There are plenty of tools out there that my work flow depends upon or that I find valuable in some other way, that are free and open source software. People need to support open tools they value, if they want to keep them around. One way of getting more people to do that, is showing you do it. If something is seen as pretty standard behaviour it will get copied more easily. That is why I added a little widget on the right hand side, that shows some of the projects and initiatives I send money towards.
Not for me to be seen as special, but for you to see it as ordinary, and something to potentially also do. In the hope that those projects stay in existence.
I support the IndieWeb, the Internet Archive, CoderDojo Netherlands, Obsidian and Open Street Map, and a few others, with donations. It’s an affordable way for me to support things I can’t support with e.g. writing code or spending time. What do/can you do? Maybe you support things I might copy, and vice versa.
Today, following a book reference by someone in a discussion thread, I ended up purposefully using the Internet Archive’s book collection for the first time. The book in question was a 1965 UK paperback. The Internet Archive offer several million books from around the world, and my Startpage search for the book led me to their collection. Being logged in with my account (I’m a monthly supporter of the Internet Archive, maybe you want to consider that too), I could hit the ‘borrow’ button and have the scanned and indexed 1965 book before me for an hour. Going through the table of content I quickly found the two things of interest to me, skipped to the two related chapters, read the relevant few pages, and hit the ‘return this book’ button after 10 minutes.
That was very useful. Following up a loose thread of information, finding the source, lift out the few relevant details, make a note of it, connect it to a few existing notes and move on. Useful and a very pleasing process.
A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
Theme related tweaks
Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
in the entry-footer template and the comments template
Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
Added a widget with projects I support
Functionality related tweaks
Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
Added an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
Added a /feeds page
Added a Now page
Added a way to share book lists / feeds.
Stopped embedding slide decks, and stopped embedding new Flickr photos (as well as removed older embeds, currently from June 2020 and before 2006, and daily for all ‘on this day’ postings)
Removed all affilliate links to Amazon books as it entails tracking
Other tweaks
Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)