Dan J’s Website

I've been looking for guides for how to do .NET development in Vim, because Vim has long appealed to me for a variety of reasons too esoteric to get into right now. And, despite it being what I'm using to write this post, I'm hungry to get away from Visual Studio Code and its "I'm secretly Javascript running on Chrome don't tell anybody"; I mean, I've used WAY worse web-simulacra-of-native-apps (I'm glaring at you, Descript), but still. Code is a little janky (for some reason, File > New Window doesn't seem to work anymore) and I don't need my text editor to swallow 2GB of RAM when I'm not using it.

ANYWAY, I'm bookmarking this article because it looks helpful. Actually, Rudism.com just looks all over like the kind of site I want to have. So, also bookmarked for inspiration.

I want to switch away from CloudApp to a host/domain under my control, and DropShare looks like a great alternative, because it lets you pick a back-end.

They have instructions for setting up SCP/SSH using your own server via nginx on DigitalOcean. I’ve already got danj.ca …

A lot of good potential resources for IndieWeb/decentralized/non-siloed social media tools in here.

Patrick Rhone shared a link to his /reading page, where he posts short notes on all the books he reads. I saw this page, and immediately thought two things:

1. I love that! I should have a /reading page on my site
2. …It’s too bad the hyperlinks he provides to …

I've had a tab for this 2014 Ars Technica article open for ages, let me collect the series here:

1. How to run your own e-mail server with your own domain, part 1
2. Taking e-mail back, part 2: Arming your server with Postfix and Dovecot
3. Taking e-mail back, part 3: Fortifying …

I use, but don't really like, CloudApp to share files (mostly images). The desired solution is:

1. Drag a file to an icon or something
2. The file is uploaded somewhere that it can be linked to via URL (ideally at a domain I control)
3. The URL goes on my clipboard and I can easily share it

If you pay for CloudApp, it does work with your own domain... but I kind of dislike having a third-party service for this at all.

The link above is to an old article from 2012, so there are almost certainly better solutions for self-hosting a file-linking thingamabob, but I'm bookmarking this as a start.

Example that may be relevant to building my own static CMS (if you have a static site generator, you need some trigger to regenerate the site in response to a Micropub call, if you want to be able to update the site from a Micropub client).

(via Indieweb wiki on Micropub)

Important article by Cory Doctorow about "adversarial interoperability" - the concept of building a system that interoperates with an existing system for the purposes of competing with it—what it is, why it matters, and what's happened to it.

In short: alt. took over from Usenet in a way that federated social networks are struggling to take over from facebook and twitter.

(via... I can't remember; EFF's newsletter, probably)

There's no good reason I should build my own site generator, instead of just using Jekyll (as I am at the time of writing this post.)

No good reason, other than I want to, other than I miss software development and, more specifically, have never really done a big software …

A favourite post from one of my favourite tech bloggers, Scott Hanselman. I keep this in mind when trying to decide how the URLs on this IndieWeb site should work.

Memory matters.

We need to know what we were, where we came from, to know who we are, where we're going.

This is true of the individual as well as the society, the species.

It's a powerful thing to crack open your journal from five years ago and be reminded …

Medium is bad for the web. It’s just one more silo that people pour their creative work into, because it promises convenience and reach. And then it looks like your work is on the internet, but it isn’t, really.

And Medium is arguably more sinister than e.g …

I used this article to properly position the little Micro.blog logo next to the Status Feed link in this site's navigation bar. Useful!

Brent Simmons, creator of NetNewsWire (which I'm quite happily using—can't wait for the iOS version!) on the whole reason I've wanted to have this site:

You choose the web you want. But you have to do the work.

A lot of people are doing the work. You could keep telling them, discouragingly, that what they’re doing is dead. Or you could join in the fun.

I'm in. How about you?

(via @manton and Brent's blog itself)

Every few years, I start a blog. When I don’t have a blog I think about starting one, but I dawdle and dawdle. When I see blogs I admire, I look at the list of hundreds of posts covering maybe a decade or more and think… what a missed …