So excited about our new add-on to the MicroBlog.pub code base: now you, I, we can edit your post. By the way, this is part of the work towards a v2.1.
Thanks to @778a0a for contributing their code to help it happen.
State of the Blog Address
So there's some folks, starting with @read@blog.nigini.me, who have put together an org (as mentioned here to help those of us using #microblogpub to move forward with some new development while the original developer is...well, apparently not originally developing for a while (I certainly wish him the best with whatever's keeping him away).
I definitely need to spruce up my own customizations so that maybe some of the ones that some other people might find useful can be contributed toward the new org.
First step of that was to try to get my changes rebased on top of some of what's already been incorporated.
I will readily admit...I did not comb through all of the changes trying to figure out what all of them were. I was interested in doing that rebase as soon as I was contacted about the community effort, really...but what got me eager enough to jump in feetvfirst this past week was finding out that one of the contributors had determined that the software already had support for federating updates, and had implemented a simple post edit ability.
Which was a key thing I'd wished I had, although now that there's nowhere I care about syndicating to (and therefore no need for u-syndication links), I have less need for it. The bird site is no longer a place I consider worth caring about, and even if it were, the API changes have made syndication a hassle and backfeed nearly impossible. So far, I'm not really interested in federating to Bluesky or bridging to Nostr or anywhere else. So...I'm just here, and don't generally care about syndication links. But editing is still nice to have!
So I spent some time on that these last few days, and now I'm up and running on top of that fork. #bw3dev
As of this writing...the original dev's sites seem to be down, and the footer has been updated to have a link to one (the most prolific, I think) contributor's fork, but still lists the same version as before. I'm probably going to change a few of those things shortly and then test the edit feature.
One of the changes that was made was adding separate styling for some of the buttons, which made me very unhappy with how my site looked until I figured out why.
There were also a lot of dependency updates. In fact, that same very prolific dev had updated FastAPI past what was apparently a breaking change. He compensated for most of that - in the same commit, in fact - but not for the semi-hidden custom route support that I use for my About, Site, and License pages, so I had to figure out why my site was broken and fix that bit. As a result...even though I tried to clean up my changes when I rebased...even my new branches are already kind of a mess again. Oh well.
Anyhow, because of my rush to get to that point, I actually spent little enough time perusing the rest of the changes that I'm not even entirely sure what else I pulled in. I think the place has a few minor appearance changes, but maybe that was only the new button styles before I figured out what had happened and changed my theme. So I guess I'll see if I notice anything else different, and this'll be an adventure!
Road to really self-hosting this same blog you're reading now:
- Get a #RaspberryPi and install an #Ubuntu server on it
- Find the IP of your Raspberry Pi server on your local network and make sure you can access it from another local computer
- Go to your Access Point and Forward requests
from:to
the desired ports - FAIL! Because your damn internet provider does not redirect income requests to you. (THAT, my friend, would cost you some sort of a business account!)
Attempt number 2:
- Talk to your tech friends about your frustration
- Learn about the fact that some VPN services DO let you NAT the hell out of this problem
- Confirm that the AMAZING #ProtonVPN will let you hack that up
- Read a looooooong tutorial about the whole deal
- Find out that you were only a
natpmpc
away from making it happen - Run a simple test server on your laptop
- Celebrate!
Write about the PARTIAL victory and go find out how to make this happen dynamically on your RasPi server, which then needs to publish its IP:PORT
to your NO-IP DNS thingy.
I have just spent some hours taking the spiderwebs from my #HCI researcher persona. That is because I am going to teach again one of my favorite courses ever: The Prototyping Studio at the #MHCID Masters at UW.
You know, most of the time, academic knowledge is so far away from the general public. But in the case of the now-called #UX #Design space, the industry has always partnered with academia to create better interactive products.
But, as a #geek and #builder, one of my favorite facets of this design process is the bias towards action: contact people, explore ideas, build and test stuff, and go again. It is actually very humbling to recognize that those "genius" ideas we have are likely far from the best way to approach real-world problems.
Try it yourself: Next time you are excited about an idea, instead of just building right away, sketch on paper -- yes, ugly and cheap drawings -- how your thing works. Now, most importantly, go show them to a bunch of people, get the talking, and take notes. NOPE, don't try to defend your precious design: The challenge is to get back home and explore the ways you could pick on all those human brains and make the thing even better.
Now repeat!
Although I haven't used this poor abandoned blog much, it is not because I dislike the MicroBlog.pub software that I am using to self-host it. It actually helped me to learn about the IndieWeb.org and MicroPub.net communities, as well as practice work with the ActivityPub.rocks protocol (which is the engine of the #Fediverse).
Sadly, as I got excited about MicroBlog.pub, I realized that the creator had abandoned the project for more than a year. Issues, requests, and pull requests have piled up. The excitement of users faded away as I found forks close doors. But it is #opensource, right?
Yep!
Hence, I decided to contact some other users and start a collective effort to keep this cool project alive. Here is where it will live: https://github.com/microblog-pub
Let us hope I will be able to put together a good crew.
What an impressive set of #tech #design principles Nathan Schneider presents as the framework for his "Governable Spaces" book (https://nathanschneider.info/books/governable-spaces/):
-
Aníbal Quijano: "...search for holistic cross-cultural knowledge that welcomes difference and refuses domination;
-
Arturo Escobar: #pluriversality "...no single design can serve all people... design as an exercise in historical consciousness and multiplicity" and #decoloniality "a form of resistance to being designed from elsewhere."
-
#DesignJustice: "design must occur through rigorous accountability to the people whose lives it will shape."
... and more!
History is the virtual made actual, one hack after another. History is the cumulative qualitative differentiation of nature as it is hacked.
-- McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto