TIL poison dart frogs are actually harmless when kept in captivity. In the wild, they only develop poison because they eat mostly ants, and the ants themselves ingest different varieties of poisonous plants. from todayilearned

[Poetry] WEDNESDAYS ARE BACK! from youtubehaiku

This cat on a fluffy seal pillow from Eyebleach

Making an #IndieAuth authorization endpoint. #indieweb #webdesign

I hold da han from Eyebleach

estoy OBSESIONADA con este video porque siento que es la manera en la que funciona mi cerebro pic.twitter.com/GEyOpsdlef

— maricons tanza 🌹 (@ulyss__es) August 11, 2020

I’ve always been about having my own site to control my own longform content instead of relying on for-profit companies to have my best interests in mind — but the IndieWeb is more than that. The IndieWeb is a different philosophy and approach to using the internet. It reverses people from being mere users of corporate silos, where their value is how much ad revenue they can generate directly through clicks or indirectly through providing free content, into beacons of thought and information and connectors themselves.

A Human-Centered, Less Corporate Approach to the Web

Recentering How I Use the Web Based on My Needs Rather Than the Private Services That are Available

Because the IndieWeb is a complete system of tools that can be used to do almost anything you want to do on the web, it’s been a lot to wrap my head around. Taking advantage of the whole ecosystem and going full IndieWeb can be a dramatic shift in how we use the web. Instead of checking in on various social sites, you can use your own home base to communicate with others across the web, no matter where they are. Rather than email being the hub of your daily web experience, your website is. It appeals to me for communication the same way RSS appeals to me for following blogs. I’m still soaking it all in, but getting more excited about all the possibilities!

Making the Web A Little More Alive

So much of the web is “sanitized,” nipples deemed inherently sexual and therefore offensive, and yet full of content that is actually offensive like hate speech and bullying and racism and straight-up false information. When the internet makes money through clicks and shares, and money is the only decision-making filter, content that outrages is good. I have enough stress in my life without manufactured crises — especially since there are real crises happening in the US that we shouldn’t lose sight of for the outrage-of-the-day. Having our communication tools controlled by for-profit companies means that our human needs for safe, good-faith conversational spaces come second to maximizing the number of users on the site and drumming up “engagement” even when it is unhealthy in human terms.

Give me nipples over trolls any day.

Computers guess what demographic I fit in — they’re right on my age and marital status, yet wrong about my goals and lifestyle. (Psst, AI! Not all women in their thirties have or want kids.) Algorithms recommend content that will reinforce what I already think since that makes people feel good, or show me art and design similar to what I’ve seen and liked before. In a web dominated by AI and algorithms, it takes effort to seek out quality material that will challenge you, whether visual aesthetics or political.

On social sites, algorithms decide what content to show me, even though I’ve chosen who I want to follow purposefully. In Gmail, Google decides what emails are spam or promotional, even for newsletters I signed up for (with CAPTCHAs and double-opt-ins and everything!) — and they’re wrong a lot of the time. Personalized recommendations make sites like Amazon and YouTube into echo chambers. I’m tired of AI deciding what to show me.

I’ve long said the future of the web is curation — there’s so much content, much of it crap or irrelevant — and I want to hear what real people find interesting. As a designer, I want to be shown a wide variety of other creative work, not just art that I already like. As a thinker and writer, I need to be exposed to different ways of thinking and other approaches to problems. For me, there is value in seeing and reading (some) things I don’t like or disagree with — and it’s hard to train an algorithm to do that.

Meet Other People Who Run Their Own Websites

It’s fun to meet other people who also run their own websites, even if their interests are different! (Yet another way to get to learn about new things.) The Indie Web community seems very active, with lots of online events held during the pandemic and an open chat.

Better Ways to Share Thoughts and Connect with Others

Micropublishing as a New Way of Saving and Sharing Info and Short Thoughts

I don’t have a great system for keeping track of information on the web. I have a terrible habit of keeping 50+ tabs open on my phone because I don’t want to forget about them, but I don’t have a system for filing them. Or, I’ll read an interesting article, and want to refer to it a couple months later, but didn’t save it at the time. (Happened while writing this article 🙄) Apparently a lot of ideas take longer to incorporate than I expect!

Recently I tried out the beta of a promising-sounding service, but it didn’t work for me at all. Currently I use a blend of Pinterest, Trello, and emailing notes to myself. But why am I waiting for others to make a system for me? Why not make my own filing system, that will never get shut down? I don’t need anything complicated. I can use micropublishing to create my own record and repository of information, thoughts, inspiration, and articles!

