Like: IndieWeb Summit 2018 Recap
Last week was the 8th annual IndieWeb Summit held in Portland, Oregon. It was a roaring success.Source: IndieWeb Summit 2018 Recap
Last week was the 8th annual IndieWeb Summit held in Portland, Oregon. It was a roaring success.Source: IndieWeb Summit 2018 Recap
Favorite Single Malt Scotch: The MacAllen, 12 year, sherry cask. A near religious experience. Favorite Blended: Dimple Pinch. Favorite Budget Scotch: Inverhouse. First sip is a little rough but it smooths out some.
This is an Indieweb conforming site search script. Very interesting. Very powerful. Site search is so important.
The number of Linux distributions available just keeps getting bigger. In fact, in the time it took me to write this sentence, another one may have appeared on the market. Many Linux flavors have trouble standing out in this crowd, and some are just a different combination of puzzle pieces joined to form something new: An Ubuntu base with a KDE desktop environment.Source: Robolinux Lets You Easily Run Linux and Windows Without Dual Booting | Linux.com | The source for Linux information
A comprehensive overview of the history of search engine technology companies. Read about search’s origin in 1945 and innovation through today.Source: Search Engine History.com
Replying to: Kicks Condor.
Horror directory: This was really a faux directory. Every category was really a search with the category name as the search keyword. Of course you could do multi keyword searches from the search box. Ranking was mainly done by keyword placement and density: KW in Title carried X weight, KW in description carried Y weight, KW on page carried Z weight, etc. It worked.
Science fiction/Fantasy directory: This was a static directory with categories. Pretty conventional. At first sites were ranked by user voted 1 - 5 star rank next by alphabetical order for those with no votes. At one point I tried an experiment: “SearchHippo” a little search engine had a free API to compute “HipRank” (poking fun at Google’s PageRank). Google’s directory listed sites by order of PageRank. So I had my developer incorporate listing sites in categories by “HipRank”. :)
Nobody appreciated the joke. So I reverted back to the old way.
Most of the old directory scripts had a simple meta tag fetcher like you describe. We really could not launch a new niche directory without any sites listed in it. Visitors would come to us trying to find sites and they would never come back if you gave them empty categories. So we would seed the directory with sites, a few for each category. That was a lot of work for one person, but we would use that meta tag fetcher (spider) to help us. I always tried to launch with at least 700 sites listed. That kind of seeding went on throughout the life of the directory. A new TV show would launch and you would add new categories for that show and seed, then add categoires for the actors and seed with fan sites.
Tags: The thing is with a static hierarchical directory you get stuck with the hierachy you built. Tags, even reddit semi permanent tags, are more dynamic and finer grained. By letting a site like Reddit create the categories you help stay on top of what topics are new and fresh. It’s like suggestions coming from the grass roots rather than top-down.
But in a small niche community, with a directory editor who really know their community you could have a hierarchical directory with no problem. Or you could use a combination of search field and a tag cloud. On a niche directory that might be more minimalist.
Categories did serve a purpose: as a prompt to explore deeper:
Star Trek below that TOS, TNG, DS9, ENT, VOY
Below TOS: William Shatner, Nimoy, Fanfic, etc.
Each is a prompt to explore further, deeper, hear other voices. We are too used to Google giving us the a page and then we leave as if that is the entire answer.
I’m geeking out! There really is a webring revival. Who would have thunk it? If you are doing Indieweb, you should apply to these rings. They need members.
I was remiss in my webring launch announcement. I should have listed the other Indieweb web rings right from the start. So here goes:
An Indieweb Webring - Official ring, very cool. very Indieweb tech.
WordPress Indieweb Webring - For WordPress users with Indieweb powered sites. I love the fact that you can run a webring with WP!
IndieWeb Writers Ring - Vintage style, organic, free-range.
Sauron need not apply. 🤓
Grand Opening: IndieWeb Writers Ring. Check out the requirements and feel free to join.
This is an old school (Web 1.0) web ring about the IndieWeb.
This is a continuation of my earlier post on webrings. Start there for context.
I used the analogy of a webring being a road or highway. So I just remembered something I did back in the old days.
Anyway, thanks for listening.
Replying to Kicks Condor.
Thanks for replying. If the Web is our social network, then the question of finding stuff on the web looms large. Which is what led me to post about search engines and directories.
I like your observations about recency vs static in directories. To me the directory of the future needs to be a hybrid of directory and search engine: It needs to combine both recency and curated static PLUS a crawler. Reddit is a good starting point for recency if you have a spider crawling to pick up newly posted URLs plus the archives. Add in Curlie and Wikipedia to the crawl but use sub Reddits for taxonomy. That’s for general search engine.
