Delays and SSGs, Oh My

Apologies for the delay between posts — it’s not for lack of topics or interest, just a matter of time and energy. I’ve been spending time trying out different static site generators for a potential move off WordPress (at least for some projects), and that’s been eating into what spoons I have spare for writing. At this point I’ve been fiddling mostly with 11ty and Astro, and while I’m not 100% happy with either of them, it’s been a worthwhile learning experience regardless. I may also end up taking a stab at Hugo, but we’ll see. The main issues I have mostly boil down to opinion — every framework is opinionated to one degree or another regarding how to structure things, how to format things, and so on, and I don’t agree with those opinions all the time. Then it becomes a matter of how hard it is to override those defaults to work more how I want to work.

For instance, a lot of these frameworks/generators feel that any images you include should be optimized, and when optimizing, the file paths should become arbitrary hashes. I don’t mind the optimizing part, but I fuckin’ hate when the filename gets mangled into a hash like that. You’d think that’d be a matter of just passing a parameter as part of the image processor config, but in several of these frameworks, you’d be wrong. At least in 11ty I found some instructions in their docs to override things, but in Astro I was just out of luck, unless I wanted to store my images separately in the “public” folder.

Another recurring gripe I have is that the default markup is just markdown. Frequently either GitHub-Flavored Markdown (GFM) or CommonMark. These are fine as far as markdown goes, but they’re kind of limiting when you want to do anything more nuanced than basic formatting. Even things as common as changing the alignment for an image don’t have a generally agreed process. At which point, the question becomes: how hard is it to extend things to let you do stuff you want to do? 11ty lets you mix in a whole pile of different templating tools (Nunjucks, Handlebars, Liquid, etc), and extend things to add your own shortcodes and filters to let things work how you want. Astro gives you a few different markdown flavors, so you can go with markdown, MDX, or markdoc. From there, both MDX and markdoc have methods to extend your behavior. Personally, I’m actually more inclined to use a different markup entirely, and write everything in AsciiDoc, which I’m very comfortable with from work, and is designed to let you do the various bits of formatting you’d want to do in documentation (or a blog post, or an article/essay). The options for SSGs that support AsciiDoc, though, are quite a bit more limited — I’m aware of basically just two, Antora (which is oriented around documentation, not around blogging), and Hugo (which I should really give another shot).

So yeah, that’s basically where all that is sitting. Frankly none of the things I just griped about are all that important, but it’s been taking up that headspace I’d be usually using for writing on here, so figured I’d share. I’ve been dusting off one of my other random sites to use as a test bed — when I actually have something to share, I’ll be sure to mention it. The goal is something that feels frictionless to write and post in, and unfortunately the path to get there has been feeling pretty fraught.

Oops, missed September

Current status:

  • ~500 unreads in my RSS feed (and that’s after some aggressive scanning and running through some of the higher-volume-but-lighter-weight stuff).
  • ~100 open tabs of stuff to either finish reading, share, or process in some way.
  • Inbox is read but I’ve got a handful of messages to still respond to (apologies if you’re waiting).
    • Been terrible at keeping in touch in general, so you could apply that statement to various messaging services as well.
  • Completely missed posting anything in September, despite plenty of desire and even some thoughts to share.

Lots of excuses: I flew out to a conference at the end of August, but promptly got sick the first day of the event and missed it; we bought a house and that’s been a steady supply of tasks; the work project I spent the last 10+ months on finally released and the month leading up to launch was kinda crunch-y; we adopted another dog and have been getting her acclimated… the list goes on. After the flurry of stuff the past two or three months plus the year of traveling, it feels like I haven’t had a chance to catch my breath in a while and I’m fucking tired.

Some quick thoughts:

