Web Development

There are 21 posts filed in Web Development (this is page 1 of 3).

The topic of text boxes

Recently, in another post on the subject of textcasting, Dave Winer made a comment about text boxes:

Every time you see a tiny little textbox that’s a sure clue they’re trying to own you, and hoping you don’t notice.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/01.html#a154043

I think this is a reach. In my opinion, the simplest reason to use a text box for text entry is that users are used to it and it is easy to implement (using Occam’s Razor here). Another explanation is that it is use of prior art, as Dave Winer has written about before (see here, here, and here). No sinister plan to “own” anyone here. Could text editors be better/have more features? Sure they could! Could writing apps cooperate with each other and have APIs? Sure they could! Should people be demanding these things? Sure…maybe….or maybe they could make those things happen…or maybe they could submit a feature request….

If the software is open source (Mastodon et al), someone could make their own changes. If the software is a service provided by a company that does not charge for the service (hmmm…Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky come to mind), it seems more difficult for users to request features and drive changes. If a group of users REALLLY wanted something and no other app seemed interested, maybe they could create their own product (thinking Kickstarter here). To me, it comes down to this: how bad do you want this?

Finally, another take on this sentence comes from Ken Smith:

Ken Smith comment on Dave Winer’s “text box” statement.

Based on Ken’s comment, I take this as “any antisocial behavior” in the blank – racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination, manipulation…the list can go on and on as Ken points out. This Quora thread has some good points about someone trying to “own” someone.

Waxy.org: The Quiet Death of Ello’s Big Dreams by Andy Baio – A fairly detailed story of the birth, life, and death of a social network/platform (that I never heard of), that started off with good intentions, but after taking venture capital, headed down the road to ruin.

Creating a local start page

I have been getting in the habit of keeping a set of browser tabs open to various pages. As this list has grown, it became a not-insignificant amount of the browser tab space. I use the Brave web browser, and 85-90 tabs is about the limit of visible tabs, so giving up 20-25 tabs was sometimes an issue. I then remembered this page from Ton Zijlstra on start pages, and decided to create one myself. The site Ton linked to was not active anymore, so went to the Internet Archive to get a copy. I added both web sites and local files. You can see it here – feel free to steal and make your own!

Demo of OPML Includes feature in opmlPackage

Dave Winer released an update to his opmlPackage NPM module in May 2022, adding a feature to be able to include other OPML files within an OPML file. I wanted to create a demo of this feature and show the outlines within a web app. I combined code from the outlineBrowser toolkit to create an Express application demonstrating this feature. A live demo is available here – check it out! Comments and suggestions welcome on the Github repo. Ken Smith and Frank McPherson were collaborators on this demo, I appreciate their input!

How easy should it be to create a website?

I read this in a post by Ton Ziljstra today, referencing a conversation between Ton, Aaron Parecki, and Tantek Celik. I think the correct answer is “it depends on what you want”. Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik are recognized as the co-creators of IndieWeb.org, and leading figures in the IndieWeb movement. The context of the question from Ton’s post is that you can do it on social media silo sites, but what about on the open web? I think that Tantek and Aaron would like to be able to see this happen on the open web, but they mentioned a third party silo (Linktree) as a solution.

I think that people like to get stuff for free. They like to access web services for free. So when someone thinks “I would like to have a website”, their first thought may be to look to a free service. However, in many cases, they do not “own their data“. They may not even own their own URL. To own your data, to own your URL, has a cost. It can be a small cost, but there is a cost. I would say that creating a site on WordPress.com, and paying a fee to have your own URL and to not have ads on your site, is the simplest way to have a site and own your data and URL. To totally own your web presence requires a little more cost and effort (I wrote a book on how to do it!), but again this is totally doable. Ton says he would create a small site writing HTML in Notepad. He could, but then he would need web hosting and a URL (see my book for how to do this cheaply!). Again, it comes back to the answer “it depends on what you want”. If a person is willing to let another site host their words for free – go for it! If you want to have more control, host it yourself, or pay for a site you control (like Micro.blog or other hosting sites).

Another OPML viewer for Federated Bookshelves

I am playing with a new toolkit from Dave Winer for working with OPML (https://github.com/scripting/opmlPackage), and modified the client example to read my booklist file – nice!

A reader wanted instructions on how I did this, so here they are:

  • Download the zip file from the Github repo
  • Edit code.js in the client folder to provide a URL for an OPML file that is available on the web
  • Upload the files to some web hosting
  • Go to index.html to view the OPML file