#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…

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#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…

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#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)

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#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.

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#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

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#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?

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#143

The problem is even deeper than accessibility. It’s this unstated assumption that the solution to all of our ills is a technological one. That simply by writing code we’re somehow making the world better.

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#144

That’s why I wish the #indieweb would get more focused on the content of what’s being published (elevating, amplifying it) and less on the coder navel gazing.

I’m sounding pretty harsh. That’s kind of intentional.

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#145

I’d actually be fine if the web was little more than bare links to zines like this one:

h/t to @iain for the link.

Most people are capable of producing a nice PDF these days, even if the intricacies of CSS are beyond them.

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#147

Same! …

#148

Bootstrap…?

#149

We need to invert this.

Reading is already a form of writing, in that it involves always a creative reinterpretation. The movement of meaning is thus common to all and not the possession of any one individual, least of all the writer.

By putting writing on a pedestal, with high barriers to entry, all we’re doing is denying, and therefore obstructing, this fundamental movement or play that is the condition of possibility of any meaning whatsoever. Instead, meaning becomes something that is fixed, something that requires the presence of the writer, that hierarchically differentiates “readers” from “writers”, and so on. Meaning is converted to “authority”, to the exclusive possession of an individual – and at this point no longer flows.

The movement of meaning is also most fundamentally a movement of metaphor. Here writing need not be restricted to “words”, where images often do much better.

The very idea of “phonetic” writing already invokes authority because it makes writing derivative of speech, and speech requires or invokes a speaker.

The ideal platform, thus, would be so fluid as to merge reading and writing, to reveal them as the same thing. Only in this sense can meaning flow, can it be revealed as what it is, as something greater than the tangible contributions of individuals.

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#150

Discourse is the closest thing I can think of…

#151

Not sure I can fully agree, though I’m not sure what you are referring to exactly.
In the social media world I see lots of writers and few readers. Everybody is talking, but few are listening.

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#152

I think a more direct way of saying it is: there are more people willing to click a link to look at a web site made by an #indieweb practitioner than there are people willing to wade through their wiki to sort out how to become one.

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#154

which one though? :wink:

hence the need to attend to the entire movement of meaning…

how mournfully the wind of autumn pines
upon the mountainside as day declines

the second line – written – yields a radically different “reading” of the first (in particular, the word “pines”)

anyway – perhaps not a great examples – hopefully it shows how meaning is a movement…

the challenge with blogging is, how to be most faithful to this movement (=letting language express itself…)

unfortunately the blog format already “fixes” meaning in a sense when the author is set up as some sort of expert – all the more so if there are technical barriers, so only the powerful can speak…

don’t get me wrong, I’ve gotten a lot out of these “expert” blogs, and may not be doing anything different myself, hence my hesitation over the whole idea…

ultimately what counts is the “performative” – does a particular mode of writing actually connect various communities in ways that facilitate the emergence and flow of meaning?

in other words, whatever I would write… that is not the meaning… the meaning is in the world to come. and in the conversations that follow.

i saw much more in terms of the movement of meaning in the old Geocities sites… as I also do image streams, and so on.

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#155

That would be Myspace :smiley:
I think that the internet is actually thriving as a powerful force in our minds, like the concepts of “nature”, or “cities” (etc.), because of its ambivalent nature, that all that is ever published is stored forever, for someone to find, read, dream about, but at the same time random bits get lost, servers go unattended, p2p trackers go down, links die (some many of them!), data rots, melts, disappears.

I thought I heard about it here on lines, but quicksearch tells me not, or maybe in a since edited post; anyways this talk should make you nostalgic then.

i'd better sleep

I once had a blog using a self hosted php cms (dotclear) and maintained it though several minor versions for years even though i did not post anymore, until it got one major version behind. It subsequently did not survive a change of server which meant a too recent php version meaning the old cms couldn’t run anymore and so on.
My hand written minimal php (using like three functions include, krsort, echo) website will still probably work by php 12.
I like hugo because i like using folders to organize data, and i can just keep one folder plus the hugo executable (plus any linux system, e.g. the hosting server) to edit my site for years.
I loved making tiny websites for no real reason. All it took was browsing the web and right-clicking any page i liked to see how it was made.
Nowadays making a website it seems like one needs to understand if installing a package management system by circumventing your OS package management system will break something (i thought piping a script to shell from the internet was dangerous, not a way of installing desired stuff on my computer!), understanding how this OS inside the OS works, then learning at least three abstruse languages, maybe a framework, then some docker stuff because that’s what the “quick starting guide to websites” tell you etc. For some reason i have some nodejs websites running and really i can’t keep up with the updates(even the version numbers can’t be sequential…) so it’s probably full of holes. Actually i am probably 10 versions late and soon enough the whole sites will have to be rewritten from scratch to even be online.
Oh I love static sites.

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#156

http://www.ryleealanza.org/2019/06/22/Hello-World.html

Huge thank-yous to everyone who posted in this thread; it was a huge help to me and I hope it will help others too. I went with Jekyll, GitHub Pages and Hover. I kept several resources mentioned here and in the Stupid Questions About Design thread open in my browser basically constantly.

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#157

Just so you know, I’m currently getting an error connecting to the page. Don’t know if it’s something on my end or just the DNS waiting to catch up. Hopefully it resolves itself. :smile:

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