Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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In reply to Open Web Search project kicked off by Djoerd Hiemstra

I’m looking forward to following this project, Djoerd! It sounds sort-of IndieWeb like. Where e.g. MicroSub decouples feed fetching from feed reading and Micropub writing from posting, this project decouples index building from the search. Within IndieWeb that allows the creation of a variety of personal tools, to read and write the web. I’ve long been musing about personal search engines and personal agents and crawlers without putting anything into action. I’m curious to see if this project will actually deliver some of the things I dreamt of over time, by enabling personal tools for search.

A new EU project OpenWebSearch.eu … [in which] … the key idea is to separate index construction from the search engines themselves, where the most expensive step to create index shards can be carried out on large clusters while the search engine itself can be operated locally. …[including] an Open-Web-Search Engine Hub, [where anyone can] share their specifications of search engines and pre-computed, regularly updated search indices. … that would enable a new future of human-centric search without privacy concerns.

Djoerd Hiemstra

In reply to Als antwoord op RSS 20 jaar by Jan Boddez

In theorie inderdaad, vooral ook vanwege de aanname dat die willekeurige homepage alle relevante postings bevat. H-feeds heb ik bijvoorbeeld wel op mijn site, maar dan lees je nog niet de helft uiteindelijk. Wil niet zeggen dat het niet anders kan dan met RSS, maar puur scrapen vooronderstelt bij de scraper eveneens kennis vooraf van de structuur van een site.

Ietwat grappig dat dat nodig was (en is). Semantisch correcte HTML hoort, in theorie, gewoon machineleesbaar te zijn……Random thought: zelfs zonder expliciete microformats, die een stukje RSS-functionaliteit (en meer) terug naar HTML brengen, zou ik, in theorie, alle article-elementen van een willekeurige homepagina kunnen scrapen, en ervan uitgaan dat de eerste heading de titel is en het eerste time-element de publicatiedatum

auteur

In reply to What happens to my digital identity when I die? by Wouter Groeneveld

Ha, neat idea for a digital preservation strategy. Getting an ISBN number isn’t very expensive, 106 EUro for 1 or 28 Euro if you buy ten. With one, curation is key. With 10 it’s easy to do uncurated volumes in chronological order. Then do vanity press printing runs, to get the 2 copies of each to send to the Royal Library to save for posterity. Sounds like fun. If you’d do volumes, you don’t have to worry about timing, except for the final posts after the last volume. Maybe a last posthumous publication. If it is to be one book only, then choosing the right moment becomes important all of a sudden.

Which gets me back to this website. My intentions are to someday publish its contents in the form of a book, which can also be stored at the KBR

Wouter Groeneveld

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Thursday I visited the first day of the two day Netherlands WordCamp that, after a 6 year hiatus, took place again. Some observations:

  • The venue was fun, in the middle of Burgers Zoo in Arnhem. From the room where I presented you looked out over the enclosure where the giraffes and rhino’s were. The entrance to the venue was through the tropical jungle greenhouse, with unseen birds and other animals making lots of noises somewhere above in the foliage.
  • The atmosphere was excellent, very laid back as well as open and curious to engage in conversation
  • It was my first time at WordCamp and somewhere above a third of the participants were as well, meaning there was a good mix of new people and old hands. A mix that helps set the atmosphere and tone of an event.
  • Sustainability was a big theme. Multiple speakers explored how WP web developers can reduce the footprint of the sites they create. Heard several things (reduce the number of URLs WP exposes, find ways of limiting hits generated by crawlers and bots, reduce the size of various elements in your WP site etc.) that I can follow up on. Also made me think again about running a RSS-only, otherwise completely headless website. Though given another takeaway further down the list, that isn’t a good idea.
  • The organising team had also focused on sustainability, and I was happy they went the same route as is the custom at IndieWeb events: all catering was vegetarian. I also learned that all food that wasn’t used was donated, pre-arranged with the local foodbank.
  • It was fun to meet several people in person that I’ve known online for a long time, such as Roel Groeneveld and Gerard van Enk, and co-organisers Marcel and Remkus. Others I had met before, like Bert Boerland. Plus I met some new people.
  • I think my presentation was well received.
  • I was a bit the odd one out, as I am a non-professional blogger who is a WordPress user, not a developer. It was a WordCamp, by the WP community and ecosystem, so the audience was largely commercially oriented. Web agencies, SEO, UX design etc. I am also someone who has a longer history with WordPress than some others, having seen it start as a blogging tool.
  • The WordPress community is large and densely connected, I’m an outsider to it, although I know quite a few people who are part of it. So this wasn’t ‘my’ crowd, but the energy from people meeting in person again after several years was palpable.
  • When the opening speaker asked ‘who here still reads RSS’ and only 5 or so raised their hands, in line with his expectations, was surprising to say the least. People either ditched RSS when Google Reader went away in 2013, or if they were younger never started with RSS. How do people read at volume if not through feeds? Actually going to websites and newsletters is the answer apparently.
  • Only a few people had ever heard of IndieWeb, although there definitely were some.
  • One of the volunteers I chatted with never heard of BarCamp. Nor realised that the Camp in WordCamp speaks of its lineage. This is akin to how in 2021 the supposedly first Dutch BarCamp was going to take place.
  • Those last three things underline what E and I have been chatting about in the past months regularly. How it is needed to keep talking about, writing about and transfer to others these things, repeatedly that we think are ‘just normal’ and essential. For things to be used, and be useful, you can never assume that telling the world about it is ever done. Which brings me back to why I was at WordCamp in the first place, talking about IndieWeb.


My first encounter with WordPress, at BlogTalk 2006 in Vienna. Photo Matt Mullenweg, used with permission.

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Somehow it is hard for me to find any comments I make in Hypothes.is (h.) on the annotations of others. If I don’t remember on which annotation I commented it even becomes impossible. If someone else has responded to my comment, I get an e-mail with a link and that is the only reliable way I know to retrieve my own comments. H. help files don’t seem to mention it.

I would expect any comments I make to appear in my own overview of annotations, but they don’t.

Here’s a comment I made on an annotation by another user (screenshot below).

Notice I tagged the comment with ‘zettelkasten’.

The comment does not appear in my general overview of annotations I made, although it is in itself an annotation.

The comment also does not appear when searching my own profile using the tag I added to the comment.

I see Chris Aldrich filed the same issue, last February, but got no response. I added my own comment there to perhaps make the issue visible again.