Oh yes—I quite agree! I didn’t when I started this blog—I was pretty burned out on algorithms. But I’ve calmed down and, yeah, I think your word of ‘automation’ is more friendly to me than ‘algorithm’.

I’m really getting a lot of good stuff out of Pinboard—it is better than Google, DDG, Million Short or any directory at finding interesting stuff. And it is due to its balance between machine and human: the humans find the link and tag it; the machine collates everything for the researcher. You can do pretty complex queries with it, which I am using every day now. (As an example: /u:krudd/t:links/t:web shows me all links tagged ‘web’ and ‘links’ under the user ‘krudd’.)

However, it is still totally underutilized. I would be surprised if there were five other people on the Earth mining it like I am. (This wasn’t true of the old Delicious—it was a golden age for this kind of mining of bookmarks.)

Boy oh boy—this is great! So you have done a great job writing descriptions, trimming the list down to your essential set and coming up with a good category structure and all that. (And I mean: who am I to tell you this—you’re the directorymeister around here.)

I wish that /links was the home page. I like being right in the middle of things and that page has tons of useful information. However, I can see why you’d want to take the Google approach.

I also wonder about starring things. I like that it’s an invitation to participate. (As are ‘commenting’ and ‘reporting’.) I’ve left this kind of stuff out of my directory, in part because I’d rather that they create their own directories if they disagree. I think ‘reporting’ is a really cool idea—I can see the value there, possibly. With starring: how valuable has this kind of feature been to you in the past?

I really like that you’ve highlighted categories like ‘Fiction’ and ‘City Planning’—in a massive directory, these would be deeply buried, but they are key to your experience on the Web, so they are near the top. This is a really cool advantage to a smaller directory: finding niches that aren’t ever nearby—except here.

I think, at this point, you will learn what works and what doesn’t. I’m going to browse around and announce this on my site soon once I have a chance to take it in completely. Man—this is so fun!

Hi, folks - just jumping in because this is my wheel house a bit. I have been having an extended discussion with Brad Enslen (so, on our blogs: ramblinggit.com and kickscondor.com) about discovery. We talk a lot about how this is more of a human problem than a technology problem - and that technology has played a negative role in this, perhaps.

(My part in this is: I have been spending time every day for the past six months searching for blogs - to see what the Web looks like outside of social networks. So I have a good perspective on where one can search nowadays - you can’t just type ‘blogs’ into Google. And I’m starting to get a good feel for where I would want to go to find blogs.)

blogrolls didn’t scale. ring blogs just sucked. SEO is just survival-of-the-fittest money pit.

Yes, so - for sure. (See Brad’s comment on Google here.)

In addition, self-promotion has become a dirtier word these days - you can’t just post your blog to Reddit and Instagram - it’s seen as being overly assertive. So there is almost nowhere for blogs to go.

What an astounding post—this feels like the situation today. (And sure enough—FOAF, XML-RPC and SOAP all went their way.) It is pretty surprising that Microformats have somewhat survived—the u- and p- prefixes, figuring out how to nest elements, complex rules like you see on the Indieweb authorship page.

I wonder what drives the complexity of something like ActivityPub. Is it a kind of premature future-proofing? Is it just a desire to load the thing with features? I especially wonder about something like FOAF, which should be conceptually simple.

Really appreciate the conversation, Manton.

In a way, Webmention doesn’t even seem like a spec—for crying out loud, it is just source target endpoint! So, really, microformats are the substance of Webmentions. I think it would be interesting to see a variation of Webmention which did JSON, perhaps using Activity Streams or something. I almost wonder if this is what Parecki is doing by offering three different forms of JSON on all of his posts.

It’ll be hard to beat Microformats, though, in that having a single definitive HTML source is amazing—compared to having all of these other source documents floating around: feeds, ActivityPub outboxes and such. So I’m content to stay put. I already get plenty of great stuff out of Webmentions. Like this ping from you, Eddie!

Since people are going here, I’m going here. Test test te te te test.

I’m not really responding to your draft here—just testing the ‘whostyle’ I’m working on for your quotes. Of course, this is your idea, S. It’s simplified compared to what the two of you can do cross-wiki. I’m trying to decide if I want to copy h0p3’s complete letters over. I think I am against it.

I think about the Dunbar Number now and then. I’ve always felt resigned to it. There’s a limit, so why reach out? Maybe the point is to have few friends and find ‘depth’.

