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I really appreciate this encouragement - and I am enjoying browsing your Known site, especially the recent post on Gopher Web. I don’t attend conferences - I generally like to stay low-key and would prefer that the spotlight fall on others. I thank you for the kindness, glad to bring happiness to anyone who is reading.
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Fraidycat 1.0.4 is out today in the Firefox and Chrome stores.
Fraidycat 1.0.4 is out - and things are rolling. Much appreciation to all of those who are pitching in ideas on the issues page. Particularly Bauke and Joshua C. Newton - who brought up bugs that I was able to fix in this release. (And apologies about all the noise on this project - I’m excited about it right now and, believe me, I have a variety of things planned over the next month that will take us away from Fraidycat.)
The new version is already approved in the Firefox Add-ons area. The Chrome (and Vivaldi/Brave) extension is still at 1.0.3, but should update automatically very soon. I’ve also started offering a plain zip that you can install manually using these instructions. Auto-updates will not be available - but you will also not be dependent on the official ‘stores’.
This video is also mirrored at archive.org.
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I’m going through some of this, as a chaser to We’ve Got Blog.
This is a list of essays and online comments that paint a modern picture of blogging and online dynamics. I’m not reading all of these - some are focused on PR, advertising and economics - which aren’t interesting to me at the moment.
After hunting around, I also found this syllabus for Ribbonfarm’s class The Art of Longform. This shared enough crossover that I decided to pepper in some of that list, to get a picture of what is being disseminated about online writing in the last few years.
I’m going to take some notes here about this group of essays, as a continuation of my Notes: We’ve Got Blog (2002) steno.
"Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution" by David Chapman - and a response “Subcultures aren’t dead” by @allgebrah.
Both authors make good points here - I never thought subcultures were dead, but I definitely thought the ‘underground’ had been abandoned during the early 2010s when it seemed that everyone suddenly surfaced on the Internet, nothing was hidden and formerly underground people were now entrepreneurs. (Very similar to the picture that Toby Shorin paints in his “After Authenticity”.)
However, if you step back, I feel like it’s obvious to see that ‘the underground’ has held. I mean if I’m defining ‘the underground’ as this hip, exclusive, stylish place hidden from view - well, that definition is kind of repulsive, so I don’t care whether it’s still here or not. But if ‘the underground’ just consists of unknown people - presumably remarkably talented or interesting people - all you need to do is look around your physical neighborhood to know that they are quite well hidden still.
I know a kid who does pipe-cleaner art down the street that is SENSATIONAL and I can guarantee you’ll never encounter him by random chance. Most people in the neighborhood aren’t aware of him. (He made me a ‘teenage minotaur’ character that is hanging on the lamp just above me.)
Of course, looking at people as ‘geeks’ or ‘mops’ or ‘the underground’ tends to overdramatize all of it - which is fine, given that - if I try to publicize and bring cultural prestige to the pipe-cleaner kid down the street - that necessarily involves some overdramatization.
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What are blogs for? A trip to the beginning. The halcyon days of dot-com idealism and sheer shit-talking.
Here are my notes on the book We’ve Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture—a worn-out name, but a pretty decent compilation of blog posts from the early days of the phenomenon, mostly 1999-2002.
The articles in this collection are early reflections on the weblog phenomenon. Mature reflections do not exist: the weblog community coalesced only three years ago. Not even the pioneers—some of whom contributed to this anthology—know where weblogs are going, or what place they will eventually fill on the World Wide Web.
— p. xii, Rebecca Blood
The word ‘weblog’ was coined in 1997 - but I think 1999 was officially the first big year for blogging, with both LiveJournal and Blogger appearing. Somehow, wanting to reach back to that era now that 20 years has passed - to attempt to uncover what went so wrong between then and now - I checked out this book from the library on an impulse. It seems to capture the spirit of that age in such a remarkable way - like that jar of deer meat I recently found in my brother-in-law’s basement labelled: '97. (“Oh, it’s still good,” he said.)
And considering Rebecca’s point above: 20 years later, do ‘mature’ reflections now exist? Is it all over and we’re far beyond reflecting? Has the blog just been a tulpa for some ancient essence that we’ll never capture?
Time to reflect.
For the first fifty pages of this, I felt nothing but self-loathing. Blogging suddenly seemed like the most disgusting thing to do - to aimlessly, carelessly write endlessly about my tastes and interests. While I quite like Rebecca Blood’s analysis in the early chapters, this quote chilled me:
As [the blogger] enunciates his opinions daily, this new awareness of his inner life may develop into a trust in his own perspective. His own reactions - to a poem, to other people, and, yes, to the media - will carry more weight with him. Accustomed to expressing his thoughts on his website, he will be able to more fully articulate his opinions to himself and others. He will become impatient with waiting to see what others think before he decides, and will begin to act in accordance with his inner voice instead. Ideally, he will become less reflexive and more reflective, and find his own opinions and ideas worthy of serious consideration.
— p. 14, Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective”
Perhaps Rebecca could really use the confidence boost - and that seems entirely wholesome - but I personally do not need to take myself more seriously. I can definitely appreciate improving my articulation - yes definitely, definitely - but becoming more ‘impatient’ and more opinionated - yet somehow more ‘reflective’? More weighty? I don’t want this to happen… (I think I’d like to remain aware that I’m a perfectly worthless dipshit.)
Any idea that these days of blogging were somehow more idyllic, pleasant or enviable quickly goes out the window in this book. The shit-talking is near-epic! Names are named—denounced and disgraced as ruining the form—mostly deriding “A-list” bloggers, but also decrying “the unbearable incestuousness of blogging.” Seems like the confirmation I’ve needed that mastering hypertext is going to be a formidable challenge for us - one that they were only just beginning to embark on and, therefore, were well over their heads in.
However, so far I’ve found a surprising amount to glom on to. These early bloggers definitely had a whiff of what was to come (partly because many had recently left the experience of Usenet) and I think I’m coming away hugely crystallized. Unexpected!!
