Excursions

I read this. And then I read this again. I checked the source to make sure it isn’t from The Onion. It wasn’t.

We know that people want a relevant Twitter timeline. One way to do this is by unfollowing people they don’t engage with regularly. We ran an incredibly limited test to surface accounts that people were not engaging with to check if they’d like to unfollow them

If a platform has to tell its users to not follow some of its other users, you have to think something is inherent wrong with how they running it. I find it fascinating that Twitter will suggest “good” citizens of its platform to unfollow some who aren’t. But they would not grow a spine and just bar those problematic users from engaging on their platform. Crazy.

We need a directory of microbloggers. This fact is clear from the sheer number of discussions that happen on the Micro.blog platform asking for recommendations on users by interests, or geography or something else.

I just wanted to put down my thoughts on what such a directory would need to have for it to be helpful and not polluted with mess.

1. Directory needs to have a vouch mechanism. A user mentions some information about himself, his followers vouch for that. And the vouch’s what matters. Without such a mechanism, the system is prone to abuse, where people can pollute it with catchy tags without nothing to back it up with. We know how such systems are gamed. SEO. App Store tag words.
2. Other users should be able to associate more information about a person, an extension of vouch. They only get shown if the concerned person accepts.
3. Group types need to be limited. Possible options for groups need to be predefined. So geography - possibly timezones or countries, interests - sports or tech or writing etc, current events followed. Without this, it’s again prone to abuse. This may also make aggregation/interface easier to manage. Tagmoji is already a good example.
4. As Brad Enslen opined, may be it should not be limited to micro.blog platform. One should be able to provide other details too. May be via IndieAuth signin?
5. An option to add to directory directly from a post would be handy. It may also allow building metadata for the vouch system, if needed.
6. A person’s interests, geography, isn’t it an extension of one’s identity? Can it not be captured as part of one’s h-card?

Can such a directory exist outside of Micro.blog? Sure (I even had basic one running on Micro.threads dev). But for it to be helpful it would need a significant number of users adding their information to such a service. I believe it fits best with the platform, as the list of users is already available. With some metadata added, a directory page, just like there are Tagmoji pages for posts, can be enabled for users. This will avoid creating a parallel user list, which will always be lesser than what would exists with the platform.

Directory can be made as tricky as it can get. But it is sure one is required as the number of microbloggers grow. Blogrolls, personal directories on individual blogs are good starts. We need a place where that can be brought all together. And displayed easily on demand.

There is a lot of chatter recently around the features on Twitter/Facebook that should be incorporated in the new¹ social media platforms. Or even the lack of the Twitter/Facebook like features that make the platforms better. Just look at the timelines at any of these platforms and you are bound to see some meta discussion on these lines. You will see it on Micro.blog. You will see it on Mastodon.

Let’s just take a couple of examples. Here’s how Mastodon’s boost is presented as better.

Boosts are essentially like retweets, with one key difference: there’s no option to add your own commentary. You simply can’t post something awful with a message saying how awful it is—all you can do is boost something awful without commentary.

Well, I can’t be the only one to remember the early Twitter days when retweets were just that, without commentary. It was all the third party clients that had an option to “quote” tweet. Remember those days of appending “RT:”, etc? We were using the feature and Twitter was forced to officially support it.

Same was the case with hashtags, another feature that made experience on Twitter a nightmare - but was brought in because users were “enjoying” it. We kept boasting we brought the hashtags to Twitter and now we want nothing to do with it.

Don’t get me wrong here. I do not want to sound like a Twitter apologist. The platform is in a dire state and their current and previous owners are rightly to be blamed here. As I recently wrote, I have no sympathy for these folks. Examples mentioned above are not the primary reasons why Twitter, and Facebook, are struggling.

But it is worth considering the fact that many of the features being touted as responsible for Twitter’s fall are ones introduced by its users.