Ok, got it. It’s interesting—we kind of have to do this on our personal sites anyway. Like if I get a reply from myself further down the conversation, it’s useful to just use the post I ‘own’ directly rather than go parsing myself.

It’s kind of tough to get it all working by hand—but it’s also amazing, so I’ll take it!

Interesting—the ‘make use of’ part really doesn’t apply to what I’m doing because I’m not evaluating links on ‘usefulness’—I want links that are more of an experience or perspective. But I like that you’re doing that in yours. I think it will allow us to compare what draws people in—if that’s even possible.

Themes: Rebuilding the independent web, the web as our social network, alternatives to silos, security and privacy.

With mine, I’m specifically avoiding software and business links—because these dominate Google and already have a lot of directories. I’m not linking to technical posts of any kind, though I do have a section on free sites to use to participate on the Web and Indieweb.

My themes are more: unique sites, colorful sites, bizarre sites (to some extent) and thoughtful sites. I love those pages that I read and they were so profound or beautiful that my life changed just being there.

These first 100 links have been kinda from memory: so software to help a beginner build a website, computer security, better browsers, privacy search.

That’s sweet. I’ve been loving the links you’ve been finding (like millionshort and findx—to which I would add wiby perhaps) and so I will definitely use the directory. Vivaldi has been great—I’m following along, Brad.

On top of this, I have categories that I don’t want to leave blank, stuff I don’t have in my head anymore so I have to dig. Oh the rabbit holes! There are lots of things I need to dig up more on but it can wait till later.

Yeah, so, this is a good topic. I started a few categories that I’ve decided to hold off on. I have an ‘Animal’ category, for instance, but I don’t think I’ve got enough quality material to make it happen yet. I’m close, but I might hold off.

Like you, I found it useful to build my categories first, though. I’m only going two tiers deep. So I have a main category and then the actual category. I don’t put any links right under the top-level yet.

Incidentally, here are the classification systems that I springboard from:

• BISAC Headings List.
• SeekOn—I feel like the categories here are similar to the old Yahoo!'s—not that that’s what I want at all, but it helped to think in terms of why I think this organization doesn’t work.
• Cutter.
• To some extent, Colon—though I could never seem to find a detailed category list here.

I don’t want to overdo the hierarchy, because frankly I expect most people to use the search function anyway.

Huh—I am skipping the search. I guess I’ll have to rethink this. I also have so few links that a lot of searches will draw blanks.

I’m listing both websites and individual web pages (sometimes known as deep links) in the directory. Sometimes both. In essence I’m giving myself the flexibility to say, “I don’t know about the rest of the site, but this one post on blue widgets is brilliant.”

Same. In fact, sometimes I link to just an image or a video and those are marked as such.

A link may appear in more than one category if it is relevant.

I don’t do this—I tend to link to the second category in the entry’s description instead. I do have some meta categories like ‘Blogs’ and ‘Wikis’ that will list all websites of those types from all categories.

I do have some ‘secret’ categories that aren’t reachable from the hierarchy. For instance, I have a ‘Charlie McAlister’ secret section that goes into depth on his life—and which is only reachable from his link in the ‘Visuals/Zines’ category.

At some point I will go back and cross index categories that are relevant to each other.

Cool—not sure I have enough categories to do that. (Probably 30-40 categories.)

Link descriptions: Right now I’m just making sure the description has the keywords in it that are needed for people to find it. I’m not trying to write a review although sometimes I do editorialize.

This is where I go to town. I sometimes include five more links in the description. I am spending a lot of time making these juicy, giving history, including images. I may need to expand some of these into full-page articles.

The directory will be open for submissions at launch. Frankly, I’m not optimistic I will get a lot.

I think we need to look at this as long game. It might be good to give yourself a timeline to work with. Like I am giving Indieweb.xyz a year to see how it goes. I might go for two years. It requires a lot more maintenance and work because people interact with it—it’s not just static HTML.

With this directory, I am committing to 20 years. I am definitely going to keep it up for the long run. It is designed to be a portal to the somewhat permanent Web and it needs to be there longterm in order to work. This means I can play a long game and just build it gradually. Maintaining links is the hard part—but if I keep it small, it’s fine.

I’d really prefer that bloggers add their own blogs and write their own descriptions. For example how do I describe Kicks Condor’s blog or Chris Aldrich’s blog? Blogs like mine and yours and Chris’ are about a little bit of everything.

Well, here’s my entry for your blog so far:

Brad Enslen
https://ramblinggit.com/
Web/Meta Blog 10m
I bounce ideas back-and-forth with this fellow. He blogs about web
directories and web search---but in an effort to understand how else
we could be doing this. Our conversations led me to make this directory.

You might take umbrage with my description—it’s pretty low-key. I try not to pitch a site with too much fervor—if I say that every blog is ‘the best blog ever’ then it’s meaningless. But I also don’t want to judiciously decide that one is the best. I’d rather just say matter-of-factly why I visit a site. (I could see myself saying, “This is THE guy I go to when I want to read about organizing links and enhancing the Web these days.”)

But I think if the description is written by me, it’s more likely to be interesting because self-promotion will always come off as marketing—this entry just comes across as an informal recommendation, like you’d hear in a conversation.

You could also start with the description meta tag on your links.

It’s easy to Duckduck for cooking blogs and find them, but what about blogs that are about every topic under the sun? They are hard to find by keywords but they do need to be found.

Well, this is the advantage we have over Google. We can link to anything and it will be found because it’s never too lost in the directory—since we’re both only in the small hundreds of links.

Finally, there are topics I’m just not interested in or want to avoid: Politics, sex, religion – better served by a search engine. Sports? I can’t be bothered. But this too is cool, because there is room for sports, political and other niche directories. Just as there is room for thousands of small general directories.

Let’s hope!

Cool, cool. Hearing this has made me ramp up my work on mine as well. Looking forward to linking to each other when we get there.

I am nearing 200 links in my directory—that I’ve snapshotted and summarized—and my attitude toward the directory has changed a bit. At first, I simply thought, “Oh, I’ll just put any link in there that I like.” Which basically turns it into a big list of my bookmarks. (Which is fine—if it’s useful to me and helps the sites I really enjoy, then that’s a good angle to start with.)

However, I’m starting to see that I’m actually attempting to paint a picture of the Web—making a map of it, right? And so I’ve started branching out and including stuff that I may not visit all the time and that I may not even like, because I’m trying to show how ‘wide’ the Web is. As a result, I’ve started including a lot of controversial links across the spectrum of humanity—in order to make the directory more about the Web than it is about Me. (I’m a very passive person, so I tend to rule out posting anything inflammatory or controversial, because I have no idea what the ‘right’ side of an issue is and I just would usually rather not deal with it.)

I realize you’re writing a draft but I’m going to say make a few squeaks and then go back to work.

So, {Verify} should actually be pretty trivial to add. Since the diffs are generated by this script, there would just need to be a step added to generate the .sig file (or add the hash to the .json file—the hash could be used by the loader to do the check there.) I will work on adding that soon—because my curiosity is peaked enough.

I fear I fail to T42T both you and kickscondor by failing to reciprocally build a useful tool for you. I’m trying to think of how I can contribute to your lives and art as much as you have for me. I apologize for not knowing how to do that. I feel inept like someone who doesn’t know how to buy a good Christmas present for their friend (and that makes me a bad friend). I don’t know you well enough to figure out how to create a gift that you’ll love and use. I’m sorry! I’m thinking about it.

So I think this is one of the possible misprojections of T42T—it leaves someone in ‘debt’. It is a very rational approach to relationships, because it reduces the interaction to numerical totals. But those numbers are very hard to derive—how much is the script I wrote worth? 2T? 3T? 16T? And how much are the thorough, immensely thoughtful replies that you write? Is that 2T? 53T?

Oh and: does 2T literally mean double? Or is it just a bit step beyond single T?

And–what is T? Does T represent “your last set of actions” in our relationship? So, if you just pulled off a 2T (doubled my T)—T is now 2T, expanding 2T into 4T from now on.

Sweet! So this works identically to Salmentions?

Ok, let me see if I’ve got this right—if I reply to a reply that’s later in the chain, I try to track down the original post like this:

1. Load the URL I’m replying to.

2. If it has an u-in-reply-to link, load that page (repeat step 1 & 2, ad finitum).

3. Once I hit the end of the chain, I am left with an array of the reply history.

This should work on micro.blog because the only actual h-entry on a reply’s permalink is the ACTUAL reply—the other entries shown on the page are just posts that won’t be picked up by the microformats parser? Pretty interesting approach.

