#indieweb
How this site works
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple....
Getting off of Netlify
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of "build minutes" on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the "Photo"...
Taking down Goodreads
London, United Kingdom
TL;DR I'm switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it's owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for...Links, October 2022
First off, here's a DJ set I liked. Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here's mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here's mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That's nice. I don't believe it's really going to be that simple, though. On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That's a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The...
Links, May 2023
First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented...
If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
— If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs, TTTThis
The Internet Is For End Users
— The Internet Is For End Users, Mark Nottingham in Internet Architecture Board RFCs