Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The IndieWeb – the community of independent and personal websites built around open standards – fascinates and frustrates me in equal measure.
The web is a democratic publishing platform but its inherent limitations means there’s a thriving market for centralised services that focus on frictionless user experience, often at the expense of control and agency.
The IndieWeb however is, like humans, messy. There’s great power (and pragmatism) developing technologies based on usage – rough consensus and running code. Yet, as a recovering perfectionist, it’s this mess, this roughness, that so often frustrates me.
I’m trying to smooth over some of these bumps with Indiekit. Alongside usability, I’m also focused on accessibility, extensibility, customisation, localisation and much more besides. My over-designed CMS might have become a worry stone.
As the saying goes, if you want to go far, go together. Recently, I’ve been contributing to some wider community initiatives. Granted, these may be motivated by the frustrations of a graphic designer who yearns for order and structure, but hopefully my little interventions have been useful.
So, if only for my own vanity, here’s a list of things I’ve contributed to the IndieWeb over the last few months.
At IndieWebCamp Nuremberg last October, I proposed a series of icons for common IndieWeb protocols and concepts. They now appear on an about page for Micro.blog and in Indiekit’s documentation.
They have yet to see any broader usage, but I’d rather see the protocols and concepts they represent gain wider adoption, and if the icons come along for the ride, even better.
The IndieWeb wiki is an important resource for learning about the movement, its standards and practices as well as a place to share insights and implementation examples. By using an older version of MediaWiki’s default theme not optimised for smaller screens, people new to the community didn’t get the best first impression.
There’s a newer version of this theme, but to make it the default on IndieWeb.org meant updating a heavily customised homepage. The homepage is a difficult page to get right, and many attempts have been made to update its design over the years. I was keen that such discussions didn’t prevent the site moving to the newer, responsive theme.
I proposed a limited scope redesign, one that retained the existing content and layout, but made small changes so that it wouldn’t look out of place with the new theme, while also being easier to edit and maintain.
I documented the issues with the older theme and homepage, outlined my redesign proposal and provided a way for people to try out the new homepage. With the help of Aaron, Tantek and the wider community, we ironed out bugs, made tweaks and then gradually rolled out the change, launching the new design on Valentines Day.
I’m a huge admirer of the work Manton has been doing with Micro.blog. Since its launch in 2017, his platform continues to prove out many of the ideas and technologies that underpin the IndieWeb. It’s no accident that it’s one of the best places on the web to publish and then share content across the different social networks that have sprung up since Elon Musk rocked up with a sink.
The service also provides a number of companion apps for iOS and Android, and the launch of the note-taking app Strata brought this number up to 4. That each icon appeared unrelated to Micro.blog made me twitchy.
My unsolicited redesign caught the eye of Manton, and the new icons are being slowly rolled out across the different apps. This image gives me more pleasure than is possibly healthy:
Finally, alongside Mark Everitt, I’m organising the first IndieWebCamp of the year which is taking place here, in Brighton. It’s just 2 weeks away, and a handful of tickets remain.
I’m excited to think about what may emerge from 2 days of discussion, prototyping, hacking and hopefully, together, we can make a few more dents in the IndieWeb.
Too closely related? Possibly, but there’s something in this, I think.
Is 2024 the year of the personal website? Perhaps it’ll see the federated social web go mainstream. Maybe a resurgence in RSS? One thing’s for sure, after more than a decade of consolidation, the Internet is about to get weird again. The perfect moment then, to bring IndieWebCamp back to Brighton on the weekend of 9 and 10 March.
A lot has changed since the last camp was held here in 2019. There’s a growing interest in alternative approaches to social media, but also the threat of misinformation and inauthentic content being generated (and regurgitated) at awesome scale. And yet, some things haven’t changed, with incumbents continuing to mistreat users, giving scant regard to their privacy or safety.
IndieWebCamps are a wonderful opportunity to learn about how you can take back control of your content and online identity, and discuss new ideas for doing so with fellow citizens of the World Wide Web. Importantly, they are a combination of learning and making, turning theory into practice – and everyone’s invited.
Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.
Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.
Our venue is small, which means we have a limited capacity; if you want to attend in person, grab a ticket today. Otherwise, add yourself to the list of remote attendees on the IndieWebCamp wiki page, which is also where you can learn more about the event. Hope to see you there!
I’m so glad I did. Not so much due to the work on display (although Barbara Walker’s beautiful charcoal drawings of people affected by the Windrush scandal are emotionally powerful and the most accessible of the 4 exhibits), but these environments are always a feast for the senses, awakening bits of my brain dulled by pixels and rectangles.
