Hello again, everyone. It’s been a minute! I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to come up with what I wanted to write in this post - originally I wanted to post on the 1st January, to properly kick off the New Year. I managed that for my regular blog, but not here; I struggled to come up with a suitable theme to structure the post around, which led to several drafts discarded as “aimless”. But then it hit me: themes!
No, not the things we might install to our chosen website tool to give it a fresh look, but “theme” as in “an implicit or recurrent idea; a motif.”. I don’t like to give myself resolutions for New Year anymore as they don’t work for me, but I do like to give myself a theme to guide what I do in the year. It’s not so much a firm goal as a guiding mission statement. A motif for my year. This year I’ve been inspired by my partner’s own plans. In her case she’s referring to and framing it as a “low spend year” because that’s what it’s usually referred to in the online circles she travels in, but the core principle is quite simple and widely applicable:
So I’ve been thinking about how to apply this theme to my year in various contexts, and importantly (in this context) how it might be relevant to you, dear reader.
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re the sort of person who has their own website. Think about what you use your website for: most likely as a blog? Maybe a portfolio of projects/work? Maybe a little bit about you and links to other places you have profiles? But what else could you be doing?
Personal websites are great because they are so flexible. You can do anything you can dream of, it just takes various degrees of time and effort. But sometimes it’s easy to forget you have that flexibility. I know I often do. I’ve been struggling to articulate exactly what I mean, but thankfully Alexandra posted a couple of days ago on a similar theme, and this bit resonated with me and speaks to what I’d like to encourage you to think about:
we don’t have to return to the 2010-era of blogs being the main function and form of a website; instead, incorporate creative ways to tell the world about parts of you that you wish more people would ask you about.
This all might make more sense if I talk about how I’m intending to apply this thinking to myself and my own site. It might not be as purely creative as Alexandra suggests, but it’s definitely about doing more with what I have (namely, a website).
I build my site on top of Eleventy. Eleventy is insanely flexible when it comes to integrating and rendering data. I experimented with this last year by using pulling in data from the Feedbin API to generate my Links page. I’m in the process of rebuilding that page into something more personal than a big dump of every single feed I subscribe to, but that’s somewhat by-the-by.
Last year I was looking for a bookmarking service where I could collect interesting links as I find them. For whatever reason, dumping things into the browser bookmarks manager doesn’t work for me, and I’ve never really clicked with any of the services out there. A few years ago I collected them on the Wordpress version of my site, using the Indieweb Post-Kinds plugin and that worked pretty well for me, but I don’t think it worked as well for readers, and it was also not portable - I’ve still not extricated those posts from the Wordpress export because they are in an opaque data structure.
But then I got thinking about how I could build this feature using Eleventy data files, and provide a nice clean way of browsing them separate from the regular blog posts. I could even maintain some of the Indieweb niceties like microformats and contextual webmentions. IndieKit would even give me a nice bookmarklet and UI for saving bookmarks.
I’m still in the design and experimentation phase of adding bookmarks to my site, but hopefully it will be available soon.
Last year I used Micro.blog in lieu of something like Goodreads or Story Graph for tracking my reading habits. I don’t need much from a reading tracker - store book details and track “want to read”/“currently reading”/“finished reading” status, and maybe adding a few thoughts about the book. While Micro.blog definitely gives me a lot of conveniences, this feels like the sort of thing I should use my site for.
Whenever I want to learn a new frontend framework or related technology, I build a new version of the same app: a tracker for my miniature painting. It’s my version of the classic To-Do app almost every framework uses for a programming tutorial. Last year it was Angular and Azure Static Web Apps. These learning exercises are great, but it means I’m constantly rebuilding the data and interface. I can keep doing these exercises, but why don’t I build a “canonical” version on my site?
Coincidentally, I just migrated my site from Netlify to Azure Static Web Apps. While it was mostly a cost-driven decision - I was rapidly running out of “build minutes” on my Netlify plan, and I already had an Azure subscription with a more generous build allowance - I’d be remiss to not mention that SWA opens a lot of opportunities for hooking in other tools and services. My head is buzzing with ideas of how I could augment my site and do more with it.
