shawn.medero.netShawn Medero

shawn.medero.net About Archives Feed 2024-01-24 I’m not sure if I’m misremembering but my brain says there was a time when blog posts did not havepost titles” by default. Coming up with a post title is one of my least favorite exercises when writing a blog post. Often how these things change on the internet is a bit hard to unearth (particularly in the early 2000s) but it could have been as innocent as some blogging software package requiring it to something more evil such as Google forcing SEO down our throats . I don’t remember Movable Type requiring them but I do feel like most blogging software packages for the last decade have assumed per-post titles were required information. If anyone happens to have some pointers to the internet archeology on blog post titles feel free to mention me on Mastodon (@soypunk@friend.camp) . Follow-Ups Derek Powazek , who worked at Blogger, wrote :when we launched Blogger in 99, there were no post titles (or post pages, for that matter). But we added them soon after. They were a top request.” Worth nothing that Derek authoredDesign for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places” - a book which radically re-shaped my approach to user experience and product management and I still think about to this day. I highly doubt we will ever see a second edition but if we did I would happily buy a dozen copies to hand out. Jeff Eaton , also said :Yeah, Livejournal defaulted to the same when it launched - just a date and a message.” (Since we are saying nice things aout people, Jeff was one of the early pioneers of making Drupal handle some seriously gnarly enterprise content management problems. His social media posts are always insightful and well-worth your attention.) Both of these at least help to suggest that my usually failing memory might have logged this nugget correctly; blog entries with post titles were not necessarily the norm to start. 2024-01-11 This is going to be one of those meaty, meandering, old school blog posts about… well blogging. Welcome back everyone. With the fall of Twitter over the last several months there’s predictably been some folks moving their online presence back to their personal websites. Similarly we’ve seen more calls for a return to the concepts of theIndieWeb ” and folks rightfully calling out that’s it still too hard for people to own their own content . One of the interesting things about the Substack’s product strategy to become the go-to place for radical hate content is that a lot of the small, indie voices on Substack didn’t know how to get off of it. Sure there are alternatives to Substack ( Buttondown or Ghost come to mind) but they don’t offer anywhere close to thefree tier” level of service Substack offered. (And they sure heck are not offering one year of paid healthcare , holy moly.) Trying to wrangle how to get something like a self-hosted Wordpress instance to also act as a newsletter is surprisingly complicated. It is not that easy to send email in volume anymore because many of the large email-as-a-service providers (and international/regional laws) require a lot of safeguards to ensure emails are authentic, wanted, and not tracking you without your consent. It is interesting to note that if Google Reader had managed to stick around I don’t think there would have been as strong of a push to return to the newsletter format. (And Google Reader wasn’t exactly an ideal RSS citizen either much less anIndieWeb” friendly one.) Anyway, I’m excited to see some movement back towards personal websites because I’ve also been thinking about bringing back my blogging habit. Somewhere around 2005 I threw in the towel on keeping a personal websitefor realsies” because Twitter was just much easier to use. I’ve had a personal website since 1996, originally hosted on the free web space my ISP gave me and later moving it around to several different domain names and software systems. I’ve used Django, Drupal, Jekyll, Hugo, Movable Type, Wordpress, as well as quite a few bespoke applications I wrote to manage the site. These days this site is hosted & powered by David Merfield’s blot.im . I’m writing software usually every other day and I don’t need to add yet-another-thing to maintain to my daily brain-load. There’s no lock-in with blot though - I own my domain, the content is in plain-text, and it is easy to obtain all the materials and go somewhere else that supports static website generation. For several years now I’ve been microblogging on a Mastodon instance run by Darius Kazemi . I choose Darius’s instance because Darius is a smart person who cares about the good parts of the federated networks (e.g. see Darius and Erin Kissane’s very recent announcement to organize research intofediverse” governance ) Microblogging is great and it does feel like thegood years” of Twitter - for the most part (I don’t remember there being so much mansplaining and contrarian posting for the sake of hearing yourself argue in the early days of Twitter but there were so manymicro-islands” of conversation at the beginning it was easy to not see the whole picture.) More often over the last few years I’ve found myself sayingthis should really be a blog post” because threaded conversations on microblogs suck for any number of reasons. Over a year ago, Phil Gyford opened up https://ooh.directory , which Phil describes asa collection of hundreds of blogs, to help people find good blogs that interest them.” . I was browsing through it this week and it was really uplifting to see so much interesting content that was just plain-spoken and not heavily packaged. As an example ofthis should really be a blog post” - here’s an example of theheavily package” content experience that befuddles me. Jason Kottke had shared a link about themost borrowed library books” that looked interesting. So I clicked on the link and the following happened: It sucks to click on a link to an article and then only see the title of the article that I already decided I wanted to read as the only thing on the screen. I get it, websites cost money and need a business model to recoup that money - so ads. Was it really not possible to fit in more than just the title, byline, and a single sentence lede? That’s okay though because even if more than the lede had been there before I could even scroll down my screen was covered with this: I don’t know what this is and I don’t want it. I wanted to read an article and instead there was like a two minute montage of people skiing covering the entire viewport and there wasn’t even80s movie action” skiing music. Finally after I figured how to dismiss the ad and scroll down I was left with this mess: This screenshot is hilarious for a number of reasons. First of all there are ads overlapping each other - so I can’t even tell you what the ads are about. Content baby! Second, this paragraph is impossible to read because there are too many hyperlinks distracting me from just like… catching my breath and figuring out where to start reading. What’s sad is I don’t even know what the most borrowed library books were because I gave up trying to read the article at this point. It is taken a while to get to here but in summary: let’s bring back personal websites! Let’s make them easier to setup - those of you savvy enough to do so need to file bugs and enhancement requests with your software folks to enable this. Let’s bring back content you can actually read and let’s figure out how to help people afford to self-host this stuff so they can post fun quirky things we can read and learn from. 2020-01-20 Traveller Universal World Profiles to M-Space Planets Traveller is well known for it is variousuniversal codes.” The Universal Character Profile/Universal Personality Profile was a shorthand method to quickly describe a character’s characteristics. The Universal Planetary Profile/Universal World Profile ( UWP ) describes the qualities of a world. In this article I want to take at look at how you...