The juiciest quote, for me, so far is this one:
‘Accept that the Web ultimately overwhelms all attempts to order it, as for now it seems we must, and you accept that the delicate thread of a personal point of view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos. The brittle logic of the hierarchical index has its indispensable uses, of course, as has the crude brute strength of the search engine. But when their limits are reached (and they always are), only the discriminating force of sensibility will do - and the more richly expressed the sensibility, the better.’
— “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man” by Julian Dibbell (2000)
This might be a little self-affirming, because it seems to vindicate the web directory (e.g. my l’il href.cool) but what it really seems to be describing is the blog as our premiere discovery mechanism.[1] This must have been a common view at the time, considering this earlier quote:
[…] the weblog movement will begin to realize its true power, a more widely distributed version of what the Open Directory and other collaborative web directories have promised but only minimally delivered.
— p. 40, Brad L. Graham, “Why I Weblog”
In hindsight, this feels like hyperbole - the finished product of a blog seems (to me) less navigable than a directory, although both are usually stale by then. But I think this has played out, to some degree, especially if I think of how useful a good music blog can be when attempting to discover new music. (Though I think a good music podcast or YouTube review can be equally good.)
Hmm. A medium really is only as good as the artist makes of it. It’s not that hypertext is tapping into us. We’re pushing it wherever we want, right?
We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from “audience” to “public” and from “consumer” to “creator.”
— p. 16, Rebecca Blood, “Weblogs: A History and Perspective”
I want to draw a comparison here between this quote and (apologies) Fortnite Battle Royale. Putting aside everything else about Fortnite, it tacked on an interesting innovation: the ability to build structures (in a Minecraft-inspired fashion) with a traditional (third-person) shooter.
Most people seemed to scoff at this blend—as if it were some kind of mere monstrosity of buzzwords. No, this ability to build boxes around yourself or staircases to scale mountains added a much-needed defensive strategy to shooter games, aside from stuff like holing-up or strafing. What’s more: the building strategy can also be seen as ‘shooting’ defenses—you are adding to the environment—it is a constructive, perhaps aggressive, kind of defense.[2]
That’s what seems to resonate with bloggers: not the publication of a first-person journal but the chain of interaction it often ignites.
— p. 170, JD Lasica, “Blogging as a Form of Journalism”
This chain of interaction can manifest as a scorching backdraft. And that is not usually what you are trying to ignite. We like to think that we are kicking off a fantastic, fulfilling discussion that moves the world forward—but the chain is well outside of our control.
(My initial thoughts to ‘controlling’ such a thing is… defensive in the Fortnite sense. Many hypertext writers now build layers around their writing. Nadia Eghbal has direct interaction through Twitter, indirect interaction through polished essays and a newsletter—but also, concealed interaction through an unadvertised notes page that is not easily syndicated or followed. Similarly, representing the public-self modelers—h0p3 has a home page entry point that is carefully curated and groomed, but which is several layers up from a complete chaos of link dumps, raw drafts and random introspections—all of which you can only sort through by learning his curious conventions. You are on his turf. These layers run a spectrum of accessibility—there is always a learning curve before you hit the bottom. You start with a doorway before entering a maze.)
I do think what this has left me with so far is two very clear impressions:
So, while certain writers in this book seemed to look at the blog as a fully-realized literature format - and perhaps it can be that to some - for me, I see it as a conduit between writings and creations - a place where some of my own words fester and pile up, as a kind of byproduct.
Lastly, there’s no question that we are far from a mature view of hypertext. I feel that much of the last two decades has been spent just trying to emotionally process what our open exposure on the Internet means. These bloggers lived during an early expansion when the population was much smaller. The extreme growth (along with stuff like constant mobile connections and the Snowden discoveries) has transformed the Internet into a very public, chaotic place.
Developing a blog/wiki/etc demands writing, editing, publishing and even relationship chops. I’m not even touching the journalism, entrepreneurial and community-building aspects that this book focuses on at times. Trying to do this in a disciplined way is difficult in the changing landscape - partly because so much of our discussion necessarily revolves around examining that landscape.
p. 5. “[so-and-so] grouped a bunch of webloggers into high school cliques and called me a jock” the shit-talking begins, this is comfortable, nothing has changed.
p. 5. “Dave decided I must be ‘brain-damaged’ because I used frames.” first
thought: this is worthy of publication? second thought: oh, wait, these are
raw blog posts republished. third thought: 
Tracked down the Dave Winer post myself, to ensure ‘brain-damaged’ was the actual wording. (It was.) Quote just below it:
Dad says I shouldn’t criticize other people on my site. He’s right, in theory. But in practice, what I don’t like is just as much a part of my personality as what I do like.
— Kate Adams
(Personal aside: I once criticized the cover of a Philip K. Dick book publicly on the Internet. The only response my post receive was from the illustrator that had designed the cover. She basically said: “Thanks, that hurt.” You might think she had no business replying to my post and should have just taken the criticism. But she didn’t like my criticism - which is “just as much a part of her personality” as anything else, I suppose.)
p. 9. Good Rebecca Blood quote: “These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The Web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them.”
p. 11. There seems to be a recurring theme that Blogger made blogging “too easy” by just having a single textbox to post in. Didn’t realize it was that much of a progenitor to Twitter.
p. 12. Filters as their own thing: “I really wish there were another term to describe the filter-style weblog, one that would easily distinguish it from the blog.”