Cool—found your blogroll. This is great! I especially like the links to your diary-x blog. Really wanted to check out your links page from back then, but there appears to be none archived. (I also really appreciate your links to Blot things—was unaware of Blot.)

Ran across this note from 2013 that hates on ‘content’. From net.artist Olia Lialina. Relevant.

Took a look at your blog—it’s sweet! I will be sure to include it in my next href hunt. I enjoyed the article about Dat and am interested in finding others who write about practical uses of the ‘dweb’—unfortunately, many of the links on Tara Vancil’s directory are ‘broken’ (perhaps ‘vanished’ is more correct?) and I’m not sure how to discover more.

At any rate, good to meet you!

This is a great article! It follows all of the same things I put in my reply—which makes me nod my head, for sure—but it also goes into much more detail and thought, which I very much appreciate.

The war against the word ‘content’ is also rad. Yeah, keep that up.

Good to have you. Let me know if you need anything.

If it doesn’t, it’s a bug. I use the mtime of the post’s file to arrange these, so I cannot sneak around it. If you can give me an example of the difference, I would really like to know!

Thank you for the Robustness principle. It’s beautiful.

I’m glad you see it! I find it very profound—however, it is also somewhat cliché you could say, because it is only another sighting of ‘yin’ and ‘yang’ in the system. (I say ‘cliché’ not to belittle it, but to underscore how commonplace this strain of epiphany seems to be in the ‘eastern’ ways of thinking. I often think of the expression ‘if you meet the Buddha, kill him’—how do you both attempt to follow an archetype and to avoid archetyping that ideal too closely? But it does seem wise.)

I wonder if you can also help me find some philosophical discussion about dichotomies and tradeoffs. For example, I find both socialism and capitalism very appealing—I truly can’t say which I prefer. I like that the library exists; and I like shopping for boots. I know there is a lot of negativity around this dualism (“this isn’t free-market capitalism”/“socialism hasn’t really been tried”) except that there seems to be respect for Denmark which has both free markets and high taxes, which certainly looks dualist (pluralist?—not sure the proper term) to me.

So I wonder where in literature I might look for more about living/thinking pluralistically. My friends seem to see it as being hedonist, non-committal, ‘lukewarm’ and impossible. Well, yes—but it’s much more than that. It’s pluralism after all.

I want to apologize for my constant ninja-edits. I have a thousand evolving things to say to you, and my drafts are just never done (as you have probably noticed).

Change anything you want! You have my full trust. We are in a process of mental and lingual refinement. The tradeoff here is that I won’t be responding too closely to your words. I am going to not pick them apart—unless I want to tease out more understand or to encourage further ninja-edits.

Had to look that song and lyrics up. I keep an almost full size oil canvas reproduction of The Starry Night about four feet to the left of my desk.

Yeah I guess now that I think about it, my thoughts were more on the painting than the song. But both are very intertwined for me. I had an uncle die of AIDS in his twenties. I was in third grade at the time. He was the rare uncle who is a friend—and he was a sensitive and stylish person. He was a painter and this was his favorite painting. My first experience crying emotively was when this painting and the song came on to the screen during a school assembly in fifth grade.

Mmmnhmm—ok, good, good.

See, now I just really want to read your Bob Dylan stuff. I watch Don’t Look Back like once a month. Wish I could have experienced those days.

I am sending this reply with a musky pork pie smell. See the attached WIFF file.

Yet again to my ignorance: I clearly do not appreciate Art as well as others. I’m an uncouth pig here. I love consuming it as a drug, and I’ve (very poorly) made plenty of it before. Trying to emotionally communicate the cognitively ineffable is something I do take seriously (enough to be very particular about it). Forgive me for being the joyless buzzkill rhetoric-hawk.

Ha-ha! Well, you are becoming very endeared to me, hawk. And you are right to keep us all in check. The buzz that you do kill—and it’s certainly not a buzzard-sized buzz—is not any buzz that was killed just 'cause.

I’m especially interested in form as it relates to function; I want something productive (pleasant workspaces help me work, of course). I don’t think I’m obsessed with minimalism (though I appreciate it), but rather plainness irwartfrr. If it works and it looks good enough: cool, I like that. I’m the kind of dude that will buy 5 identical shirts if I know they are cheap and comfortable. I want the majority of expressive work in my wiki to be in my words. Ideally, I want my words to carry as much of their meaning as possible without relying upon appearance (which I think can be nearly all of it), and only then do I want to work on appearance beyond as function as the delicious bonus.

