May 2024 Thirty-three posts
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Notas del viernes
En realidad mi español no es muy bueno. Pero es un buen tĂtulo. Y es bueno practicar español. But English is my best language so I shall endeavor to do that.
I signed a petition about San Clemente beaches yesterday and was glad to do it. I think about the beach a lot and go as often as is practical. I went yesterday after a drought of several days. I’ve had cold symptoms and was only really strong enough to do programming work, so I took it easy on beach. Going yesterday was wonderful, even if it was short.
I liked James’ post about automatic creation of image collages. I suspect code like this will help me if I get to doing object detection on my own huge corpus of images of the beach and toy robots.
Cat and Girl’s comic Facts aren’t feelings made me guffaw. The way it uses the word “whimsy” reminds me of my own embrace of whimsy in the year after my mother’s death. To whit: go hard at whimsy. Be goofy. It’s the way to survive. The toy robot collection is about that.
This past week I learned about the British Post Office scandal, in which people were convicted of stealing because of accounting software bugs. (via Mark Sutherland who mentioned it in passing in last weekend’s morning’s IndieWeb event). I learned the term “moral crumple zones” a few weeks ago and this certainly is that. When computers fail, someone must be blamed. Ultimately someone must be held responsible. All the more reason we ought to understand what computers do.
This is also an implicit dig at LLM-based software that we have no idea how it works. If we get a result from something, we ought to be able to audit how it got to that result. If we don’t then it’s indistinguishable from magic. Financial accounting is not magic.
I am considering adding some kind of emoji reactions to posts and comments here. I am skeptical. But if I do it it’ll be using things like this and this.
Matt Haughey wrote Embrace The Weird and it was inspiring. It’s in the tradition of other favorite aphorisms from people I have an esteem for, most particularly Bruce Sterling’s “Follow Your Weird” from “The Wonderful Power of Storytelling” Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991 (San Jose CA), which I stashed some time back here.
Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, “woo the muse of the odd.” A good science fiction story is not a “good story” with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like movies, it shouldn’t be more like books, it should be more like computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE!
“Woo the muse of the odd” is another quite good one but I don’t ever really think of that one.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” is from Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas book.
Incidentally, we can’t stop here, this is bat country Additionally, I am a big fan of AAAFNRAA, which I blogged on June 9, 2001 and is still stuck on me, along with Frank Zappa.
AAAFNRAA — Anything, anytime, anywhere, for no reason at all.
Admittedly, maybe whimsy has been with me all along, and what I needed to do after my mother’s death was remember that it was with me.
WOO THE MUSE OF THE ODD
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C6mOtSavr46/ via IFTTT
UFW flag on a BEAUTIFUL Classic Chevy at Venice beach. Saw a young woman surfer unzipping her wetsuit while dancing to a very very very loud remix of Bidi Bidi Bom Bom with a live electric guitarist warming up accompanying. Coming to Venice was worth the heavy costs to park, navigate, and just BE in. It’s a bit like going to a rave. Have fun, have an exit strategy.
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Front End Study Hall Continues!
The next Front End Study Hall (#003) will be on May 23, 2024. #002 was yesterday and was another solid get together. I learned bit of nuance around using
grid-template-areasand understand what I’ve seen before when trying that, one really needs to have predictable markup to use it properly. Two different elements with the same value of `grid-area` will necessarily share the same space. The notes are worth a peruse.As to the next meeting:
Front End Study Hall is an HTML + CSS focused group meeting, held on Zoom to learn from each other about how to make code do what we want.
Come prepared to teach and learn!
If you have some CSS you’re trying to make sense of this is a great place to hash it out. at #002 we made an attempt to do a responsive hamburger menu style sidebar using the new
popoverspec and I ran into limitations of it. We also looked at possibly usinglight-dark()to manage dark mode preference based on this good article. We didn’t reach a steady state with either but participants offered some other techniques that were promising.So, if you’ve got an interest in CSS, come along and spend some time with us on Thursday May 23rd! If you have any questions about Study Hall (or anything else IndieWeb) feel free to leave a comment here or message me privately on my Feedback page.
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Comment like you’re going to read it in 5 years.
April Wensel wrote, in her latest newsletter from Compassionate Coding:
Before you add an obscure cultural reference or quirky inside joke to code, though, I implore you to think of the poor developer who may be wading through your code a decade (or a few months) later.
I’m a fan of April‘s work. Her newsletter is worth a subscription.
For me, I try to write a comments so that I’ll understand it when coming to it fresh, five years away. Here’s a terse comment to myself for a function that seems like it’s overkill, but I left myself this message so I don’t footgun myself.
