Notebook

Adam Newbold posted on his website an article "Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day"

It's hard for me to disagree with the idea of people learning how to do things for themselves when it comes to technology but I think the whole premise of this idea is flawed from the first principles.

He starts:

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content.

There is nothing practical about the IndieWeb approach. Practical would be using one of the services he's arguing against.

IndieWeb.org says:

By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

There isn't a modern blogging platform that says they own your content. There is no modern blogging platform that doesn't give the sort of control they talk about either. And frankly, once your content is on the Internet it's out of your control. The idea that anyone has full control of anything public on the Internet is a fallacy.

Adam continues:

In fact, when you use one of those services, you’re actually taking a step back from real independence, because your content often winds up living in someone else’s database on someone else’s server. They’ll tell you that’s OK because you can always export it whenever you’d like, in open formats, and of course that’s nice. But you still don’t fully fully own and control your content when you’re dependent on someone else’s service.

[...]

But if the idea of having complete independence and control over your content on the web is appealing to you, read on. Because that’s what Hardcore IndieWeb is all about.

You will always be dependent on someone else's service. The idea that there is some independence is the biggest fallacy of the whole "IndieWeb" idea. If you have to use someone else's server and/or connectivity you will always be dependent.

Adam's two major criteria are:

• If your content doesn’t primarily exist on your own hard drive, you don’t fully control your content.
• If you don’t have a copy of your published HTML and web assets on your own hard drive, it’s not truly portable.

I mostly agree with the first point (other than the fallacy that you fully control anything you publish on the Internet) but there is nothing preventing someone from having their content on their own computer system with any web platform. Many of us frequently write in other tools and publish from those tools. I tend to use Ulysses or iA Writer to write, then publish to Ghost hosted by Magic Pages. That doesn't require knowing HTML or any other web technology.

I completely disagree with the second point in terms of published HTML. Nobody needs that to have truly portable content. Markdown is a superior format to have an archive of your content in a truly portable ASCII text format. Easy to read, and easy to process, a person is better off sticking with Markdown.

Adam asks:

Your ability to move to a new service depends entirely on your ability to export your data. What if you can’t export it? The service provider may have told you that you own your content, but what good does that do if you can’t access it?

I'm trying to figure out exactly which platform he's talking about. It certainly isn't the 800-pound gorilla in the room, WordPress. WordPress is one of the easiest platforms to export content from and one of the most supported in terms of importing elsewhere because of its ubiquity as a content management platform. From a personal website standpoint this problem doesn't exist.

I literally laughed out loud when I read this next part:

From a portability standpoint, consider what happens if you discover that the owner of your IndieWeb blogging service has been outed as engaging in abhorrent behavior or just comes down with a major case of the ick (this has happened before!). Sure, you can export your data in an open format and move house. But now you have to find another service that can work with that format, or convert everything and adopt an entirely new set of tools or processes. And you have to move house, which is a major pain.

"Major case of the ick"?

Forget the dig (for reference to "this has happened before!": Adam has had a long-standing grudge with Manton Reece of micro.blog and Vincent Ritter who does work for Manton and also runs his own services) - this is a problem that just doesn't exist in boutique blogging platforms, or big ones like WordPress.

"Hardcore IndieWeb" is a solution looking for a problem. If you really want a more hands-on way to maintain your website at that level look into static site generators (SSGs) like Jekyll or Hugo. If you can learn all of the stuff in that article you can learn an SSG and reap all of the "rewards" Adam's article suggests while making things a lot easier on yourself.

Better yet? Find a good hosting service for your blog/website and have fun writing vs. worrying about the plumbing. My recommendations?

1. Magic Pages. Ghost hosting run by a fabulous person deeply involved in the Ghost ecosystem. It's not cheap but Jannis, the owner, is constantly working on making the service better. If you need Substack-level newsletter support this is the way to go.
2. Pika. Good Enough is two great guys running a constantly evolving blogging platform. They've been on fire with the updates. I can't recommend this platform enough.
   
