Today one of my few favorite famous people, Wil Wheaton, told Facebook and Zuck to go fuck themselves to death, which makes me happy.
Category: blogging
Posts about blogging
The Internet is Amazing
I’ve been reading a lot recently about how shitty social media has made the internet. I agree. What started out as promising has really turned to crap. At the same time, I’ve been very immersed lately in learning about the IndieWeb, the “small web”, and such.
For a “normal person” — someone who wasn’t in the tech or academic realm until 1994 — I feel like I was a pretty early adopter of the internet and web. I detail my introduction to the internet and the World Wide Web in this post on my other blog, Me and the Internet, Part 1. (Yes, my blogging has been kind of divided for the last year or two. Been blogging over at micro.blog because I like the platform a lot and it is very interesting.)
I’ll get around to writing part 2 soon enough, detailing the years from 1999 to 2010 when I ran the first skateboard trick archive with video. A site called Bob’s Trick Tips, which got 40,000 page views a day and nearly blew up my credit card with pre-cheap bandwidth/pre-YouTube bandwidth charges.
My point, I suppose, is that since 1994 there has never been a time when I didn’t have at least one personal website. Until I discovered Moveable Type and then WordPress they were for the most part hand-coded (except for running phpBB message forums and trying out a few content management systems).
Further, my point is that I’ve been creating websites and using the web for so long I think that until tonight I had really forgotten how amazing it is and how amazing it can be. When I started on the internet, the browser that came on the floppy the university gave me was Mosaic. There were hardly any sites compared to today. I used Gopher and Telnet to connect to servers all over the country and the globe. It felt fucking incredible. I mean – INCREDIBLE. From our crappy apartment off the drag by UT Austin, with our 28.8 modem and our new Macintosh Performa computer we’d taken out a loan to buy, we could connect with people a world away. It was quite literally William Gibson shit (I’d just read the Sprawl Trilogy).
For the full story, read that post I linked to earlier on the other blog.
Tonight I got an email from Matthew, who runs the starbreaker.org blog and site. We’ve been corresponding a bit. He mentioned that he loves building static sites, just him and a text editor and pushing that stuff up to a server pointed at the internet. That is power. And man, he struck a chord with me. I’ve been thinking so much about how fucking punk rock blogging and/or personal sites are. In fact, I wrote this thing about it recently. But Matthew’s words were simple and powerful. Yes – with a computer, a simple text editor, an FTP client (or maybe just some browser-based upload setup), and some storage space on a server, YOU can publish stuff that can be seen all over of the world. THE WORLD. That is a damned low barrier to entry, because truth is you could go to the public library, use their computers and internet connection, and their books to learn HTML and if you are feeling industrious CSS, and BOOM. You can have your own manifesto on the internet for all the world to see and fear.
So yes, I am unhappy that social media has made its inevitable transformation into mountains of fecal matter. Yes, I’m unhappy that for so many the internet is just a place to 1)buy things (though god damn I do love buying some things)and 2)plugging in to the 24-7 outrage machine, BUT I feel reminded and more aware than I’ve been in years that the old internet is still there and it is still absolutely fucking amazing.
I understand that not everyone has this crazy compulsion to post their thoughts, the records they buy, the shows they see, and pictures of their cat to the internet, but I really want to encourage friends who are so inclined to do it. I mean, you can have your own domain name so cheap every year, and web hosting even cheaper.
Tonight I created this simple page, by hand, in a text editor. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. I can write basic HTML and build sites from memory. I need a little refresher and some references to do CSS. And of course, I embedded a video from my Vimeo account just to see how it looks. The only hard part was finding the meta tag that made it look good on a phone (without the right tag the text was super tiny). Yes, it’s a shitty page, but not really. It loads fast. Regardless what device you see it on it works. Turns out that plain old HTML is nice and responsive. I’m going to work on it as a site. Get the style sheet the way I want it, see if I can find a good way to generate an RSS feed without automating the whole site with a static site generator. But Matthew was right. Writing it on a text editor and pushing it up to my server with an FTP client is wizardly and grand, which I had forgotten.
