I wanted to differentiate them from the "new" labels. Since "new" was the odd one out (expressing recency rather than a topic), I changed its shape and color scheme. Here's how looked before.
What do you get when you put 10 website geeks in a room? Exactly what you might expect: lively conversation about unconventional uses for RSS feeds, "retro grouching" about old-school UNIX tools, and spitballing of potential session topics for IndieWebCamp 2020 East, coming up on November 14th and 15th. Here are the collaborative public notes we took during our discussion.
Indie Web Camp East 2020 will be taking place on November 14-15. I'll be there, and I hope you'll join me.
The magic of any special-interest social gathering will mostly be destroyed by the need for a virtual conference -- but, having attended Indie Web Camp West 2020, I can verify that the remaining 10% of the magic is enough to enjoy oneself.
Come make your first-ever website, or tinker with the one you've got. Come share what you've learned as a website enthusiast, or listen to others as you decide what to implement next. Come fall in love with personal websites, or storm off after two hours to take up fishing. There's so little downside: register today!
Today at 6 PM Pacific, I'm hosting the IndieWeb's Homebrew Website Club West Coast. If you have a personal website, come join in the fun!
HWC is informal, so there's usually no fixed agenda, but I'd like to start this week's club with a discussion about the tradeoffs between posting on a website to perform data storage (as with bookmarks), vs. using a website to display information ultimately stored elsewhere (on disk, or in a database, or live-updated from some service.)
I'm running my Micropub implementation against the official test suite at micropub.rocks. Despite the fact that I haven't implemented the entire specification (much less the extensions), my version already passes about a third of the test suite -- and a couple of the failed tests gave enough feedback to code fixes on the spot. Full steam ahead!
Tests for creating posts via Micropub (other tests not shown.)
I've spent the last couple weeks developing version 2 of this website as a Python Flask-based web application. This has required learning more about server administration, as well as putting into use the web-app development skills I've been chipping away at all year.
I'm happy to report that the new version of this site will be going live next week, with Micropub support implemented. Your end user experience should not change at all (but please report any broken links!) Improvements to navigation, content discovery, subscription, tags, and syndication are forthcoming.
My main motivation for this upgrade was to lower my self-imposed barrier to public writing and interaction.
Lately, I've been working to change this website from a pile of (generated) HTML files into a proper server-backed dynamic site. There's not much to show off, but I'm implementing a Micropub server and learning a lot more about Flask (the web-app framework.)
As I write up explanations and annotations for my poems, I find myself wanting to use lines and shapes to pick out particular areas of each work.
Here's a rudimentary prototype, drawing heavily on the LeaderLine library. Try clicking or hovering one of the bracketed sections.
I'm a fake poem, sure to spin
A top around its bottom
I am a fine explanation! And I am his lovable pal.
I'm not currently planning to turn my annotations into sidenotes or marginalia, but I'll certainly draw inspiration from the numerous attempts at that style of web design. I'll also be investigating annotation platforms like Hypothesis, which may have something to offer.
I'm attending two events today: one professional, one personal.
In the afternoon is "Digital Sources for Chinese Studies" (or "Chinese History" -- sources conflict), put on by UCI's Long US-China Institute and Yale University's Council on East Asian Studies.
For the sake of readers' eyes, I've redesigned the blog index. This post explains what changed, and why.
Before the Changes
Here are the problems with the "before" picture.
Cluttered presentation of notes
The reader can be told, "This is a note," without nearly as much text as shown at (1). Let's take a lesson from Tufte and not put so much ink on the screen.
Notes are the foundation on which specialized IndieWeb post types are built, and are so basic they don't even need titles. The note's presentation should get out of the reader's way.
Furthermore, if there are multiple consecutive notes (not pictured), then, whether they are on the same day or not, the clutter pointed out in (1) makes it hard to tell when the date changes.
There won't be an in-person IndieWeb Summit this year, but in its stead, the all-online IndieWebCamp West has been announced! Come join us for two days of discussing and developing personal websites. There's something for everyone in the IndieWeb, so whether you're a first-time blogger or an old hand at web development, you're sure to walk away charged up with the creative spirit.
Today is Day 2 of 2 for IndieWebCamp Online 2020, which means today is Hack Day! My goal for the day is to reconstruct my poems page.
[As of 15:32:57, I'm all done!]
My first task today is to solve the page-redirect woes that I've been blogging about since a few days ago. Diligent implementation of the solutions given in S3's documentation got me nowhere, so I'll use a little JavaScript to redirect from the old poems URL to the new one.
[2020-02-09T09:38:25-0800: first task complete!]
With the redirect in place, I can proceed to the larger of today's tasks: breaking out each poem onto its own page. This will accomplish two goals:
Despite getting up an hour too early, I am excited for IndieWebCamp Online 2020! I'm facilitating a session on collections, an IndieWeb term for an explicit grouping of posts which is conceptually distinct from a typical chronological feed.
By the powers vested in me, this post indicates that I am following Malcolm Blaney's Indieweb Planet, so that the Planet follows me back. Gazounds!
[Edit: it appears that the Planet has reached its subscription limit. Curses!]
[Edit, 2020-02-06T16:53:56-0800: Discussion with Malcolm on IndieWeb chat shows that I was mistaken about the subscription limit. His Planet has successfully subscribed to this website. Baboosh! Mission Accomplished! And it even exposed a bug on my site: I'd somehow deleted the rel="feed" link in my HTML <head> tags, which is how subscribers to this website know to retrieve posts from the blog.]
Edit, 2020-02-09T13:52:23-0800: I've finally solved this problem by replacing poems with a stub page that redirects to poems/index, using JavaScript to preserve the URL fragment. Mission accomplished--no thanks to S3!
Edit, 2020-02-07T20:15:29: I've tried using the other form of S3 redirect: uploading a zero-byte file called poems and adding a redirect from that file to the new /poems/index location. We'll see if that works.
Edit, 2020-02-07T10:48:32: Dammit, I don't know what I'm doing. Can anyone help?
Redirecting from the no-longer-existent poems file to the new poems/ in the "Static Website Hosting - Redirection Rules" section of the S3 Console is not working at all: I get the AWS-default 403 (Access Denied) return code (which AFAIK is masking an underlying 404 Not Found, given that poems has been deleted from the bucket.) I'm already stuck, and it's only step one of the plan below! Here are the routing rules I'm using.
