It's that time of year again. New website month!
This year, I finally added a feature I've wanted to add for a long time. But what could it be?
AT Protocol
The problem: I'm tired of connecting with people on various social media sites only to have those sites fall out of favor, shut down, or become racist, fascist hellholes.
Over the years, I've eagerly followed development of various federated social platforms like Activity Pub (think Mastodon) and AT Protocol (think Bluesky). I researched how each one works. I experimented with both. They each have pros and cons.
Apparently, I'm drawn to the mechanics, design, and ownership structure of AT Protocol more than Activity Pub. Given you can own/host your AT Protocol data the same way you can own/host your website, the model appeals to me. It harkens back to an earlier version of the web, before all our data was cordoned away behind the overly manicured walls of private gardens. In many ways, the concept behind it reminds me of the science fiction I've always enjoyed, where all these feeds exist, including our personal ones, and we can tap into posts of our choosing in unique ways on myriad devices. This is the future I want to support.
So, for step one, I've integrated my AT Proto posts into my website.
My website's home page now presents my short form Bluesky posts and longer form blog posts in a single unified feed. You can subscribe to my website or follow me with AT Protocol or both.
Ideally, long form posts will eventually migrate to AT Protocol, but that was a bit too ambitious for this iteration.
The idea behind the move is to take much more control of my followers. Anyone who finds my website can see my posts and follow. AT Protocol is a lot like a peer to peer network, and the nodes are growing daily. As long as new relays develop that aren't completely funded by a single company, the network will be much more likely to survive corporate mergers and collapses.
AI, Words, and Darkness
Previously, I hosted the site using Ghost Pro. Ghost is the content management system I use for writing and storing blog posts, for sending newsletters, and processing subscription lists. But I wanted something new.
With the new site, I'm self-hosting. I access ghost as a headless CMS (i.e. via API) the same way I access my bluesky feed. This introduced some complexity, and I don't know if I've worked out all the bugs. But it's a direction I'm excited about.
I confess to using AI for much of my development process. AI coding tools are getting better every day, and they're not going away, so either learn them or have no more job opportunities. They certainly expedite development and turn me into a more productive developer. That being said, I've witnessed the tools make a lot of mistakes. They know syntax, but they don't have 30 years of bad front and backend design mistakes to guide them like I do. They certainly don't put much effort into maintainability without guidance. Nevertheless, they're awesome. Of course, not knowing every line of code introduces new complications, but I can live with that on my own personal website, which exists for experimentation anyway.
AI assisted development feels like the early days of learning HTML in the 90s, when you copied someone else's source code until you understood how everything worked. That was fun. This is more powerful. In fact, it helped me improve the site's accessibility settings in a single afternoon, a task which I've been putting off for years due to ignorance, uncertainty, and tedium.
Another change was to revert the site to a less photo-intensive design. i.e. More words. All my current projects revolve around words and video. Not so much photos. This let's me move faster with updates.
Lastly, I've spent an enormous amount of time lately consolodating decades of notes and writing scattered across dozens of notes apps, drives, and folders into Obsidian. During that process, I've rediscovered many old writing snippets and short stories. This includes some of the fun stuff I posted to MySpace back in the day, about which I still get questions and praise. In an effort to continue consolidating my entire online existence to this site, I'm going to reintroduce many of those pieces. Whether you see them in the main feed or not will depend largely on whether I use the original publication date or a new one. Original probably makes more sense, so check out the Words page for updates.
Oh, and of course the new design has dark mode!
Say Hi!
So... welcome to the new site. I'll continue to iterate. Let me know if you see anything wonky. Or just say hello for the fun of it. I receive mostly spam and AI inquiries. As introverted as I am, I can still occasionally miss connecting with humans.