(No indication of the tools available to the ‘filter’ blog are given - except that it has access to other filter blogs. Also, there are about five different blog types alluded to - none of them matter now.)
p. 18. The author seems to say that communities, in order to survive, must stay small - and credits The WELL with the best approach. I don’t know The WELL - but it’s still here today. Wonder if it is considered intact…
p. 20. The term ‘webpools’ is used here several times. There are many, many outdated terms and awkward language choices in these essays. These are really cool to me because the language was in such flux - and it reminds me of how repulsive the word ‘blog’ was at first. (I invent crappy words, too - guilty.)
p. 27. Having a good ‘link checker’ is mentioned. Interesting that this technology is nowhere to be seen now. (Href.cool has a simple, dumb one I made - but it’s proven essential.)
p. 31. Some discussion about crediting sources. The discussion is basically “this is a virtuous thing to do” vs. “it clutters up the blog”. This misses the point (imho) - the point is to aid discovering related blogs.
p. 32. This is so funny: “But what about a weblog for the homemaker?”
p. 32. “Wouldn’t it be great if all the neurosurgeons in the world had one place to go for up-to-date information about the numerous changes in their field?” No. Hard no.
p. 35. The need for one’s own domain name. I used to think this wasn’t very important. Starting to come around.
p. 37. “fram” - friend spam. This was nostalgic - ahh right, basically, e-mail forwards were the Facebook of that era. Again, recurring theme of: people need to become better, more disciplined independent writers and publishers. That is what the Web asks of us.
p. 43. omgz, a spoof of “we didn’t start the fire” in the middle of the book. “Wetlog, BrainLog, NeoFlux, and Stuffed Dog…” this is amaaazing.
p. 49. beebo.org?? wtf, this is the second time this has come up. “a blog best-seller list”? The captures on Internet Archive do not explain this well enough for me.
p. 51. It’s becoming clear that Blogger was the poster child of its time. Strangely, people don’t really trace the lineage of Twitter or Tumblr back to it - nor does it come up in the Friendster, Myspace, Facebook dynasty. It’s just kind of this useful website that appeared and is still here. Strangely, Google has managed to keep it low-key, ad-less, customizable - seems like a completely ignored utility. There even seems to be a “New Blogger” dashboard for mobile. I wonder what keeps this thing going?
p. 52. Fears about blogging becoming “too easy” - leading to “blogorrhea”. Yeah, that panned out.
p. 54. The Bicycle story. This seems like some kind of a precious take on memes. Or, alternatively, a satire on a template blog post. The self-loathing returns.
p. 59. Damn, this is serious shit-talking!! (Like on the level of Bernhard’s The Woodcutters.) I need to talk about this in more detail later.
p. 68. Blogs as “exteriorized psychology”. Sure. But no. Hard no.
p. 70. Where did Jorn Barger go? Seems like perception that he was antisemitic turned against him? Nah, it’s got to just be burn out or something. Everyone should retreat from the pulpit at some point. (Actually, not sure why I’m asking where he is - most of these blogs are vacated. I think people didn’t want out of blogging what it ended up giving them. There was definitely something of a gold rush.)
p. 76. This Julian Dibbell has some good stuff. “Does it even count as irony that Barger’s rigorously unfiltered perspective is perhaps as good a filter as can be found for the welter of the Web?” This is a good question! And it really confuses the topic of what makes a good algorithm or a good editor. The discussion kind of stops at: it’s a sensibility.
p. 78. Blogger was a one-man business in 2001 after initially having a team. It really squeaked by. This is cool. It actually survived.
p. 82. “I do think there was a blog concept. Then there were a couple blog concepts. And now we’re getting closer to a blog concept again.” Lol. I think we’re back to a couple blog concepts again.
p. 87. Comment about 2001’s “p2p hype” drowning out interest in blogs. It’s interesting that blockchain took that space for awhile. And it’s interesting that some p2p+blog projects have a niche community now. It’s also interesting that those were seen as competing at the time - I can see how people would think that, but those were clearly two different crowds.
p. 89-98. No real interest in this chapter (on the Kaycee Nicole Hoax) - although veracity of information continues to be a big topic. Was a topic in the radio and newspaper eras, too.
p. 103. “[Blogs are] nothing new, they’re not changing the world with their content, they’re not going to make anyone huge amounts of money, but they are a form of self-expression and community which others enjoy reading.” (Finally, some tempered enthusiasm that’s grounded in reality. No one in this book even considers that blogs might have been a fad - which is a reasonable appraisal given that blogs have almost vanished within the past ten years.)
p. 112-115. An actual essay on link-hunting! It’s rather thin, but it’s a good start. Most of the sources listed in this article are gone now. (Except mailing lists - though they aren’t nearly as prevalent.)
p. 124. “linkslut” (Sick, this is me.)
p. 131. “… most popular weblogs function to serve up the piddle and crap the authors either don’t have time for, don’t believe worth taking any further, or perhaps are testing the waters for.” (So: people know they are writing for free and withhold their best work. Really makes me grateful for insanely high-quality essayists out there like Nadia or Toby.)
p. 138. Kottke is a serious target in this book. He is quoted here, talking about his laptop bag. The writer then basically says, “See, this is the epitome of decadent navel-gazing.”
p. 141. This Blogma 2001 stuff hasn’t aged well. The satire is just thinly veiled bile. Which is not a problem. It’s just that the target of this piece (“A-list” bloggers) is not interesting. Maybe it’s too easy. (Like a satire on modern influencers - who cares.)
p. 144. In a section on blogging tips, called “Anonymous Is Okay.” ‘If you are being
anonymous give some hints about you from time to time. “I am a fat boy!”’ 
p. 152. This has really gone downhill in the last few chapters. I’m now in an essay on how to get noticed. “Also, when sending email, try to be funny” - oh boy. And yet, this is exactly what you expect in a book titled We’ve Got Blog from 2002. (This essay does highlight that self-promotion was very awkward even then.)
p. 155. “Once in a while remind yourself that you are not only as good as your last update.” (Based.)
p. 164. Referring to a time in the late 90s: “Then reality set in and those individual voices became lost in the ether as a million businesses lumbered onto the cyberspace stage, newspapers clumsily grasped at viable online business models, and a handful of giant corporations made the Web safe for snoozing.” (Had to do a double-take on this one! Were they talking about 2011?)
p. 166. Reference to Paul Andrews’ “Who Are Your Gatekeepers?” Sounds worth reading.
p. 166. “Where the weblog changes the nature of ‘news’ is in the migration of information from the personal to the public.” (Premonitions of Snowden. Regardless of whether you think he was successful, in this respect he certainly was.)
