busybee fluffy rambles

I just read this great essay by Matthias Ott. It does a great job of summarizing the state of affairs of blogging and social media, and how we can try to escape the current orbit to get back to where the web was meant to be.

I especially like the bit about “Don’t do it like me. Do it like you.” Because that is exactly why I’ve been building Publ the way I have; I have specific goals in mind for how I manage, maintain, and organize my site, and these goals are very different than what other existing blogging and site-management software has in mind. The fact that I post so many different kinds of content and that they need different organizational structures to make sense makes this a somewhat unique problem. I’d like to think that Publ is a very general piece of web-publishing software, but it’s probably so general because I have such specific needs. Which makes for an interesting paradox, I suppose.

I guess what I’m saying is that I want to see more types of web-based publishing where the schema and layout fit the content, not the other way around. But it also needs to be able to interoperate with other stuff, while still making sense from a producer-consumer UX perspective.

So hey, Publ now has a tagging system, so I’ve updated my site to show tags in a lot of places. I’m not sure if I should make some sort of tag explorer view or if it’s okay to just pivot between tags within a category listing. Insight or ideas would be most welcome.

What I want to do at some point is tag all of my comics with subject matter and characters, but that seems like a lot of work. I wonder if there’s a way to outsource that to other folks which doesn’t involve opening up my git repo to the world. Maybe I’ll build a simple tool which lets people suggest tags for entries which don’t have tags. Iunno.

I’ve been building Publ with IndieWeb principles in mind. One of the things I’m playing with right now is adding in very basic support for WebMention.