  • I’ve been pondering looking at other blogging options, possibly rolling something up with a platform like Astro or similar. It’s no diss on WordPress, but it doesn’t hurt to experiment. It might give a nice opportunity to try out different layouts and patterns and ways of approaching the site beyond the traditional “blog” experience (maybe start thinking more of the garden concept). I’ve got a few underutilized domains sitting around, so I’ll probably experiment there rather than muck with this blog directly (for now). My actual blogging/writing needs are pretty simple: a spot where I can write without it feeling like a chore; working RSS feed support; maybe some improved media handling. Everything else is gravy.
  • One of my favorite online communities (the Slack associated with the XOXO festival) is going read-only soon, as the conference has officially run its course, and there’s sort of a scramble within the community to find a solution folks can migrate to. As I mentioned before, I don’t have a particular desire to run a forum or online space again, but the conversation has still piqued my interest and left me curious about what the options are these days, especially if you want something open source.
    • A few I’ve noticed while looking around is setting up an XMPP server, or a Matrix server, or a Rocket.Chat server, or a Mattermost server, or a Discourse server.
    • They all seem like kind of a pain in the ass in different ways. I think the ones I’d be most interested in experimenting with personally would be either Matrix or Discourse (and yes, I know Matrix is technically a protocol, but I don’t really care whether it’s Synapse or Conduit or whatever). I think it’s kind of neat that Discourse is primarily forum software, but they’ve implemented what looks like a fairly robust chat system on top of it, so you get a hybrid chat+forum experience.
  • Thinking about my relationship with information in general, and how to better organize both what I write and what I read and want to save. Sort of a perennial topic if I’m honest, but I’m getting that itch again. This blog is still too high friction to be a scratch notebook, but as a step past that it might still fill a purpose. Pondering giving a genuine go at using Obsidian for that lower level scratch role.

Tired, a little fried from the pace of things lately, but hopeful that this fall and winter will strike a better balance. Hope you’re all doing alright as well, and that this fall turns out to be slow in all the best ways.

Home(Owner) Again

I wasn’t really mentioning this publicly, but now that the papers are all signed, I’m happy to announce we just bought a house! It’s a very, very, very fine house in a quiet neighborhood in Rutland, Vermont. Which means, yep, I’ll be a Vermont resident again. It feels like a nice culmination to spending the last year exploring the country (almost exactly a year – we left August 17th, and here it is, August 6th). We’re still planning to travel when we can, but it’ll be nice to have a home base again. Looking forward to it!

The Internet in the 2000’s

Found via Pete Ashton, Richard MacManus has been doing a nice sort of stroll through the earlier days of the internet. (As of this writing, it looks like he’s got articles covering 2004, 2005, and 2006.) It’s a nice (and useful) historical view of what was happening then. Also, here’s a bit from the 2004 article:

The “blogosphere” was kind of a prototype for social media, because it was where people learned to be opinionated and express ‘takes’ on the internet.

Richard MacManus

Not wrong! (But also: LOL)

Flat, Not Flat, and an Ocean

This post has some pre-requisite reading to get the most out of it:

First off, I think it’s great to see some crosstalk across blogs like this. I love to see it.

Second, as you might have guessed, I have some thoughts about the subject. (Usual caveats, this is some off-the-cuff thoughts, maybe I’m missing things, et cetera.)

Continue reading “Flat, Not Flat, and an Ocean”

Not Who I Want To Be

Jay has a recent post up called “Not The Sort Of Person I Want To Be Online“, and it strikes pretty close to home. It’s worth the click, in my opinion. It opens with:

It would be so so easy for me to open my blog editor every week and vent and rant about the state of the world. About how crazy everything is, how detached and divorced from reality so much of the media is, how the Internet isn’t real life. But I don’t.

Jay Springett

And yeah, basically. If I want to spend my time online complaining and writing scathing takedowns of one thing or another, there is no shortage of topics (and the list gets constantly refreshed). It’s so easy to dwell on all the shit going on. But that’s not who I want to be, online or in person.

I also liked this bit:

I don’t want to be part of a negative Internet, so I choose not to add to it. I don’t see any value in doing cynicism as a service. There’s enough negativity out there without me piling on. Instead, I aim to post things that I think is going to be beneficial for both my readers and myself. 

I want to only have things online that I can stand by. The thoughts I’ve had in public should be useful to me and others 3/4/5 even 10 years down the line. Referenced, revisited, and built upon. I don’t write anything here thats written specifically for clicks and likes. Which being negative an Internet cheat code for.

Of course it’s nice when other people do link to my writing and when people share my blog with others – it’s always a thrill – and of course I’m interested in growing my audience online – who isn’t?

Jay Springett

I’ve commented before that I’m not particularly interested in “growing my brand”, and how freeing it has felt to be writing here because I want to, and maybe a few folks find it useful or interesting. If there is a magic formula for building an audience and becoming an online personage, I’m sure as hell not doing it – my site traffic is largely stable (low, but stable) and has been for years at this point. I get the occasional brief spike when someone more notable happens to link to me (and there was one point a few months ago where I suddenly got about a thousand times more visitors for like two days, and I never figured out why – if it was a botnet I don’t know why it landed on me, if it was someone big/popular linking, they must’ve had noreferrer turned on, as analytics were useless). But Jay is right that it is nice when I get linked to or new folks start reading.