p. 167. The rest of the essays in this book are by amateurs, so they look at editors at entirely superfluous. This section is written by journalists, so they seem to see it just as a tradeoff. Yeah, for sure. (As a reader, it certainly seems valuable to evaluate online writing on a spectrum of heavily-edited and fact-checked vs. off-the-cuff - depending on what you are getting out of it.)
p. 170. “One of the most interesting things about blogs is how often they’ve made me change my mind about issues. There’s something about the medium that lets people share opinions in a less judgemental way than when you interact with people in the real world.” (Eh? This seems spurious. The medium is still just the written word. I think what you’re trying to articulate is that you never quite know what you’re going to end up reading online - so it’s possible to be exposed to arguments you haven’t encountered. Hence all the talk about people being accidentally radicalized politically.)
p. 170. “That’s what seems to resonate with bloggers: not the publication of a first-person journal but the chain of interaction it often ignites.” (Yes. Hard yes. This explains the migration to social media. Quicker, faster, immedate sparks of interaction.) (It also occured to me at this point that ‘likes’ and such are analagous to ‘hit counters’ from this age.)
p. 171. The editorial process produces writing that is “limp, lifeless, sterile, and homogenized”; blogs produce words that are “impressionistic, telegraphic, raw, honest, individualistic, highly opinionated and passionate, often striking an emotional chord.” (I really don’t like that this paints a picture that writing just got better all of the sudden because of blogs.)
p. 192-193. During an essay which completely demolishes the war blogs of the time, Tim Cavanaugh quotes a full page-and-a-half of shameless gladhanding. ("…the consistently correct Moira Breen." “Mark Steyn—this guy is so good!” “…Natalija Radic really hit them where it hurts.”) (It goes on and on. This seems similar to current questions of ‘virtual signaling’. Which I don’t have a problem with generally. Really: what should a personal signal? I think the problem here is that the concept of a war blogger is gross. So perhaps it is the incompatibility we see between a person and their signal.)
p. 195. “For all the bitching they log about the mainstream media, none of the bloggers are actually cruising the streets of Peshawar or Aden or Mogadishu. Thus, they’re wholly dependent upon that very same mainstream media.” (Well, the mainstream will always exist in some way - as a baseline of culture, as a central point of reference, like Magnetic North. Therefore, we’re dependent on it. And we move ourselves around it by defining our various loves and hatreds of it. And, in this case, I think it should still be safely used as a resource. Also, ‘it’ is actually a massive, pluralistic, infinite, incongruous organism.)
p. 228. ICQ as “I seek you.” Durrrr. I never caught this! Wowwww. 
Definitely in the way Joe Jennett or Eli Mellen does it—and also h0p3’s link logs. I think tumblelogs and Delicious innovated in this department. ↩︎
Many shooters allow you to project or throw force field areas. So this concept has been around, to some degree. I don’t know the lineage—I’m not a gamer. ↩︎
A few days after writing this, Nadia posted “Reimagining the PhD”, which casts her last five years as a kind of self-styled doctorate - which will now concluded with her publication of a book on her field of study. ‘Rolling up’ a blog into a formalized work is parallel. ↩︎
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@kickscondor would you be willing to publish the source code for your website?
If I can get it cleaned up, I hope to at some point.
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I’m not setup to do this kind of thing at the moment - however, I really appreciate this invitation! Hyperlink.academy is sweet. The concept of a barebones hypertext university - I’m happy this exists. Has anyone done hypertext criticism? Maybe even taking a tweet or a Reddit thread and dissecting it together?
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Promised I’d do this after getting Fraidycat out there. This regular feature is back: me hunting in the brambles, coming back up with 22 newly discovered blogs from a variety of sources, mainly 8 threads and blogrolls out there. Raw dump. Good quality.
Promised I’d do this after getting Fraidycat out there. This regular feature is back: me hunting in the brambles, coming back up with 22 newly discovered blogs from a variety of sources, mainly 8 threads and blogrolls out there. Raw dump. Good quality.
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PSA: To anyone reading this ‘unfiltered’ page: I now have feeds for this page, so you can just put /all/ in your reader if you accept the dangers.
Fraidycat is also now out for Chrome. Both extensions have been updated to version 1.0.3, which is the latest code. Now we’ll have to see how sending updates to you goes. (Planning on an update next Monday.)
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‘Accept that the Web ultimately overwhelms all attempts to order it, as for now it seems we must, and you accept that the delicate thread of a personal point of view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos. The brittle logic of the hierarchical index has its indispensable uses, of course, as has the crude brute strength of the search engine. But when their limits are reached (and they always are), only the discriminating force of sensibility will do - and the more richly expressed the sensibility, the better.’
— “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man” by Julian Dibbell (2000)
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Fraidycat is officially out for Firefox now! While it should move your follows over automatically, you should probably export them - to be safe before upgrading. addons.mozilla.org
The Chrome/Vivaldi extension is very close. Thanks for all of the encouragement this week!
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Fraidycat is a delightful browser extension for following people on the interwebs. Roughly, it’s an easy-to-use yet hackable, user-owned, FOSS, privacy-respecting, and experimental next-generation feed aggregator and reader. Not every platform offers RSS, so Fraidycat tries to build those bridges for you, scraping and packaging it up for you automagically, allowing you to tailor your own feeds, priorities, and timelines from across the web in your browser.
This is really helpful, h0p3!! Krikey, you’re such a friend.
Hear ye, hear ye. Tolle, lege; tolle, lege. Srsly, hyperbolic skiddie fanboi gushing here, so ignore me at-will, plz:
Haha, oh imagine if this was what you had to do to play well in the HN crowd. (This actually reminds me of that amazing story from The Star Diaries by Stanislaw Lem where the robots all speak Chaucerian English.)
Don’t let the frisky aesthetic of this gem fool ya: underneath the hood is essentially an engine which is necessary (even if insufficient) for a functioning democracy, for treating people not as mere means but as ends, and for fixing the problems of the centralization of infrastructures and processes which commodify our attention spans. It’s a spicy tool for the people and about the people. It sprankles your browser with mana, dope maymays, and the people you like or love (or don’t, ;P).
