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🔖 Bookmarked: Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway

“The state of personalized recommendations is surprisingly terrible. At this point, the top recommendation is always a clickbait rage-creating article about movie stars or whatever Trump did or didn’t do in the last 6 hours. Or if not an article, then a video or documentary. That’s not what I want to read or to watch, but I sometimes get sucked in anyway, and then it’s recommendation apocalypse time, because the algorithm now thinks I like reading about Trump, and now everything is Trump. Never give positive feedback to an AI.”

Every service I use which has moved to “personalised recommendations/discovery” using some ML algorithm has gotten worse by doing so.

Every. Single. One.

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Reposting: Bad Squiddo - Annie on Twitter

“It's hard for small businesses in this industry (as well as others), constantly knife edge. This year will be extra tough with all the Brexit shenanigans. We're gonna lose some along the way. If you can afford to - please buy the things, if not, just spread the word. Thankoo x”

Twitter
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IFixit screwdriver set

In what feels like some sort of modern day right of passage, I just successfully replaced the battery on my daughter’s hand-me-down iPhone 5. It really wasn’t hard at all! #RightToRepair

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So I think I’ve finally got things setup properly, where I can tweet from my website, have any replies and likes show up on my website (after moderation), *and* have the website original linked from the tweet by a custom shortlink.

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Reposting: Bees on Twitter

Online it is very easy to speak up if you don't like something, but we often forget to say when we do.

If you see something you like, make a point of leaving a comment. Give some praise and encouragement, it really makes all the difference. Let's spread some positivity!

Twitter

I need to do this more often. I have been trying to be better at telling people their stuff is awesome, or if they’ve been helpful, but I’m fighting against my introvert nature.

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Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird? by Jarred Sumner

“MySpace inspired a generation of teenagers to learn how to code. We have Dark Mode now, but where did all the glitter go?”

I may be showing my age here, but I was never on MySpace. That said, this blog post (and the CodeBlog service it’s advertising) reminds me a lot of platforms I do remember, like Tripod and Geocities. Pages were built from raw HTML, and adorned with all sorts of widgets found on places like DynamicDrive and BraveNet. The <blink> tag ran rampant! Early Tumblr had a similar vibe, but look how that turned out.

These early services were places you could experiment and explore until you had the confidence, skills (and cash) to get your own domain name and server. Nowadays anyone can have their own domain and site quickly and cheaply on somewhere like WordPress.com/Blogger, but they are very cookie-cutter and locked down. Even using self-hosted tools like WordPress.org reign-in a lot of the free-form creativity.

One of the reasons I love Kicks Condor is because of how anachronistic and fun it looks; I can easily imagine 15 year-old me, magazine HTML tutorial in hand and full of enthusiasm to learn something fresh and new, creating something similar by accident and having a blast doing it.

By making things easier, more accessible – and safer – it feels like we’ve hidden away the building blocks. It’s harder for people to get at the pieces they need to try their own thing out of curiosity. Can you imagine if LEGO pieces were keyed to only fit a certain way, so you could only build what was shown on the box art?

Shared to IndieWeb.xyz and IndieNews

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🔖 Bookmarked: An Introduction to Kubernetes

“Kubernetes is a container management system meant to be deployed on Docker-capable clustered environments. In this guide, we will discuss some of the basic concepts that Kubernetes introduces. We will discuss some of the design decisions and what make”

Kubernetes is one of those things I really wish I knew more about/had the time to learn sooner, rather than later.

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🔖 Bookmarked: Bodoni*

“Bodoni* is the first ever no-compromises Bodoni family, built for the digital age. Years in the making, this font family includes a whopping 56 font files, ensuring you will have the perfect Bodoni for every situation.”

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I added myself and this site the the IndieWeb wiki WordPress Examples page earlier. It felt a little narcissistic, if I’m honest!

I’ve not added K to the WordPress Themes page for now, as I don’t think it’s ready yet, but I’ll add it in due time (or let others judge it worthy of inclusion).

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🔖 Bookmarked: Paying tribute to the web with View Source by an author

“I owe much of my career to View Source. It’s what got me started with web development in the first place. Going to sites that I liked, learning how they did what they did. Yes, I also bought a bunch of animal books from O’Reilly, and I read WIRED’s Webmonkey, and the web was full of tutorials even then. But it’s not the same. Seeing how something real is built puts the individual pieces of the puzzle together in a way that sample code or abstract lessons just don’t.”

an author ( )

I love View Source. I still use it daily. I’m not a person who builds sites in JavaScript – that’s never really been my thing. I love to craft in HTML. I get annoyed when I can’t alter or overwrite the output HTML of a WordPress function or plugin, and have been known to reimplement it myself if necessary.

Right now, K is a lot messier under the hood than I’d like. Once things are a bit more defined I intend to go back and clean it up so the output source is as readable as possible (proper and consistent indenting and the like), and the structure is better from a POSH point of view.

Shared to IndieWeb.xyz.

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I implemented proper pagination between archive pages last night, which should help making getting around the site slightly easier. I still need to implement pagination for pages/posts that are split into distinct pages. I’m not going to implement comment pagination, because I don’t like it.

Alongside this, I’ve added some templates for archive pages and search results. There’s nothing much to these, but it does give me flexibility to give these their own special formatting if I want to.

I need to come up with a better archive page than the current “Sitemap”. The current “design” was inspired by the archive page on Daring Fireball. It works fine if you’re only posting a couple of items a week, but in January I posted 112 items1. I’ll probably keep the sitemap for discoverability purposes, but a more friendly archive page has been added to the todo list.

  1. That’s almost twice the previous high water mark of August 2018. ↩
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I have a lot of editing in my future, to get through that “pending” queue…

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I need to take a break from the merry-go-round of mf2/parser compatibility. I excitedly thought it was fixed. But it wasn’t. I’ve made some further changes, and it might be fixed, but there’s a good chance it’s still broken in some obscure way… IndieWebify.me refuses to recognise my Like and Bookmark posts properly, even though every other parser I throw at example URLs comes back fine? Last I checked, IndieNews still refuses to return anything but “error: no link found.” Update: something I did today must have fixed this… I fixed a typo in an earlier post, and suddenly it was on IndieNews ?‍♂️

It’s getting a bit stressful, to be honest, and that’s means it’s time to move on to another task before it burns me out on the whole project. I’ll come back to it again in a while, hopefully have a break-through and iron out the kinks.

In better news, I do have some custom gallery markup up and running, and the h-card in the sidebar is now a fully-fledged widget. Baby steps…