Greetings everyone! Well, greetings you, in particular. Thank you for reading this entry. It's an honor to be on your screen currently. Always blows my mind that words can be transported all across the world. So hey!
Long story short, it was a feed aggregator. Feeds (from blogs, gemlogs) could be added to districts. Visiting those district would show the latest posts from these feeds in a similar fashion as what CAPCOM.
I decided to stop making it a feed aggregator, and instead making it a directory of sites. A sort of webring. So instead of seeing latest posts from people in a district, you'd directly see the sites of the people in the district. I'm hoping this will allow more people to submit their site to Nightfall City and not just those of us with a Gemlog. It's also going to make adding sites much simpler for me, and remove the huge delay I took to actually add people (sorry about that!).
I've been working on a forum software for a few weeks now. I just realized I haven't spoken about it in here yet. It's a simple forum inspired by phpbb. It started as a fork of Midnight but I soon realized I wanted to do something very different. The main difference is that it has a flat-thread approach. It's not possible to branch conversations, unlike on Midnight. To create a new branch, someone needs to create a new topic.
This forum software is called "vpub", which means "Virtual Pub". It's built to be simple to install and self-host. It uses Go and postgres, and few dependencies. It includes a whole back-office to manage everything.
It's getting close to a V1 but I still have some work to do. If you are interested to see what it looks like, you can go to:
Or perhaps I just need a good vacation. Not the kind where I stay home, but the kind where I go somewhere. A mountain maybe? Take a little retreat from the speed, the noise, the "now" and the let my only anxiety be to know if the coffee is good.
Well, that's happening. Starting tomorrow, I'll take a week at the mountain, and I'm thrilled. The last time I went to the mountain I was probably around 8 years old. I don't remember much, except that there was a lot of snow and that the food was good. Which is all I need right now.
Fast forward to today, I don't ski, but I don't mind. My partner doesn't ski either, but we planned to take a some hikes, enjoy the scenery, breathe.
I'm writing much less than I used to. That's in part due to a lot of work during the day and relatively short time to work on projects during the evening/morning. However, as the world goes by at increasing speed, it gets hard to not to feel overwhelmed. Some days are quieter than others, but on this Monday morning I'm really feeling the force of the kinetic energy pushing. This is going to be a tough week work-wise, a kick-off week of some sort, with quite a lot of associated stress.
There's also a little feeling of excitement. I know a lot will probably happen. Seems like excitement often comes with apprehension. It's strange. Why am I adding unneeded anxiety to the mix? If something wrong happens, then be it. No amount of apprehension would prevent it. Seems rather logical, right? Well, it still doesn't help so much. Perhaps I'm just unreasonable. Or perhaps I just need a good vacation. Not the kind where I stay home, but the kind where I go somewhere. A mountain maybe? Take a little retreat from the speed, the noise, the "now" and the let my only anxiety be to know if the coffee is good.
It's okay to slow down, but I tend to forget about it. Doing things is addictive, may it be at work, or on personal projects. What matters is the reason we're doing something. Is it for the serotonin rush, the feeling of accomplishment that comes with it? If so, perhaps it's good to revisit the motivations. Chasing the next serotonin hit is a slippery slope that narrows perspectives and will only take you so far. And in what direction?
So hey, let this be the theme of this week for me.
The small net isn't a social network, yet it's deeply social at its core. Meaningful connections happen naturally. I think it works thanks to three components: a homepage (Web, Gemini, Gopher, other?), a feed and an email address. Those three components enable most of the features a traditional social network offers.
A homepage is a lot like a profile. It introduces who we are, what we like and anything we'd like to share. While on social media there's often a "friends" section, on a homepage there are links or blogrolls. Sometimes even old-school 88x31 buttons. There's little limit to how creative we can be on a homepage.
While on social media you can subscribe (or follow) someone, with a homepage, you can subscribe to a feed. Atom/RSS are widely supported by readers. A homepage doesn't need to limit itself to a single feed. Maybe there's one for small updates, one for pictures and one for posts. As the author, you control what you want to share, and as a user, you decide what you're interested in.
Emails are the perfect DM system. Everyone has an email address. It doesn't need to be there only to receive email confirmations or notifications.
So there we have it. A fully decentralized social network based on widely available tools. Here's a summary:
During my commute a few days ago, I read about chat.sr.ht. It's a service that simplifies using IRC. As a teenager, I've hoped on and off from IRC channels without ever fully appreciating the technology. It was mostly a mean to ask people about a programming question, get the answer, and move on. Fast forward to now, I can't help but notice how communities are built on closed platforms like Discord. And while such platforms are incredible from a software and user experience standpoint, they're closed. You can't host your own Discord and invite your friends. We don't control their pricing model, nor their financial stability. We can't know what will become of the platform a year from now, 10 years from now.
Of course all I'm saying is to take with a grain of salt. A platform being closed isn't necessarily a bad thing. And it's a slippery slope to think that it will lead to it being different than what it is today in a few years. However, that was enough to make me want to dive into IRC again. Now that I found out about chat.sr.ht, I had a good reason to!