This is My Jam was a short-lived social network where users could share a song they were listening to on a given week. I tended to use it to share whatever embarrassing tune was stuck in my head, typically one heard in a television advertisement. But sometimes it was a useful means of expressing myself, subtweeting my feelings without being explicit about them.
The service was shutdown in 2015, but great care was taken to ensure that all the data was archived. The site can be browsed on the Wayback Machine, while a dump of anonymised user data was saved to the Internet Archive.
I then had a second thought; I could recreate This is My Jam on my own website. And that’s what I’ve done.
The first step I take when adding a new content type is to seek out prior art. The IndieWeb wiki describes a jam post type inspired by This Is My Jam, whose content starts with the ♫ character followed by a white space character, and then a link to or embed of a music video or audio track.
I’d hoped that having posts with links to YouTube videos would mean my jams would benefit from the small enhancement I make to YouTube links. Turns out my custom rule for markdown-it only works if a paragraph starts with and only includes a link; the ♫ prefix breaks this convention.
Then I remembered that Apple Music allows users to share links to songs on its platform. Instead of linking to music videos on Youtube, maybe I could link to songs on Apple Music instead? Investigating further, I discovered that Apple Music has a good library of music videos, and provides an embed code that supports both songs and videos.
So, I want to save this Markdown:
♫ [<cite>1234</cite> by Feist](https://music.apple.com/gb/album/1234/1440743123?i=1440743244)and generate this HTML:
<iframe src="https://embed.music.apple.com/gb/album/1234/1440743123?i=1440743244" height="175"></iframe>My first thought was to create a LiquidJS template filter to perform the transformation. Or maybe I could support another custom rule for markdown-it; a complex and fragile option I was keen to avoid.
Besides increasing the complexity of my templates and potentially increasing build time, both of these options would mean showing an Apple Music embed that, annoyingly and for no good reason, doesn’t work without JavaScript.
Fortunately, there’s a shiny new tool in my toolbox: web components!
I’ve created a new custom element — with the fun name apple-jam – that, when used to wrap content containing a link to Apple Music, replaces the link with an Apple Music embed:
<apple-jam> <p>♫ <a href="https://music.apple.com/gb/album/1234/1440743123?i=1440743244"> <cite>1234</cite> by Feist </a></p></apple-jam>This is the script used to define this custom element:
class AppleJamElement extends HTMLElement { constructor() { super(); this.appleMusicLink = this.querySelector(`a[href*="music.apple.com"]`); this.jam = this.appleMusicLink.parentNode; } embedCode(href) { const embed = document.createElement("iframe"); embed.src = href.replace("music.apple.com", "embed.music.apple.com"); embed.height = embed.src.includes("music-video") ? 450 : 175; return embed; } connectedCallback() { if (this.appleMusicLink) { this.jam.after(this.embedCode(this.appleMusicLink.href)); this.jam.remove(); } }}customElements.define("apple-jam", AppleJamElement);This custom element does a few things:
href attribute includes music.apple.comiframe element, with the src value derived from the hrefiframe if the link is to a music video instead of a songiframe embedAnd if this doesn’t work for whatever reason, the original link remains.
If you don’t have an Apple Music account, you can only play an excerpt of the song or music video. While not great, it works for me and well, this website is for me, not you.
I’m pretty happy with the result. Once again I can share my atrocious taste in music and/or obliquely express my feelings at a given point in time. It also means I can republish all the posts I’d previously made to This Is My Jam.
This was another one-day build, cobbled together the evening of the day I had a melancholy thought about a dead social network and decided to recreate part of it on my website.
The year of the personal website continues into 2024.
This post is for Matt’s birthday.
| Year | Articles | Notes | Photos | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 23 | 38 | 50 | 111 |
| 2022 | 11 | 69 | 32 | 112 |
| 2021 | 4 | 47 | 77 | 128 |
| 2020 | 12 | 73 | 79 | 164 |
| 2019 | 25 | 76 | 30 | 131 |
I almost published the same number of posts this year as last, however they skewed more heavily towards longer form articles than shorter note or photo posts (2019 was the year I experimented with weeknotes, which counted for 19 of that year’s 25 article posts). Hard not to conclude that is a result of my decision to stop syndicating short posts to Twitter.