So a plea to all the decision makers behind these “new” platforms - don’t let us, your users, drive the roadmap for you. We cannot foresee what’s right. You on the other hand can decide where you want to take your platform. That may mean some people won’t ride along and get left behind. But, at times, it is better to follow what’s right in the long run than chase the immediate growth.

I know people behind both Micro.blog and Mastodon are making these design decisions very carefully², and are not heeding to the pressure.

So just stick to your beliefs, Manton, Eugen and others. Take your time and decide what’s right for us.

There was one (last?) missing piece in the quest of mine to simplify posting to my blog - and that was photos. Most of my posts originate on micropub clients, mainly Micro.blog. But photos couldn’t without a media endpoint. Not any more. Blotpub now has one in-built.

I recently wanted to create a new view (a page) for all my social posts. Apparently, even if you create the page there are still few additional configurations to be done for the template to make it available at a particular link.

Configuration to be done is to define a route which will serve that particular page. This can be done on the web editor at Blot dashboard in the template section.

You can create a new ‘view’ on the web editor in the view section of the templates (available at https://blot.im/template/<theme-name>/view).

Once you create a new view, go to settings page for the newly created view and specify its route. For example, the route (or URL) for archives.html is set to /archives. This enables the Blot engine to render the given template view at the configured URL. You can explore the archives view for more options.

Cathy O’Neil, along with criticizing these “big boys of tech”, feels some sympathy for them.

I might be the only person on Earth feeling sorry for the big boys of technology(…) They all started out wanting to make the world a better place using cool technology, and here they are, dealing with all of this democracy and public responsibility stuff, which they never signed up for and honestly don’t have the chops to handle.

You might very well be; if not the only, you are at least in minority. I have no sympathy for these “big boys”. There is no justifying the sheer carelessness these “geniuses” evince in the way they go about their businesses.

You can’t dream of making the world a better place without first being a part of that world; living there; seeing it through the eyes of the normal people. Anticipate every possible way that the platform you build can be misused and empathizing with every single person that such a misstep will affect. This is the foremost quality needed in the person that leads the group building such a “world-changing” platform.

On the first indication of you realizing you do not possess that, you should sidestep. If you don’t do that after multiple slip-ups, it reveals your selfish behavior. And you lose the right to ask for any sympathy.

With all the recent discussions around Mastodon and how it is different, possibly better, I thought there is no way to judge that without using the platform first, be a “native resident”.

But I have come to realise one fact, I just can’t post actively at multiple places. Especially important, none of those places can not be my blog. It has to be posted on my blog first and may then flow into other systems. POSSE.

Micro.blog was covered, via feeds. It had also got me covered for Twitter. Mastodon didn’t look to be an easy case. There is no easy way to push updates from feeds to Mastodon. Web hooks may be the only feasible way. I thought I had to get a more seamless solution than that.

And what better may to do that than syndicating right while posting. So I have updated Blotpub to support syndication to Mastodon. I can now indicate the Micropub clients to syndicate current posts to Mastodon. Nice!

I have been a lot restless these last few days. My mind wanders a lot, it’s cluttered, full of thoughts. Full of things I need to do. Things that I can, I should do. I start working on one, and then my mind forces me to move on to another. Without completing any.

I do not think that’s really healthy. I think I may have to put my mind at rest.

Meditation is, of course, one of the way. So I started looking out for all the help possible, to figure out how to get started. And guess what? It’s a market full of catchy, link-baity articles from opportunistic freaks. Anyway, I think I may not get much help on the internet; may be there is just no need to go out there, seeking help on getting started. I may as well just get started - so I have started with an app called Oak. I have had a couple of sessions and have been pretty satisfied.

I will continue to have these sessions as beginner and see what happens. I am really hopeful that meditation helps, that it allows me to regain focus. I know few people who have benefitted, I know of a strong proponent in @ablaze. Actually, it is his experiences that have inspired me towards meditation.

