Tag: blogging

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Way back in the year 2000, I bought a domain name to move my personal website from the school web server to someplace I could keep it visible after graduating. I picked Hyperborea.org from an adventure movie I’d seen years earlier, wanting something that sounded fantastic but wasn’t Atlantis, which had already been done to death (and besides, it was taken). In 2002, I set up the first version of this blog, running on b2/cafelog. At the time, Katie and I both posted here. She later moved to LiveJournal, then stopped blogging, then set up again at Feral Tomatoes.

Somewhere along the line I bought KVibber.com and set it up to redirect to my main site. Then in 2022 I rebuilt it as a simple Indieweb-style profile, figuring that while Hyperborea was a digital home, it really wasn’t a digital identity. I’ve been using that in various online profiles ever since, but kept most of the actual stuff on the existing site while I dithered over what to keep where.

Eventually I decided I wanted to move over to the newer domain.

The Eleventy parts were easy: I just needed to change some parameters and rebuild. The hand-crafted parts were relatively easy: global search and replace.

And of course redirecting each section to the new site as I moved it.

Search indexes are slowly shifting over. Google so far has decided to keep pointing to some of the older pages even though those pages redirect to the new ones.

The blog…is complicated. WordPress and ClassicPress use a database for some things and files for others. Plus I’m using the ActivityPub Plugin to make the blog visible on the Fediverse, which brings its own set of complications. I was relieved to see that copies of posts previously federated at the old site do in fact show up correctly on the new site’s Fediverse view.

One thing I decided on early on: I was going to use a subdomain this time instead of a folder, because too many things (some plugins, .well-known files, etc) assume your blog is running at the top level of the site.

I did a first pass Wednesday night to copy the files and database, set up the new config, run all those search-and-replace actions, and kick the metaphorical tires. Since then I’ve been spot-checking things here and there, and the new site seems fine so far.

I tried running the ActivityPub migration, but it doesn’t seem to have sent any followers over. And when I look at the old @kelson profile in Mastodon, it says it’s moving to…@kelson, instead of to @k2r. Most likely it’s either an incompatibility with ClassicPress or another problem with running in a subfolder. I’ll give it another stab tomorrow, but there are only about 5 followers at the moment, and I can just DM everyone if I really need to.

Then I can self-destruct the ActivityPub view on the old site, and once that’s done, I can redirect the blog to the new location.

Better Late Than Never

I’m kicking myself for taking so long. I should’ve just moved wholesale over to KVibber.com back in 2022. By waiting until 2026, I’ve left the new location without proof of having existed before the slop era. (I’m still writing articles myself, not using an “AI,” so all the mistakes in this post are my own.) Unless someone looks up the old hyperborea.org version of a page on the Wayback Machine, but they shouldn’t have to know to do that.

But the old name is awkward and hard to spell, and apparently some of the creepy groups that have weird obsessions with the myths it came from are more substantial than the historical footnotes I thought they were back in the day.

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I’ve been meaning to disconnect from Jetpack for a while now. This seems like a good time to do it, and to finally clear out the older Tumblr and WordPress.com blogs I don’t use anymore.

Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools — 404 Media

It’s the kind of thing that you expect from Google or Facebook, or from any number of start-ups, but there’s been this sense that Automattic should know better — and with Tumblr being login-walled and ad-saturated, and the push to upsell in their WordPress plugins, and now this…it’s looking like they don’t.

I don’t think they’ve hit the “trust thermocline” yet, but selling user data is a pretty clear line.

As for AI access to the Firehose: My previous understanding of the firehose is that it’s basically an aggregation of what you’d see in a bunch of blogs’ public RSS feeds. Which, OK, fine. Analyze your heart out. Display my posts in your RSS reader. Just make sure private posts and comments don’t leak.

But LLM training isn’t the same as analytics, or showing a properly attributed post in a reader. And quietly changing the terms to allow more kinds of re-use on something most people using the service don’t know about? Not cool.

And not making it clear what is and isn’t included for which purposes? That breaks down trust.

Before this, I wasn’t worried about the Firehose. But now I’m not sure I can trust Akismet, never mind Jetpack, and I’m looking for a new spam filter.

Originally posted across several threads through my GoToSocial test site.

Update: Automattic did clarify that self-hosted blogs with Jetpack are not included in the training data. Only company-hosted blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.com. But I still uninstalled Jetpack from this site, just to be sure. Like I said, I’d been meaning to for a while.

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In response to girrodocus’s question: #PersonalWebsite creators… what’s your rationale for deciding when to use a subdomain or a subdirectory?

I usually prefer to put sections in subdirectories. That makes it possible to make the entire site portable (depending on authoring tools, anyway). Ideally, I want something that could be zipped up and moved. Or sent to Archive Team. (One of the downsides of dynamic site generators is that you can’t do this.)

When I use subdomains, it’s typically because I want some sort of isolation between the content, or the server apps, etc. But in those cases I’m as likely to use another domain entirely.