Omgz - I hate to play into your hyperbole here, but I think you’re right. (Don’t get me wrong - this is a shit tool.) This “having a personal engine to negotiate your link to others” is maybe the whole of it. (For some reason, I was thinking it was the simplistic non-feed view, purely an organization thing.)
The problem is that I need the networks to play well in some sense - I at least need to have access to scrape HTML fragments. But these networks will always fight back against that. We have to accept that. Fraidycat will need to be incredibly resilient and aggressive - like Stuxnet or like PRISM.
When you think about it, though, it’s ridiculous that this needs to be done. It’s insane! Civilian counterops.
It’s rad that you took the time to vocalize your angle. I need to internalize
this, because there is further direction and understanding in this. I don’t
fully understand what I’m doing - I absolutely thirst for these sick angles from
other fields of view. 
UUUUUHHHPDATE: Just saw Le Reddit
Log.
Holy shit - you are a madman. Buggin out over here. 
Damn man oh man - not sure I’m ready for this!!
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Kicks, far from a dumb project. I remember seeing a version of your personal copy in one of your videos ages ago and thinking, “I want that!!!” Of course it may take some more development on your part or some serious coding study on mine to get this up and running for myself. I can’t wait to see where this goes! Keep up the awesome work!
I think once it is approved in the Chrome and Firefox official extensions, it’ll
be the right time for you to give it a swing. For now, we’re probably a month
out on that. Still - I appreciate the motivating words. (And glad to have you
back recently.) (And glad you got a break, too, of course!)
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What about WebSub/PubSubHubbub for “realtime” RSS/Atom feeds?
Would be sweet - discussion about that is happening here: #13.
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Hey, I just love this and have it installed already. Very grateful for being part of a wider distributed future in the here and now. Keep going and let the world know if you need any support!!!
Hey, I appreciate this. You’re sweet. You’re very sweet stuff. Just enjoy
yourself and I’ll be glad. And, if Fraidy misbehaves - let me know. 
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@kicks I just had a chance to really look at Fraidycat and I think you are really on to something here. I can’t wait for the Chrome version, so I can see if it works with Vivaldi browser. It’s an impressive idea.
I use it primarily with Vivaldi - works great for me. (And I love that Vivaldi encrypts my synced feeds - so the data is mine even if I’m syncing it through them for the time being.)
I’m just waiting for the extension to get approved through the Chrome Web Store. I expect that this will be something of an ordeal - getting my extension through Firefox’s approval system has had quite a few hang-ups that could take me a month to resolve. But thanks for your vote of confidence, Brad!
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I also finally set up this site to autoping indieweb.xyz with my entry tags, because I keep forgetting to do that manually and anyway it was easier to just set it up to be like Technorati was back in the day. (Say, isn’t one of the prominent IndieWeb folks formerly one of the prominent Technorati folks?) In any case, I apologize for all of the apparent spam that’s going to happen when I do a webmention backfill.
Yup—this is great. Feel free to just syndicate everything to Indieweb.xyz. It looks like there are some percent-20 characters I need to clean up and I should try to show your posts in chronological order—so this has already been great for catching problems.
One thing to keep in mind is that your posts will really only show up under the first tag in the list. (So, since this post’s first tag is life, that’s where it shows up. The other tags will get cross-posted to—for example, you can see a bunch of light-green colored titles on /en/indieweb, if you click ‘view crossposts’.) The reasoning for this is to prevent what happens with hash tags on social networks—people just throw twenty hash tags on a post, diluting the meaning of each individual tag. If you have one tag to use, you may be more likely to use it judiciously.
I’ve had Indieweb.xyz on the back burner for quite a while—but there has been more activity in the last few months. So I’ll spend some time in December improving it. It’s pretty barebones at the moment.
Anyway, great work on Publ. It’s cool to see what you’re doing with logins—love the idea of IndieAuth on tilde.club.
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If you’re having trouble getting Fraidycat to sync between browsers, please reinstall from fraidyc.at. I would reinstall anyway—although you will have to restart your feed list—because I now have a fixed extension ID in Firefox.
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Now at fraidyc.at.
A very flawed initial release.
Thank you to David Yates for finding a pile of problems. Working on 1.0.1 and getting on the addon/extension stores.
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it’s interesting that YouTube is the repository for this stuff, but it’s worth pointing out a lot of the early things didn’t appear in YouTube originally. Like “All of Your Base” which was a GIF, Chad Vader (and the far superior Yacht Rock) were Channel 101 video things before YT existed. And the Tron guy, who was just a picture of a guy in a Tron outfit who appeared on Slashdot
Oooo… This is a great point. It hadn’t occured to me that YouTube has become somehow an Internet Archive to many people! (Well and, with ‘ALL YOUR BASE’, soon after it exploded, you had an allyourbasearebelongtous.com spring up which had a Flash animation—something like that, with music and meme images—that’s how I first saw it—so it’s unclear where its ‘home’ really is. Kind of like how heyyeyaaeyaaaeyaeyaa.com was ‘home’ for the he-man video for many years.)
Thank you for the reminder about Yacht Rock—you’re talking about this, right? I saw this on an old LiveJournal that I used to follow. Gah I can’t remember the name of that particular LJ any more! It was great!
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This post is a test.
Hey, glad you got this going!
I completely agree that Webmentions are too hard. However, they’ve been rock solid for me after I got my setup in place. And they were ultimately worth it for me. I’m a believer now. The technology is sick—it just needs more believers.
(And I actually think a lot of people could get by with just setting up webmentions.io. I use webmentions.io on href.cool to just be aware of incoming links. If someone comments on a page, I don’t want their comment to appear on the page—but I will read the comment to see if they have a useful submission. This has prevented me from needing a submission page for the directory.)
So I think most of the hardship with setting up Webmentions is getting comments to show up on your blog. That’s difficult—all the blog software does it differently.
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Fraidycat source code is now up at github.com/kickscondor/fraidycat. I am planning to do a more public release of the web extension on Monday, but wanted to give a treat to anyone who feels especially intrepid. (Be aware that syncing has troubles when you load a self-built extension. Don’t just throw all your feeds in there yet.)