Once upon a time: I used Fluid Dynamics Search Engine to create a sort of crawling Horror Fiction directory. It used the Meta tags and or user submitted data, plus it crawled the submitted page so it was indexing both meta data plus real on page text for search database. It worked quite well. I had always wished I had the resources to crawl deeper.
Anyway, I think you are on to something.
The goal is discovery, I think using many means, large and small is best.
First, let me say, I understand that the IndieWeb movement already has a lot on their plate and that they have already accomplished a lot.
It seems to me, at some point, the problem of commercial silos of web search engines must be addressed since 1. a near monopoly is held by Google, 2. both spidering engines (Google and Bing) are oriented towards brands, data mining user profiles, advertising and the commercial.
How we build websites today, is largely controlled by what Google likes and dislikes. If you don’t build the site Google’s way, you don’t rank in Google. If you don’t rank in Google, you might as well be dead. It has happened slowly over time, but Google has warped the Web into it’s own image. We don’t build websites the same way we did Before Google (BG).
But there are alternative search engines, and I like and use several of them.
Duckduckgo - protects user privacy. Draws search results from many sources. Bing is the backbone of their search results. They do have their own spider and index but I’m not sure how large that is. If Bing should cease operating DDG will be in trouble.
StartPage - protects user privacy. Is basically Google feed stripped of geolocation and personal search history data. But if Google ever turns off access to the search feed, StartPage is gone.
Hotbot - claims to protect privacy. Appears to be straight up Bing feed, stripped of advertising and tracking customization. Clean, minimalist results pages. But if Bing should cease operating, HotBot will go down.
As much as I like Duckduckgo and StartPage, both depend on the search indexes of large siloed companies. With only two major search engines (Google and Bing) that spider the web it seems like an unhealthy state of affairs.
Mojeek.com - privacy protecting. UK based. Active spidering as money permits. Has potential.
Gigablast.com - Open Source code. Active spidering as money permits. Can index URL’s very quickly. Has potential.
Both need larger databases. Both need funding. Both need some R&D to improve search results and ranking logarithms.
One option might be for the IndieWeb to campaign for private donations for one or both of these independent search engines. Publicity within the movement would help.
Searx - (running instance). Open Source Meta search script. At best this would be a stop gap solution. One major problem is it is scraping results from other engines without permission, sooner or later that will get shut down.
Gigablast - The script is Open Source. Gigablast, as is, is quite impressively capable if one can afford to keep it indexing and provide the coding to fork it and improve it.
More Open Source and P2P Search Engines.
Curlie - is the revival/continuation of the Open Directory Project. Large meta directories have had their day but Curlie could provide two things: 1. a big index for a starting crawl for a new search engine, 2. A ranking indicator of quality for web pages. Human reviewed collections like ODP were used by Google in the early days as a quality indicator in ranking and can be used by new engines.
Wikipedia - 1. Using Wikipedia itself to answer queries, 2. Wikipedia contains a lot of outside links, so it would be another place to use as a starting crawl.
Directories and Filter Blogs - niche directories can still work when tied to an interest community (just ask almost any local Chamber of Commerce). Filter blogs might work too. Boingboing is an example of a filter blog that leads you to things posted on the web. Most bloggers already do some filter blogging.
I’m sure this has already been discussed within the IndieWeb community. Coming up with a full fledged search engine would be a monumental task and expensive. But I’ve also tried to lay out smaller interim steps that will gain experience or help break the corporate silos.
Agree? Disagree? What am I missing? Feel free to comment.
I am looking at Curlie.org, which is the continuation of the human edited Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), and my conclusion remains the same: unfortunately, big static meta directories are obsolete for daily web search. It pains me to say that because I was a directory owner for many years.
Google has the Curlie’s of the web beat on every point save one big issue: Quality. A good human editor can say, “this site is quality on the subject, and it deserves to be listed and it deserves to be found.” It’s a bit like a librarian recommending a book: you know it’s going to be on topic and probably pretty good.
Theoretically, the brilliantly written page will eventually gain more links back, more notice, but how long do you have to wait: months, years?
We first discussed this back in 2000 on the old Searchking.com forums, and even though Google has improved in so many ways, that central fact remains true.
Anyway, the answer is yes, human edited directories can still have value if they are used right. A fountain pen is a perfectly good writing instrument, we just don’t use them much everyday for writing.
Feel free to tell me what uses am I not seeing.
Ice cream! 😜
What the IndieWeb on Wordpress needs is to be much more robust. Or it just needs to be more robust in general even without Wordpress. When it works its glorious. When it doesn’t then you get that free falling and forgot your parachute feeling. Just before you slam into the ground.
