2024.11.21.

Read “Pluralistic: Tabs give me superpowers (25 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”

Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I’m staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the “unfucked rota” item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.

It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it’s changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T “unclose” shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there’s anything useful and new in one of those tabs).

I like the idea of using tabs as a list for next actions; however, my main concern with this approach is that it doesn’t clarify why I need to open a specific tab. It feels like a variation of the “Waiting for” list, which can serve a similar purpose. I can access this list daily, quickly scan it, open links from the task notes, and even update it with new information.

It’s interesting that Cory discusses how he utilizes the “Waiting for” list in another article.

2024.10.03.

Read “Re: How I find interesting blogs | Loren’s Blog”

I’m relatively new to the indie blogging, so I’m always on the lookout for new blogs to follow. What works best for me is when I come across a blog that references another one I almost always click through, check out the “About” page, and skim the article archives to see if their content interests me. If it does, I’ll add their blog to my RSS feed.

This is exactly what I do as well. I have never used any directory to find interesting blogs—okay, maybe once—but the point is that linking to other people is a natural way to discover exciting things.

I love it when I have ten tabs open related to a topic and browse the web as we used to.

Using the web for discovery feels like how time was presented at the end of Interstellar. The past, the future, and the now exist all at once, and you can go anywhere on the timeline.

2024.07.07.

Read “Blogs as Modern Commonplace Books”

I rarely feel an urge to write about things I fully comprehend. More often than not, such regurgitation feels like a chore. I might do it to spread awareness on an issue, but rarely for its own sake.

Instead, I find it more exciting to write about things I don’t yet fully understand, where new information has become available or where I want to clarify my thinking. In other words, to “write so that I know what I think,” or to “write what I need to know.”

Read “What We Give Up”

Whatever regulation that required these kinds of policy-change notification emails greatly failed us. A notification is not enough. If a company changes their policies, individual user data should be made completely inaccessible to that company until that user explicitly agrees to the new policy.

Yes, this should be the default. However, companies would heavily exploit a rule like this, like they abused the cookie consent UIs on the web.

2024.04.01.

2024.03.18.

2024.03.17.

Playing around with Tailscale

I’m playing around with Tailscale, but I’m not sure about the privacy aspect of being on a VPN all the time. I want to sync DEVONthink and OmniFocus using a WebDAV server on my Mac mini, but running Tailscale 24/7 raises some questions.

  1. Is it really end-to-end encrypted?
  2. Does all traffic go through the VPN?
  3. What about network issues when using a VPN? I’ve seen some connection drops in the OmniFocus sync logs when I used my Mac mini as a sync server.

I love the idea of having my private network of devices available everywhere. But I don’t trust random companies with my data, so I want to do my research before I start to use Tailscale with all my devices.

2024.03.16.

Read “Building a Stronger Web Without AI”

If we all build our own places, we can live the dream of the web, now. We can create the web that was always meant to be. By connecting our websites together by—spoiler alert—linking to the people who inspire us, we build a stronger web than a search engine can index, one that won’t be littered with content we can’t control.

Amen!

2024.02.22.

The new version of the ActivityPub WordPress plugin lets me reply to comments coming from Mastodon and federate them back as standard replies. I just wanted to install an instance this morning to have a profile that I can use to reply to incoming comments, but this one is way better.

Again, you can follow me on Mastodon by searching for my profile (zsbenke@decoding.io) from your instance.

2024.02.18.

Building my own web

I’m very disappointed after reading comments on this article: How Twitter’s descent into chaos is paving the way for a new web

I don’t want to see this divided mentality (especially politics) under articles that are talking about cool indie projects. The mainstream web has gotten into a state where people just inject politics into everything. If I want to have a place that I like, I have to build my part of the web.

A Zettelkasten and a blog can help with that. I can make my blog cozy, write about what I like, and then browse that from time to time to rediscover things.

2024.01.01.

2023.12.30.

2023.12.24.

Read “Jack Baty | I won’t be joining RSS Club”

Mostly, though, it’s that blogging itself has enough problems with adoption. I’m not sure it’s a great idea to be “hiding” blog posts. Good blogs are hard enough to find these days. Why limit your writing to only those people who’ve already discovered you?

These are exactly my thoughts about this RSS Club thing. I don’t want to make my readers search for hidden content on my site (there is hidden content on my site, but it won’t be accessible by RSS), I want them to find my stuff easily.

It is already annoying that social networks, like Twitter, hide otherwise free content behind a login page; bloggers shouldn’t force readers into subscribing to something (maybe this is why I wouldn’t say I like newsletters too).

If you enjoy hiding your content, that’s fine, but we have a sparse number of good blogs these days. I want good content to be more discoverable, not hidden behind login pages and RSS feeds.

2023.12.19.

2023.12.16.

What’s up with Twitter these days?

I read: What should I do with my Twitter:

I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my Twitter/X account. I don’t want to leave it dormant, because the current policy is to reclaim usernames from accounts that don’t post, which creates a risk that someone will come along and claim to be me later on.