// this is also used in some content. remove at your own riskEven when I don’t expect anyone else to work on a chunk of code, me in the future is a valuable team member I want to make sure is clued in.
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Declarative vs Imperative Programming
Kevin Marks shared this talk: Declarative Design, by Jeremy Keith which has been given in a few places around the world. It’s quite good, quite simple, but also tells a fundamental truth about the web, that is is designed to give a certain amount of control to the user. There’s video available. As I’ve been not just writing CSS lately, but also attempting to communicate about why CSS does what it does in the Front End Study Hall meetings, and why we make the choices we make. Jeremy’s video goes deeply into the why, which I greatly appreciate.
I used to say “the web is not a screenshot” — a shorthand to communicate that there’s no one correct way a website looks. People view your site on their phone and in their browser with a particular kind of screen at a particular resolution and with a particular default font size and preferences for dark or light mode and how their scrollbars look and whether they use assistive technology and how good an internet connection they have. A web page “performs” in whatever context the visitor to it is using.
In 2005 I lamented that I never wrote an essay about this:
In 2000, I started saying “the web is not a screenshot” which some people on mailing lists thought was insightful. For a long time I intended to write an insightful essay about how the web works, and what makes it great, and that we should not be so fixated on pixel-precision when it comes to the web. I regret never having put these thoughts down, because it was something that needed saying. The needs of the web its users have moved on, but I wish I had contributed that.
Let the web be the web, and let users have their say in how web pages look!
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C62AZQnyp6X/ via IFTTT
(and a sweetness washes over what has been)
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C6221VKuvHG/ via IFTTT
Hit @_woca_ at @radiantbeerco because my pal Chris Greazel had some artworks up. Fun venue, good art trip!
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Roger Corman my excuse to reminisce the time I was an extra on a monster movie
More people die than I feel I can properly memorialize in this blog, so not every famous person gets an obituary here. But for Roger Corman I’m making an exception.
in 1978 my parents, sister, and me lived at 70 6th Street in New Manila, Quezon City on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. We’d been there for a year and a half, making a life there. My father, having been denied entry to US medical schools because he was too old (at 30) was going his own way along with other expat Americans in similar situations. He enrolled at the University of the East in Manila.
We subsisted–I think–on money loaned to my parents from his parents and siblings. But along the way, my mom, incredibly beautiful woman always, had somehow come to do some modeling. I remember seeing her, and her bottom, modeling for “Mac Jeans” there. I leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to consider why the Philippines needed white ladies to be in commercials intended to be viewed in Asia and Oceania , but it was money that made a difference in our lives.
I think through the US embassy in Manila–where I played T-Ball and could buy issues of Cracked and MAD Magazine–that she had met someone who hired models. And I think it was that same person who let my mom know that they needed Americans to be extras in a movie like Jaws. And that is how it came to be that Roger Corman—through his company New World Pictures—changed my life and the life of my family.
The movie was to be called Up From The Depths and was to be set in Hawaii. The opening scene if I remember does a swish-pan to the backsides of women doing a vigorous hula dance. You may think to yourself–“Hawaii is not an island in the Philippines”–but now, as then, it is expensive to shoot a movie in Hawaii. The ethos of Roger Corman, detailed even in the title of his book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime–was thrift.
That book is amazing. I read it when I was still going to school for respiratory therapy. And it was the draw of making movies that got me to move from Charlottesville, Virginia to Los Angeles in 1995. I just had to take a stab at filmmaking. I got sidetracked making web pages and that’s what I’ve done as a profession since then.
Back in 1978, My mother and I were to be extras in a B-movie about a killer prehistoric fish awakened from millennia of sleep or some other very silly premise.
It was an amazing experience. Dozens of expatriate Americans and Australians on a bus from Manila to Batangas—-60 miles (100km)—but the roads were primitive and bumpy enough that I remember having to hold on tight on that school bus.
Manila to Batangas I made $70 for those few days working as an extra. My mother and I walked around in backgrounds. We sat on beach chairs and did nothing or pretended to talk. I swam around in the water. I lingered around in the water with a cheap inflatable ring and Charles Howerton repeated walking up to us and then suddenly tripping and emerging from the water covered in some sort of animal flesh. I had a line: “OOOH–What is it?!” I think my mom made a few hundred dollars. She is in scenes in the lobby of the “Hawaiian hotel” and in a nightclub scene, dancing. I was never far away, looking on.
My memories are vivid, impressionistic, and positive. It’s also possible some of them are incorrect. Sorry, my mom’t no longer around to tell her experience of it.