| Year | Countries | Trips | Distance | Carbon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 6 | 22 | 6439 km | 215 kg |
| 2022 | 6 | 13 | 8093 km | 263 kg |
| 2021 | 1 | 4 | 1624 km | 54 kg |
| 2020 | 8 | 7 | 4166 km | 136 kg |
| 2019 | 3 | 8 | 5624 km | 184 kg |
I travelled less distance but over more trips, largely due to me visiting more places in the UK this year.
| Year | Cinema | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 5 | 13 | 18 |
| 2022 | 7 | 9 | 16 |
| 2021 | 4 | 7 | 11 |
| 2020 | 3 | 5 | 8 |
| 2019 | 7 | 13 | 20 |
Fewer trips to the cinema but an increase in other things I went to see. Not mentioned in my review of the year was an evening at the National Theatre to watch Dear England, a beautiful story about Gareth Southgate and challenging what it means to be an England fan. I also attended a wild life drawing class at the Brighton Aquarium, which I’d like to do again.
| Year | Commits |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 4052 |
| 2022 | 4295 |
| 2021 | 3050 |
| 2020 | 3324 |
| 2019 | 1606 |
A slight dip on the number of contributions I made this year, but still the second highest number I’ve recorded.
| Year | Walking | Cycling | Running | Swimming | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 9h 4m | 0h 0m | 0h 0m | 3h 46m | 12h 50m |
| 2022 | 8h 32m | 4h 2m | 0h 0m | 6h 21m | 12h 34m |
| 2021 | 39h 4m | 20h 37m | 19h 50m | 0h 0m | 79h 31m |
| 2020 | 6h 14m | 13h 40m | 28h 16m | 0h 0m | 48h 10m |
| 2019 | 0h 0m | 0h 0m | 2h 41m | 0h 0m | 2h 41m |
While a similar total for the time I spent exercising, most of it can be accounted for by two days spent walking on the South Downs. Must do better.
| Year | Check-ins |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 1008 |
| 2022 | 941 |
| 2021 | 785 |
| 2020 | 623 |
| 2019 | 1527 |
Still no idea why I check-in to places on Swarm and yet I did it more this year than last.
| Year | Races | Winning drivers | Winning constructors |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 22 | 3 | 2 |
| 2022 | 22 | 5 | 3 |
| 2021 | 22 | 5 | 4 |
| 2020 | 17 | 5 | 4 |
| 2019 | 21 | 5 | 3 |
I still watch Formula 1, for some reason. This season was particularly difficult to follow given the result of each race was a foregone conclusion. Were it not for Carlos Sainz’s smoothly controlled win in Singapore, these numbers would be even worse. I’ve got my hopes pinned on McLaren continuing their resurgence next year.
| Year | Holders | Parties |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 3 | 1 |
| 2021 | 1 | 1 |
| 2020 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2 | 1 |
An unusually stable year for Conservative Prime Ministers, with just one holder of the office. Here’s to a 100% increase in both holders of the office and their parties (political, not booze-fuelled) early next year.
Happy New Year!
In January I took my eldest niece to see ABBA Voyage, a brilliant demonstration of technology being used in service of pure, unadulterated joy. I arrived with heightened expectations yet still left thoroughly impressed (with my niece suitably embarrassed by my dancing). Another visit is surely needed before the temporary venue is dismantled and shipped to another country, possibly next year.
In August we undertook another musical pilgrimage, this time to see items previously owned by Freddie Mercury and being auctioned at Sotherby’s. We also visited Abbey Road, requiring me to jump in front of traffic to get the iconic photo alongside throngs of other tourists attempting the same.
Last year’s review concluded with my disillusionment with web conferences as well as general anxiety in big crowds. Well, not only did I end up attending and enjoying 3 conferences, but I also spoke at another: UX London.
Having worked at Clearleft during the event’s founding and seeing the calibre of people invited to speak, I felt honoured when Jeremy asked me to be part of this year’s line up, albeit on a topic I felt had little mileage: design histories. Joking that it could be summed up in one slide (“write things down so you don’t forget”), I used this as an opportunity to lay some ghosts to rest.
In effect, this presentation allowed me to revisit my time at the Department of Education and extract lessons learnt the hard way about cultivating a team culture through design. It was also an opportunity to publicly celebrate parts of that programme that made it a success. I’m pretty happy with how the talk turned out. I especially enjoyed the time I spent with my fellow speakers whose talks neatly dovetailed together.
Speaking in front of an audience of peers helped boost confidence in my ability and usefulness – I’m enough and I’m great at doing stuff – at a time when my job could be summarised as getting paid more to achieve less.