If these couple of sessions are any indication, am sure it will be a good experience to go through.

I have recently observed a lot of anger from people across the world towards social networks of all forms. Especially Twitter. I had also expressed why I can’t quit Twitter completely for now - there are still a few people left there whom I follow, and a few friends.

I recently had a discussion with one such friend whom I was trying to convince to give up on Twitter and move all his posting to his custom domain. I demoed Micro.blog and Blot, hoping that the simplicity of getting started would be enough to abate any friction the change might throw at him.

He listened patiently, he is an active poster on Twitter. He has a distinct voice and perspective towards all varied things. And so my attempt had a selfish tinge too; it would help me if I could follow his posts in feed readers, even better if on Micro.blog.

He looked genuinely curios. “But what’s the big deal with owning the content and the domain?” I thought I had his attention.

I gave him the standard pitch, primarily how it would lend him control of his online identify, allow him not to lose his words when some private silo decides to change the rules of its services and how, if that happens, he can decide to take his content and move to some place better.

All he said in response was “what’s so special with what I write on the web that I would want to maintain it over time? If Twitter dies tomorrow, I will just move to some place else.”

I was left astonished. Here’s a guy who has been posting his opinions on all things, at times even as Tweetstorms, sharing some fascinating stuff for all; here’s a guy who has produced at least a short novel worth of content on Twitter and Facebook, but has the least attachment to his words.

May be it’s a regional trend, may be people in some places are more forward, more open to spending money and effort for the control.

But one thing is for sure. We can never convince people to give up silos and start owning their identities, their content on their own domain or start moving to services like Micro.blog till we make them realise how worthy the words they write are. Even tweet length ones.

Here’s a list of articles I liked throughout the day.

1. I do not think there is any debate on whether Artificial Intelligence will have some unplanned consequences. There would be. It is as good as a new species. And when two new species start communicating with one another, there would be hiccups and miscommunication. I guess the only fear is this time the other species might actually be smarter. Wired has some interesting real life examples covered.

Given a clear goal, an algorithm can master complex tasks, such as beating a world champion at Go. But even with logical parameters, it turns out that mathematical optimization empowers bots to develop shortcuts humans didn’t think to deem off-­limits. Teach a learning algorithm to fish, and it might just drain the lake.

2. I had no idea there were multiple theories for the reason behind Dinosaurs’ extinction. I always believed the “a fairy tale: ‘Big rock from sky hits the dinosaurs, and boom they go.’” Well, that may not be the case. Bianca Bosker has a fascinating coverage.

Before the asteroid hypothesis took hold, researchers had proposed other, similarly bizarre explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise: gluttony, protracted food poisoning, terminal chastity, acute stupidity, even Paleo-weltschmerz—death by boredom. These theories fell by the wayside when, in 1980, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Luis Alvarez and three colleagues from UC Berkeley announced a discovery in the journal Science

3. Being ethical is not black and white. It is almost impossible to lead a life which you claim has been ethical and to make everyone agree. However, “figuring out how to live the good life is fun” - a great essay by Ephrat Livni.

By virtue of accidents of birth, we find ourselves unfairly profiting from all kinds of inequalities, depending on where we are born, who our parents are, our racial or ethnic backgrounds, and more. Your passport determines more than just access—it means you are the beneficiary, albeit abstractly, of actions you may not approve. Most of us, wherever we live, are funding wars or policies we disagree with. We can’t help but do wrong.

4. A much-needed account from a non-profit group “that reunites refugees around the world with families”. Another reminder that we humans have heart beating incessantly within. Some may have painted it black, but as a species, we will keep fighting back.

“While hundreds of families separated at the US–Mexico border under the Trump administration’s”zero tolerance” policy remain apart, a Michigan woman has inspired people to help reunite loved ones by donating their frequent flyer miles.”

