Tantek’s Thoughts 2024-6

This is a summary curation of prior posts of mine on why post, what to post, and how to post, as well as some bits I wrote on the #IndieWeb wiki. This post assumes you already have a blog — if you don’t have one and wonder why you should, that’s a different blog post. If you have a blog and ever feel stuck about why you should post, what to post next, or how to write your post, hopefully this post will help get you unstuck. These reasons, topics, and techniques help me create, expand, edit, publish, and update more posts, sooner. Choose the ones that resonate for you, ignore the rest, and publish what else works for you on your personal site! Why Post There is a whole wiki page on the topic: * https://indieweb.org/why_post — which could use some gardening Here are a few specific reasons why you should post: * Wean yourself off social media. Post to your own site instead of social media. If you already post on social media, into someone else’s garage^1, then you already have reason enough to post. So post on your own site first, and optionally syndicate^2 to that silo, only if you have friends who still use it to read posts. * Search everything you write. Do you post long comments or issues on GitHub? Do you post on public mailing lists? Post such things to your own site, so you can more easily search everything you’ve written on a topic. Then post a copy to those external destinations. * All the reasons to own your data: https://indieweb.org/own_your_data What to Post There are so many things to post about! This is obviously highly personal. Here are a few that I use myself: * Post positive things promptly: https://tantek.com/2018/357/t3 * … from that day first: https://tantek.com/2018/364/t1 * … in time order: https://tantek.com/2018/364/t5 * Make and share lists. People like lists * Post to learn in public, and pass on what you learn How to Post I have spent a lot of time thinking about, trying, and iterating on different methods and techniques for starting, expanding, completing, publishing, and updating posts. These are a few of the techniques I use: * Use a local text editor * Capture first, edit & publish later: https://tantek.com/2023/365/t1/ * Do something positive (in-person), then post about it: https://tantek.com/2018/002/t1 * Single topic post * Short and to the point. Edit and remove anything distracting from the main point. * Quotable post title * Summary opening paragraph * Put tangents aside * Quotable sentences and multi-sentence paragraphs * Subheadings help cluster related paragraphs * Use a footer for updates, terminology, previous posts, additional reading, and citations. * Move definitions, citations, etc. to the footer unless including them inline either provides little risk of distraction or significantly helps reading flow * Use footer sections: Previously, Post Glossary, References, Additional Reading * Check your references Each of these points could be its own blog post. There are many more whys, whats, and hows. See more on these pages on the IndieWeb community site: * https://indieweb.org/why_post * https://indieweb.org/what_to_post * https://indieweb.org/how_to_post Add your own to each, and/or help organize them! Glossary mailing list https://indieweb.org/mailing_list own your data https://indieweb.org/own_your_data post footer https://indieweb.org/posts#Footer_sections silo https://indieweb.org/silo social media https://indieweb.org/social_media References ^1 https://tantek.com/2023/001/t1/own-your-notes ^2 https://indieweb.org/POSSE This is post 29 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts ← https://tantek.com/2024/306/t1/simple-embeds → 🔮

Last week at a #HomebrewWebsiteClub session^1 I pointed out that I was working on implementing a “simple” way to support embeds of my notes, that is, make my short notes embeddable, like how people embed tweets or toots. I noted that to keep it as simple as possible while being flexible to implementation changes, I planned to implement three things: 1. A separate “embed” version of my post permalinks, with just the entry information (no header, nav, search, sidebar, footer etc.), embeddable via copy/paste or an iframe. 2. A way to “Follow Your Nose” discover that separate embed version 3. A way to discover the original post from the embedded version For (1) a minimal h-entry, with perhaps a little bit of inline CSS would suffice. For (2) I proposed using “rel=embed” which I’ve subsequently written up briefly^2. For (3) The obvious existing answer is rel=canonical link from the embed version to the canonical post permalink. Soon thereafter, several folks in the #IndieWeb community went ahead and implemented such embeds for their own sites, and even the https://libre.fm/ open scrobbling service! https://indieweb.org/embed#IndieWeb_Examples I have yet to implement it myself, and that’s fine. This is one of the things I appreciate about the community, we can share our plans and ideas for improving things on our own sites, and if someone else does it first, that's great! We celebrate it and explore the solution space together. Got other ideas for simple embeds? Want to implement them on your own site? Join us in the #indiewebdev chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev UPDATE: What about oEmbed? tl;dr: oEmbed requires JS and backend code, more work and unsuitable for embeds from static site hosting (like GitHub pages). A simple HTML method is accessible to many more independent publishers and easier to implement. More: https://tantek.com/2024/306/t2 Glossary embed https://indieweb.org/embed Follow Your Nose https://indieweb.org/follow_your_nose h-entry https://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry oEmbed https://indieweb.org/oEmbed rel-canonical https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical static site hosting https://indieweb.org/static_web_hosting References ^1 https://indieweb.org/events/2024-10-23-hwc-europe#embedding ^2 https://indieweb.org/rel-embed This is post 27 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts ← https://tantek.com/2024/287/t1/fediverse-unfollow-bridgyfed-bug → https://tantek.com/2024/314/t1/indiewebcamp-berlin-2024-day-1