Oh, I see this in you and I applaud it—loudly, standing—an ovation which goes in a great arc, knocking over the drinks of everyone else standing around me. (Part of this ovation is a simple appreciation of your last epic missive, which is due.)

I only side more toward art because I get so much out of it. I can’t think of a reasoned argument that has transfixed me as much as “Starry, Starry Night” has. And I don’t reach for a reasoned argument when life has fallen apart, but for Neil Young. (I am not arguing with you here—I know you have these things, too, and that you love cartoons and songs and shows and all that. And, come on—you are nuts for ASCII art, amirite? Alas, I also do fall into the trap you’re talking about of form over function.)

Alright, so with all those caveats in mind, we may end up doing this all by hand and passing tiddlers around—I’m also going to play with some styled RSS tonight and see what happens. And we’ll toss some ideas around.

One thing I know for sure: I don’t want to go too crazy on fonts, because I don’t want readers to have to load ten Web Fonts to make this work. That would be EXACTLY fonts over functions. But the basic colors and stuff—worth a try, yeah?

(One time you asked if you should read Vigoleis—no, don’t. He’s mine. And it’s like Infinite Jest, it will take you way too long to read and you’ll never want to read it again. Infinite Jest also wasn’t for me.)

Oh, also, from the footnote:

In a blind, stripped-down test, I’d prefer to make it so even a paraphrase of something I’ve said would evoke: ‘that sounds like h0p3’ or ‘h0p3 would like that’ or ‘you know who probably wouldn’t stop blathering on about this if he were reading this with me right now?..h0p3’ or ‘omg, this sounds like that asshole h0p3, lol.’

I feel this way about the words, too, for sure—but also the appearance. It’s like remembering The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for both the chitinous foreheads inside and the orange-red cover of the bug-eyed man with the robotic hands. It all comes flooding back like that.

Haha—ok, well, I definitely own the ham and cheese! Am I close??

With my car, it depends on the legal jurisdiction, the name on the title for the vehicle, the ability of the government to enforce my ownership—and maybe ‘owning’ a car isn’t nearly as important as ‘controlling’ it.

I wonder if that might be the issue here with Micro.blog—perhaps Belle feels like she can’t ‘control’ her stuff enough. I guess I’m trying to draw a parallel between the public_html directory and Micro.blog. If a platform ultimately just feels like a folder that I can sync ‘in’ to and ‘out’ of—then I think it reaches the ideals of ‘ownership’ and ‘control’ on the Web. But that’s me—am I missing something?

(This is also clearing up why I’m seeing TiddlyWikis spring up—that’s a platform where EVERYTHING is local and is likeliest to have longevity because it doesn’t rely on ‘anyone’/‘anybiz’ else.)

Oh boy—man, I am sorry! FWIW I think you are doing great with micro.blog. I already have my own setup and I’m just glad I can still participate in the network from the outside. What a gift! I actually think you’ve figured out a great way to keep the Indieweb humming AND build a nice smaller network. You deserve a lot of encouragement—and Belle could use it, too, I’m sure. It’s difficult to build these things.

I think the larger problem right now is that there are so few good choices. This puts a lot of pressure on you and your team. But I think that your work could encourage more small networks like this—just as you said in your recent post. This all takes a lot of patience to wait out. Let’s hope you, Belle and the rest of us can see this through. Peace, brother.

Ok, this is seriously insane! What a ton of work. Serious respect for your past lives in directory building!

Couple questions:

• How much fanfic did you read while building these? I guess I’m wondering how much of this job bordered on literary critique or editing.

• Scifimatter refers to ‘HipRank’ in the links—what was that? It seems that you used this to order the links.

• You say on Scifimatter that you want to help ‘the surfer’, the ‘amateur and semipro websites’ and—most importantly, perhaps—to ‘encourage fans of SF/F to start their own website’—did this play out? (These are definitely my goals, too—I wonder how to accomplish them.)

Also, I’m a pretty big Godzilla (and monster movie, Kaiju, Biollante) fan, so I loved looking through those links on the Planets Doom. Also, I have to say: it’s impressive that many of the outgoing links in the directory STILL work thanks to the thoroughness of the Wayback Machine! Another benefit of static HTML—even if these directories are static versions of the original dynamic ones.