It also needs to be simplified. You have rel=me and h-cards, subblubblubs, dowatchies and do-hickeys and you know the damn page links back but it don’t validate as linking back so you have to line up all the offending Indie-dinkybits and say, “Oy, which one of you lot isn’t playing nice?“ Which leads to another diagnostic scud-hunt because all them plugins are denying it, swearing up and down they have an alibi.
And all this sh-t is getting in the way of blogging. Gah! Zounds! Fie!
Bookmarked: Why ActivityPub is the future.
This reminds me that - many roads lead to Rome. “Different drummers.” There is more than one way to take down the corporate silos.
After posting my previous post, I dug a little deeper and found a webring host still functioning Webringo.com. So if you have an idea for a ring you want to start you might give them a try.
I doubt they know about the Indieweb movements efforts to revive webrings. Maybe somebody from Indieweb should reach out to them and encourage participation. It looks like they are holding on as a hobby, but barely. A little encouragement might help.
There may be a webring revival afoot. Webrings had their heyday back in the 1990’s. Good search engines, like Google helped make them redundant. Fear of Google, the decline and fall of free hosted websites like Geocities helped kill them off. Yahoo ruining Webring.org didn’t help either.
I was a Ringmaster of several webrings on the old HTML code Webring.org. I also had several rings on Ringsurf.com. Eventually, whilst turning my Scifimatter directory into a portal, I added webring hosting which made me a mini-webring host for a few years. Keep in mind this was a time when it was more common to surf the web than use a primitive search engine. (BTW, Ringsurf.com is still around, but I have no idea how they operate today.)
The neat thing about webrings was they were like micro web directories. They were like taking a subject subcategory of a web directory and linking the sites all together. The topic possibilities were endless: Dwarves in Tolkien, Vulcans in Star Trek, One Handed Knitters that only use Alpaca Yarn. You could slice those topics very thinly and create a webring.
Surfing a webring was a bit like getting on a two lane highway, you didn’t know what kind of site or page you would encounter next, all you knew is each site had something to do with the same topic and it was up to the Ringmaster to act as editor and keep crummy sites out and insure the ring codes were in place and working to insure the navigational integrity of the Ring.
I can tell you one thing: being a Ringmaster, in the old days, was a lot of work. Just try explaining, by email, how to edit HTML to a brand new webmaster that knows nothing about HTML. Maintaining the navigational integrity of the ring often meant surfing the ring yourself, regularly which burns up time. Things should be more automated today.
Webrings brought instant traffic. Don’t underestimate the value of this. With modern search engines, you have to somehow gain links back to your site from other websites before you start ranking high in searches. In the early days of Google it took at least a month to get listed let alone rank. Even today that can take some time. In the meantime discovery is difficult.
Webrings brought quality traffic; people surfing a webring of sites about Mr. Spock of Star Trek are sort of pre-qualified to want to stay and read your Spock page(s). If you had good content the audience was appreciative.
However, at some point many search engines started using link popularity in their algorithms. Simple link popularity was: the more outside pages that link to your page the more important your page was with that search engine. So the webring HTML codes often provided a lot of links back to sites. Particularly, the link to that webring homepage described above. It shows the unintended consequences of using simple link popularity in your algorithms.
Google’s PageRank was a much more sophisticated form of link popularity and not as easy to manipulate. But those webring HTML codes must have had some effect on PageRank, and Google is hostile to any unnatural linking. I don’t think Google ever did anything about ring codes, but fanciful theories and rumors got passed around by the SEO community worried that ring codes might effect their Google ranking in a negative way. This helped reduce the popularity of webrings.
I applaud the Indiaweb’s willingness to try new old ways to navigate the Web. But I have to say, nothing in my wildest imaginings, would have led me to think of bringing back webrings. This ought to be interesting.
In Reply to: Chris Aldrich - Webrings have come back to the web. Gah! This brings back half forgotten memories. I was a RingMaster on both Webring.org and Ringsurf. Plus I actually ran a Science Fiction/Fantasy webring hosting site via a nice free Perl script for a few years. I never thought in my wildest imaginings that somebody would revive the webring concept, but it fits with the theme of the Indieweb movement. (BTW: Ringsurf appears to be still around but I have no idea how it works today.)
What is the purpose of a “tall kitchen garbage/waste bag?“ In my household, it is to keep all the non-recyclable trash together until it reaches the landfill. An amazing amount of that waste is plastic packaging used on food. So the plastic garbage bag keeps all this plastic and some paper together both in the home and on the truck. When driving behind a garbage truck, I see a lot of those plastic “grocery bags” flying out the top or back of the truck to litter the environment or work it’s way into a waterway. A garbage bag minimizes that.