You’ve probably just read the section above and thought “that sounds like a lot of work, and I don’t have the time for that”. Or “that’s great, but I don’t have a fancy Eleventy-driven site”. That’s all fair! But you don’t have to do anything fancy to do more with your website. Remember: I’m a software developer; my mind usually goes to the most complicated and/or impractical solutions first 😅
Everything I described above could also be a single static page that I update manually using simple HTML: text, links, and images. You might have your own ideas to expand your site but don’t want to spend a whole bunch of time building something elaborate. So start small and simple. Add that HTML page and fill it with something that is intrinsically you that doesn’t really fit your regular blog format.
Why do I think you should do more with the website you already have? Well, there are a few reasons I can think of. There’s the obvious “you already have it, so do something with it”. You could argue that you could potentially save some money somewhere by replicating the core usage of a service you pay for elsewhere. These are OK reasons, and there are others, but for me there’s a big one: nostalgia.
An aside: I hesitate to air the nostalgia reason; a lot of the current resurgence of the small/indie/open web is driven by a nostalgia for what we had before, and ultimately I’d like us collectively to move past that nostalgia and start imagining new ways of using the web on a personal level.
But. But but but.
I can’t deny there is an element of nostalgia driving this desire to do more with my own website. Way, way, way back… back before we standardised on blogs, I had a website and it was a melting pot of everything I was interested in; it was a miniature “hub” online for me and my “IRL” friends (one of several hubs we used, all run by someone we knew in person). There was a feature where people could leave messages for each other. Meetups were arranged in the comments. If I decided I wanted to experiment with using maths to drive Adobe Flash animations, well I guess now there’s a new gallery page for that. Photo dumps of nights out before we started using Facebook for that purpose - before Facebook existed, even! Reviews of local band gigs that were as much about promoting those bands and venues as anything else, because I was in love with that world and wanted to share it… in short: anything I could think about putting online I experimented with doing so. Some of it didn’t work and got pulled down again quickly, and most of it would almost certainly make me cringe now - but isn’t that part of the point of being young? To embarrass your older self with how carefree you were?
Now, I accept the world and I are very different in 2024 to how we were in 1999-2002, so it will never be exactly the same. But the ethos still clings to me. I still believe - even if my aging memory needs reminded and pushed into action - that our websites could and should be a reflection of everything we want to share about ourselves. Your website could be your central hub on the web, instead of one part in a network of profiles across dozens of sites. It could be something so deeply you, that even though you post prolifically in many places, it’s your website people remember about and read first.
I’m nearly 1700 words deep into this post at this point, which is over twice as long as I intended it to be (Happy New Year!) so should wrap things up. I’m not asking you to go out and do anything to your website right now. I’m also not saying anything I’ve talked about is something you should feel like you must do, as this post is meant to be just me talking about what I’d like to do this year, and why. But I would like you to ponder something: if you could do more with your website, or if you’ve ever thought “I could add [thing I’m interested in] to my site”, why not make 2024 the year you do it?
As always, if you do have any feedback or ideas for future topics, you can reach out on Mastodon, or email feedback@theunderground.blog. I would like to apologise to the people who emailed me after the last post; I’m still catching up on festive-period email, but I should hopefully be in a position to reply to you soon.
It’s been a busy week-and-a-bit in chez The Underground, so I missed a few slots I had pencilled-in to publish some posts. One of the most important parts of any blog, I find, is the initial momentum and impetus; lose it, and things go rapidly downhill. As much as this is “an experiment,” I would like for it to last in some manner for the long haul.
So, what’s been happening? Well, there’s been the festive preparations, and some birthdays, work - oh, and an exam.
For a bunch of boring reasons I won’t get into, we have our main festive gathering in the middle of December, about a week or so “early”. It means the latter part of December is wonderfully chill and relaxing, but on the flipside the first half is stressful due to the compressed timeline. This year we had three households visiting, some coming from the other end of the country. It was nice to get everyone together under one roof for a day.
But it’s done now, and that means I’m finally able to start winding down for the end of the year. I have two and a half days left of work this year, with most of my colleagues already out of office - so unless something catastrophic happens it should be a relatively quiet time. If I were superstitious then I would probably think I’ve just jinxed myself.
My plans for the next 3 weeks are to decompress and relax. I want to tidy up as many loose ends from projects started this year as I can. Some of those will be online, but a lot of them are offline. It will be nice to spend an extended time away from the computer.
