Tag: IndieWeb

Posted on
by

I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. And I’m on track! I’ve written 24 posts in the last two months, so I’m actually ahead! But a few days ago I found out about Blaugust, a challenge to publish daily and/or write 31 posts in the month of August.

I can’t resist the wordplay in the name!

100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

Besides, it’ll help motivate me to catch up on book reviews.

As with 100 Days, for Blaugust I intend to include any new or substantially rewritten page on my site, not just the ones that show up here in the reverse-chronological feed. The way I see it, what matters is less the specifics of what counts as a blog, and more that I’m writing new stuff on a regular basis and putting it out there on my own website, not on corporate social media.

Time to start my Blaugust post list:

  1. This post.
  2. Legends of Amberland (game review)
  3. First the Migraine, Then the Headache
  4. FairEmail (app review)
  5. Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
  6. Where to Put Your Permalink
  7. What is rel="bookmark"?
  8. TIL about Hybrid MBR/GUID Partitions
  9. Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?
  10. The Prestige
  11. Eulogy for the Pixel 5
  12. Canon Camera Connect
  13. To Each This World (book review)
  14. Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
  15. The Confidence Game (Maria Konnikova) (book review)
  16. Regarding Empathy

Posted on
by

I recently added “Your LLM was trained on my blog” to the intro on my home page. I’m sort of being facetious, but it’s also true: my old site (hyperborea.org) has been in the Common Crawl data set for years, this blog has been online since 2002, and the major LLMs have used Common Crawl’s data in their training.

Way back when I switched to WordPress in 2003, one of the things I found annoying about it was that it would auto-convert punctuation from ASCII to “fancy” characters. Curly quotes, curly apostrophes, em-dashes instead of double-hyphens, ellipses…These were things that bugged the heck out of me when I saw them in broken emails and Word documents. Over the next year, seeing the difference it made in legibility, I came to appreciate real typography. Since then I’ve been happy to let WordPress, and later ClassicPress and Eleventy convert my plain typing.

Side note: I still have trouble using some apps with code snippets (ex: Apple Notes and Stickies), ’cause I haven’t figured out how to stop them from converting ASCII punctuation that means something in the code to Unicode punctuation that means something more specific in printed human language. Also, notice in that sentence that ClassicPress was smart enough to convert a straight up and down apostrophe used on a contraction to a curly apostrophe, and not to a curly single quote like it does with ‘here.’

Anyway, WordPress powers a huge amount of the web. I’ve seen stats bandied about such as 42% of all websites, 60% of content management systems, >50% of the top 10,000 websites (by some measure or another). The exact numbers aren’t important, it’s just important to know that a whole lot of the web uses WordPress to convert what people write into HTML pages for the web.

Now let’s get back to LLMs:

  • People think they can identify LLM-generated text because it tends to include em-dashes.
  • LLMs were trained on writing by actual people on the web.
  • A whole lot of that writing by actual people is presented by WordPress.
  • WordPress has auto-converted typography including em-dashes since 2003.
  • That means a large chunk of LLMs’ training data includes text by real people that uses real em-dashes.

“AI” doesn’t use em-dashes because real people don’t, it uses em-dashes because real people do [note: lots of swearing] (via).

The only place I can imagine it would be even a semi-reliable indicator would be in social media posts, on platforms where that kind of auto-conversion doesn’t happen. Even then, I can easily imagine someone writing a draft in Word, or copying a sentence or two from their WordPress post, or just hitting option+shift+hyphen on a Mac (or whatever the key combo is on Windows).

Posted on
by

I’m considering starting the 100 Days To Offload challenge to post 100 times to my personal blog over the next year. I’m going to include any new posts I make on my personal website, including the tech tips and reviews sections (which is where I’ve mostly been writing these days). I could mirror those posts over here, but that seems kind of silly, since they all show up in my main site’s feed anyway. (They’ll also get combined in the sitewide 100daysToOffload tag list.)

It’s been a while since I did one of these challenges. A long while: The last one was probably when I tried to do NaBloPoMo in 2018 (blog daily during November, sort of a companion challenge to NaNoWriMo) and dropped it after a few days. This one’s longer, but it’s a lot more flexible.

Though I am curious: across my whole website, how many posts have I made over the past year? Only nine on K2R (counting the update round-up, but not counting the individual posts I’ve updated), but it turns out I’ve written 96 reviews since May 23 last year (which is a lot more than I realized!) and 14 troubleshooting articles. So I guess I’ve got a decent shot at hitting 100 again!

Posted on
by

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. Update: I gave it another stab the next day, but it failed again. There were only about 5 followers, so I figured it wasn’t worth the trouble. I issued a self-destruct on the old ActivityPub view, waited for it to run, and set up the old site to redirect to the new one.

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.

Posted on
by

Not that I’ve been particularly active on Twitter for quite a while now, but the way things have gotten, especially under its new owner, I decided it was finally time to go. I haven’t deleted my main account (yet), but I’ve deleted most of my tweet history, and the accounts I used for side projects, and I don’t plan on returning.

Mastodon has filled Twitter’s niche for me over the last few years (obviously different people have different use cases, so it may not fit yours), and you can still find me there at @KelsonV@Wandering.shop.

As for the archive, I’m slowly going through and looking for threads (and occasional single posts) that I think are worth keeping, importing them where they seem to fit best on this website, whether on the blog or another section.

It may be time to do the same with Facebook and Instagram* too. I haven’t been active on either of them in ages, and I’d rather own my data IndieWeb style than wait for Meta to go the way of LiveJournal.

December 2024 Update: I’ve since deleted my Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts outright. I’m still on the Fediverse, mostly at @kelson@notes.kvibber.com these days.

*I’ve already trimmed a lot of my Instagram history.

Posted on
by

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.

Posted on
by

For human-readable HTML, I can write:

<a href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

For machine-readable HTML:

<a rel="author" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

For IndieWeb microformats:

<a class="p-author h-card" href="https://example.com">Lois Lane</a>

But for inline Schema.org I have to write:

<span property="author" typeof="person"><a property="url" href="https://example.com"><span property="name">Lois Lane</span></a>

I’ve been grumbling about all the redundancy in putting multiple sets of metadata on a page: classic meta tags, OpenGraph, Twitter cards, Schema.org, microformats2. So I’ve been looking to consolidate as much as I can.

I thought, Hey, Schema.org has inline markup implementations! I can probably just tag the same elements I used for microformats2!

But there are so many things like author where it wants a multi-part hierarchy when you could easily use a single tag.

At this point the added complexity to the code isn’t worth it. I may as well stick with the JSON-LD lump of text in the header. Heck, the extra spans and divs might actually add up to more bytes than the no-longer-duplicated content.

It’s not actually that much extra space, though, and the site in question generates all the markup from one set of markdown front matter. It just bugs me that to fill in all of them I need multiple copies of everything.

Though it is kind of funny to compare design decisions:

Facebook: We want a single block that can be copied and pasted and all looks the same. We don’t want to reuse existing tags and we don’t care about DRY.

IndieWeb: Invisible metadata inevitably gets out of date, and all this stuff that should already be on the page or in the head anyway, so let’s use what’s there and make it simple to mark up the actual page content.

Schema.org: CATEGORIZE ALLLLL THE THINGS!!!!!

»All pages site-wide with this tag