   Write in their web-based editor, export to Markdown for portability.
3. Pagecord. Olly, the owner, is another great human being who, like his counterparts at Pika and Magic Pages, is constantly evolving his platform for a ridiculously low price. Pagecord's standout feature? Posting via email.
   
   Write in their web-based editor (or email), export to Markdown for portability.
4. Scribbles. Vincent the owner is constantly working on this platform. It's gorgeous and well-maintained.
   
   Write in the web-based editor, export to Markdown.
5. micro.blog. This is the OG "IndieWeb" subscription platform from Manton Reece and it does a lot (newsletters, podcasts, video, etc.), including one of the main pillars of "IndieWeb": POSSE. If you're interested in making sure your posts make it to your social media accounts this is a great place to start.
   
   Write in the web-based editor in Markdown, or one of the many Markdown tools that support it directly (Ulysses and iA Writer for example), export to Markdown.
   
   I'd also note that behind the scenes micro.blog uses the SSG Hugo mentioned above to publish your blog/website.
   

At a lower level (i.e. closer to the HTML):

1. Bear. Herman is running a more "bare metal" environment here but it's still easy to use.
   
   Write in Markdown in their editor, export to Markdown.
2. blot.im. This is post-by-folder. Set up a Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. folder. Save a Markdown file to that folder. Boom - instant blog post.
   
   Write in Markdown, no need to export because you already have a folder full of posts.

They all do RSS feeds. They all allow custom domains. Which one you choose will be based on the other features you need.

Anyone likely reading this right now knows I'm a fan of playing around with applications in various "productivity" realms. I also like to revisit things I've used in the past to see how/if they've progressed. I'm never one to shy away from switching things up. After listening to the CTO of Proton on the Decoder podcast from theverge.com I thought I've give Proton Mail and Calendar a shot again for a month just to see where things are.

A couple days in and I've got to say that I'm pretty impressed with the basics. Proton has been doing some significant performance work in Mail and Proton Drive and it shows. They've also been busy adding new features like Newsletter handling with auto-categorization of emails on the way (overdue actually, really looking forward to this one and hope it shows up soon).

Some other noticeable things:

1. Proton Mail Bridge seems to be faster. I'm not sure if they've spent significant time on that or not but it certainly seems to be faster and more resilient than in years past.
2. Proton Drive is significantly more performant from the few tests I've done so I'll be using that more over the next month.
3. Proton Calendar seems useful enough at this point to be able to use it for my regular day-to-day stuff and they are doing significant work on it with a rewrite.

Part of the problem I've had with Proton in the past is the lack of progress on their main applications while introducing new products like Proton Pass and Proton Wallet. Browsing through their updates on their blog it seems they've gotten a handle on that.

The other thing is that encrypted systems like Proton are hard to build and update because the end-to-end encryption always limits what can be done compared to an email system like Gmail or Fastmail where everything happens on the server. Things like search indexing for full text search are easy in those systems, for Proton it's all got to be in the web browser. Security considerations also have to be taken into account for every single update so the time to develop new features just takes a lot longer.

Proton Mail Bridge mostly addresses that problem on the desktop because it allows using a regular email application like Apple Mail while still ensuring that things are fully encrypted. Proton really needs a Calendar Bridge to support third party calendar applications too but that doesn't appear to even be in their plans.

At any rate I'm impressed so far just a couple of days in especially with adjusted expectations based on past usage. I know the spots where Proton's apps just won't match their unencrypted counterparts and will make adjustments.

I have been running into issues with "make this my card" for several releases of macOS at this point, up to and including 27 dev beta 4 (Golden Gate). I'm not quite sure what the root issue is but the end result is "My Card" can't be set and there is no error.

I generally use Fastmail for contacts, and only Fastmail, but found through experimentation that if I turned on iCloud contact syncing as well, and had my own contact in iCloud it started working, I was able to set "My Card" properly. When I set up my new Mac things broke again.

I thought at first just having a contact card on iCloud was enough. When things are working properly you can get to your own contact card by going to "System Settings"->"Users and Groups" then clicking the "Open Contact Card..." button for your user account. When it's broken that same procedure will create a new contact card (local or iCloud depending on whether iCloud is set up or not) with the first name set as the Mac account username and set it as "My Card". On my new Mac that kept happening and it would never open the proper card.