It was all amazing. I remember the “stars” telling jokes to us kids on the beach. I remember the elaborate camera set up. People with equipment and walkie talkies. I remember watching boats do runs back and forth between points out in the water. I remember the fake monster fish fins being towed behind a boat. (The prehistoric fish had two telltale dorsal fins–double the number of fins in Jaws).
The fish props were huge and impressive in size, but also mundane. They reminded me of surfboards. Fiberglass and painted and pretty. But really fake too. I think I was somehow both easy to impress and hard to impress at that age.
That was where I first got to read pages in a screenplay. Me and a few other boys ages 8-10 in a glass-bottomed boat. The boat is in the movie, but the scene doesn’t.
I had a mask but no snorkel. We could swim out to the wooden platform that appears in the movie. What was under the water was amazing. Right at the water’s edge it was like being inside a fancy aquarium. Colorful and slightly menacing fish, shells and coral, very gently swaying plants in the small bay.
These are the shells I collected during our stay in Batangas. They are specific and special enough to me that I’ve kept them separate from every other thing I’ve collected in my life for the last 45 years. If you watch the film, which I can’t possibly recommend, you will note a young kid with messy black hair in a scene with 2 other boys. That’s me, pretending to be a kid vacationing in Hawaii and looking confused.
From an early scene in Up From The Depths. I didn’t like having a ring around my neck. Even then I was proud to be a good swimmer and I’d never use a useless toy like that. But on a movie set, you do what you’re told. The movie is not great. Here’s a scene that happens to be on YouTube, depicting the reaction of a Hawaiian resort to a sea monster. I am one of the shadowy figures running to shore. You would have to ask the producers how they justify everyone on shore being scared of a monster that can’t leave the water.
My aunt somehow bought the poster in the 1980s, way before eBay and the web, and I’ve kept it safe, and usually on the wall in my living room, ever since. -
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20 Year Article Idea Fulfilled
My first blog post was 23 years, 5 months, 7 days ago. This blog has 774,562 words, which would take about 71 hours and 33 minutes to read.
By comparison, the dense and well-nigh unreadable Gravity’s Rainbow is 305,000 words. Depending on when I stop blogging, which is to say, once I am incapable of blogging because of infirmity or death, that sentence will stop updating because that sentence is generated programmatically.
Why the above preamble? It’s to tell you that I don’t know what’s in this blog unless I go looking. I recently did go exploring older posts. Why? Because I remembered that for a few months or years I used Markdown in some posts. I didn’t do anything more elaborate than using underscores and asterisks to denote bolding and italicizing (aka
strongandembut it was something I did and then abandoned). I was using a WordPress Markdown plugin inside WordPress at the time. It worked fine, and allowed me to write somewhat faster. I stopped using it in 2005 or so.When I stopped, I didn’t go back and find and edit those older posts.
So I wrote a script to go looking for old posts with lots of asterisks and/or lots of underscores. There were more than I thought. Underscores can be used for distinct reasons. I had a number of fun examples, for example in quoting the song Blank Generation I wrote lines like “I belong to the ______ generation and I can take it or leave it each time” – Richard Hell leaves a pause in place for some lines of the chorus. A distinct and legitimate non-Markdown usage.
But that’s not what I really want to talk about. What I want to talk about is that I found a post about ideas for posts on the long-since-sold local blog San Diego Blog: San Diego Blog (July 13, 2004). Included are some of the goals for the site: “post daily.” And I’ll include again what I wrote soliciting some posts for the site:
So — I guess I’m again begging your indulgence for feedback and stories that should be covered. Some stories bouncing around my noggin that are not really stories yet are:
was there a plan to blow up the strand if the coronado bridge was blown up — to allow egress of navy ships?
history of the giant dipper roller coaster (it was dormant for YEARS!)
the san ysidro mcDonald’s shooting
the dredging of “False Bay” to make “Mission Bay”
famous San Diego Bands
radio stations that used to exist (Mighty 690, for example) in San Diego
Unarius Society — cable access nutballs for years
history of the PSA skytower at sea world and the lights (they didn’t always keep those lights on) — maybe a history of sea world (like –what was it like on opening day?)
great record stores in San Diego (Lou’s, Blue Meanie, Off The Record, etc)
famous people who got their starts in San Diego (e.g.: Regis Philbin, Whoopi Goldberg, Racquel Welch, Tom Waits)
____________________________ <- insert your idea here!
If any of you would like to tackle any of these things, I’d really dig it. If you just have factlets or links that are like the germs of a story, I’d dig that too.Thanks for listening to me brainstorm! I appreciate your time.