Discord makes everything simple for the user: connect to their app, and you're automatically connected to all your servers automatically. You get a full history of what you've missed, you can see notifications simply. You can also receive email digests of what happened. That's... not the case on IRC. While on Discord you have one account, on IRC, you'll need one per network you connect to. Which is often the first hurdle: sending the right command to NickServ so that you can get in. But hey, at least your in. After joining a few channels and speaking for some time, you decide to log off only to realize the next day that you have no history of what you missed while you were away. Perhaps someone answered to your message? Perhaps someone share something interesting? Maybe you live on a different timezone than most and your style is mostly async? No history of messages in the channel is a big issue. That alone was the main reason I struggled to get into IRC.
Then comes the bouncer. Or BNC (Bounced Network Connection). It's a software that acts as a proxy between your client and the IRC networks. Essentially, it connects for you and sits on channels indefinitely, capturing logs and offering services. That's what chat.sr.ht offers, and it's what made me excited to try it: I could finally see all the messages I missed.
With my current limited knowledge of the IRC ecosystem, it feels like a BNC brings the whole IRC experience much closer to some of the modern alternatives. That's why I like chat.sr.st. It packages the BNC with a simple front-end client and I can access it from anywhere, even from my phone. I feel like it's a great step in making IRC more accessible for a less tech-oriented audience.
Anyway, if you also start with IRC, or even if you've been doing it for a while, feel free to hop to our little channel: #midnight-pub on libera.chat. We're not a lot, and some of us might not be directly connected, but our bouncers will surely be there! ;)
If you're wondering what I've been doing for the last few weeks, wonder no more: I've been working on status.cafe, a place to share your current status. It all started when I discovered imood, a service that's been around for more than 20 years. It allows people to share their current mood. In many ways, it's a lot like micro-blogging, but centered around feelings. What's incredible is to see that it still exists after 20 years. There aren't millions of features. It's the same today as it was 20 years ago and it still works because it's good.
status.cafe is a lot like imood meets myspace. You can share your current status, and customize your profile with HTML. If you want to follow someone, you can subscribe to their atom feed. If you'd like to show your current status on your homepage, you can too, with the status widget.
While I value diversity of opinion, Smol Pub cannot be used as a mean to share any kind of idea and content. Smol Pub is an inclusive place comprised of human beings connecting respectfully to one another. To that end, I've added Posting Guidelines [1] to the manual. Please go ahead and read them. It's important for the future of Smol Pub. I'll have no choice but to remove accounts that continuously go against these guidelines.
Greetings reader! I hope your Saturday (or perhaps another day?) is going well. On my end it definitely is. Today I created a new homepage and updated smol.pub.
I hope you like it! If you'd like a web space to create your own, just shoot me an email, and I'll happily send you a key.
In the page, I wanted to include the content of this blog. To do so, I updated the CORS on the /atom.xml URL of smol.pub so that we can embed our journals on any static HTML page with JavaScript.
If you'd like to do so, here's a tool that'll generate a script for you to include on your HTML page:
I'm always surprised and excited when I discover something on a technology that I thought I knew everything about. It happened with atom. A few days ago I received a message from crussel who found a vulnerability on ichi [1]. Not only did they explain a way to solve it, but they also mentioned that if we add an email within the atom/rss feed, people who use supporting clients can reply directly to a post. Which I think is absolutely phenomenal!
So from now on, every smol.pub user who desires can go to the Settings > Advanced > Email (feed) tab and enter the email they'd like to add to their feed. Want to comment on someone's post? Hit the reply button on your feed reader (if it supports it). Of course, if you'd rather not add your email, no problem at all. It's fully opt-in.
And that's it! Feel free to try and to reply to this post if you read if from a feed reader.
I love Internet suites. A set of desktop applications used to help us navigate the internet, write emails, subscribe to RSS feeds, even connect to IRC and compose web pages! Almost like an IDE for the web. I tried SeaMonkey for almost a month and if I didn't run into JavaScript issues on sites I often used, I wouldn't continued to use it.
It's a weird thing to say, but it feels fresh to leave the browser to look at my emails. Or to look at the feeds I follow. I spend so much of my online time in a browser than being able to use other software is cool. I'm able to leverage my OS to switch between tabs. Full power!
It's cold and sunny outside. I love this weather. There's something comforting about wearing warm clothes and stepping out. Halloween is right around the corner, and we're headed to the winter season slowly but surely.
For the last few weeks, I've been working on a new project, ichi.city [1]. If you know NeoCities, it's that, just smaller and with less features. It's a tiny community that offers free 10 MB hosting for people to create their homepages, which are listed on Ichi's index, allowing everyone to explore, discover, and engage with one another.