I was worried about this, but I don’t care anymore.

Then… The idle elite:

At this point, if you’re still on Twitter, it might be time to accept a hard fact about yourself: there’s not a single thing that its leadership could do that would push you off the site. Since the takeover almost a year ago they’ve fired everyone who cared, they’ve invited back 4chan, kiwifarms, and sundry other threat actors, they’ve started revenue sharing with the rape peddlers and insurrectionists, they’ve given priority lanes to every paying NFT and AI grifter, and even outright blamed the jews for their bad finances. That’s not even close to an exhaustive list!

Twitter is the worst “social media” site you can use nowadays. Look at what is happening with Threads and Mastodon over here.

I still don’t trust Meta, though.

2023.12.06.

Read “Web Apps Are Better Than No Apps”

Since web apps can’t just use the components provided by the operating system, they have to recreate everything from scratch. And this creates a lot of burden for developers and, I think, lowers the quality floor. Creating beautiful, compelling apps is possible, but it requires so much work. People building native apps get it all “for free”. In fact, this could be one of the reasons Apple still has such a vibrant ecosystem of great artisanal apps since developers can build most things out of nice ready-made components.

Well, yeah!

2023.12.04.

Read “How I Take and Publish Notes – Jim Nielsen’s Blog”

Jim writing about his reading note publishing process:

I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.

I don’t do this. If I see something interesting, I usually publish it immediately (like this post). On the other hand, I have a Zettelkasten site, which contains more in-depth notes that are also coming from reading notes. However, that site is so new that I haven’t really published anything that counts as reading notes there yet.

2023.11.27.

Read “Neil Gaiman’s Radical Vision for the Future of the Internet – Cal Newport”

Between 2012 to 2022, we came to believe that the natural structure for online interaction was for billions of people to all use the same small number of privately-owned social platforms. We’re increasingly realizing now that it was this centralization idea itself that was unnatural. The underlying architecture of the internet already provides a universal platform on which anyone can talk to anyone else about any topic.

2023.11.23.

Publish bookmarks from DEVONthink

  • I’m messing with my bookmarks today.

  • I keep a lot of cool articles in DEVONthink as my central repository, but I also want to share some of these links here.

  • I’m testing a simple workflow for this using a DEVONthink smart group, which shows me all my bookmarks from my Decoding database that aren’t published yet.

  • This workflow desperately needs automation, but I want to start as simple as possible and see how it works in practice.

  • Here’s a demo video.

2023.11.22.

Read “I love email”

You see, I love email. It’s gotten a bad rep, and numerous services and startups have both tried to replace it, and make it work differently. To me, email was never a bad thing, not since we moved over from POP3 to IMAP. Sure, there’s better and more secure technology out there, but the fact that my email account will work, and synchronise, with any device using standard protocols is great. Amazing, really. I don’t need a specific app for a specific service, not as long as I stick with the open standards (i.e., no Proton or Skiff). You can’t say that about Slack, possibly the worst solution to “the email problem” to date. There, you are stuck with the Slack app, which is basically the same as running the service in the web browser. And it whines at you in real-time, breaking your workflow.

I like email as well.

2023.10.27.

The Handcrafted Artisanal Web – nadreck.me

I’m still a big believer in having expertise in something and sharing that with your peers.

The future is returning to an artisanal web, where you cultivate your niches and small communities, where maybe you don’t become a millionaire and a star, but you do feel a sense of belonging, and maybe make enough to get by.

But having enough money is what people forget to realize. You can get a nice online side business up and running relatively quickly if you have an interesting “product”. Making that a full-time job is yet another step, but you can still stay a niche without losing your soul.

2023.09.18.

Download iOS icons for Safari web apps using Shortcuts

I love how you can save web apps into separate apps via Safari in Sonoma like you can with Fluid.

Safari tries to fetch the default icon, but sometimes it’s not that pretty or it’s even in a wrong aspect ratio. Finding proper app icons is hard, but a lot of web apps have iOS versions, so why not use their icons?

I created a shortcut, which lets you search the App Store and download the raw app icon. Now you can also use the proper iOS style icon for the web app.

You can download the shortcut from here.

Here’s a video on how you can use it.

2023.07.28.

2023.06.15.

2023.02.16.

2023.01.30.

2022.01.31.

Portable thoughts is a website built using a single HTML file.

It simply uses URL #fragments and the :target CSS selector to show and hide “pages”. The result is a self-contained website, digital book, interactive document, or whatever you want to call it.

So, you have a single HTML file that contains everything and is easily navigable without any JavaScript by just showing and hiding sections via CSS. This is smart.

I don’t know what I’m going to use this idea yet, but it will be useful one day.

2021.02.23.

HEY for World

HEY for World can be an excellent idea for those who don’t want to be bothered to set up a blog.

When I write a certain kind of email — aka a blog post — why do I have to address it to someone? Why can’t I just address my thoughts to the world? Direct to the web for anyone and everyone? Rather than define the recipients, I just write and let the recipients find me.

Although we had this before and it failed miserably.