More or less developed 250-1500 word essays, mostly about the web and its politics. Some of it’s technical.
There’s a tradition of bloggers making grand announcements when they change something on their site, such as its visual design. As this strikes me as yet another manifestation of techno-individualism, a kind of PR for the demesne of me, I shall keep this brief. I don’t plan to post any new articles here to This day’s portion . As I’ve mentioned before, I have a distinctive name that’s easy to…
I last blogged here on 15 March, which is a long time ago considering I was posting about once a week for years before that, often more when I entered my slightly manic periods. I have had a lot going on. Firstly, I stood as a Green in the local council elections earlier this month. This was simply hard work , what with all the calls, planning, leafleting and canvassing over a six week period. It…
It’s worth remembering the meaning of the luddites doesn’t lie in the fact that some of them were skilled machinists, somehow reluctant to rebel against the tech of the day. It’s that they smashed machines in an act of collective bargaining by riot . Emphasising a lack of antipathy towards machinery is, in part, an example of the victors writing history: it seems absurd for our heroes to counter…
Khürt argues that the indieweb is not defined by its enemies , a positive sounding notion that’s hard to disagree with. No-one wants to succumb to the enemy’s framing of the world, do they? It also chimes with a certain part of the tech community looking to reaffirm the indieweb they want: free of the “noise” of politics — a purely hobbyist, technological concern. Khürt states: The indie web did…
A mild drama broke out today on, well, the fediverse, but possibly in other places as one of the protagonists POSSEs to various platforms. Tante posted Acting ethically in an evil world in response to an article by Cory Doctorow ostensibly about the sixth anniversary of his blog, Pluralistic , which takes an odd turn about halfway through. Doctorow discusses his (seemingly very convoluted)…
I came across a blog with 147 lines of CSS today, including a couple of font-face declarations and a handful of custom properties. It looked pretty good and was perfectly readable, which is a testament to the author’s skill and judgement, the expressiveness of CSS and the robustness of browser defaults. This sort of thing always gets me thinking about the minimum CSS required to publish a blog.…
Manuel arguing for some specious neutrality and detachment : …if I tell you my favorite book is the [sic] Mein Kampf , you have every reason to be perplexed and ask follow-up questions. But if you just assumed, based on that, that I’m a Nazi sympathizer, that would be wrong. If “raising an eyebrow” is your only reaction to this statement with all [gestures] this going on: you’re a problem. Bix…
Over Christmas and the new year I wrote my way through some ideas on redefining the term “indieweb”. One of the conclusions I drew was that the indieweb doesn’t have to consist of websites that emphasise the personal , small, cosy or whatever — we could (and should) look to include and share writing from journalists, academics and thinkers, with the ultimate aim of helping them move away from…
At the risk of boring you, here’s yet another post about the indieweb. Well, more of an update, really. After spending a lot of the new year thinking through and writing about the thing I refer to as the “indieweb”, I’ve come up with a more polished definition, and added an entry to my website glossary . Glossary entry for “indieweb” . And if you’re looking for my one paragraph definition:…
Venkatram asked where we think the indieweb will be in 2030 , which prompted me to explore what we mean by indieweb in a couple of posts. I argue that the “official” definition addresses concerns over Facebook and X’s ownership of our content, and that it represents an effort to wrest ownership from corporate social media to our websites. Defining the indieweb for 2026 Amateurs and professionals:…