I wish micro.blog becomes bigger, more diverse with more voices spread across the world, the timezones, narrate their stories. It becomes difficult for a user from a non-American timezone to benefit from the timeline. It is either crawling or swings past as you stay asleep. I have to consume posts via feeds and depend on Micro.threads to pull out posts that lead to discussion overnight.

I fear though if the place becomes bigger before there are tools in place to handle the scale, we may inundate it with too many voices and interactions. Making it extremely difficult and unpleasant to follow along for any person. We need to tread carefully.

It is important the service attracts both established and diverse voices. I am sure the awesome people behind Micro.blog are already planning for this.

Throughout the day, I read so many article which I would like to share to others. It also is an exercise so that I keep track of all the articles I havr read and liked over the years. However, sharing them instantly was polluting the feed. I wouldn’t want to see that from others in my timeline. So it was only fair for me to not do the same.

Hence, going ahead I plan to share a list of articles I liked through the day as a list. This is the first edition of the post.

1. Dave Winer feels may be it’s a good thing that Twitter hasn’t banned Alex Jones yet. And he is unhappy with the journalists for bashing Twitter incessantly for that.

“Their unwillingness to follow the herd is a sign of hope that we may continue to use the net to speak freely, even if the majority wants us silenced. And what does it say about journalism that there are few if any dissenters? You see this regularly, they’re too scared for some reason to present all sides of a discussion.”

2. Rebecca Cook disagrees with Dave completely. And she shares one of the heartfelt experiences she had during a community she visited, on December 15, 2012 to back why.

And any media executive who can’t see the harm in protecting the publishing power of a person who denies what’s real with such utter cruelty and disregard for the pain of his fellow citizens should be asked to explain himself. And then to explain again. What do you really believe in?

3. Matt Levine summarises Elon Musk’s latest stunt, attempting to take Tesla private. And does so perfectly.

Musk amusingly named his promotional flamethrowers “Not a Flamethrower” to get around shipping rules banning flamethrowers, and he seems to have learned the wrong lesson from that stunt. I suspect that naming his public company “Not a Public Company” won’t actually work to get around securities laws.

4. The world of technology and science never fails to fascinate me. Another such eye opening article. I had no idea that the nuclear tests carried out in 1950s to 1980s were prominently used for detecting fraud in Californian wine. And apparently Fukushima’s nuclear disaster has affected those tests.

Dave Winer wrote few of his thoughts on how the search engines need to improve with time. He was focused a bit on how it can make blogging valuable. However he also had a underlying criticism for current search engines, mainly Google.

Sorry Google, your search engine is showing serious signs of age and boredom. We can do so much better. (…) It’s (Google) been stagnant for too long. They clearly need some competition.

I think it’s high time the way search results are presented to the user had some rethinking and redesigning exercise done. Search for anything and it is still a list of links (or an AMP carousel when it fits your business needs) even after more than 15 years since it was introduced. I do not think there is anyone who ever paginates to the third page of search results. I would bet more than 90% don’t even go to the second page.

I believe when people search for something they have a fair idea of what they are looking for. Search engines need to be smart in understanding if the user is searching for a place on the web or a general query around concepts. If it is the former, it should present every data it has about that place, in a manner that  easy to grasp. Dave’s list already has some good ideas. Give as much context as there is out there.

For later, it is important to focus on credibility and transparency. For example when a query is on some technical concept, it is good to show the discussions on Stack Overflow. In addition, it would be good to also show the articles that were referenced from those discussions separately. Don’t go along sweeping the web for all the key words. Without credible shares, it hardly matters and just gets exploited. Someone sharing it while discussions attaches a credibility factor to it.

Google’s attempt with Knowledge panel is good. But I believe it needs to be more transparent in communicating why it is displaying what it is displaying there.

I am reading a lot of views these days from people I respect deciding to leave Twitter. And this is after a similar exodus from Facebook pretty recently.