I originally put my main blog in a subdirectory (/journal), but if I set up my own git repository or something like that, I’d probably put it in a subdomain.

That said, I’m currently trying to sort out what I want to keep at the domain I’ve had for the last 20 years and what to move to my IndieWeb identity site.

IndieWeb and Identity

It took 4 or 5 years from me discovering IndieWeb to actually building support into my website(s), because Hyperborea.org, named after a fictional place, felt like a digital home, but not an identity. So I set up KVibber.com as my digital identity instead.

I’ve been considering several approaches:

  • New stuff on KVibber, leave old stuff where it is.
  • Professional stuff on KVibber, fun stuff on Hyperborea.
  • Original work on KVibber, fandom stuff on Hyperborea.

I might move my scenic and nature photos over to KVibber but leave the funny and comic-con photos on Hyperborea, or move my tech articles over but leave the personal posts.

I’m also planning to put together a light microblog to be the canonical location for short posts on Mastodon/Twitter/etc that I want to keep, but don’t feel big enough for a full blog entry. That’ll probably go on KVibber, even though it’ll blur the pro/fun and original/fan distinctions.

Originally on Wandering.shop.

Update September 2022: I’ve tabled the whole question at this point. For now, I’m just using KVibber as a profile page and putting everything else on Hyperborea, like I was doing before.

Update April 2026: I’ve been moving stuff over to KVibber, and put the blog on a subdomain because subfolders have .well_known problems.

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I’m not ready to give up on the flexibility of WordPress for my main blog yet, but holy crap are these pages heavy. Even with compression. There’s no reason it should take 450K (before compression) and 20 requests to display a 500-word post.

And I don’t even do ads, popups, social sharing buttons or anything else like that.

By contrast, my Les Mis blog, where I post about once a year, is currently generated by Eleventy using a custom minimal theme that only takes around 10K of HTML, 3K CSS, and a third request for the icon. And another 40K for the header font, which I recently set up locally so it no longer has to call out to Google Fonts.

One domain, just four requests, and only 50K for the first hit and 10K for each subsequent page.

Never mind the Gemini version of the blog which is around 2-5K per page and a single request per page!

Compression cuts down on those 500Kb WordPress pages — all the text and code compresses really well so only around 200K bandwidth is needed. But it’s still got multiple JavaScript and CSS requests going on.

I was able to cut it down significantly by switching to a lighter theme and turning on the minimize/combine feature in WP-Optimize so it’s making fewer script calls. But it’s still way bigger than the minimalist setup I have with 11ty.

Some of it is images, though. I still have my latest Flickr posts in the sidebar, and I’m using Jetpack’s related posts feature which includes thumbnails. I could cut out a big chunk by removing those, but I kind of still like the idea of having them in there.

I think I need to take a look at how much extra stuff I really want on this site and rip some of it out. Eventually I’d like to replace all the JetPack features because they just seem to keep adding more scripts. Plus I want an entirely local stats package instead of one that’s offloaded to a third party even if they’re less awful than, say, Google or Facebook.

On the other hand, I want to keep Gravatar on the comments sections (on the older posts where people actually commented) because that’s actually useful to readers as an aid for following a conversation better. But that’s all on top of the base page size.

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Sometimes you choose which social app to open based on

  • who you want to talk to
  • who you want to hear
  • what you want to talk about

Sometimes you’re just shouting into the void. At those times, I figure I’ll choose the void that feels less exploitative.

That’s part of why I still have a blog. And why I post more on Mastodon, while Twitter is mostly auto-shares from my other networks, retweets, and occasional cross-posts.

(And politics, because I’d rather keep that on Twitter, where it’s sort of the main topic anyway, than on the network that’s still fun. Not that Mastodon is apolitical. Far from it! But it’s a lot more varied than the overwhelming focus on US partisan politics I see on Twitter. And the culture and structure make the discussions at least somewhat less train-wrecky. Most of the time.)

Update: If you’re interested in checking out Mastodon and the Fediverse, good places to start are JoinMastodon.org and JoinFediverse.wiki.

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What’s the minimum viable blog feature set these days?

  • Rich text posts (output; the source can be anything)
  • Titles
  • Permalinks
  • Tags/categories
  • Navigation
  • RSS feed
  • Images hosted locally
  • Media embed (remote or local?)
  • Author info for multi-author blogs

I won’t back down on RSS/Atom, because there’s SO MUCH you and subscribers can do with it.

I also think images should to be built-in and not something you bolt on clumsily afterward.

Not sure if I’d consider comments part of the base level.

What else am I missing?

Candidate Software

Looking for something lighter weight than WordPress.

The last time I tried Plume and WriteFreely, they didn’t support images, though IIRC you could embed remote images in at least one.

Static site generators I’ve tried like Jekyll require you to bolt on separate commenting systems like Disqus, or jump through hoops to roll your own in a way that will re-generate the site when someone comments…and you still have to reinvent spam filtering.

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