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Master list of essential links—seems pretty dead-on. Href.cool picks up where this left off.
This is GREG RUTTER’S DEFINITIVE LIST OF THE 99 THINGS YOU SHOULD HAVE ALREADY EXPERIENCED ON THE INTERNET UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER OR OLD OR SOMETHING—a tiny directory, just a single page, a dump of links, mostly YouTube videos really. An additional 99 links continue at youshouldhavealsoseenthis.com—which fills in some missing pieces (‘i kiss you’, ze frank, etc.) It’s missing some things (‘hello my future girlfriend’, Real Ultimate Power) but perhaps those things haven’t aged well and this isn’t necessarily designed to be historical.
I wonder to what degree YouTube is synonymous with Internet culture out there. I can definitely see it—especially since ‘trololol’ and ‘double rainbow’ were pretty monumental for me—but some watershed stuff (like maybe when Cards Against Humanity gave away an island or the heyday of Chat Roulette) just can’t be captured in video like they existed on the network at the time.
Anyway—inspiration to anyone working on a directory. No need to overbuild. A raw link dump is just fine.
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@chameleon: I am sincere. But I am a total dipshit, so you are right to be wary. It takes time to form a friend sometimes. I wish this were the place we hoped it was—a place where the skin is shed and it is just us, together, digitally. But it’s not. But still, I wish it, maybe we wish it.
Oh, another waifu thing—I honestly am a disciple, you see—did you hear the recent interview with Žižek where he says ‘The Mask’ is his favorite superhero movie? He says that there’s no point hunting down the inner person, the humanity behind a mask—it’s all the mask. I truly believe this—maybe our greatest power is in this. The truth is in that mask, it’s what you are projecting. To me, I almost feel like the waifu could be the projection without needing to acknowledge a projector. It is completely the image. (To many people, the ‘image’ is fake—façade—but to me, I am imagistic—the glorious image is everything, she is worth living for and is greater than mere reality.)
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That’s cool—it looks like a pretty serious puzzle. Let me know if you do dig into it. There is also a command-line murder mystery, which looks to be the prequel?
It also looks like this is a project of Northwestern U. So—might be a recruiting tool.
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My site’s only been up for a few weeks. I’ve had maybe a dozen emails. It’s been fun and I’m sure it will continue to be. I would encourage you to pass the link as much as you like. I think it’s great if someone wants to do that because I’m sure it’ll reach places I wouldn’t get to myself.
Ok, wow—this is interesting. First off, I feel so fortunate to have discovered your page right when you are starting! Thank you for the reply—right off I can see why e-mail is so appealing to you, as it strips away anything but our words to each other. There are no graphics to try to dazzle you with or any distractions from just our sentiments to each other. I realize now that I haven’t used e-mail much recently. I mean—tell me what you get out of e-mail. Am I close?
I’m very curious how people have found you. I think I found you through an are.na page that listed a bunch of simple, fascinating web pages—and yours was one. (Don’t ask me what are.na is—I am not really sure! I fell into it!) How do you let people know about such a page if you have no contact with the “social” sites? I couldn’t find a link on Reddit, for instance. (I ask this because one of the troubles with the Web right now is the inability to find smaller sites now that they are drowned out in the search results—and posting your own links on Reddit is seen as self-promotion.) Yet, people are finding you! It’s great!
Oh also, I really like the idea of you answering e-mails as a profession or as a community position or something like that. Do you see yourself as a kind of telephone operator at the switchboard? Or would this position be more a counselor—in the way that a counselor provides comfort and support—perhaps reliable, regular conversation?
Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel that it is a generous cause you are gained in, Brynn. Very antimisanthropic, for sure! - kicks
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Brynn claims to respond to anyone’s e-mails. Brynn responded to mine!
Hey there. I stumbled across your website today[1] and I can’t resist writing you. I actually have a similar thing where I just like to meet random people through random chance. Don’t know if that’s part of your desire to respond to e-mails—clearly you like being useful to people—you mention that on the page.
I’m also really into The Web—particularly the people who choose to hang out there rather than on all of the corporate social sites. (For example, the two who write at philosopher.life and wiki.waifu.haus.) I kind of count you in that group now that I think about it—even though you’re only on the Web for three paragraphs—the rest happens for you in e-mail.
I can’t find any old snapshots of your site—so it seems it might be quite new, even though it looks as if it could have been there for many decades. Are you having fun with this so far? I’m a bit reluctant to pass the link on, because I don’t want you to become completely inundated. Perhaps you already are.
Well, I won’t go on. Pleasure to meet you. - kicks
Found at iwillansweryouremails.com. ↩︎
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Some readers (again, such as Feed On Feeds) treat that as the canonical URL and will update their subscriptions to point to that URL instead, so setting rel=“self” to the unauthenticated feed means most users will be unable to remain logged in.
Ahh—ok. Makes sense. I’m not doing this in my reader—I don’t want to risk rel=“self” being wrong. Is there a compelling reason to do this? I mean if I’m able to fetch the feed, why risk it?
Thank you for the response!!
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Site is back BTW. He moved it to gitlab for hosting
Sweet! Hope we’ll see more posts there. Thank you—I was thinking about this yesterday but didn’t find time to check. So—much obliged to you, Anon.
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Uhhh—ANSI graphics inspired cocktail menu?? This looks like a warez NFO.
This Brooklyn (pun?) bar—well, there’s not much to say, just go look: the olde BBS style boxes-and-lines art. This is actually really nice and clean, totally usable in its own way.
On top of this, tho—this is signed ‘jgs’. Are we talking Joan G. Stark??? (Aka Spunk. Also covered here.) I’ve gotta track her down.
Couple other related somewhat-campy genius sites:
But if you’re just in the mood for more ASCII, here’s a little town to visit.