They say never meet your heroes, perhaps the same is true for working in policy areas. An advocate for sustainability and protecting the environment, I was excited to join DEFRA and work on a programme seeking to improve how the government disseminates information and educates the public about air quality.
Unfortunately – and as I quickly discovered navigating layers of middlemen involved in my hiring – this is a deeply dysfunctional organisation. Trying to exit their offices in Bristol to get some lunch was like a scene from Brazil, The Thick of It and Fawlty Towers combined, but there were plenty of other embarrassing, unintentionally comedic examples I could mention. A poorly conducted service assessment – during which I was asked why our prototype wasn’t optimised for search engines – turned out to be entirely pointless as the new service would be canned just a few days later.
In a team overrun by architects, and in a programme frustrated by indecision and politicking, I spent 5 months working with my head in my hands. There’s something to be said for perseverance, but facing 6 weeks of well-paid thumb twiddling while the senior leadership team decided what not to do next – and inspired by Kate Raworth speaking about only pushing on doors that open – I threw in the towel and got on a train.
I wrote a number of posts about my train trip around Italy, so I’ll save reposting my thoughts here besides restating my desire to spend more time in Germanic parts of Europe in 2024. I returned from Nuremberg in October but part of me is still there, enjoying the language, architecture and culture.
As I look back on another year of travel, I’m glad that most trips resulted in a blog post: Birmingham’s disappearing brutalism, Turin’s Olympic leftovers, Milan’s majestic chapels, beauty to be found closer to home along the South Downs.
In September I joined some former colleagues from the DfE to work on another pointless transformation exercise within government. While that may or may not be true – we’ll soon find out – regular trips to London and working in an office alongside familiar and friendly faces means I can say that, from a work perspective, the year ended better than it started. And with a few more ghosts slain for good measure.
While my day job was one of fruitless frustration, I found joy in the many side projects I tended to. Perhaps too much.
Indiekit saw a few updates as I slowly move towards something I deem worthy of being declared 1.0; scope creep and other distractions prevented that from happening this year. I did however scratch a long festering itch by proposing a set of icons to represent the different IndieWeb building blocks, which seemed to go down well with the community.
Distractions included rebuilding my website using Lume, a static site generator built on Deno. As that rebuild languished, I ported a few improvements and changes over to the current site, one of which I wrote about, others not making it beyond the drafts folder. I’ll undoubtedly spend more time on my website next year; perhaps I’ll unveil a new design and publish those posts.
One project that did ship, and in the space of a few hours, was Classnames. Unfortunately it got picked up by Hacker News where the uninformed yet highly opinionated displayed their typical levels of ignorance (my second appearance this year, I must be doing something wrong). Besides that, I enjoyed the challenge of a one-day build and having ‘finished’ a side project.
Towards the end of the year, and with one eye on completing Section III, I rebuilt Bradshaw’s Guide. Untouched in 5 years, this turned out to be an exercise in discovering how much the web has progressed, with numerous hacks and workarounds able to be removed.
Indeed, I’ve spent the last few months refactoring side projects to use web components. I’ve never been more excited by a web technology since learning about CSS and web standards at the turn of the century. While others choose to market bullshit ‘upgrades’ like web3, OG Web 1.0 – iterated and improved over 30 years – continues to be a brilliantly performant, resilient, accessible and expressive toolset you can use to build delightfully digital things with, if treated with respect.
Proven technologies were easily lost in a year when attention focused on artificial intelligence (emphasis on ‘artificial’). With lines drawn between artists and technologists, I find myself increasingly on the side of the former, somewhat resentful that the materials and products of my profession are continually co-opted by charlatans who wield them to ill effect.
I like to think back to the opening ceremony of the London 2012 and the pride I felt seeing fellow creatives elevate the national mood, with Tim Berners-Lee’s invention being celebrated, not bemoaned. Near that same spot a decade later, art and technology are again being combined to bring ABBA to the stage and entertain people in breathtaking technicolour.
That’s how I intend to go in to the New Year, avoiding illusionary and artificially inflated distractions and instead seeking out proven technologies and tools that allow me to be creative; maybe spending more time behind a lens than before a screen and exploring a world beyond pixels and code.
I said much the same last year.
Over 4 hour-long episodes, Keanu Reeves tells the story of Brawn GP, a Formula 1 team previously owned by Honda who, dealing with the fallout of the financial crisis, decided to exit the sport and shutter the team.
This decision couldn’t have come at a more unfortunate time. An aerodynamicist had discovered a loophole in the sporting regulations and the team believed that an innovative double diffuser would give them a significant advantage over their competitors going into the 2009 season.