Best, Joe
Since the, I’ve written in bits and pieces about some of these things. But I was stunned to see at the top of that list: was there a plan to blow up the strand if the coronado bridge was blown up — to allow egress of navy ships? – because just this year I wrote a post about that here on my own blog: No, Bridges Don’t Float: Some Coronado Bay Bridge History
I was delighted to have fulfilled a part of a leftover editorial calendar, but alarmed it took 20 years.
(Not found in my search for asterisks were old drawings of giant punctuation in the desert).
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BO-HWC: Social Norms in the IndieWeb: upcoming event
Bonus Online Homebrew Website Club – Social Norms in the IndieWeb is an event this weekend organized by Sara Jakša. The description of the event includes:
Let’s have a meeting connecting to the social norms on the internet. Bring any topic connected to the social norms in the internet there. If you want to interact with other people on the internet or make connections, then this meetup is for you.
Some possible topics to discuss could be the good norms from other places, the deceptive patterns to avoid, what you would need to be more social in the IndieWeb context, social, personal or technical barriers to that, how social does one want to be, how does one decide how much, when and how to be social on the internet, personal protocols for that and so on.
Please bring up any other topics of under the umbrella of social norms in the IndieWeb as well. I know there were multiple great blog posts discussing this topic already 🙂 . Or you can come to just listen and vibe with other people as well.
I find the social aspects of the web fascinating overall. Comments, reblogging, blocking and banning, webmentions, video responses, remixing, are all fascinating parts of what was once referred to as the “blogosphere.” Having done this for decades I’ve seen bullying, spam, hate-sites but also genuine care, inspiration, friendship and love.
The internet is made of people! And I love thinking about it and hearing what other people think.
See also:
- Sara Jakša wrote The First Stab at the IndieWeb Interaction Social Norms (July 2023)
- Tracey Durnell wrote Barriers to a more social IndieWeb (July 2023)
- Jo wrote Quick Thoughts on IndieWeb Social Norms (July 2023)
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On Belonging
James wrote thoughtfully and wistfully two days ago:
The memories of standing on the street late at night surrounded by laughter from friends left me with a message that I had thus far not thought about emotionally: that this is a community in which I feel I can be myself. After spending so much time worrying about whether I am good enough — whether I do enough work, have created enough — I realised more so than ever that no amount of work substitutes the joy of sitting back and sharing ideas (from the good ideas to the whimsical ones that make people laugh) and getting to know people.
For a long time, I have wrestled with a difficult separation: that other people have already found their in-person community, and that I am one who is an outlier in the places I am. The worry perhaps I will never find the people who find my particular brand of humour or interest in ideas comes often.
I had the experience of being monolingual in an overseas country. I moved around a lot because of my father’s education and career. Once I got settled in my first valid career I made the decision to leave and start over. And after a few years there I moved again. And when that relationship exploded I began another one and moved yet again. Maintaining connections during that time requires conscious effort.
Moreover, I also have made mistakes and disappointed some friends in past times–a particular and peculiar kind of self-destructive behavior on my part. I mourn the relationships lost by my actions.
The relationships that have survived are strong. But the lessons of the ones that drifted away or disintegrated are that without a certain effort, relationships can’t last.
In January this year I wrote Al & my Friendship-as-Garden theory. I’ll repeat what I wrote then, as it continues to be true for me:
Friendship is a garden that we cultivate. It’s not a bad metaphor. Friendship as a thing which requires nurturing and care, just as a garden does. It’s subject to the weather. It changes with the season. Some friendships fit in the garden, and some don’t. Some plants require particular care and climate. And some are sturdy. Some things grow without prompting. When conditions are right, incredible and unexpected beauty and joy can emerge from a garden. So much so we can share it with others. And some years, nothing goes right, and the garden goes fallow.
Friendships are only partly under our control. Some years are bad. Too much sun. Weeds. Flood. Pests. But also Murphy’s Law applies: sometimes things just aren’t right and go wrong.
And I’ll say–James–that the signal your feelings are giving you are valid–and the answer is that just as you cultivate your website as a garden, you might also cultivate relationships. Embrace the seasonality: the springtimes and the winters, and the lens you look at the world with will show you the beauty that’s out there.