But this time it looks to be different; for one they are putting too much effort with their Twitter profiles. They are deleting their tweets, resetting their profile information to convey that they are not “here” and resolving to not posting on Twitter again. Well, some are even ready to pay some shady¹ services to get the tweets deleted.

Brent Simmons did it. Matt Haughey followed a similar approach. And there are many more people doing the same.

I, on the other hand, was just reading through the articles and sitting there wondering what’s different this time. I was looking for that one argument to not simply delete the account. Quit Twitter completely. Best I could get was from Matt.

I’ll continue to read twitter occasionally, and I might keep on liking tweets, but I’m not going to send another tweet until the service changes or the management changes in very drastic ways.

Well, if you are still not exiting Twitter, how’s it helping? I am afraid the place will only become messier with all the respectable voices leaving the platform.

It’s like being part of a coffee club that used to meet often in a coffee house of the group’s choice. Each one of the group would talk and discuss on varied topics. It was a fun place where you could learn so much. And get to know of so many new things and news all around the world.

But slowly the coffee house became louder, with some hateful voices propagating their distasteful views. You look to the owner of the place and hope that he doesn’t be a jack and acts; you hope he asks these people to leave. And block them from coming to this place ever and ruining the experience of many such clubs as yours. But when you realise that the owner isn’t going to do so, you decide you need to act. So you decide to take your group and discussion to a better, saner place.

The question to ponder at then is would you still visit the old coffee house daily and see what’s being discussed and voiced and promulgated?

This is a running list of things I need to implement in Blotpub. I intend to pour my thoughts and prioritise. This may also go to github on things to come once finalised.

1. [Low] Support like and reply with data pulled xray. I am not sure what I plan to achieve out of this. It is primarily when I like a twitter post or an image posts, xray gives data in nice format. I would want to use that.
2. Media upload as multipart. I thing this should address the need for photo upload, mainly from quill. It is simpler as I have a reference of voxpelli’s project.
3. Media endpoint(?q=config). This is a big ask. First need to implement one without any reference. Second use it for photo upload.
4. Syndication (?q=syndicate-to). This should be simpler. Need to support sending posts to twitter. Again, I have the reference from voxpelli’s project.
5. Support for update/delete posts
6. Handle authentication issues reported by micropub.rocks

This is a must read article from Ben Werdmüller where he concisely conveys the problem around fake news¹ and also presents how different players in the system can contribute in their own way.

How can trust be regained by the media, and how could the web become more credible?

There are a few ways to approach the problem: from a bottom-up, user driven perspective; from the perspective of the publishers; from the perspective of the social networks used to disseminate information; and from the perspective of the web as a platform itself.

Social networks have to play a big part, changing their outlook, their perspective to the problem is important. And that is one aspect that is discussed the most. However, the other players in this - we the users, the publishers and the web as a platform will also have to play a significant role if this increasingly painful blight is to be addressed.

It was really fascinating to read Ben talk about the web - in his words “a peaceful, decentralized network of human knowledge and creativity, designed and maintained for everyone in the world”. That is perfect. As I had shared recently as part of another post, it is high time the web, and the gateways to the web, introduce more ways to capture the context from the readers and present the same in a simpler manner for all the future readers. A link can stay contextless, but it is important that the information it lays out is vetted by every one who consumes it.

It is welcome to see that groups like W3C Credible Web Community Group already exists and even the established players are getting involved to build a “more credible web”.

The Web is, without a doubt, the most powerful research tool currently available to man. No longer must researchers comb through endless indices and catalogues to find what they are looking for.

In spite of its tremendous improvements on what came before, however, the Web is frankly a disappointment in comparison to what it could be. Most saddening, perhaps, is the way in which the Web constrains the use of links. For example: although the link is the primary form of reference on the Web, underpinning the tangle of connections that make the system so useful, the ability to create new links is a privilege granted only to content producers. The vast majority of those interested in a piece of work are merely readers, unable to contribute, only to consume.

