Personal Websites are the Best

Made it to Homebrew Website Club after a long month of NaNoWriMo!
Shared that I finished my novel rewrite and got onto the topic of science fiction. Johannes gave The Ministry for the Future a bad review — too naively detached from reality, and somehow cheating to jump ahead to everyone getting along from… today. He’d been excited to read optimistic sci-fi, but the execution failed. We agreed that it’s frustrating that so much sci-fi now is dystopian, and doesn’t offer a hopeful path forward out of our quagmire. I’ve been feeling lately, as have several of my writing friends, that we want to write optimistic sci-fi — I wonder if we can break free of our dystopian imaginations. It’s easy to imagine the worst… can we imagine the harder solution, to get to the best? Heard some writers positing that dystopia somehow feels more believable, more real, and that we critique utopia more.
David reminded us about websites 😅 and shared the 2021 IndieWeb gift calendar as well as the 2022-01-01 “commitments” to ship something on your own website. I’m tempted to do something for both / either, but have been burned by overcommitting myself before and doing too many “challenges” in a row… but also, website stuff is fun… so maybe?
I’m planning to go to IndieWeb Create Day on Christmas Day, and haven’t decided yet whether I’ll work on something for myself or do some more work on the mushrooms 🍄
For IndieWeb gifts… I wrote up most of a post of how I’ve been trying to get Indigenous working as a Microsub server through my website. But, I can’t actually post it since my subscriptions won’t show up in the app 🙃 I’m not sure what the problem is… I suspect the Microsub endpoint isn’t working properly? The endpoint isn’t showing up in Indigenous even after refreshing… But, my subscriptions do show up in Monocle if I activate the Microsub server via Aperture 🤔 Micropub is working in Indigenous, but a different WordPress widget creates that endpoint. I’m probably missing something 🤷‍♀️
Maybe working some more on my IndieWeb homepage proposal would count as an IndieWeb gift? 🤔 Someone brought it up in the chat the other day which prompted Aaron to compile a bunch of how-to and improvement resources on the wiki, and made me itchy to work on it again. What’s holding me up is not knowing how to do formatting in Markup, which is a silly thing to put me off it. I also don’t know how to add images to the wiki lol. Reminder to self: ask in the chat for someone to point me to Markup / wiki formatting guidelines, and the wiki image etiquette.
I’ve also been thinking about a more dramatic proposal for the homepage, with much shorter and more pointed messaging (feeding off interest following the Facebook / Meta literally-destroying-society-for-money-also-making-teenager-girls-suicidal crap and Web3 crypto bullshit), that would take a lot of information off and move it to an “About” page. I’ve been pondering whether it would be off-brand to make something too slick-looking for the homepage because IndieWeb is not corporate. My personal inclination as a graphic designer is to make the homepage look more in line with modern sites and less wiki-y but maybe that’s the wrong approach. What I’d really like to do is mock up how I’d design the homepage to look if it wasn’t a wiki site, but I don’t want to bother if it’s not possible to make a wiki page look flash 🤷‍♀️ I’ll probably keep it on the back burner for now, I guess unless someone pokes me about it or I need a break from editing 😂

Replied to Too Much Information: Why Personal Knowledge Management Is Hard (Analog Office)

Difficult truth: The more complex the information you manage is, the more complex your systems will have to be.

I so appreciate Anna’s thoughtful prompts. Her piece is great but today I’m “yes and-ing” a tiny aside in it:

you make a lot of notes for yourself (btw IRL most people do not do this, just sayin’)

This friendly jibe got me thinking — I’ve seen a related sentiment from many places that note taking is not particularly productive for most people, and that knowledge management can be somewhat a fool’s mission. To each their own, but personally, I have found my mind garden to be a huge spur in my thinking. I wanted to dig into why I find my mind garden worth the time and effort when others do not.

I realized that, for me, the act of note-taking is a form of deeper engagement with the material. The notes themselves may not be valuable, but the act of taking them is critical. It brings my consideration of the ideas to another level, prioritizing what’s important and noting what sparks my thinking. It keeps me actively processing rather than falling into skimming. I also feel, as Burkeman recently put into words, that the details of any individual work are not what the important takeaway is for me, but rather how that work fits into or shifts my big picture perspective — or as he puts it, shapes my sensibility.
Often I’m set off by a stray remark like this one, a tangent to the original work’s point, and for me that’s totally fine: I’m reading to think and make connections, and I’ll take them wherever they arise. I have no set expectation of what I’ll take away from most of what I read or watch. I’m not an academic, focused on a particular topic or theme; I’m not coalescing information towards any particular end, but following my curiosity. That’s not to say I don’t want to be intentional in what I spend my time thinking about, but that my reading and thinking is oriented around some big questions that are important to me, not intended to inform a professional product for others.
I totally understand why others would think it’s ridiculous or time-wasteful, but I find I like doing things these days without considering their efficiency or utility. I’ve been driven by these precepts so long, it’s a good practice for me to set them aside occasionally. Like leisure need not be earned, neither must learning be driven by purpose or need. I see this thought pattern emerge in many forms in our society: we argue vacation is important because it makes you a better worker, not because work should not constitute our entire lives; applied science and engineering get more funding than basic science research that’s not immediately monetizable; hobbies are expected to become side hustles. Focusing on the end product to the exclusion of other outcomes (like play) is the same attitude that leads to effective altruism. I think disrupting this cultural fixation we have on productivity from time to time can be a healthy reminder that we are more than our work.
Baby step subversion.
My website is a place I play; if I’m having fun, it’s served its main purpose. Thinking and writing bring me joy. I’m ok with my learning drifting slowly with the currents of my reading. For those who treat their knowledge management systems more traditionally, being effective and efficient in their note-taking is an essential part of the system; here, a less methodical approach suits my different needs and goals.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks as writers on Substack weigh whether to go or stay where Nazis…