I stumbled across the concepts of both “digital gardens” and commonplace books as places to keep disconnected notes and thoughts before they’ve coalesced — thinking and learning in public. Micropublishing seems like a simple way to accomplish this without setting up complicated infrastructure. I’m long overdue to update tracydurnell.com, which no longer reflects a need I have, so I think I’ll set it up to host more of a directory and personal journal, while keeping my articles here. I’m most excited by micropub options for logging books, notes and bookmarks, and drinks.

Theoretically, I could post all those things on this blog — but my goal for this site is talking about productivity and creative work and finding inspiration in the Pacific Northwest’s outdoors. Sometimes I find things that don’t neatly fit into that, or are political, or I’m not sure what I think of something and I want to digest it a little more. I’m OK with posting quotes, but here I’d like to add commentary to any other article I share — which doesn’t quite work if I don’t yet have anything to say. This is kind of an “in my head” problem about how I approach things, but one I’ve suffered from a long time — even in high school I hated to write things down in the “wrong” notebook!

“Leading by Example” and Adopting Better Systems, Even with the Kinks

The IndieWeb is still in its early stages, with a small (but active) community. There are definitely some technical hurdles to widespread adoption, but I am a proponent of acting based on how I would like to see the world run, rather than accepting the status quo, even if it takes a little more work.

Although some question the value in individual environmental action when so many problems are systemic, I believe it’s important to do what we can to live in accordance with our personal values, and participate in the process of culture transformation by shifting my lifestyle to use less resources. As a consumer, I’ve been shifting away from using Google and Amazon, and trying to shift my purchasing power to local and independent businesses whenever possible. And as a user of the web, I want to participate in the internet I want, in an internet I believe in — one that centers people instead of companies, ideas and conversation instead of profit, and self-empowerment and personal action over inertia.

About Tracy Durnell

Seattle-area graphic designer and SFF writer inspired by the Pacific Northwest, crafting a sustainable and intentional life. (she/her)

Timelapse of my last drawing 🌿✨

(I started off based on a drawing I did before but thought I could make better) pic.twitter.com/OCNeGw7npG

— Momo (@momodraws) August 6, 2020

Raphael Saadiq.

Always a evening mood.

I have a great fondness for IndieWeb building blocks and Webmention is a wonderful meta-building-block that connects so many individual websites together.

Obligatory "what is Webmention?": it's a specification that describes a way to "tell" a website that some document out on the web links to one of the pages on that site.

Sound simple? It is! Perhaps even suspiciously simple. Webmention enables whole new kinds of interactions between sites (some great examples in this A List Apart piece). Unfortunately, almost all of the coordination to support these interactions happen outside of the "Webmention" spec itself.

So, when I see blog post titles like these I am not sure exactly what to expect:

• Integrating Webmention with my blog
• Pelican, Pingback and Webmentions
• Webmention for TiddlyWiki to enable website to website notifications and communication
• and this clickbait sensation: Add Webmention support to your website in ten minutes

There are many more like this, I just grabbed a handful off the last few pages of news.indieweb.org.

These examples and many more are referring to the most talked-about use of Webmention: enabling site-to-site comments and responses, like a souped-up independent alternative to terrible embeds like Disqus.

This may sound like a simple feature! We might expect it to look like this:

• You see a post on the web that you like. Let's call that "their post".
• On your own site, you make a post that links to theirs with some comment like "Nice post!". We'll call that "your post".
• Assuming that you both "have Webmention support", you might check their post a little later and see a nice summary of your post as a comment below their content.
  

However, for a webmention to "succeed", a lot of coordination needs to happen.

On your side:

• You publish "your post" which links to "their post". So far, so good, you probably publish links to your site all the time.
  
• When that post is live, you can try to send a webmention. How do you do that? It depends.

From here, it's pretty much out of your hands. On their side:

• Their post needs to advertise the URL of a service that will accept them.
  
• That service checks that your post is a real post on the web, and that it contains a link to their post and it ... stores it somewhere. Maybe it goes into a moderation queue?
  

So then they have the webmention, but to actually display it, their site must:

• Pull your post out of wherever their webmentions are stored.
• Somehow understand what your post "is".
• Render that into their page.
  

When I see folks posting "I added Webmentions to my site" I want to believe that they have some version of all of the bullet points above. But, there are lots of incompletes.

