Tagged “personalsites”

I’ve recently been updating my website over a series of nights and weekends. The changes aren’t very noticeable to the eye but involved some careful modernisation and streamlining of back-end features and technology, plus improvements to accessibility and performance. I’m really happy to have made them.

Recently my work colleague Francesco told me about a new Edinburgh branch of Homebrew Website Club. Exciting! I unfortunately couldn’t make their first event but just attended their second event. Here’s how it was billed:

Join us in Edinburgh for demos of personal sites, recent breakthroughs, discussions about the independent web, and to meet IndieWeb community members!

It was good fun! Great to chat about and personal websites and writing with fellow tinkerers. I’m sure I’ll be back.

Martin introduces the “Now” page concept and how he adapted it for showing on his homepage.

I quite like the Now concept in general and have already starting tinkering with it. I also really like Martin’s neat, front matter-free solution in Eleventy (single config file plus date-oriented filenames) and could see that being more widely reusable for me for other “light-touch, non-page collections”.

A fantastic so-called “Scroll Story” from Robin Rendle. In his own words it’s “an elaborate blog post where I rant about a thing” however given the beautiful typography, layout and illustrations on show I think he’s selling it a little short!

The content of this “story” is pretty interesting – Robin laments the fact that web authors often need newsletters, or to “spam social media” in order to publicise articles on their websites, because most people don’t use RSS (awareness is too low and barriers to entry too great).

However it’s the story’s design and technical implementation which really caught my eye.

Robin does some really cool stuff with the CSS scroll-snap-type property and also explains some steps he had to take to tame differing implementations of height:100vh across browsers.

I’m currently interested in how to spend less time on social media platforms so as to be less exposed to ads, algorithms and general ill-effects. One approach I’m trialling is going back to the old school and using RSS to receive and aggregate updates from the people I follow, allowing me to read them in a central, noise-free place and not have to use social platform websites and apps.

I use the free, open source Mac and iOS app NetNewsWire on my MacBook. This is where I tend to add and organise my RSS feeds as it has a good UI, for example for arranging feeds into suitable folders.

If I want to read new items away from my Mac (on my phone, or on another computer), I use Feedbin – either the website or the iOS app. NewsNetWire and Feedbin sync pretty seemlessly so any organisation I’ve done in NetNewsWire is visible in Feedbin.

Feedbin is paid (I currently pay 5 USD per month). It has a slick UI and, since it’s a website accessible from anywhere, could be treated as your “central hub” for reading.

Feedbin also offers a few very interesting features.

• You can use it to subscribe to email newsletters, because it provides you with an email address for that purpose. This means you can have your newsletters arrive into the same central place as your RSS feeds;
• You can subscribe to Twitter accounts, and choose to filter tweets by only those with links or media attached (in theory the “more interesting” tweets);
• there’s a “Send to Feedbin” bookmarklet that essentially provides a one-click “Read later” function for use when browsing the web. This is a really handy feature because sometimes when I’m browsing I want to mark an article as “read later” rather than bookmarking it on my website, because until I’ve read it I won’t know if it’s bookmark-worthy. Having this feature destresses online life a little by stopping me leaving lots of browser tabs open at articles I “need to read”! I previously used Instapaper (and their bookmarklet) for this function, but again, it makes sense for me to bring everything into one place (Feedbin);
• You can “star” (i.e. save) items you’ve read but want to revisit, which is handy when browsing your “Unread” list on the move; and
• You can “share” items to well-known services (Twitter, Facebook etc) but interestingly also to a “custom service” by providing a URL. I could see me using this in future to bookmark an article on my own website.

I’m also currently trialling RSS.app for its ability to let me type in an Instagram user profile URL then give me back an RSS feed URL which I can add into Feedbin, and that’s working well so far, too.

Note: many thanks to Chris Coyier whose post NetNewsWire and Feedbin pointed me toward these excellent RSS clients.

Just saw this – https://daverupert.com/bookshelf/ – and now I really need to up my book-logging game!

(via @davatron5000)

Bram Stein, a software architect at Adobe, wrote the book on Webfonts, so it’s no surprise that his own website showcases some pretty beautiful typography.

Type is set in Expo Serif Pro, Expo Sans Pro and Source Code Pro.

No CMS, no installation, no server, no coding required.

Another quick and clever way of creating a website; this time by collecting a bunch of files (HTML, video, images, bookmarks) into a folder, connecting Dropbox and Small Victories to that, choosing a theme and Hey Presto, you have a website.

I could see this as maybe being useful for some sort of transient campaign idea that doesn’t need a CMS and that you want others to be able to collaborate on.

Note: to get a custom domain and host CSS and JS files, you need to sign up to a paid plan, but at $4/month or $36/year it’s pretty cheap.

These days when friends tell me they want a personal website, it’s often just a single-page profile that they’re really after rather than something pricier and more complicated.

In the past there were services like http://flavors.me/ but it seems to have fallen by the wayside. This looks like a decent option to point friends toward if they’re not looking for a blog or want to take baby steps toward that. Incidentally, I came across Carrd through Chris Ferdinandi’s Vanilla JS List which features organisations which favour Vanilla JavaScript over JS frameworks.