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Molly White is optimistic about the #IndieWeb
Recent video interview between Flipboard CEO Mike McCue and Molly White is worth a watch for people interested in the IndieWeb: it relates directly to controlling what and where you write and having a better sense of where what you read comes from. Watch on Flipboard.Video. They also talk federated social media in terms of Mastodon and Fediverse and about the “formative time” we’re currently in. I’ve pulled out some quotes to whet your appetite:
On the resurgence of blogging:
…something I’ve tried to argue for a long time is I have this strongly held belief that everyone is a blogger. I feel like the word blogger has become an insult over time where it’s like, Oh, you’re just a blogger. You’re not a real writer. Twitter. It’s like, now people want to be substackers. I’m like, But you’re just a blogger. That’s what blogging is. I think that’s great. I think everyone should be a blogger. If that means that you’re writing to your own web page or you’re publishing a sub stack or you’re just tweeting, any writing on the web, I think, is essentially blogging, and I think that’s great. I think blogging is a really healthy activity for people, and it’s something I think everyone should have a blog. This is my little blogging soapbox.
On POSSE:
POSSE is an acronym for Post on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. There are slight variations to it sometimes, but that’s the general gist of it. The idea is that instead of writing your material on Twitter and just having it live in this walled garden that is Twitter, you first write that content in a place that you control–a website that you fully operate yourself and have total control over, and then you syndicate that post to anywhere else you might normally want to have your content. And so for me, it’s Twitter, Mastodon, and Blue Sky, but you could hook something up with just about any other software you wanted to. And it’s a model I’ve adopted recently after admiring it for a really long time. I just didn’t have the time to do it. But it’s something that’s come in really useful, as I mentioned earlier, with the whole proliferation of social networks. I actively use at least three social networks, some more that I use with personal friends and things like that. It became overwhelming to write something on one network and then manually cross-post it to the other ones or decide if I wanted to or not.
And she talks about how that works for her own writing:
Now I can just write it on my site, click a button, and it goes out to wherever I like to post my ideas. I still have the main copy of it on my website so that if Twitter goes up in a ball of flames like it seems likely to do, I don’t lose the things that I wrote when I was publishing there. It’s something that I’ve really enjoyed building out. It also allows me to build out the features that I wish those sites had, which has been really enjoyable as well.
And on the challenges of getting that capability into the hands of “regular people”:
I think there are a lot of indie web projects that are trying to do things like this. I’ve seen people developing plugins that will post your WordPress blog to the Fediverse or something like that. It’s pretty straightforward to just download the plugin and write your WordPress blog, which is also meant for people who are not super technical. I think that there is some acknowledgement among the people who are developing software for these types of projects that it isn’t user friendly these days. I think that alone is progress. I saw a blog post recently that was like, as soon as you’re telling someone to type in
npm install, you’ve gone too far. That is just not the level that we’re looking for here. I thought that was really accurate. It’s like, okay, we realized that this is asking a lot of people. But yeah, I mean, I think Blue Sky is a really interesting example of trying to straddle the line between federation and this very open protocol, but also make it a little bit like Twitter, so that it’s recognizable to people who’ve used Twitter for 10 years. If you just want to sign up, you can use@bsky, you can just log in and it looks pretty similar, and you can follow people.See: Entering a New Phase of the Web, with Citation Needed’s Molly White (post)
Entering a New Phase of the Web, with Citation Needed’s Molly White (video) -
Frank Zappa: American Composer
This is a radio documentary that at one time was on the Zappa.com website. It’s now available on YouTube in 4 parts and is excellent.
I had linked to it in Shockwave Audio form in 2001 on my short essay I am a Frank Zappa fan and I’m glad to see it’s available online on YouTube. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
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Where’s the IndieWeb going? some random musings
Tracy Durnell, who you ought to be reading, posted The IndieWeb’s next stage?.
But the growing newsletter movement shows there’s a hunger for deeper conversation — nearly every Substack newsletter I read has a lively section of thoughtful replies. Having more readers of personal websites could bolster the existing community of indie publishers. The more people who use the independent web–whether creating new work, participating in conversations, curating links, or simply reading–the healthier it becomes.
In IndieWeb Zooms my age and experience compels me to bring up prior art that is similar. I try not to focus too much on the past, but I do appreciate that patterns recur. And the walled garden-to-open platform pattern is not new.
I was an AOL user. I loved the Trivia chat rooms – rapid fire trivia quizzes run by whomever was around? Free form text chat? Sign me up! I fell in love with the platform and with a woman I met there. Had parties and meet-ups with fellow chat room denizens. But at some point it was not enough. I moved to Earthlink because it had a fuller experience of Usenet, it came with a webspace I put my first professional website on. On an account that I can still type out from memory:
home.earthlink.net/~artlung/.Cory Doctorow reminds us about a similar transition, from MySpace to Facebook, in an piece for Locus:
Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you.
Brid.gy is a service that allows a similar kind of interop or transition. But you can’t bridge to or from Instagram:
Why not Instagram?
