Archive of posts from 2022/01 📝

A quick note: this post does contain quite a bit of IndieWeb jargon and may be confusing if you are only just getting started. Don't let my jargon deter you from the IndieWeb. This is an architectural discussion so I am asssuming readers have a good understanding of the standards incubated in the community.

I usually write cohesive thoughts on this blog, diving deep into a subject that I find interesting. Today, to spice things up a little bit, I'm going to go for a different format. I am going to write down a list of things that I am either thinking about or have been thinking about over the last few days. I am going to leverage bullet points for this, lest I begin writing one sentence in a new paragaph and turn that paragraph into a whole section.

One of the concepts in social readers I am really excited about is search. The specification upon which my social reader is built, Microsub, separates clients and servers. This means that there is plenty of opportunity for clients to experiment with search and come up with new ideas on how to help people find content and other websites. I have been exploring search for a while now so I was excited to think about what search would look like in a social reader.

A key requirement for my social reader is for it to be usable on mobile. To accomplish this goal, I have added some progressive web application features to my reader, enabling its use as an app I can save to my home screen. I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how the social reader should look on mobile.

While I was trying to figure out how to link a manifest.json file to my feed reader, I found myself looking at the source code behind Jeremy Keith's website home page. The fact that you can see the source code behind how a page loads is an amazing feature behind the web. You can see the code that tells a browser how a web page loads. Sometimes the source code behind a site is almost or completely illegible but there are plenty of sites out there whose code you can peruse.

Jeremy Keith published an amazing article on how to install a progressive web application (PWA) on your phone. A PWA is a website that can technically be used as an application, as opposed to a regular website which is optimised only to be shown in a web browser. Jeremy's article is definitely worth a read if you want to install a progressive web application on your phone.

Over the holidays, I spent some time removing post types from my site in favour of publishing notes. Notes are short posts. So far, I have used notes to share my morning coffee, to ask about movies like The Matrix series, and more. I like being able to publish notes that are unstructured and free flow. Most of my thoughts are not long enough to turn into a blog post, even if they are something I would like to share.

There was a discussion going on in the IndieWeb chat yesterday about feed readers. One big point that I took away is that developers must abstract away from technical terms that mean little to nothing for those who might use a tool. Technical terms are useful for implementation: they help developers communicate. But end products should be as easy as possible for someone to use, requiring little to no technical knowledge.

I just read a delightful blog post called "An app can be a home-cooked meal". The author of the post, Robin, shares his story of making a personal messaging app just for him and his close family. The messaging app doesn't aim to do much other than let them communicate in a way they feel is natural. There are no ads, forced updates, or anything of that nature to worry about. Because Robin made the app himself, he chooses its direction.

IndieWeb Search has been intentionally designed to be open. The source code for the project is open. From the early days, there was a basic API that let you retrieve content and featured snippets from search results. I often chat about the search engine and how it is designed. The project is well documented. Another way in which the search engine is open is that all search result pages come with feeds. I hope to see more search engines do this too.