Even though a bit unrealistic, this work by Joe Savage around open hypermedia is a fascinating exploration of what happens when you take link-based web systems outside of the web browsers. The possibilities are endless as it opens up a completely new paradigm to hyper linking — this takes it across all apps.

And therein lies the biggest friction for this concept. Expecting every app to support this is too much to ask from the developers who are already running thin meeting the changing expectations of the primary platform they are built for.

The simple goal of bringing annotations to the web (which should address some of the concerns the open hypermedia attempts to handle) itself has been attempted so many times, but has failed to stick.

Anyway, for the research community, the prototype system as demonstrated below should work wonders. And they might welcome this. But it is a long shot to expect this to be implemented and accepted anytime soon.

Since I introduced blotpub a couple of days back, I have been continuously posting to the site from different Micropub clients. And I am happy that the system worked well. Added satisfaction was provided by the community by expressing interest and openness to try the endpoint out.

The information is added as properties in-reply-to and like-of to the post metadata.

Earlier, file creation date was used as the post date. The enhancement was discussed with @jack as part of this git issue. With this version, if the published date is provided, it would be set in the metadata. Else date-time for post creation request would be used. To enable this, just set SET_DATE environment variable to true. Additionally, you can also set the TZ variable to override default timezones for the server hosting your endpoint. Refer to the README for more details.

I have also fixed some minor issues in handling the post creation via different clients, mainly Micro.blog iOS client.

What’s next? Handling of image files.

Updated: 05-Aug 15:15

I am seriously considering the option to make this blot blog as my primary site. I do not want to take decision in haste. So here I am jotting down the things I will have to sort out before the switch. This would be a rolling list.

1. Moving all the old posts to Blot. This should primarily involve handling of metadata. Hugo frontmatter needs to be converted to something that Blot can parse. Tricky part is going to be around dates and tags.
2. Handling of redirecting journal posts. Currently they are available at /journal/<postname>. This will have to redirected to /<postname>.
3. Handling of redirecting lab. urls. All the current blot posts will move to www subdomain.
4. Handling of Blot images redirect or modification of the posts.
5. Moving of the /now and /about pages to blot.

As I jot this down, there is another option that looks simpler (and so more probable).

Blot becomes my blog, replaces journal on the current site. Hugo site remains my main site. I will not move any posts, journals or pages. Everything in the old site remains in the old site. All the formatting rework is avoided.

I can move the complete journal section to an archive link in the footer. Blot will be serving /blog. /lab will be redirected.

Main site navigations will be Home | Arcticles | Blog | Now | About

That means the current site will keep serving my long form posts, the articles. Ones for which I spend significant time, I have a machine available to write over the days. And I can control the publish process. The blot blog will sever my thoughts, ones that I need to quickly put out, may be mostly while mobile.

Update [04-08 17:40]: Discovery of threads

• Discover new threads from timeline
• Refresh explore threads if not refreshed for 2 hours
• Minor styling changes

Update [04-08 17:40]: Possible options to unearth in Dashboard

1. People I do not follow, but are in my stream (via interactions) - with a easy follow button - Done
2. Find original posts in the stream - with option to respond
3. People recommendation from Discover - Done
4. People recommendation by emojitag
5. Longest threads
6. Recommendations from threads — add to recommendations thread
7. Post reply-of - API seems to not expose this information

Update [20-07 23:43]: User information display

• Added user information for recommended users
• Follow directly from app, with an option to open profile at Micro.blog
• Thread recommendations purging of old items on refresh
• Upgraded packages to latest - npm-check

Update [17-07 00:50]: Refresh to the Micro.threads

• Added performance improvements by rewriting using Promises.
• Added content around user recommendations
• Security improvements around using and storing tokens
• Security improvements around using config
• Fixes for unhanded promise rejection errors

Update [15-07 11:00]: Tentative Authentication flow

Implemented using Passport. Passport handles maintaining os user object in session. DB temporarily stores the token information — deleted on logout.