I’m spectacularly behind on posts in my feed reader, so I don’t have a list of links for you today. Instead, I thought I’d write up a mini “FAQ” about The Underground and some of the feedback I’ve received over the last few weeks. Some of this will be pulled from responses I’ve given others already.
Why not? The web is the ultimate playground, and it’s at it’s best when people are building new things, or trying things out of the norm. Whether The Underground “works” or not is for others to decide, but I wanted to try it. So I did.
That’s fine. Not everything has to be to everyone’s tastes. I’m OK if you don’t subscribe because it’s not “for” you.
You can’t respond directly - by which I mean comment on the page - and you can’t webmention or pingback an individual post[1]. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still write about what was written.
Anything that’s shared on The Underground is considered “out there” in public and open for discussion, even if you can’t directly link to the post as part of that discussion. My intent with The Underground is to simply publish in a particular format, and I don’t necessarily feel I need to be part of any ensuing conversation. If someone does want to loop me in, there are other channels to reach me on where I can take part. At the bottom of each post so far I have linked to my Mastodon and given an email address for sending me feedback.
Is it? I don’t think it is. The format is open, nothing is locked behind a paywall or registration system, people can choose the tool of their choice to read the content. It’s just a different experience to what you’re used to. People have been experimenting with “RSS-only” posts for a while now and I view The Underground as just an evolution of that premise.
For me, “the open web” is an expression of the promise that every one can publish information, and that information can be freely accessed for as long as it’s online; it’s not necessarily an implementation of any particular “thing” we see on open websites. If we start limiting ourselves to a particular publishing format then every website looks and acts the same – which would be fine in the short term but get boring eventually. I accept I might be wrong about this, but I also worry that we sometimes conflate “the open web” with doing things like we did in the 90’s/early 2000’s before every other website became an app, and not trying new things.
The Underground (in my view) is open. It’s just doing it in a different way.
Yes and no? It’s not intentionally Ephemeral Blogging - ideally a feed reader would load all posts going back to the first when it imports the feed - but I can’t control that. I also can’t control how long a feed reader stores any given post, so I have to accept that for some people posts might be ephemeral in nature. I’m slowly growing more comfortable with this.
I know, I hate it too. But spec-compliant IDs have to be fully-formed, preferrably-unique URIs and I don’t publish posts to web pages, so there are no valid URIs to use as IDs. Replacing the URI with a hash seemed the best choice because then people don’t accidentally get sent to pages which don’t exist. It’s a “lesser of two evils” choice.
That’s a wrap for this entry. There may or may not be another post before the end of the year - it just depends on how much time I spend online over the festive break. I hope you have a happy and safe time over the next few weeks, no matter how you choose to spend it. As always, if you do have any feedback or ideas for the future, you can reach out on Mastodon, or email feedback@theunderground.blog
I am looking at setting up webmention support for the homepage. This will let you reference the blog and still let me know. This was always something I wanted to add, I just didn’t manage to implement it before launch. ↩︎
If you’re reading this then thank you! I honestly wasn’t sure what the reception would be like, but the idea seemed to go down reasonably well on Mastodon, so I got some positive reinforcement out of it - which is always nice. As I mentioned in the explanatory post over on my regular blog, I really enjoyed the “sort-of email newsletter” format of the first post, so that’s the format we’re going to continue with for now.
So what’s been happening since the last time I wrote here? Well, it’s been a rollercoaster few days. I’m still on a bit of a buzz about blogs; at the weekend I added some more “IndieWeb Building Blocks” to my blog, and I’m in the process of building out some more. I also came down with a stinker of a head cold, and we put up the Christmas Tree. My work project continues to be… challenging, for non-technical reasons outside of my control. Last, but no means least, the blogs category in my reader continues to be filled with so many enjoyable posts. My time on social media has severely diminished over the last week or so as a result.
Hopefully you’re all doing well!
IndieKit, by Paul Robert Lloyd is a hostable Node.js server that can provide IndieWeb functionality to static sites running on Jekyll/Hugo/Eleventy, and other SSGs. It’s customisable and adds IndieAuth, Micropub, and syndication to your site. I set it up over the weekend and it’s a foundation for some of the additions I’ll be making over the coming months. It’s not too hard to setup (but still a bit technical), and when I get time I’ll be writing up how I host it in Azure.
A nice long-form article by Kelsey McKinney, by way of Tim Bornholdt. This part about discoverability especially rung true to me:
The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on the endless feed of Twitter, and (at the time) Facebook, and they got whatever they got.