One option I tried in the past was a simple AppleScript that sets the card. That works but I ran into other issues as a result of that so ultimately I abandoned that fix.

I found another solution today via stackexchange.com. The user ended up going to iCloud.com and set "My Card" there. This worked for me as well. That is from 14 years ago, this is still broken, and that fix still works!

I guess I've come full circle as I forgot I used this URL, notes.jkratz.me, previously for this Ghost blog. I just noticed that the Fediverse account I had set up is still there and...full posts are still available even though this account is a brand new Magic Pages account and has no relation to the old one that originally had the notes.jkratz.me URL. Strange indeed.

Trying out a theme I purchased from Bright Themes quite awhile ago, Curie. I've tried it in the past and haven't been super happy with it but I enjoy tweaking Ghost themes so I'm going to play with this one for a bit while I figure out what I'm doing with this website.

It’s been a minute since I posted something here. Been in the doldrums for a bit as of late. Lots of uncertainty in life the last month, more than I can take at one time. Thankfully feel like today I’m coming out of it.

Too much AI hand-wringing

Manton Reece writes:

I wrote most of my book years ago, so this is the first time I’ve actually run it through AI to get some feedback on structure, redundancies to trim, and grammar problems. It’s valuable, but it’s also leaving me with doubt that I didn’t have before.
Let’s say I let AI come up with a bridge paragraph that helps tie something together. Just a few sentences. Is it still my work? Am I contributing in a small way to the slop of the web?
For a blog post, this wouldn’t bother me. There is something about a “book” that gives me pause, even though it’s 50k of my own words. The tiny part that AI helped with would barely register.

I honestly don’t understand this. When journalists or authors turn their work over to a human editor, that person is going to make changes, and nobody seems to question whether it’s their own work or not. If you’re doing the same thing with an LLM why is it somehow different?

That’s what is driving me crazy about the discussions around “AI” (mostly LLMs) several years after their introduction to the general public: too much hand-wringing over simple things! I think there is valuable discussion to be had over completely-LLM generated text but using it as a tool for editing? Does that mean that in years I’ve been using spellcheck on my documents that the work isn’t my own?

I really wish people would stop with the extremes on this topic given that there is so much in the middle worth talking about.

Yet another article about starting a blog

Joan Westenberg writes about starting a blog. Lots of words about a subject that has been beaten to death at this point. It’s also the usual rose-colored glasses look at blogging from the early days.

For instance:

The blogosphere of the mid-2000s had its problems: It was insular and often smug, prone to flame wars between people who agreed on 95% of everything but found the remaining 5% absolutely unforgivable. But it also produced actual intellectual communities.
Remember those?
People wrote long responses to each other's posts, those responses generated further responses, and you could follow the thread of an argument across multiple sites and weeks of discussion. The format rewarded careful thinking because careful thinking was legible in a way that it simply isn't on platforms designed for rapid-fire engagement.

That might have happened for popular blogs, and frankly following threads across sites sucked. There is a reason social media became popular, and is still popular among bloggers for syndicating their writing — it makes discovery and discussion much easier.

At the end of the day I agree that it’s a good idea to start a blog. It can be fun and it’s a good way to share things but let’s stop with the “good old days” stuff.

Great video on Chicago’s basement bars.

My house, a Cape Cod built in 1943, had a bar when we moved in. I tore it out years ago but someone put some real love into building it. And when I look back at old family photos of parties of years gone by…they are almost always in my grandparents’ basement bar.

We…kidnapped? Abducted? Apprehended? the President of Venezuela. The press conference was a shitshow as expected. Trump reading in monotone his prepared speech. Pete Hegseth looking and sounding like he had an hours-long hard-on and wanting to get his face firmly planted in Trump’s ass. More bullshit from the Joint Chief Caine (they kept referring to him as “Raisin’ Caine”) with way too many adjectives about how great our military is (no shit).

Supposedly we’re going to run Venezuela. No details on how given we have no presence there and they didn’t finish the job by getting the other members of the regime.

Great start to 2026.