It’s a conscious decision and effort, you know. When the default state you see when navigating online discourse is hate and cynicism, oneupmanship and takedowns, not only yucking other people’s yum but declaring them bad people for thinking it was yummy in the first place… it’s easy to let that become your default as well. But it’s not healthy, it’s not useful, at best it may give you a quick endorphin hit if you’re lucky.

There’s a bit from Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse that has made it into a few songs and elsewhere, and I think about it sometimes:

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Kind,” said the boy.”

Charlie Mackesy

Me too, kid. Me too.

A Website is a Room

Found via Jay Springett, Nancy Wu’s thesis project, “A Website is a Room“.

I came to this conclusion sometime during quarantine when I realized that certain websites give me a sense of shelter and rest more than others.

These spaces that particularly stood out to me all had some quality of slowness,  quiet, and/or gathering.

We ought to carefully examine the qualities of the living environment that each web space provides for us.

Nancy Wu

The result is a semi-curated list of websites (some blogs, some just random sites) with a little info about what sort of space that site is. I’m looking forward to exploring the (fairly lengthy) list of sites as I have time to do so.

I kind of like the metaphor – it’s not true for every site, but there are absolutely sites where it works. For whatever reason, it brings to mind the infinite rooms of the world of Piranesi (by Susanna Clarke). I’m picturing sites as rooms filled with statues, and somewhere in there is the sea.

Roll up, Roll out

I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole via Warren Ellis, who linked to Jay Springett, who linked to Matt Mullenweg, who linked to some nifty projects, and it got me thinking about what the state of the art these days even really is, as far as blogging and forums and online spaces are concerned.

I’d rather murder myself than ever go near any kind of online forum again. But a return to forum life for people who actually want to think and talk would fit with the current tone of the dark-forest-y online discourse I’ve seen.

Warren Ellis

I’m personally with Warren on this: I’m not inclined to create, manage, moderate, or even participate in a forum again any time soon. But I appreciate that forums are useful, may scratch a need for some people, and that the tools for forums are in dire need of some attention.

I must admit, I’ve not really been following the Dark Forest discourse as much as perhaps I should. It doesn’t quite fit for me, as a metaphor. I feel like a lot of the folks I see talking about that particular metaphor for online interaction are people who already built an audience, found their tribe, and then opted to withdraw to their enclaves, taking their tribe with them. That’s not a dark forest, that’s a raiding party.

Don’t get me wrong, I see what they’re talking about, and how devastating it can be to become that day’s Main Character, and that there is value in keeping a lower profile. But I feel like the metaphor falls down. So much of the online discourse they’re theoretically shying away from is centered around a desire to draw attention to yourself, to build an audience — in short, a popularity contest. So does that guardedness and wariness to share yourself more openly come from a dark forest where you could be destroyed, or does it come from a desire to control your narrative with the audience you’re trying to grow? I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something.

As a side note, I decided to start putting together a Glossary of the New Web, to try and capture various terms, concepts, systems, and tools that are part of the “internet discourse” these days. It’s not exhaustive, slightly opinionated, and generally brief, but I do try to link to where you might find out more. It’s a start.

Calm Tech Institute

Amber Case just announced her new project, the Calm Tech Institute. It’s got a lofty goal (encouraging and implementing calm technology design principles in various bits of technology that we use, all the way down to creating a service mark for tech that adheres to the principles), and she’s a leading expert on the topic (she’s been talking about this stuff for a long time, and also wrote the book on Calm Technology for O’Reilly). I figure if anyone has the chops to make headway on this subject, it’s probably her. I’ll be keeping an eye on this space, as it’s definitely a worthwhile topic.

Our ultimate goal is to make our “CTI” stamp nearly as ubiquitous as the “UL” stamp became over the last century. You might have noticed it on lightbulbs and other everyday appliances: a very tiny mark placed on 22 billion products each year worldwide! And while it’s found everywhere, many of us probably don’t know the important historical story behind its origin:

But while we depend every day on invisible guidelines which protect us from electric hazards, we have few standards for technology of the 21th century. Consequently, we often encounter products and services that interfere with our time and attention in ways which degrade our well-being.

Amber Case