Sadly, Instagram’s API is locked down to limited manual approval.My favorite tool for capturing Instagram content for backup, InstaLooter has been broken for some time–the issue? Instagram does all it can to thwart people having control over their own work. I talked my mistrust of the silos recently.
Back to Tracy’s words:
It may be that most community members are satisfied being more of a hobbyist organization than an activist one. Or we might want the community to stay at a small scale so we don’t have to address spam and moderation. What we’ve got already may be as far as folks want (or have the energy) to take it. Maybe there’s some other group that makes more sense to be the David to the corporate Goliaths. But without asking, I won’t know.
I think people who are living IndieWeb values outnumber actual community members of IndieWeb by 100x or 1000x. There are a lot of websites. And I’m not factoring in sites with a language barrier–it’s a big planet. In 2001 when I attended SXSW there were already a lot of bloggers but I had a sense of the 500 or so that existed. It was when I ran San Diego Bloggers and went looking for bloggers I realized just how many there were just in San Diego alone.
If it’s true what Molly White says, that everyone is a blogger, that scale is already larger than my brain can possibly understand. And that’s not even considering blogs not in English or English with a little Spanish. There’s no way for me to wrap my brain around the scale.
To me the victory condition of IndieWeb is not that everyone joins the wiki, it’s that everyone that wants a web identity has one that they can keep easily, with minimal expense, minimal admin tax, and can do what they want. I want them to not feel censored, limited or algorithmed out of finding and being found by whomever they might choose and whatever information they’d like to find and I’d like nobody to be subject to harms, spam and abuse as much as practical. It’s a big ask, and implies large swaths of infrastructure and tooling that only exists as patchwork.
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Webmention check!
I do so love when a “Hello World” is also a “Welcome Aboard!”
…and now it’s time to get busy…
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Joe Project Updates
It’s fun to see the last 30 days and the last 23 years side by side. See #3 below: - GitHub.com/artlung was updated to include a
READMEfile. - I updated by Tilde Club site: tilde.club/~artlung/
- The landing page of the site is no longer the blog. Instead, it’s an overview with various pages and projects. See: artlung.com
- I keep adding to the styling on this site based on headers:
- I made a new header last week
- I added respect for
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark)in the CSS Thanks Al and James for reviewing it - Many buttons and user interface elements were affected by these changes using code like
color-mix(in srgb, var(--backgroundColor), var(--global-background-color) 20%). Buttons to set full screen on tag pages, the visualization page, pagination for blog pages.
- I’m using a CDN to improve site responsiveness and uptime. WordPress and PHP code do what they’re good at and the CDN can serve assets, fast.
- I added support for comments (and webmentions and pingbacks) on a few of the pages of the site I didn’t before.
- I took over blogofthe.day from James. Already had a few folks add themselves. Learning to use Eleventy and Netlify. See my page about the project. If you have an IndieWeb or even just an “indie” blog, add yourself!
- The next Front End Study Hall will be this Thursday. Al asked me to explain what the code
FLEX: 1 0 0does as though he was a child. We’ll try! I want to do a basic scroll-based animation in a live coding session. I always have a good time during the Study Hall. JOIN US!
On a personal note: I notice I’m shaving my face slightly less often than every day or every 2 days. That can be correlated with not taking care of my needs properly. I’m keeping an eye on it. Less self-care and less beach equals trouble, basically. But it can also mean a period of productive improvement before a breakthrough. Impossible to know the difference while it’s happening.
Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading!
- GitHub.com/artlung was updated to include a
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CSS Illustrations
CodePen has been great for playing with ideas during Front End Study Hall . That’s a good service. Here’s what my new collection, called “CSS Illustrations” looks like: -
from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C7X_sCxtfqg/ via IFTTT
“What’s Björk Wearing?” … in 2021 someone here in Instagram shared a blank of Björk and I drew this rubber duck dress. I wish I could remember who shared the Björk blank! Was it you?
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Bits and Pieces Programming
The Photos page was an instance of Gallery I originally installed 20 years ago. I was never quite happy with the way it was presented. The last update I made was maybe 10 years ago, moving it out of Gallery and using the database tables to drive something hand-rolled. Yesterday I was able to remove those pages and use a new, custom template in WordPress and script the import of these galleries. I like the control WordPress offers. It’s a work in progress.
I find it fun to revisit work I had forgotten.
Lightpointe Flight Navigator. A pre-sales tool for their laser networking products. 
Avencom contact map. It was a good office. Our whole neighborhood in Downtown San Diego is utterly different 20 years later.