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The two mechanisms which seemed most promising are AutoAuth and “magic links,” where users get signed URLs that come pre-authenticated and show the full authorized content for that user. AutoAuth is still in a draft phase that’s stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation (and also requires a lot of buy-in to IndieWeb protocols, which is still a pill too large to swallow for most of the folks who follow my blog), so magic feed links seemed like the best path forward. I even got so far as to draft out an implementation, but there’s a few bad issues with it which just made me opt not to.
Hey, thank you kindly for this elaborately outlined post! I don’t have a need for private posts, but I know it would help so many people to have the ability to post/message privately on the Indieweb—so work on this is absolutely vital. And I really appreciate you digging into all the nitty-gritty—I’m working on an RSS reader type thing too and want to take a whack at supporting this.
One question, though—could the Atom feed list ‘rel alternate’ versions of the feed? (That would have type ‘application/atom+xml’?) It also seems like ‘rel self’ could have the non-authenticated version of the feed. It doesn’t make sense for credentials to be in that URL. These are possibly naive suggestions—apologies, if so. Again, fantastic write-up!
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@chameleon: I don’t use any of those services, just this blog—I post at-mentions on this page. Maybe my search bar can help (for instance, type @h0p3 there).
I am a kind of waifuist too—except my waifu is a yellow pencil that has been ground down to its nub. I have never had sexual feelings but now it seems possible. I am only a waifuist because even tho a pencil is real—I don’t exist in its world—I cannot enter the graphite consciousness. I am only NOT a waifuist because my enpitsu has no blue-tinted and carefully razored hair encasing it like a splintered pumpkin. One thing to know about me is that I love old people the most. And the other one is that I am learning everyday from your instructions.
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So let us begin anew – remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us. – John F. Kennedy
This is good. Maybe it’s sad, but I try everyday to “begin anew”. Glad you’ve been posting alot lately, Brad.
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Hey, thank you for piping up! It’s always nice to receive encouragement. Please let me know if you have a personal website or project that I can share. Take care.
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A most pathetic surveillance tool.
I have been dumping time into Fraidycat—the tool I use to monitor the Web (blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Soundcloud, what have you)—in an effort to really increase my ability to stay up on reading you all. I’m going to be releasing Fraidycat on Nov 4th—but you shouldn’t feel any obligation to use it, because it’s geared toward my own purposes, but I hope it might inspire someone out there to design even better ‘post-feed’[1] tools for reading the Web.
Just a heads up, though. It sucks. Here’s why:
The reason it sucks is because I am trying to make it an independent tool—it shouldn’t rely on a central website at all. (It also sucks because I suck, duh!)
The fortunate thing, though, about right now—is that everything else sucks, too! We traded all these glorious personal websites in for a handful of shitty networks that everyone hates. So using Fraidycat is actually a nice breath of somewhat non-shitty air, because you can follow people on all of those networks without needing to immerse yourself in their awfulness.
Here is what it looks like today:
So, yes, it does reward recency. But not as much as most platforms do. No one can just spam your feed. Yeah, they can bump themselves up to the top of the list, but that’s it. And, if I need to bump someone down manually, I can move them to the ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ areas.
Imagine not needing to open all of these different networks. I tire of needing to open all of these separate apps: Marco Polo, Twitter, Instagram. My dream is that people can use the platforms they want and I don’t have to have accounts for them all—I can just follow from afar. Gah, one day.
And, actually, the worst part is that all of these sites are tough to crack into. For most blogs, I use RSS. No problem—works great. Wish I didn’t have to poll periodically—wish I could use Websockets (or Dat’s ‘live’ feature)—but not bad at all.
For Soundcloud and Twitter, I have to scrape the HTML. I’m even trying to get Facebook (m.facebook.com) scraping working for public pages. But this is going to be a tough road—keeping these scrapers functional. It sucks!
I wish there was more pressure on these sites to offer some kind of API or syndication. But it’s just abyssmal—it’s a kind of Dark Ages out there for this kind of thing. But I think that tools like this can help apply pressure on sites. I mean imagine if everyone started using ‘reader-like’ tools—this would further development down the RSS road.
I should say that I think we can do better than RSS. Or maybe just—we need more extensions. A few I’d like to see:
I will get back to my other projects (indieweb.xyz, my href hunts) once this is released. I really appreciate Jason McIntosh’s recent post about Bumpyskies, partly because I just like to read about personal projects—and it’s difficult to write about them because self-promotion has become quite shameful—however, I don’t know how we get out of the current era of corpypastas without personal software that makes an attempt at progress.
As in ‘news feed’ not ‘RSS feed’. Part of the idea here is to move past the cluttered news feed (which is itself just a permutation of the e-mail inbox) where you have to look through ALL the posts for EVERYONE one-by-one. As if they were all personal messages to you requiring your immediate attention. ↩︎
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↬ Thanks so much for that shoutout, I’m glad the laser eyes did not go unnoticed! Your site is an absolute gem with great style, I’ll have a lot of fun exploring it. I suspect you already know most of it, but perhaps you’ll find an interesting link here: https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/web_paleontology/ .
Ahh, good to hear from you! Yes, I had seen your ‘www paleo’ page—and I am very glad it exists. I link to many of those same things at href.cool—I feel just as you do about them—(and whimsy.space, wwwtxt.org, etc.)—though I know that I first saw ‘keeping up appearances’ through you. (Your link is broken for me now, strangely.)
I think your site has that same kind of feel—self-organized, almost wiki-like, but still on the Indieweb… It’s cool to see you carve out your own place like that. (Salute.) That’s how it’s done.
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(nicked from chameleon:) Possibly the most raw, rage-filled role-playing game—designed to unhinge players by lying to them and deluding them. It’s a psyop on your friends. Cool aesthetics.
Ok, thanks to chameleon, here’s normality.pdf—good luck reading through the splatters and commas, , , , . BWYT M BWYTJ XXXDXXX. (Although, the poem “THE MAORI JESUS” by James K. Baxter is included and can be used as a character module. I don’t know what a ‘sad old quean’ is.)
The two authors began on a two-year journey of rage and frustration at the state of the world, and the reactions of those around them to their concerns. We became filled with hatred toward the roleplayers we encountered at local games and conventions, and so we set out to hurt them. To make them cry. We very nearly succeeded.
