Notes
Screw Twitter, and bugger Mastodon. I can keep my microposts on _my_ website and you can come find them.
Some of these get syndicated out to Twitter on occasion.
Sorry if I've been spamming people with new and random and extremely old RSS posts. Metalsmith has been going a bit haywire with dates. I say Metalsmith, I mean I fucked some stuff up. 😂
Don't mind me - I'm just trying out publishing notes automatically to Twitter.
#personalbrand
I've recently changed my site over so that the content is stored in Dropbox, rather than Github.
While deploying from Github is a million times easier than dealing with the Dropbox SDK, I've found myself blocked from writing by not wanting to go through the annoyance of writing a file, applying frontmatter, commiting to git (which might mean stashing work on another branch, and pushing it. I've also found myself not wanting to write drafts on the site, fearing that some overly interested imaginary horde is going to read the public Github codebase and critique my pre-published prose.
Now I can publish both articles and notes a lot easier. In fact notes are now a matter of writing a new markdown file in a dropbox folder (no frontmatter needed as it's supplied by the build chain) and, assuming it's marked for public consumption, it will automatically get made live on my website.
Okay, vim ~/Dropbox/_blog/text/notes/$( date '+%Y-%m-%dt%H-%M' ).md is not the sexiest line in existance, but a bash alias will sort that little detail out.
When I started trying to IndieWeb my site I didn't think for a second that I'd be reading up on using promises on node, due to the Dropbox JS SDK being an undocumented piece of crap.
Loving the way that Gmail now freezes every other time I try to use it, and takes at least 20 seconds to load.
reserve all other single-letter-dash prefixes for future use. In practice we have seen very little (if any) use of single-letter-dash prefixing of class names by web developers/designers, and thus in practice we think this will have little if any impact/collisions. Certainly far fewer than existing generic microformat property class names like "title", "note", "summary".
Er, wrong. Lots of people use single letter prefixes for CSS. The global company that I work for does exactly this. Famous web authors use it.
I love the Indieweb, but the "microformats as HTML classes" thing is just something I can't get on board with. They could have used data attributes. They could have used a blob of JSON in the head of each page, like schema.org does. But no, they went with something that directly collides with presentational CSS.
You can read more about this terrible aspect of microformats. I'd link directly to the section, but while they love using classes, they apparently hate using IDs so that people can link effectively.
Torn between love of building my JAMstack site, and cursing the idiot who didn't just install Wordpress and go from there.
Choose the least powerful language suitable for a given purpose.
I think it'd be great for everyone to read this article by Jeremy Keith.
In the web front-end stack — HTML, CSS, JS, and ARIA — if you can solve a problem with a simpler solution lower in the stack, you should. It’s less fragile, more foolproof, and just works.
I think it's time to take back control of my social media. From now on I'm making short microposts/notes on this website, and syndicating them to Twitter whenever I feel it's necessary.
Check out my notes section to see more and to follow them via good old reliable RSS.