I’m pretty pleased with my switch from blog-first landing page to something custom. I had fun creating a WordPress plugin to facilitate creation of those 9×9 grid images. The source is on GitHub: Aggregate Thumbnail Images.
blogofthe.day is cruising along and growing. Feel free to read the code. Add your indie blog if you feel the notion! I’m am pleased that James is pleased with the results.
I started a page today: Amiga: computing memories… but I think it’s not quite done. There are so many memories and lessons from how I used the Amiga I’m not sure I can encompass it in a single page.
That’s all for today. Have a great day!
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Blogger Redirects, Linkrot & Writing
I have been reading blogs a long time. And I’ve been writing for a long time too.
Today at the IndieWeb pop up event focused on writing I had reason to remember when I got linked to on Boing Boing. It a list of links I had collated, but it was to my old blog url format, when I was still using Blogger.com via FTP to post. The url was:
https://boingboing.net/blogosphere.htmland it’s still there. Just a bit broken.
LIVE FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE! February 15, 2003 The link that page links to is
https://artlung.com/blog/-2003_02_01_archive.php#89271672. And that link still works because at some point I added a redirect to the.htaccessfile on my site to tell my webserver, Apache, to send requests like that elsewhere.RedirectMatch permanent /blog/-([0-9]{4})_([0-9]{2})_([0-9]{2})_archive.php https://artlung.com/blog/$1/$2/is how that looks.Link rot haunts many of my posts.
I don’t remember listening to the audio cast of the file that is referred to on that page, the link is broken. I’ve asked the Internet Archive account on Mastodon where it might be. I’m curious to hear it after all this time.
I loved that trip to L.A.
Here are the posts from that: Blogosphere Part 1: From San Diego to Los Angeles, Blogosphere Part 2: Musings/Blogosphere, Lots of Links on Blogosphere and Google Buying Pyra and Blogger
During today’s writing event I mentioned re-reading and finding writing that second-guesses itself. Cringe, I suppose one might call it. Here’s the bit that stands out to me now:
A sweet older Japanese woman is complaining of the cold on the train. The cute (well, I assume they’re cute, I’ve not seen them from the front) Japanese girls drop out of Japanese and into English to commiserate with her.
Hmmm. Am I racist to immediately call any Japanese girl “cute.” It probably is. Not a negative stereotype. Well, maybe negative in the sense that I limit my ability to understand someone else fully. But not negative like a lot of racism.
It’s funny, I want to delete that last paragraph. But I’m leaving it in. Yeah. Leaving it in.
I hadn’t planned to write stream-of-consciousness all the way to Los Angeles, but that’s the way it’s turning out. It becomes hard to imagine anyone reading this. There’s no editing to speak of. There’s only masses of words and thoughts as I progress.
I like that instinct I have to share my whole self. So far it’s not hurt me too much, or at least that I can tell. I suspect that I’ve had employers think twice about hiring me after being exposed to my blog. Maybe. But it’s hard to know.
I enjoy writing. I enjoy thinking. And this is where I do it.
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(Not) Now
I started this post in January as a “Now” page at
/nowin accordance with nownownow dot com but given I don’t think about it at all, and meanwhile I’ve shifted to having my landing page at/be much more dynamic and visual about what’s new that seems to be how I’m wired.I do like the idea of
/nowa lot, and love the variants documented at slashpages dot net (/chipotleis particularly deranged and inspired).Here’s what I put on the page and never updated.
It’s January 2, 2024.
This is a placeholder, but I think I’m going to do the /Now Page thing.
Maybe it’ll have IG posts. Mastodon posts. Whatever’s newest on my /links page. My latest posts longer than a certain word count. Maybe it’ll also include current listens?
It might be fun.
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The Web Is Better.
When we old heads talk about how the web is much better, I wonder sometimes how it lands on the ears of younger people.
The clichĂ© of a parent saying “I had to walk to school, both ways, in the snow.”
Here’s a datapoint. Here’s a chunk of code:
It’s not great code. I can see optimizations I would make 22 years later. The block of code that uses
document.getElementByIdworks fine.document.layersanddocument.allare no longer “truthy,” as we programmers call it. They don’t exist because the browsers that use them are dead. Goodnight Navigator. Farewell, Internet Explorer. But for rather a long time both Netscape and Microsoft were VERY INTERESTED in having programmers write code that used their vision for how a browser would work because it meant market share. Get programmers to write for THEM, not that other company. Don’t bother writing that code for that other browser. That’s so much work! We have the best browser.Microsoft was so sure that they could dominate that there was an Internet Explorer for Unix at the same time as their message was that nobody could ever possibly need an operating system other than Windows.
Aside: NCommander is great
As a person who made things for the web, I was obliged, if I cared to have a page work, to know these browser differences.
