Liked https://barryfrost.com/2023/03/week-80-underpants

Replied to Simone Silvestroni

I love this essay, Simone. Fully embracing the very IndieWeb concept of a personal website has helped me shake this feeling of FOMO, I imagine the same way it did for you. Don’t be hard on yourself, though, we all fell for this concept, and many of us still do. If society presents something as a way to solve a problem, most people will eventually try it. And while it does solve some problems, it also creates others. I have a few Gen Z friends who never fail to make me feel old whenever they talk about “their personal brand” in an unironic way. Gives me the shivers.

Replied to Barry Frost

Darn Barry, I feel like 2023 is throwing you for quite a loop. Ever since you wrote about you getting laid off I think about you every now and then. I’m sorry this happened last week, although I must say I suppose it’s a lucky thing those divvies wanted to get a break-in early bird special.

I’m quite excited at the prospect of an impromptu, Kimberly Hirsch-is-in-the-Netherlands-inspired IndieWeb meet-up.

Recently, I’ve been making some great progress with my personal website. While I normally don’t engage in technical ballets on the goings-on of this website, I feel it’s relevant to document what I’ve learnt and done, if only for posterity.

Tools

• Jekyll: as is often the case for me, this site is built using my favorite flat-file content management system
• Github: hosts the code for this website
• Netlify: serves the content to my website
• Obsidian: I write in a single Obsidian vault
• obsidian-git: helps me manage the version control of my Obsidian content
• Push git subdirectory as branch: a Github action that lets me publish a part of the content of my Obsidian vault to a separate repository
• Git submodule: my separate repository is pulled into my website’s code base
• Netlify build hook: every day, Netlify looks for new content and publishes it to my website

Why this is great

• I hold the strong belief that tools don’t matter. This means, among other things, that I don’t like to be limited to using particular platforms or apps to write. I want to see my files in a folder that I can move around. Jekyll allows me to do just this.
• My website is a text-heavy space: most of what you’ll find on here is written content. As a knowledge worker, writing is an integral part of my daily life. Many of the things I write are not for public consumption, but they are closely linked to things that are. To avoid duplicate content and awkward linking, it was important for me to manage my text files in a single space, one Obsidian vault.
• I have a tendency to tinker a lot on my website. This can make it so that I spend more time trying out new things and changing the design than I do writing. Having my code base and content separated helps me focus more on writing things that are meaningful to me.

Some things I haven’t figured out yet

• Is it worthwhile for me to publish more granular IndieWeb post types such as notes and likes? Do I care about them? Am I making them only to show them? What’s their value if I cannot automate this process? Does the technical implementation change if I push said content to a git repository that consists of only notes?
• What does a proper dark mode look like?
• Do I want to continue my barebones experiment and document the discomfort of vanity? Or am I ready for something more modern?
• How in the world do I even go about Micropub and Webmentions?

Brushing my teeth on Friday morning, I think about the weekend ahead, secretly complaining that my social engagements will keep me from getting the rest I need. Then I remember Easter Monday. The true marker of my mid-thirties is the excitement I feel at the prospect of a bed, and nothing but it.

I hold a baby this week, one of my favorite ones. His face has two states that exist simultaneously: the one of utter shock and surprise only newborns can have, and the one that reminds you that babies know everything about the world and forget it as soon as they start to speak. He laughs when I bop his nose, although I quickly learn that the force with which I bop Anja’s adult nose shan’t be applied here.

I am nostalgic about the way the Web used to be. I miss the handcrafted blogs that I used to visit, and the intimate windows they gave me into the lives of strangers.

I miss that I knew all the domain names by heart. It is a phantom pain of sorts; an unrest in the tip of my fingers reminding me I no longer need to make series of key combinations to find those personal public spaces, some more arts-and-craftsy than others, because most of them are gone. These days, I just circulate through a small number of news sites, like I did when I first got online as a young girl, not yet having found my way around the Internet.