To me, it does not matter if the garbage bag itself will break down because it is going to be sealed in an air tight landfill and will probably still be there for centuries.
I do see some uses for this technology from BioBag. They might work as lawn and leaf bags, grocery store produce bags (if strong enough) and dog waste pickup bags, but not for general kitchen trash that is going to end up in a landfill anyway.
Seventh Generation Drawstring Kitchen Trash Bags: I bought these in 2017. They are 65% recycled plastic (somebody has to use up the plastic sent to recycling). To my surprise, these are pretty darn good. Strong, reasonably priced and I like the drawstring. They are also sized right. They help the environment by creating a use for some of that plastic we recycle and they take less energy to produce. I would buy these again.
Hippo Sak Tall Kitchen Bags: So far I like these the best. The material is 85% plant based from sugar cane. They are not any more environmentally friendly after you use them than any other plastic bag, but they use less petroleum products so that’s a win. They are very strong and resist leaking. I didn’t think I would like the handles but I found it just as easy to tie then off to secure the top as any draw string bag. I will buy these again.
Your routine and circumstances may vary from mine.
Shadows Over Baker Street, is a crossover of Sherlock Holmes and the Lovecraft Mythos. The collected short stories are by well known Scince fiction and fantasy authors. So far I’m finding it good and enjoyable but I’m not calling it great. 📚
Since World War II, the naval aircraft carrier has proven itself to be the supreme surface combat vessel. Nothing can project America’s power like an aircraft carrier, we know it and other Great Powers know it. At the top of the heap is the nuclear powered super carrier and only America has these immensely powerful ships. We’ve put nearly all our eggs in the super aircraft carrier basket and that is dangerous.
The super carrier has two problems in the 21st century: 1. they are incredibly expensive to build and operate, 2. technology has moved on and carriers are increasingly vulnerable to a host of threats.
Of course even super carriers are vulnerable against old fashioned tactics: if an enemy can attack with enough aircraft, cruise missiles and super sonic anti-ship missiles all in the air at the same time, defenses will get overwhelmed and something is bound to get through. Remember, even though super carriers are massive and very hard to sink, all an enemy has to do is put the flight deck out of action to render the ship operationally useless. Not many countries can put together such an attack but two that have the resources are, again, China and Russia.
Submarines are not new, but submarines good enough to slip past our escourt screen are new. Submarine technology has advanced a lot in the last 20 years, torpedo and sub launched anti-ship missile tech has grown too. And the numbers of good modern submarines in the hands of our rivals has gone up dramatically. Numbers count. We might be able to defend against simultaneous attacks by 3 submarines, but what if they have 5?
Lastly, we have costs. A super carrier has thousands of highly trained, highly paid, crew onboard. You have to pay, feed, clothe each one. Moreover, a carrier cannot operate alone, it needs a battle group, a mini-fleet, of escort vessels to guard it and supply ships are needed to fuel and rearm the smaller escorts. So for every carrier you have to build, man and maintain a small fleet. And THEN you have to build some extras for replacing war losses. There is a real question as to how long America can continue to pay these enormous sums of money just to keep super carriers operational.
We will slowly see more combat drone aircraft introduced to the US Navy. First on aircraft carriers for high risk missions, but also on amphibious assault ships that have flight decks. Drones require fewer people to maintain them so we may see a new class of carrier emerge, one with a few manned fighters for air to air defense and attack drones for bombing missions.
Submarines: The US has great attack (hunter/killer) submarines. But again, they are so advanced, so expensive to build that our enemies can afford to out-class us with shear numbers. We need some cheaper nuclear attack submarines and frankly we need some conventionally powered subs for coastal defense if nothing else.
I’m not sure how to do it but there must be a way to cut costs on building a nuclear attack sub. Perhaps designing it to do nothing but hunt and kill other submarines and merchant shipping? We need to come up with a class of these.
Conventional subs: these are very quiet, very hard to detect when they are lurking. They are cheap compared to nuclear subs and many surface ships. They can be very useful in guarding coasts and ports against enemy submarines. Many other navies have them and it would serve us well to have first hand experience of their strengths and weaknesses. Germany, Japan and the Netherlands all make really good conventional submarines, we should select something off the self and buy them for defense of port duties.
Don’t think I am anti-carrier or anti navy. The US Navy, combined with the US Marine Corps remains the most effective way for America to project power world wide. I’m just trying to identify upcoming trends.
We need more Art Deco. In general and particularly in architecture. If you are building a new retail building Art Deco is way better than International Style and Early Cement Block. Just saying.