And the code I wrote? It ran! It looked like this:
2002 DHTML Portfolio Piece And here in 2024, it still runs, because that standard code still runs.
document.getElementByIdworks great.We still have some edges where Safari can do something Firefox can’t do, or Chrome does something Safari can’t do, but we understand they are at the edges. Maybe we can try it out in a beta version of the browser or set a “feature flag” to turn it on. But we can check a site like caniuse.com and see whether I can turn it loose on an audience.
What’s more? These days I could do the same effect now with much less code. By adding the attribute
popoverto those divs and I could make the same thing happen with no JavaScript at all. And I can check how well I can trust it quickly.Things were worse in 2002.
Today? The web is better.
The goal is to keep the browser makers honest. Keep on pushing on them. To adhere to standards. To prioritize accessibility. To keep up the fight for privacy and against tracking.
And wherever you put your stuff on the web, KEEP A COPY. My Myspace page still exists, sort of, at
myspace dot com / artlung. It’s so terrible I can’t bear to link to it. In the Internet Archive, the way I remember it kind of exists. But it’s no good. Don’t trust Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or X-dot-com to care for your stuff better than you can.The World Wide Web belongs to YOU. It belongs to ME.
Move on up,
And keep on wishing,
Remember your dream is only a scheme–
So keep on pushin’And listen to Curtis Mayfield today. I suggest “Move On Up.”
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XOXO Fest is a go.
I will be at XOXO Fest this year! In 2019 one great thing I got more into was the IndieWeb. I do plan to be part of one or more #XOXOFest #IndieWeb #Mastodon coffee / breakfast / assemblies. And Kelly will be attending with me, too 🎉! Our first trip to Oregon together!
Plus: folks I know from IndieWeb and in my blogroll will be there too).
And you bet I’ll be hitting Billy Galaxy for some 🤖 shopping.
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Questions of the Day
From Benjamin Wittes:
Does a criminal conviction of a past president, in fact, serve any significant democracy protective function in a prospective sense as that person seeks the presidency anew or is it just so much noise? Does Trump’s being convicted of 34 felonies make it any less likely that he will be elected president five months from now? Put another way, does the criminal law serve any meaningful role in shielding American democracy from its own populist instincts? Does it actually matter in a prospective sense?
From Thoughts on Donald Trump’s Conviction, in Lawfare.
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Goodbye, FOAF
I have a FOAF file on this website.
It has a timestamp of
Jul 29 2003.Here’s what’s in it.
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:rdfs="http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> <foaf:Person> <foaf:name>Joe Crawford</foaf:name> <foaf:firstName>Joe</foaf:firstName> <foaf:surname>Crawford</foaf:surname> <foaf:nick>ArtLung</foaf:nick> <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>06ff9b5ac353498d7ce158b4b03b53bb177160e9</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="https://artlung.com/blog/"/></foaf:Person> </rdf:RDF>What is that. Let’s check the IndieWeb wiki (continually gardened by me and hundreds of IndieWeb members):
FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is (was?) one of the more frequently used RDF vocabularies/formats, in many ways a reinvention of the vCard vocabulary (used in hCard microformats and h-card microformats2).
And the way that was referenced was in the
<head>of my site was a header:<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="/foaf.rdf">which would in theory would someday cross-link with other people’s FOAF files. It would all constitute a social graph. Then soon enough LinkedIn and MySpace became dominant for that. And we know what happened next. That glorious future of XML dialects inside our sites didn’t happen. It wasn’t useful or practical enough and it was obscurely technical. Without easy and free tools to edit and use RDF it was never going to happen.Here’s the blog post 20 years ago where I mentioned that I added the file. I suppose it’s telling that the domain “foaf-project.org” which I linked to doesn’t exist anymore.
These days my site communicates similar things with microformats. Microformats are simple enough that a child can use them. Literally on one of the FrESH calls we had a young kid who (with the help of a competent adult) showed off her Glitch web page with recipes marked up with microformats. The barrier to participation is far lower!
And there are great tools like IndieWebify.me and I can check for what my
h-cardsays about me.
Screenshot of IndieWebify output to parse for hCard h-card is related to hCard is related to vCard, which dates back decades now.
So it’s time to say goodbye to the 1 kilobyte this file has taken up for 20 years.
And if you want to play with code, check out Glitch, it’s fun to code.
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from Instagram https://instagr.am/p/C7o_zfvpSDL/ via IFTTT
San Diego Airport @peetscoffee has an auspicious sign #XOXOFest which Kelly and I got tickets for yesterday. I hope it’s a good day to fly.
joe crawford. blog since 2001 indieweb guestbook