1. Get the app token (user provided or from Micro.blog login API)
2. Make an entry in db with token and a primary key [some thing unique and encrypted]
3. Store the key as cookie on client side, sent with every API call
4. On API call, fetch the key from cookie and query DB using the key to get app token.
5. Use token to fetch data from M.b

I need to improve micro.threads. Noting down the current limitation with the implementation.

• Threads concept itself is limited. Currently it takes a post id, fetches the conversation (thread) and then pull out all the links and only show these links as a thread.
• Creating thread is a mess and so is updating it.
• No way to provide access to external users. Only I can create/update threads at this point

What I want to introduce now

I think it would be important to change the whole direction itself. I feel the goal needs to be discovery. Help users discover interesting posts and people on micro.blog. To achieve this, below has to be handled.

1. Authentication against micro.blog. Pull individual stream.
2. Dashboard against individual stream. Summarise. Most active posts, links, micro monday recommendations, likes, books etc - similar to nuzzle etc.
3. Simple way to build threads, including ones with just posts and no links - similar to twitter moments.
4. Updating existing threads with contents from different topic id
5. Auto refreshed public threads - built from discover section of micro.blog (this is close to available).

Continuing my experiments with Blot, and as a next step in Indiewebifying it, I had recently sorted out the webmentions setup and display.

There was one final piece of puzzle missing, one that I had posted in a recent update on the theme refresh.

Why not make this the primary homepage? Well, I am still on the journey of indiewebifying this place. I still post to my site using other apps, mainly Quill and Micro.blog. Until I get the micropub endpoint that I am working on done, I will keep this place booked for my excursions, my experiments.

Well, I finally managed to get a basic version of one worked out. Basic, but a workable version. Introducing Blotpub.

It is a self-hosteable Micropub endpoint for blot.im and Dropbox. It accepts Micropub requests, creates a simple Blot posts and saves them to a configured Dropbox folder. This enables updating a Blot blog through a Micropub client.

I have tested creation of both long and short posts via Quill. It supports creation of posts with or without titles. For me, the former are my micro posts while later are more of the long form articles.

It also supports metadata creation for tags and slugs as part of the post documents.

With this, I have my basic needs covered. Most of the time, I am posting text posts; the current version should be able to handle that.

Next, I need to handle the creation of like and reply post types and also handle the image files. It may so happen that I end up getting these done soon. However, I wanted to put the bare bones version out there.

How do I use this?

Well, as I said earlier the source is open. It is a Node application which you can self-host as your own micropub endpoint. I have covered some of the details as part of the project readme.

However, before you use blotpub, there is one essential step from IndieWeb that needs to be addressed - to make your website your identity online. It involves declaring openly your social network profiles as rel-me links and link those profiles back to your site. This allows you to login to any IndieAuth enabled services using your website’s homepage - no need to create an account or maintain passwords.

You can refer to the “Essential IndiWeb” section in this post on how to display webmentions on your site. That step applies to using a micropub too.

1. Install: Just install this as a normal Node.js application. A better way would be to deploy directly to Heroku.

2. Grant Dropbox Access: Generate a Dropbox access token from the Dropbox App Console to grant the application access to your Dropbox folder. Just create a new app in the console, chose API as Dropbox API, select the type of access as “Full Dropbox” and finally, name your application. You will need this generated token while configuring your application. Just to reiterate the point, the “Permission type” for the app that you create for blotpub in dropbox needs to be set to “Full Dropbox”

3. Configure: Add the required configuration values via environment variables or the Heroku app deploy dashboard. You will need the token generated above.

4. Endpoint Discovery: Once you have deployed the application, your Micropub endpoint will be available at /micropub (e.g. https://deployed-blotpub-app.com/micropub). Note that the endpoint url is different from your website url. It would be the url for the blotpub application that your installed in the 1st step.