It seems to me there are several categories of plastics that we use so I thought I would list them.
Single use Plastics/Fast food plastics: This is the low hanging fruit. This is also the stuff that often is turned to litter and makes it’s way into waterways and eventually lakes and oceans. We can force change on this rather quickly. There are alternatives: waxed paper instead of plastic film, paper bags instead of plastic, reusable grocery bags instead of the thin plastic kind. Plastic utensils might be the hardest to replace but the rest can go fairly quickly if we give clear guidance now so the paper industry can gear up. We should encourage use of produce other than wood pulp in our paper making: bamboo, sugar cane fiber, industrial hemp if they work.
Processed grocery packaging: I recommend leaving this for last. A lot of this packaging has greatly helped with food safety and food sanitation as well as storage. Some of this gets recycled, bottles in particular. A lot goes into landfills where, deprived of light and oxygen, at least it is theoretically stable and not entering streams. Plastic garbage bags hold all this stuff together until it gets to the landfill so they serve a purpose here. Companies talk about plastic garbage bags that photo-degrade, but that just means they eventually break down to fine plastic particles which gets into the water system - including our drinking water.
Plastics in clothing and cloth: Microfiber is the worse culprit here. You might use microfiber cleaning rags and wash them for reuse thinking this is saving trees because you are not using paper towels, but every time you wash those microfiber rags, small plastic particles break off and go into the sewer system. They are too small to get filtered out and they don’t break down. So wildlife ingests them and so do we in our drinking water and all those chemicals work their way into us. It would be great if we started phasing out some of the plastic fibers in clothing and stuck to natural materials as much as possible for as long as possible. Wool, cotton, linen, hemp, silk and other natural fibers have been used for thousands of years by humans and we should go back to them.
Plastics in durable goods: I’m not a fan. All these are out-gassing a chemical soup that we breath in. But they do have the advantage of lasting years and getting many uses. Some gets recycled, a lot goes into landfills. Eliminating this stuff will be hard although many of these products were made of steel back in the 1950’s - 1960’s and we could go back to that. Eliminating these plastics is a much lower priority that the three categories above.
Plastic building materials: Again, a lot of this stuff, carpets, padding, upholstery, even boats gives off chemical gasses just by sitting there. Same with exterior products. But the trade off of exterior products is less painting which saves lots of money, energy and most important air pollution. These would be the last plastics I would try to eliminate.
I’m old enough to remember, as a kid, paper straws before plastic became the norm. I have to tell you, I do not miss those old paper straws.
Oh they were okay for normal liquids like soda pop and water, but when you had a nice thick milk shake, malt or root beer float the darn straw would collapse on you in mid draw, collapsing a lung and making your face turn purple. They just were not durable or liquid proof enough to make it through an entire shake without failing.
I remember very distinctly when restaurants and fast food joints started giving out newfangled plastic straws and the glowing wonder on our faces when we could suck up an ultra thick malt, even with hunks of banana or strawberry in it and not have our cheeks turned inside out by Sudden Straw Collapse Syndrome. There was much cavorting about better living with plastics.
Little did we know we were creating a creeping doom.
I’ve looked into some alternatives for plastic straws:
Glass: maybe in the home, I’m skeptical they will work with kids.
Stainless Steel: cool. Washable good at home, I don’t think I would trust a stainless straw washed at a typical restaurant. I’ve looked at various collapsible types you are supposed to carry with you. That is a non-starter. I got too much stuff to carry on me now, I’m not adding a wet drippy straw that I have to take home and clean and remember to carry again.
Bamboo stalks: for one use, maybe. I’m dubious on this.
If we go back to paper, I suggest upping the game and make them out of waxed card stock or cardboard so they don’t collapse. We must not use paper that has a thin plastic film on it, that defeats the whole purpose.
Paper has it’s own environmental problems, but if done right it will be less bad than plastic straws. And paper does not have to come from trees, you can make paper out of bamboo and industrial hemp, both renewable resources. Both might be new crops for American farmers looking to diversify.
Whatever we use, we need to get rid of the plastic straws as quickly as possible.
The same holds true for the disposable plastic cups, glasses, swizzle sticks, and those plastic grocery bags too. Styrofoam has to go. Plastic utensils might take longer but I’m sure we can figure out something.
Most of this isn’t that hard, there was a time before plastics, we just have to look back at what used to work and bring that up to date. If the Federal government won’t lead, this is something the States can do. Let’s start experimenting and get rolling.
My best guess is that it’s either the newly updated Post Kinds plugin or my SEO plugin or maybe the two not playing nice together that is screwing up Titles and stuff on posts to Micro.blog. This is with SEO plugin deactivated.