Cleaning up My Website

I decided to make a few updates on my website - again. However, this are a bit more than visuals and I’m mostly reinventing the way I manage IndieWeb posts, namely likes, reposts, notes and replies.

What about your bookmarks?

Well, that’s a great question. I also removed the bookmarks section and merged it with my pins where I add interesting links I find on the web. I noticed I wasn’t even using the bookmarks and most of them were just repetitions of what I have on my blogroll.

To like or not to like?

One of the decisions I made was to remove the likes. “What about the own your own data think?”, you may ask. You’re right! However, not having the likes on my website doesn’t mean I don’t own them or the data related to them. I just need to create some tool that stores my Twitter likes.

I was only using this section for Twitter purposes and let’s be honest: I don’t have the time, nor the patient to hit 3 more buttons every time I just want to press like and then wait for my server to reply. It makes my likes being much more selective which, in some situations, may be good, but that’s not what I want to do.

For now, I prefer to just hit the like button on Twitter. Also, having the likes I do on Twitter reflected on my website doesn’t add much information. If I want to share something I really care about or I think it’s really important, I will do a note where I add some content.

Reposts?

A repost on the indieweb is a post that is purely a 100% re-publication of another post. The act of reposting is an umbrella term that covers the general practice of republishing another post typically on the same service or silo, but more and more across sites. - IndieWeb Wiki

Similarly to what I did with the likes, I’m also removing the reposts. Mainly because the reposts are supposed to be a 100% re-publication so I’m just getting rid of that concept. All reposts that do not have any content associated, will be removed. Others, just like Twitter’s “retweet with comments” will behave as replies (I actually think they are kind of replies on steroids on Twitter’s eye).

Microblogging!

With all of that being said, I’m also merging the notes and the replies category into one: micro. The name comes from microblogging which is just a form of blogging.

URL Structure

Once again, I’m back at changing my URLs and breaking some links - just kidding, I’m going to setup all the required redirects. Let’s take the following URL for example:

• From /articles/2020/02/29/1/notable-to-hugo/
• To /articles/2020/02/notable-to-hugo/

I’m going to get rid of the day part and the id (1), making it smaller and clearer.

What do I care about?

If that question is related to this website only: interaction with people - and that’s where the webmentions come in and that’s something I’m not going to remove anytime soon -, simplicity, cleanliness.

I also moved my experiments page and merged it with the more page. Now it includes a small section with links to some experiments that now are not generated by Hugo. They’re just plain ol’ HTML files dumped in my static folder. They mostly were already so… not much changed.

From now on, the homepage will be more curated. It will include all my articles, but not all my micro interactions will be included, only the ones I specifically set to be shown there will be visible. You can always see everything on the micro page of course.

In addition, I’m pondering to move the articles section to “blog” again. Why? I’d have a micro blog and a blog! It’s also a shorter name than “Articles” but that’s the only change I’m not applying now because, for some reason, it doesn’t feel as right! What do you think?

I also made sure I set up the redirects for the feeds so no one gets broken feeds!

Did you find a broken link? Just contact me!