweaked some tenplates for my portfolio and for my label page with custom domains. it’s inwxpensive can’t even remember the fee.

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#119

it’s all fine for me until i want e.g. responsive image sizing on mobile. then i just want to burn everything

if anyone has recommendations for a basic CSS framework that actually solves things like “make the image 300px wide, or as wide as the screen allows”, please lmk (i’ve tried Pure, Barebones &c and maybe i’m just too dense.)

sorry this is such a boring question, ugh. i’m not much of an internet philosopher and just want to get the words/sounds/&c onto the screens/&c.

here’s my blog again
http://catfact.net/

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#120

This really is true – hence my sadness in seeing most of my interests drift from anything that could remotely be considered “topical” here – and likewise – intense interest in transferring what has worked so well here to other situations where it may be possible to find a home, even if it’s yet another “marginal” situation. Blogging at least seems worth a try.

At some point though, it’s difficult to avoid the desire to just withdraw entirely.

[Edit: lines is and remains a wonderfully creative and inclusive community! just struggling with a lot of personal stuff at the moment and don’t want my disillusionment regarding the state of music, and my current desire to “no-platform” the entire academic system and mainstream “art world” to spread too much beyond where I am at the moment… if this helps clarify what I meant.]

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#121

Difficult to answer this question in a comprehensive manner, since there are so many potential caveats.

And I’m in too much of a hurry to write and test code at the moment, so I’ll just go for the hand wave:
Use a relative width for responsiveness, and add a min-width.

That’s the simplest possible answer I can think of.

Things do get complicated if you want to serve different image sizes for different device types, etc. but that doesn’t sound like the type of concern a personal blogger is likely to have?

#122

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

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#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.

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#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.

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#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?

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#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 )

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#127

a thread is born

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#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 …

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#129

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

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#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.]

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#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.

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#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.

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#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.

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