indieweb

Links, May 2023

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2023-05-09

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.

Links, October 2022

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2022-11-07

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!

Taking down Goodreads

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2022-04-12

Image generated by Midjourney 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.

The Internet Is For End Users

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2020-10-05

Many who participate in the IETF are most comfortable making what we believe to be purely technical decisions; our process favors technical merit through our well-known mantra of “rough consensus and running code.”

Nevertheless, the running code that results from our process (when things work well) inevitably has an impact beyond technical considerations, because the underlying decisions afford some uses while discouraging others. While we believe we are making only technical decisions, in reality, we are defining (in some degree) what is possible on the Internet itself.

This impact has become significant. As the Internet increasingly mediates essential functions in societies, it has unavoidably become profoundly political; it has helped people overthrow governments, revolutionize social orders, swing elections, control populations, collect data about individuals, and reveal secrets. It has created wealth for some individuals and companies while destroying that of others.

The Internet Is For End Users, Mark Nottingham in Internet Architecture Board RFCs

Getting off of Netlify

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2020-05-14

I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. Why the change 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.

How this site works

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2020-05-08

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: Develop and run my personal website Cross-post certain types of content from my website to Twitter Periodically scrape a couple of proprietary services I use, to keep track of the media I’m consuming Store and serve that data along with some other personal data in an API Regularly update my personal website with the latest in my media consumption Personal website My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go.