Welcome to volume thirteen of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. In this edition, we take part in the web revival, focus on Fedi community, and share urgent info with Dell owners.
This issue is a few days late—oops! Unfortunately, I just wasn’t able to get it out at the usual time due to some travel conflicts. But, here it is!
IndieWeb
Welcome back to the IndieWeb corner of this li’l ol’ newsletter. A place where you (the larger IndieWeb community) publish into the ether—and the void screams back…
It may not be BIG big (yet), but make no mistake, the “old web” revival is here. As they say, what’s old 1.0 is new again. There’s no one way to be a part of it. No one way to enjoy it. All that’s required is you get your own little space (no matter how silly), and put your stuff there. Let’s bring some whimsy back to the net—together!
One of the best parts about the “IndieWeb” is how few “requirements” there really are. Your website being “good”, i.e. being well-coded, or having objectively “good” aesthetics, or whatever is not in that list of requirements. But, even so, you want your site to reflect who you are, and to help, there are TONS of resources these days—tools, frameworks, development kits, “construction kits”, static website hosting providers, and non-profit / community-oriented git hosting services to name a few! Heck, there’s even tools to help you old-webbify modern sites!
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again now, and I know I’ll mention it again in the future—there’s so much you can do with your site once you have it up. Tinker with typography (check out all these awesome sites for example), do some link-maxing (maybe start with a link directory?), set up your h-cards, be inspired by web antiquity, or simply get a li’l silly.
Once you’ve got your site looking and functioning as you’d like (as much as one can before you want to tinker again), you can do a bit of writing! Looking for ideas? Maybe consider taking part in an IndieWeb carnival, write about anything notable from the past week or document the tools you use.
Just remember though! ⬇️
Want to find others on the IndieWeb? Check out IndieNews, the omg.lol directory and Hypertext TV. Or tune into what others on the IndieWeb are linking to and sharing, like I do here each week!
Small Web Finds and Features
Awesome sites and cool people I’ve discovered in the past week…
- Libre.Town from Lianna
- The Internet Review by Jared White
- Albinanigans from Albi
- Octoomy from Octoomy
- Noisy Deadlines take on the Technology Blog Questions Challenge
- Dragonbeans.nl from (https://dragonbeans.nl)
- Rainstorms in July
Typography Inspo
Rach Smith asked the Fediverse for examples of sites with cool typesetting/font choices and the Fediverse responded. Here’s some of my favorites! (in no particular order)
- Piccalilli
- Typozon
- Gwern Branwen
- Maggie Appleton
- Meyerweb
- Brilliantcrank
- i am robin
- Recursive Sans & Mono
- Roman Komarov
- Bobulate
Fediverse
Let’s be real, the Fediverse is special. Here, it’s not about metrics or virality. Instead, it’s about communities (e.g. music!) and individuality. You don’t have to beg for likes, or followers—just be yourself and make real connections.
Fedi’s no social panacea though, everyone has something they’d like to change about it if they could. Fortunately for all of us, there are A LOT of people contributing, building and working on making this place better each and every day. Tim has some ideas on url schemes for decentralized social, Panos has an update on Catodon (based on Iceshrimp), PieFed is a Lemmy alternative written in Python, Radicle is a decentralized Git-based code forge, Liaizon maintains an awesome Fediverse Iconography pack, technomancy has set up a little place for bots and Lemmy Federate is a cool tool for helping threadiverse communities grow!
Cybersecurity
Howdy cyber-friendos! If you haven’t already, come check out the cybersecurity community on infosec.pub! It’s one of the larger infosec-related Fedi communities and one that I can envision being incredibly vibrant in the not-too-distant future!
What else is cyber-interesting this week… Here’s a cool tool for searching across /.well-known pages. Want to learn more about security-related web headers? Check this out from Semgrep Academy. Mattia has thoughts on effective documentation for certs, CTFs, pentests, etc… using Obsidian. Straithe wrote up a review of the (oft-asked about) Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate. Oh and Update Yo Dell, foo!
Thanks for reading Scrolls! Time to be movin’ on!