Today's web has a lot of problems. Bloated sites, privacy concerns, using javascript for everything, overly complicated browsers, centralization and much, much more. But if there's one upside that still makes me optimistic, it's the web's expressivity power. We can add colors, images, fonts, music, custom cursors, text that scroll automatically. Should we do it? Surely not if it's an application that will be used by many. Even by few. But what happens when all websites look similar? When every layout is the same, every color is the same, where is the personality? When did the web stop being fun? In a world that can often feel colorless, I'm happy when I see quirky pages, who's only purpose is to have fun and show the world from the author's point of view.
So that's what ichi is! A quirky little place with quirky homepages. I hope you like it!
This was my first week back to work after a two weeks vacation, and I'm comfortably writing from my kitchen. Chemex is next to me, the smell of coffee overtaking the room. That's the perfect way to start a Saturday. This week's been incredibly busy at work, but it's September, and that's where the Summer months yields to Fall, so that's to be expected. While the outside gets colder every day, there's a form of coziness that takes place that I love in September.
A few days ago, mieum wrote to me to let me know that they've finished setting up and translating a fully Korean instance of Smol Pub. I couldn't be happier to see that! Not only did mieum translate the interface, mieum also improved the manual. And while I don't understand Korean (perhaps that's the right moment for me to learn!), I can see that it even includes diagrams to explain how pages are constructed. These are great source of inspiration for me to add back into Smol Pub. So mieum, huge thank you!
I can't even count how many hours I've spent writing the following blob in tal. It draws a line using Bresenham's [1] algorithm. It doesn't handle all the cases (e.g. x1 needs to be > x2), but I'm fairly happy with it.
While I looove emails, a good little form does wonder. So if your feed isn't yet on Nightfall, go ahead and add it! The form is currently web only, and I might create a gemini version of it.
I just discovered uxn, a programmable virtual computer with its own assembly language. I spent a few hours learning it over the last couple days and it's extremely fun. I did do a little bit of assembly when I was in engineering school around 10 years ago, but it's nothing like "uxntal" (or simply tal), the assembly programming language that comes with uxn. It comes with great ideas that makes writing assembly a little like a game.
So hold and behold my first rom, it's called "bg-change" and it changes the background color over time. Pretty slick, isn't it? Code below, if you're interested.
When visiting your journal on smol.pub, you are presented with your posts. However sometimes we want to add a little more to the list of posts. For that we can add a header and footer to the list. But what if we want a little more? A sort of cover. Or just a page with links, one of them being your posts page? I love the concept of a home page. That's one I've re-discovered while exploring the Gemini and Gopher space. It's one I still see on the web but unfortunately not nearly as much as I'd like. I love the creativity and quirkiness of some of them. I love the coziness.
And so it's now possible to write a home page with smol.pub. The default behavior of showing the list of posts doesn't change, however when you log into your account, there's a new "Home" section in the nav bar. When you click it, you'll be able to write in gemtext what should appear on your home, instead of the posts list. If it's empty, it defaults to showing the post (default behavior). If not, it shows your home's content.
To make it work, I've added an alias to the posts view at "/posts". So if you write a home, make sure to include a link to "/posts"! I'm fairly excited about this one. I'll be working on my home page shortly and update the manual as well.
After thinking about thoroughly, I'm not going to add a "hit" counter to smol.pub. There's a beauty in writing only for the art of writing, and I'd love to thank everyone who reacted and gave me insights!
hexdsl wrote:
Don't do it! We shouldn't write for the audience we should write because we can't not write!
I thought this was a really fun way to put it. It's true, we can't not write. And not writing for an audience makes the writing more real, more personable, more Human.
I really don't think they're necessary at all. If people want to track page views, they can always embed some kind of "this page has been viewed X number of times" image.
That's actually true! From the web, someone who really want to do it could already add an image. In a way I'm happy not to be able to find a way to hack it around with Gemini.
The more I think about it, the more I see adding a "hit" counter a slippery slope. By itself, it's not much, but by adding it, we start to let people care about something different than only the joy of writing.
I kind of like just writing into the void without the expectation of people really reading or caring about what I write.
It feels a little liberating actually! Maybe that's part of the reason why people write more on Gemini. Or maybe we don't write more on gemini and it's just my perception.
I don't know. Anyway, if m15o ends up implementing it, I'm sure it will be well done like the rest of their projects :)
Really appreciate reading that, thank you very much!
I've found the Winamp Skin Museum [1] and it's been a fun trip. Winamp was such a landmark, distinctive software. A product of its age. We could download it, theme it, make it our own. It was also true for lots of software of that era. I remember using ICQ quite a lot, and spending hours to customize it. I added a terrible sound anytime someone sent me a message, and it even got really annoying now that I think about it!
Software has evolved a lot in the years. It's become easier to use, even by non-technical people like my parents. And for that alone I think that's great. Yet I can't help but feel a little nostalgic of the time the general trend was software like Winamp. Which doesn't really makes sense since I'm pretty sure I could download an old version of Winamp and have it run. If anything, computers today allow much more customization than what was available at the time, for much cheaper. I guess I'm just getting old!