RSS – the Simple Guide
RSS is a means by which you can easily keep up with updates to your favorite websites, all in one place.
You will often see the term “RSS Feed” or see this image associated with it…
When you click on that link, you will usually see a scary page of gobbledygook that looks like this (click here). What you are seeing is the RSS Feed, the content of that website crunched together in a certain format that can be read by your new hero – the RSS Reader.
You don’t need to worry about all that scary code. All you need is the address of that feed.
So, how do you use this?
You download an RSS Reader app to your phone, tablet or computer. Sometimes you’ll see them called RSS Aggregators.
If you are on a computer you can also use a website like Feedly.com.
You just copy the address of that RSS feed, hit the “add” button on your reader, paste in the address, and you will now see every single fucking update to that site. And you do this for every website you want to follow. And you can read the articles in the reader, which means it usually strips out all the ads and bullshit.
If you have not used RSS before, something like Feedly is a good way to get introduced to it. I prefer using a standalone RSS app, even on my computer, to avoid tracking and adverts.
Note: almost all blogs have RSS feeds, even if you don’t see the link. That’s because a lot of blog theme designers suck and don’t make them apparent. With most modern RSS readers, you don’t even need the exact feed address. You can just enter something like “https://bobsawesomesite.com” and the reader will find the feed for you.
As a MacOS/iOS user I use Reeder on my devices as my RSS reader. I also like NetNewsWire. Reeder seems to sync well across all my devices. If I follow a site from my phone, it shows up in Reeder on all my devices. Some web browsers have built-in RSS readers, which is cool.
There are similar readers available for PCs and Android. Just search for “RSS Reader” or “RSS aggregator.”
Here are some screen shots of Reeder, on my phone. You can see how many unread posts are on each site that I follow. For example. The Twilight Sessions has one new post.
If I click on the Twilight Sessions, it shows me the most recent posts. I can tap one and read it from within the Reeder app.
Now for the fun part.
Why can’t you find an RSS feed for your friend’s Instagram or Facebook account? Because there’s not one. Those social media silos don’t provide RSS because they want you trapped on their sites and apps. It is that simple. So fuck them. If a site does not have an RSS feed, they are not worth your time and fuck them and the horse they rode in on.
The Greatness of the IndieWeb
I just watched this video about the IndieWeb vs Silos, from 2014. Yes. Ten years ago. It is about 14 minutes long. Worth your time.
The silos have gotten worse in 10 years since this talk. Much worse. Most of the other services mentioned, especially those from Google, were shut down.
But THIS SITE – CONCRETELUNCH.INFO – is still here.
If you had a blog back in the early 2000s I’ll bet it is still there too. Or event the late 2000s. Or even the late 90s.
All the current shit – Facebook, X, Bluesky, blah blah blah – all those silos will die, and the blogs will remain. The IndieWeb is where it’s at.
Test Blog Update
I’ve made some progress using Jekyll to create a static-page test version of this site. Just making some test pages and trying to see how it will work.
I’ve got a few things to figure out still. For example, the RSS feed is doing some weird stuff, but I found some info that I think will fix it.
One of the disadvantages of the static site generator is that it pretty much lives on one computer. It creates the pages and updates everything, saving to a folder on the computer, which you then upload oldschool-style to your server. So this means I can’t just jump into the post editor from whatever computer with an internet connection I happen to be using.
Like a lot of people, I think I’ve gotten used to the convenience of being able to access and edit documents and projects from nearly anywhere. Google Drive, stuff on iCloud, Dropbox, whatever. It’s all super convenient.
So why am I obsessed with this step back 20 years? I think there is a certain amount of nostalgia involved, for sure. There’s also an element of control. Much less worry about people hacking the static site and stuff like that. I like the community of people I’ve found who are into this kind of thing as well (https://indieweb.org/)
Also, I was in a conversation with an internet-friend the other day on micro.blog about how punk rock it feels to have a blog. I agree, and I have a lot to say about that, and sometime in the next month or so I will likely write a long post about it.