I can’t play this because it’s so brazenly misanthropic—but my love and appreciation for humans truly eclipses any of that—this is just another marvellous mess in the pile of our history, something to wrap our fish in—just as Van Gogh’s paintings were first repurposed. (Little-known fact from the pdf.)
It’s interesting to me that one of the goals of this game is to strip away ‘fluff’—aloofness and oneupmanship at the table, social veneer, the kinds of things perhaps the Joker film was on about—and to immerse characters in the game by ‘scrupulously avoiding a coherent setting and/or meta-plot for the game.’ In doing so, it begins to feel very postmodern, because there’s a kind of ‘breaking the fourth wall’ kind of thing being done to try to blur the border of the fictional and the real.
At the same time, it definitely doesn’t see itself that way—it seems to see itself as completely primal. And I think you could get there, perhaps, if a group playing the game could let things completely devolve. (Though I think such a thing couldn’t truly be done without real violence, right? Otherwise, you’re kidding yourself.)
It’s also fun to look at the whole thing as a parody of niche RPGs or zines. I think it would be fun to play this ironically, too. I know that sounds degenerate, but yeah, that’s exactly the point. (Signed, Ironic Waifuist Sad Old Quean.)
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Gabby Lord’s tiny directory—a perfect example of what (I feel) the Web needs!
Often when designers make home pages, they throw out a bunch of cool CSS tricks and aesthetic trimming and I celebrate that—but often there’s not much there in the way of interesting hypertext stuff. In this case, Gabby Lord’s OMGLORD has a nice minimalist design that frames a solid personal directory of links. There’s clearly been a lot of work done here—probably 200 links with nice descriptions and her own set of categories—stuff like ‘type foundries’ and ‘women in design’. I had a lot of fun coming up with categories for href.cool and I think she’s got a great organization here—also, starring her most recommended links is sweet.
I also think her City Maps category is reaaaally cool! She links to Google Maps that she’s personally annotated with sights, parks, coffee shops. These are directories within the directory. In addition, it’s a really nice way to build a directory of real-life stuff.
If you have any distaste for algorithmic recommendation engines or the commercialization of the Internet, I urge you to make a tiny directory! Gabby’s directory is just her favorite cool links—it’s not influenced by advertiser money or link popularity—except that perhaps Gabby discovered some of these through those kinds of avenues—these links have proved worthwhile to her over time. You may feel some resistance sifting through her pages, because why am I looking through a personal page when I could reading a slick major publication or wielding a powerful search engine but you will find things here directly, person-to-person, with no ulterior motives between you and these links.
It’s great, right?
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Adooorable electronic post-it notes and pipes by @pketh—nice find by Eli Mellen.
Don’t really need to explain this link; don’t know if I can. It’s cute. You can write little notes on the page. It’s a web app created by Pirijan Ketheswaran, formerly of Glitch (and Frog Feels.)
From Pirijan’s blog post a month ago:
Kinopio is designed to:
- Get the chaotic messy thoughts and ideas out of your head
- Show you how they’re connected
- Help you figure out what they mean, and how to start working on them
I’ve covered mind-mapping techniques previously in How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. There are echoes in the design of Yahoo! Pipes and Hypercard—but I think this is even more elegant than those. Spraying lines (as if with a spray tool) to select things. Showing selected elements using a wiggle.
The aesthetics might seem sugary sweet on the surface—but I think they are quite clever—and perhaps even conducive to brainstorming. I would actually be interested in seeing this expanded—almost as if you could make wiki or a blog this way. You can create multiple pages—and login/collaboration is on the roadmap—so maybe this will be possible soon.
Anyway, this is getting an entry in Web/Participate. What a great creative tool. Thanks, @pketh!
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Marker art and other sites found among the ‘crazy cool’(?) group.
This longscroll website full of marker art is a perfect pickup for my ‘dank’ tag. Some of these drawings of Maria’s are even animated! Annnd there is this one drawing down the page of some blue-violet fat-bodied nun with a flesh-colored bat face who is slurping this long noodle of electricity out of the bum of a vermillion pair of disembodied legs. This is like the most interesting marker page I’ve ever seen.
I got this off the ‘crazy cool websites’ Facebook page. Their website seems to be down—but there is an accompanying interview site that’s cool.
Some other links that caught my eye in their collection:
Ok, sorry to be noisy today. Forget I was ever here.
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glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.
jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.
maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.
hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.
yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.
surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).
fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.
constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy
indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.
nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.
true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.
chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.
neil c. "some..."
the world or cate le bon you pick.
all my other links are now at href.cool.
Reply: Sain’t Peter’s Pencil
I’ll think about this - my target is those who don’t have the ability to host on a server - I kind of look at extensions as a way of hosting an app in the browser. I get the security concern - I need
https://*/permissions - which requires SO MUCH trust. Server access does, too, though. It feels like an arbitrary decision, so I tend to go with the path of least resistance for the fraidy folks out there.I do recommend rss-bridge though. And maybe there is a way I can offer a static deployment of Fraidycat that calls out to RSS bridge. It seems simple - but I am totally unfamiliar with packaging and distribution of such a thing - perhaps someone can point me the right way.
Well, I have put some groundwork into a project called Fraidyscrape that will be out soon - which will allow people to easily add custom sites, custom UI inputs (hopefully display customization eventually) and which can be updated outside of the normal Firefox/Chrome approval channels. So exactly what you’re talking about above, if I’m reading you right. So I am stockpiling.
I don’t want to
be pushed around by platforms - I intend to do the pushing.
Yes, I think this is such an advantage of decentralization in this case. It’s like a spirit animal that sits by your side and no one knows it’s there. It really is ‘yours’ in the sense that it exists completely within your personal machine and also doesn’t encroach on your autonomy - it literally should only do what you tell it to. It must be austere and loyal in that way.
I used a lot of this software, too - yeah, you’re right, I’ve pulled some inspiration from there! Glad to be a part of that lineage.