A list, without references, of partial Webmention support I have seen

The Junk Drawer

Signing up for a receiving service like webmention.io ... and that's it. Often announced alongside a sentence like "Next up I'll figure out how to display them!" This brings to mind with images of the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, or a house filled to the ceiling with stacks of moldy newspapers.

There are, I recognize, lots of good reasons not to display webmentions, beyond some of the technical speedbumps and pitfalls I talk about below. For example there are a lot of unanswered questions and not-yet-built tools and services for dealing with moderation and abuse.

"Why didn't my reply show up on your site?"

Static sites are back and I love it. But if there's one thing that static sites do extremely poorly it is responding dynamically to outside events. Some static sites (including my own!) will save webmentions as the come in, but won't display them until the next time a post is added or modified on the site.

"Why does my reply look weird on your site?"

From services to command line tools to fancy build hooks on your fancy hosting service, there are many ways to automate sending webmentions. But unless the receiving end can understand the content of your post, it might not show up as you intended, or at all, on the receiving end. Current best practices would have you add some extra markup to your post so that the receiver can know that it is a reply, or a like, or an RSVP, or something else. This is a hard coordination problem between your site and theirs! In fact there is a whole community and standards process for figuring out how to do these things!

Making sure your posts have the "correct" markup to look like you want can be difficult even for developers writing their own HTML. Tools like indiewebify.me, Monocle's preview, and microformats.io can help if you are getting your hands dirty. It's much harder for folks that just redesigned their site with a new WordPress theme.

Bridgy Over Troubled Waters

Bridgy is an absolutely incredible suite of services provided by Ryan, also for free, for the community.

With the power of Bridgy Backfeed you can use Webmention to feed replies, likes, and reposts from your Twitter tweets to their corresponding post on your own site! This works despite the fact that twitter.com does not link to your website because Bridgy generates little "bridge" pages for which to send webmentions. And it's just a little bit of tweaking to have your Webmention display handle the quirks.

With the power of Bridge Publish you can use Webmention to automatically copy posts from your website directly to social media silos like Twitter! You do this by hiding a link to Bridgy in your post, which sends a Webmention to Bridgy, and then Bridgy parses your post to understand it and figure out which bits to tweet. And then Bridgy responds with info about your new tweet. And it's just a little bit of tweaking to have your Webmention sender handle those quirks and update your post with that link.

With the power of Bridge Fed you can use Webmention to automatically copy posts from your website directly into The Fediverse where yadda yadda yadda. And it's just a bit of tweaking to have your Webmention yadda yadda yadda yadda. 😩 I've tired myself out.

These are all fantastic things that are build on top of Webmention but that I often feel are conflated with Webmention.

"Just let JavaScript do it!"

This one is a bit... unfair on my part. In fact, I think this setup is the best you can get for the least effort, and I encourage folks to go for it. It looks like this:

• Register with webmention.io to receive, verify, and store your webmentions.
• Put webmention.js in the template for your posts.

I love webmention.io and use it myself. It is an amazing community resource run by Aaron at no charge! Kevin's mention.tech is another great tool, as is VoxPelli's webmention.herokuapp.com. By configuring one of them to accept webmentions on your behalf you save a lot of trouble. They provide APIs that let you pull out the mentions for pages across your site.

Similarly, webmention.js is a really great tool by fluffy that hides a lot of complexity and forethought about how to display webmentions with a single JavaScript include.

All that said, I have some issues with this particular combo long-term because all the fetching and display of webmentions happens in the browser of the person viewing your post.

If 1,000 people visit your post, that's 1,000 requests to webmention.io, putting load on a service being run by one individual for free.

This setup also means that the webmentions for a post aren't included in the original HTML. So, if your site sends a webmention and wants to check back automatically to see if it's shown up, but their site only displays webmentions via JavaScript, your site will never see it. Likewise, it becomes much harder to keep track of reply chains, for example.

Why are you being such a downer about this?

Despite, apparently, being a bit salty today, I really do get excited about Webmention, how it's being used in so many ways to connect independent sites, and new ways it can be used in the future.

I'm worried, a bit, that "Webmention" is starting to lose its meaning in conversation. It's starting to feel like a shorthand that hides important details.

Maybe Webmention can be thought of as less of a "building block" and more like a glue. You can do so many things with glue, like combining a bunch of planks into a table, or building a parade float sculpture with papier-mâché, or doctoring the photo in a passport!

You wouldn't call them all "glue".