   For Heroku deployment, it would be something like https://*****.herokuapp.com/micropub (exact url will be available at Heroku dashboard). To enable automatic discovery for your Micropub endpoint and token endpoint, you will need to add the following values to your Blot site’s <head> - usually available in the head.html file in your theme/template.

<link rel="micropub" href="https://deployed-blotpub-app.com/micropub"> <link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://tokens.indieauth.com/token">

5. Media Endpoint: Most of the micropub clients, like quill, can send the media files as multipart data. So, you can attach image while creating a new post. However, some clients like Micro.blog require a Media Endpoint to handle the media files (primarily the image files). Blotpub comes with an inbuilt media endpoint. To use it, just configure the MEDIA_ENDPOINT variable in your blotpub deployment to https://deployed-blotpub-app.com/micropub/media (for Heroku, something like https://*****.herokuapp.com/micropub/media). This will allow you to post image from such clients too.

6. Note that file uploads via blotpub media endpoint will only add the image file at the location configured at PHOTO_PATH and the URL to the image will be added to the post metadata as photo: <url-to-image>. To render this in the post, you can add the below code block in entries.html and entry.html in your Blot theme either before or after {{{html}}} as per your preference.

{{#metadata.photo} } <img src="{{metadata.photo} }"> {{/metadata.photo} }

You should now be able to post to your Blot site from external Micropub clients (like Micro.blog iOS App, Quill etc). If you do use this, ping me. All your feedback is welcome.

I have observed that I have been more inclined recently to post on Blot blog. I do have my main website which I have been using for all things long and short. But there is some lure of the simplicity of this place. You write. You save. And the post is up.

No committing a post to a remote repository, waiting then for the engine to trigger a build. No frantic refreshes to check if the post is up. It’s simple.

But every time I saw my published post here, I was left cringing at how awful the interface around was. I wish I could purely focus on the content and the process. But unfortunately I am wired a bit odd. I tend to focus on the design around first; if that sucks, I can’t move on¹.

So I had to take a pause today. If I was going to post more here, the place had to be cleaner.

And given that I already had my custom theme up, I got down to work. I refreshed the theme and made it all about content².

No navigation items or links to other places - a link opens the content. And in just the way I like it.

No homepage summarising the place - /home opens the stream of my posts.

No distinguishing posts by type - all posts are equal³.

For now, I am happy with this design. At least, I won’t cringe when I open my own posts.

Why not make this the primary homepage? Well, I am still on the journey of indiewebifying this place. I still post to my site using other apps, mainly Quill and Micro.blog. Until I get the micropub endpoint that I am working on done, I will keep this place booked for my excursions, my experiments.

Techmeme introduced a new form of ads today. This is how the homepage looked.

And this how they introduced the prominent change visible out there.

Today, Techmeme is introducing ads that are automatically placed under stories matching news topics that an advertiser wants to target. They’re a great way to associate your brand with a specific category of technology products, or even to challenge individual companies.

For instance, Yelp is now advertising against news about Google, to urge the search giant to “Focus on the User”.

To be frank, I don’t like this. Contextual advertising is overrated; it is prone to be misused by brands with power. Can a small upcoming player overcome an onslaught from the incumbents? It may be factual, but can be projected in an overly aggressive fashion.

Anyway, I think the wonderful folks behind Techmeme are aware of the possible fallouts. And they believe they have the process to avoid that.

Of course, there are limits to the sorts of messages we’ll place. We’ll decline to feature offensive or overly gimmicky ad copy. And we won’t include negative ad messages aimed at current advertisers, in effect, guaranteeing a form of competitive separation.

With the scale and scope of Techmeme, this might work, this might be enough. But I still believe it better not get into the muddy waters of contextual ads.

★ Liked “The Bullshit Web”

An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page.

★ Liked “Doing Nothing”

Push your mind out of a rut.

This is important. I need to do this more often.