I read Encouraging Small Website Discoverability, which led me to The Small Website Discoverability Crisis, then on to The Art of Hyperlinking, and finally, Build Personal Websites. Lots of good stuff to chew on and mull over here. As a side-effect, I’ve learned a bit about the Gemini protocol. I can’t see me using it (I’m too fond of HTTP) but it’s interesting to know it’s there and being experimented with.
Colin shares this wonderful anecdote about his childhood summers at the arcades. I’m sharing for no more reason than I really enjoyed reading it!
A few months back, Remy posted a solution to broken links in blog archives caused by web pages being deleted or moved. Now they’re back with a new service called Unrot.link anyone can use to achieve the same thing on their own blog. See the announcement post for more details.
I’ve been meaning to link to this interview with Matt Mullenweg for ages. It’s a really good read (also available as a podcast), especially through the lens of what came next for Tumbler.
Thanks for joining me in the continuing adventures of this little experiment. Hopefully you found something useful amongst the links. As a reminder, there are no comments or webmentions available for these posts. If you do have any feedback or ideas for the future, you can reach out on [Mastodon][masto], or email [feedback@theunderground.blog][mail] (the mailbox should be working now - thanks to Adam Nowak for letting me know there was an issue).
Thanks for reading!
Chris
The seed of the idea that would become theunderground.blog was planted in my brain a long time ago. I can’t remember when, but I vaguely remember writing a throw-away social media post about having an blog that was only available as RSS, then moving on. I was reminded of the idea while writing a blog post about blogging, a couple of days ago, and wrote it down again. Robb let me know over on Mastodon that he thought it was a fun idea, and, well, here we are…
Honestly, I don’t know how this is going to go, or how sustainable it will be. While a lot of blog content is consumed in a feed reader, all of the ecosystem expects certain things. Chief among those is a website that constitutes the actual blog, with archive pages, extra information about the author, etc. Posts have URLs. You can share a post in an app or in a blog post of your own. You can comment on a post, link to it, search for it. This blog will have none of that. The only HTML page is the home page, and I only have that to provide for feed discovery. Everything else is at the mercy of whatever RSS-enabled client you are using to read this in right now.
But it’s a fun experiment none-the-less, and I’m hoping to see it through to whatever end.
True to form, I haven’t planned for anything beyond the “can it be done” aspects of this. I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to write about. I have a few ideas, but nothing firm. We’ll just have to see how it goes. Things might be a little random for a while as I explore RSS[1] as a medium and it’s limitations. Reading that back sounds quite pretentious, but I’m sticking with it.
I figured I’d close out with a few of the interesting things that have passed through my feed reader lately, by way of giving this first post at least a little “value”:
The hottest blog post trend of the last week. Over 200 people have written a blog post about the default apps they’ve been using throughout 2023. Subscribe or import the OPML file to add everyone to your feed reader.
More bloggers! RSS Club is a group organised by Dave Rupert, who commit to posting some RSS-only content. I’ll be adding theunderground.blog to the list once I’m sure it’s going to last, as well, RSS-only content is all it will provide!
Ryan Swanstrom has been conducting interviews with a wide variety of people in the field of technology, in public, on Threads. You can also read all of the archives on his blog.
First it was Duke University Libraries, then it was Gregg dropping Basecamp because of the, shall we say, “outspokenness” of it’s co-founder, David Heinemeier Hansson. If people do or do not want to use their products, that’s their choice and none of my business, but I will say: even though DHH and 37Signals were pretty influential on my early career, a few years ago they started to give me the ick; I dropped their products and stopped following the founders on social media and don’t feel like I’ve missed anything of real value.
Blogrolls are great, so Frank invites us to share them. Here’s Frank’s blogroll. Here’s Tracy’s blogroll along with a post about building community through blogrolls. Here’s my blogroll, along with all the other RSS subscriptions I have. What about yours?
So that was the first post/issue/entry in theunderground.blog. Hopefully there are a lot, lot more to come! As a reminder, there are no comments or webmentions available for these posts. If you do have any feedback or ideas for the future, you can reach out on Mastodon, or email feedback@theunderground.blog.
Thanks for reading!
Chris
Technically, it’s Atom, but what’s extremely similar feed specifications between friends? ↩︎