Unable to find a buyer and with few other options available Team Principle Ross Brawn and CEO Nick Fry bought the team for £1 while securing a £70 million continuation fund from Honda. Engines would come from Mercedes but needed significant engineering to fit inside a chassis designed for Honda’s powertrain. They entered the 2009 season with a constrained budget, a reduced team and little room for errors on track.
That they ended up winning the Constructors’ World Championship – the only team to do so in their first season in the sport – is as surprising now as it was then.
Meanwhile, the team’s two drivers waged a fierce battle to see who could win the Drivers’ World Championship.
Jenson Button made the most of Brawn GP’s early dominance, winning 6 of the first 7 races. However, unable to win his home Grand Prix at Silverstone, a collapse in confidence followed. This allowed his Brazilian teammate Rubens Barrichello to close the gap with the penultimate race weekend at Interlagos deciding the championship outcome. Rubens qualified in pole position with Jenson managing a lowly P14.
With locals cheering his teammate and pranksters forcing Jenson to pass under ladders in the hopes of giving him bad luck, a galvanising pre-race pep-talk from his father propelled him to place fifth, ahead of Rubens and with enough points to seal the championship. Cue a poor rendition of Queen’s We Are the Champions from Jenson’s BGP 001 car.
I remember this season with great fondness. I grew up watching Formula 1, but given the dominance of Michael Schumacher and ITV’s coverage interrupted by adverts my attention drifted elsewhere.
But in 2009, coverage returned to the BBC with all 17 races broadcast live and uninterrupted. With the story of Brawn GP playing out alongside Jenson’s attempt to win the championship, and in a season with six different race winners, it was impossible not to become hooked.
By the end of that year, Mercedes had bought the team and the drivers had moved to other teams. Brawn GP was no more. Over, before it had even begun.
The release of this documentary coincided with the inaugural running of the Las Vegas Grand Prix, inviting comparisons of how the sport has changed during the intervening 14 years.
Today, live coverage is firmly behind a paywall. Not that there’s much reason to watch; the results this season have been as inevitable as they were in Schumacher’s day. Max Verstappen won 19 of 22 races, the greatest proportion of wins in a season. A commendable achievement, were it not for his dislikable personality.
Verstappen spent much of his week in Las Vegas criticising a race that Formula 1 had spent US$700 to stage, demonstrating a typical lack of grace, gratitude or humility. Only once he won did he declare it a success. It’s hard to enjoy the renewed popularity of this sport when it’s blighted not just by his dominance, but by his sulky and churlish demeanour too.
Putting the three-time world champion to one side, Liberty Media are proving to be fine custodians of the sport, increasing its audience while pleasing their shareholders. Looking to build on the success of the Netflix documentary Drive to Survive and grow an audience in the United States, a glitzy race in Las Vegas was as inevitable as its eventual race winner.
Fortunately for Formula 1, after initial teasing trouble thanks to a dislodged drain cover, Las Vegas delivered an entertaining race in its own right – the lead changing multiple times – with many declaring it the best race of the season.
But for all the supposed spectacle of seeing Formula 1 cars race along Las Vagas Boulevard, on television, the track looked like that of any other night race: long straights of illuminated dull grey tarmac enclosed by concrete and catch-fencing.
Were it not for gambling-related puns throughout the commentary, this race could have been held anywhere.
And so we await next season. McLaren enjoyed a late resurgence, its lead driver Lando Norris securing second place six times. Mercedes had a worse season than last year yet still finished second, largely thanks to Lewis Hamilton’s consistency. The dream of a compelling, competitive season – potentially with a British team and driver spearheading it – is alive once more.
However, with the regulations unchanged – Red Bull turned their attention to next year’s car in the summer – and with Max showing no signs of weakness, it may be an impossible dream.
In the final episode of the Brawn documentary Andrew Shovlin, Button’s race engineer, said he’d spent his career chasing the feeling he had in 2009 only to realise it’s impossible, that it was a once-in-a-lifetime event.
As a spectator, it’s hard not to reach the same conclusion.
As you’ll see, I score pretty highly on my dependence on the ‘default’ default apps, and so the less said about my reliance on Apple’s offerings, the better.
CONTRIBUTING file that states ‘Ha ha, nope’.Using this verbose and complex meta syntax (that offers little over what can already be achieved with documentation, commenting and JSDoc) is nauseating gatekeeping.
The sooner this ludicrous, frustrating and wasteful fad passes, the better. Fuck TypeScript, and all those who perpetuate it.
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