Tag: indieweb

An article by Aral Balkan where they compare the state of the current web, the big web, with the web of the people, introducing the concept of “small web”.

Jim shows how he uses the Well-Known links resource to show the links he has to other websites. For example, going to /.well-known/links?domain=example.com shows all the pages in his website that link to example.com.

Over the past few days, I procrastinated quite a bit instead of working on my thesis. I have this huge peaks of performance mixed with high procrastination. I guess this happens somewhat to most people. Either way, while procrastinating I added quite some new features to this website, and improved some already existing things, both visually and internally.

• Fixed the values in <title> which were wrong in some pages. I also changed the website name to be more descriptive.
• Fixed the truncation of text and the way I add the ellipsis when generating excerpts from longer posts to fit in the descriptions.
• Added image resizing on my media endpoint using ImgProxy, which I run locally in my VPS and then upload the resized images to bunny.net.
• Added Reddit integration in this website, both using Reddit’s API for upvotes (likes), comments (replies) and new posts. For the webmentions, I am using brid.gy.
• Added support for channels so I can hand pick which sections to put my posts when using Micropub clients.
• Added support for video posts, like this example.
• Added support for audio posts. I don’t have an example yet as this is a feature that I think I would more likely use for personal use. However, I am still on the fence on how to protect the media files. Right now I support private posts, but that’s it: the post itself cannot be accessed, but what’s the best way to protect the media?

I also fixed some other things and make some slight visual updates to be more consistent.

I was speaking to @seblog about categorisation of contents in our websites and some ideas came into mind:

• Now I have sections for each post type and a special section for posts that should so up in home.
• Sections are automatically added to the posts when they are created based on their post type.
• Realistically, who will follow a feed based on the post type? And why?
• @seblog suggests a more audience-based categorisation, such as “personal”, “tech”, etc. I’ve had that way back in the past and I really don’t remember if it was good or not. However, I understand the appeal.
• @seblog said that types distiction are not that useful, it’s just easy to make.
• We both already have tags. But tags feel too overly-specific.
• Both tags and sections are… at the end of the day… taxonomies.
• On my website I could technically achieve this with either tags or sections. Sections seem best as they are more general. Also, audience-based names would not collide with post types so they could still be at the root of the website, such as /personal or /articles.
• Manually categorising a post every time we post can become arduous.
• Is it worth it?

Let’s conclude with taxonomies are hard. What do you think?

As you might have read on my meta page, I inteded to remove support for ActivityPub:

I am considering removing the ActivityPub support from my website. Right now, my website is able to provide posts formatted as ActivityPub entries; post to my followers when I write new content; and receive comments via ActivityPub.

What bothers me is that the logic is a bit flaky and it fails quite often. Besides, I only have 2 followers and one of them is a testing account of mine. Removing it would cleanup the code and possibly not hurt anyone.

I just did it for the reasons mentions above. It’s a bit sad, but it gives me some peace of mind nevertheless. Maybe in the future, there will be a more straightforward protocol that is more massively adopted that I can implement. For now, I don’t see the use for this website.

Well… it was a library issue. Upgraded it, working now. Unfortunately, when I added it, the dependency manager didn’t add the last version, but it’s not its fault. The source code is not correctly tagged it seems!

The thing is: I’ve done this in the past. I just tried with a random Mastodon instance and the error is precisely the HTTP signature. Either I’m not signing correctly, or I’m not proving the public key correctly. But the fact that I did this in the past and it’s still not working, it’s what’s annoying me the most. Also, I’m doing this in Go and I’m basing on @jlelse’s implementation and his ActivityPub Accept is working. And my code literally looks the same. If I don’t figure it out in the next hour, I’ll leave it for another day.

I’ve been in spring cleanup mode since yesterday and I started on GitHub and ended up archiving and deprecating dozens of repos that were either unmaintained or actually supposed to be deprecated.

On this website, I just removed the ActivityPub support of my website because of two reasons: it had bugs and wasn’t working properly (I think) and there were only two or three people following me, being 2 of them bots. The other one also follows me through RSS so I hope I don’t affect them very much.

Today and tomorrow I’ll also proceed to make some internal upgrades and decouple the webmentions from the static generation process of this website, inspired by Jan-Luka’s post. I need to upgrade to Caddy 2 as well as some other changes I might share later.

The IndieWeb own-your-data-thing can be complicated sometimes. Since there are no full fledged systems that allow us to interact with other social media without having to implement it ourselves, sometimes we get to the point where we feel kind of limited. I’m trying not to use other services or, if I do, I’m just POSSE’ing to them. Sometimes it’s hard because there are communities that are more connected on some social media (e.g., Twitter) and the bridge is not always perfect.

Edit: I just hope someday we can have a federated social network that can easily interact with all others…

Just wondering if it’s worth it to keep my watches log and checkins on my website. I know I had some work setting that up. But, is it worth it? Is it worth for you, readers?

I like having that data accessible and I still can by just using the APIs and backing up the data myself. It can be useful and it can have many uses. But is it worthy to have on this website?

For maintenance purposes, it’s a bit harder but not impossible. For you, readers. I’d love your opinion on this. I’ve b en thinking about removing swarm checkins because of privacy issues.

About the watches: maybe it’d be nice to have a page listing the series and movies I’ve watched but not as logs.