14 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. I used to treat my personal website like a content marketer, every post carefully crafted to attract leads that could improve my career or get freelance opportunities. However, it robbed me of a lot of joy. Now, I treat my personal website as my “digital home hub”. I’m much happier as a result.
  2. Jul 2022
    1. Beyond the cards mentioned above, you should also capture any hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry on separate cards. Regularly go through these to make sure that you are covering everything and that you don’t forget something.I consider these insurance cards because they won’t get lost in some notebook or scrap of paper, or email to oneself.

      Julius Reizen in reviewing over Umberto Eco's index card system in How to Write a Thesis, defines his own "insurance card" as one which contains "hard-to-classify thoughts, questions, and areas for further inquiry". These he would keep together so that they don't otherwise get lost in the variety of other locations one might keep them

      These might be akin to Ahrens' "fleeting notes" but are ones which may not easily or even immediately be converted in to "permanent notes" for one's zettelkasten. However, given their mission critical importance, they may be some of the most important cards in one's repository.

      link this to - idea of centralizing one's note taking practice to a single location

      Is this idea in Eco's book and Reizen is the one that gives it a name since some of the other categories have names? (examples: bibliographic index cards, reading index cards (aka literature notes), cards for themes, author index cards, quote index cards, idea index cards, connection cards). Were these "officially" named and categorized by Eco?

      May be worthwhile to create a grid of these naming systems and uses amongst some of the broader note taking methods. Where are they similar, where do they differ?


      Multi-search tools that have full access to multiple trusted data stores (ostensibly personal ones across notebooks, hard drives, social media services, etc.) could potentially solve the problem of needing to remember where you noted something.

      Currently, in the social media space especially, this is not a realized service.

  3. Apr 2022
  4. Jan 2022
    1. To learn—A rather obvious one, but I wanted to challenge myself again.

      I love that Johannes Klingbiel highlights having his own place on the Internet as a means to learn. While I suspect that part of the idea here is to learn about the web and programming, it's also important to have a place you can more easily look over and review as well as build out on as one learns. This dovetails in part with his third reason to have his own website: "to build". It's much harder to build out a learning space on platforms like Medium and Twitter. It's not as easy to revisit those articles and notes as those platforms aren't custom built for those sorts of learning affordances.

      Building your own website for learning makes it by definition a learning management system. The difference between my idea of a learning management system here and the more corporate LMSes (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, etc.) is that you can change and modify the playground as you go. While your own personal LMS may also be a container for holding knowledge, it is a container for building and expanding knowledge. Corporate LMSes aren't good at these last two things, but are built toward making it easier for a course facilitator to grade material.

      We definitely need more small personal learning management systems. (pLMS, anyone? I like the idea of the small "p" to highlight the value of these being small.) Even better if they have social components like some of the IndieWeb building blocks that make it easier for one to build a personal learning network and interact with others' LMSes on the web. I see some of this happening in the Digital Gardens space and with people learning and sharing in public.

      [[Flancian]]'s Anagora.org is a good example of this type of public learning space that is taking the individual efforts of public learners and active thinkers and knitting their efforts together to facilitate a whole that is bigger than the sum of it's pieces.

  5. Sep 2021
  6. Aug 2021
    1. https://indieweb.org/2012/Positive_Arguments

      It would be fun to revisit this. I'm not sure how much we can expand on the why portions, but looking closer at and thinking about expanding the how would be useful.

  7. May 2021
    1. Assuming I’m not reusing passwords all over the place, at least the worst thing you could do with my Neopets account is mistreat my virtual pet. Imagine, instead, that you’re a queer kid living in a small town in 1999, and you sign up for Livejournal and use it to find a supportive and loving queer community online. Then in 2007 Livejournal gets sold to a company based in Russia, which in 2013 criminalizes the distribution of pro-LGBTQ content to minors, and in 2017 Livejournal loses the account info of 26 million users. Was it your responsibility to monitor the shifting geopolitical context of your childhood diary for the next two decades?

      With regard to these portions, being a member of the IndieWeb and maintaining your own data on your own website is useful as one doesn't need to worry about these sorts of corporate shifts, sell-off, changes, etc.

  8. Apr 2021
    1. After the recent brouhaha at Basecamp (context: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp), a great example of someone using their own domain because they didn't want the bad press of a silo/platform to stick to them

  9. Oct 2020
    1. The centralization of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
    2. Some of it is visual. Yes, it is true that all my posts on Twitter and Facebook look something similar to a personal blog: They are collected in reverse-chronological order, on a specific webpage, with direct web addresses to each post. But I have very little control over how it looks like; I can’t personalize it much. My page must follow a uniform look which the designers of the social network decide for me.
    3. But the scariest outcome of the centralization of information in the age of social networks is something else: It is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations.
    1. So what do we focus on instead, without that ability to tweak or iterate? Well, some of the messier network effects of social media, I’d argue. Sure, leaving a comment may be more “engaging” than picking a color and setting a design, but those things give us a feeling of ownership that we never really feel like we have when they’re all decided for us.

      Having a sense of ownership and control of identity on a platform can be an important thing. Even though I use a somewhat modified theme, I have thousands of other options and can change it at any time on my own website.

    1. Update, 11:22 Eastern: Weiss has posted a letter of resignation addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her website. In it, she denounces the Times for fostering an atmosphere of stifling conformity and accuses her now-former colleagues of bullying:

      Having your own website is a must, particularly when you've just left one of the biggest platforms on the planet and still need to have a platform to reach your audience and the world.

    1. Well, in the past, because I constrained myself to only writing long posts, my blog would only show activity when I was feeling motivated to write something longer. And that motivation definitely ebbs and flows. But now, if I want to just throw up a note or post a quick picture, I can, as easily as I could post a status update to Facebook. And instead of just posting to my blog and hoping someone sees it, I can make that content visible on social networks like Twitter, which leads to engagements that, again, come back to my blog. The end result is that my blog, the space I’ve created for myself on the web, is much more dynamic and alive. And that’s pretty darn exciting!