Category: IndieWeb

Cornerstones Part II

~ Ryan

I cannot count how many times I have set myself up for failure. Many times it’s rooted in my firm devotion to procrastination. So often I’ve found myself in a situation that could have been made infinitely easier if only I’d done something different earlier. In these moments of clarity, a single thought echoes through the distance of time.

“Past Me is a dick.”

I’m guessing I’m not alone here. We likely all have these moments. But today, I was treated to a nice little surprise. Past Me had actually done something useful! I know, nobody is more surprised than I am.

I started the day fully prepared to draft up and post some cornerstone pages on my WordPress site, Due By Friday.

For some backstory: this is a site I’ve self-hosted for a few years, and have done very little with. I had big plans for it to be a place where I could document projects I’d work on every week. It ended up being a place where I’d log in once a year or so and post an apology for not keeping up with it, and promising to do better that year. I know you know how this goes.

Anyways, I looked at the site and discovered, to my surprise more than anyone’s, that I’d actually set up some cornerstones already. And not only were they there, but they’d been there since New Year’s Eve, 2015! Thinking back to 2015, I am certain I had no idea what a “cornerstone page” was. Yet here they were, already waiting for me to recognize their awesomeness.

I’d planned on setting up three pages. An About page, a Contact page, and a /now page. What I found was an About page, a Contact page, and a Projects page.

So two out of three done already! Good job, Past Me!

I reviewed the About and Contact pages, and decided they’re good to go as they are for now. The Projects page was written mostly to serve as an archive of past completed projects. Sadly, this page was devoid of any such completions. But that’s okay. It’s not like I haven’t done things. I just never took the time to write about them and keep the site up to date.

I decided to keep the Projects page to serve as an archive, and I set up a /now page to show what projects are currently being worked on. I updated the Projects page to provide a pointer for where one could find current projects, and that was that.

For me, the best part was that I was able to do all this, post new pages and update older pages, all within MarsEdit. Which is great, because the WordPress admin interface makes me bleed from my eyeballs a bit.

This is actually one of the big reasons why I never did much with this old WordPress site. The admin panel is such a friction point that it would negate any forward momentum I may have had any time I actually wanted to write something. Between lost text from a bad browser refresh to being lost in settings hell because I wanted to tweak a thing, I rarely found any kind of flow when working within the WordPress admin page.

Once again, this is where I’m finding MarsEdit to be a lifesaver for me. There’s just enough and not a bit more. I can write, I can tag and categorize, and I can post with one click. For me, that’s the sweet spot. I know everyone has their favorite tool, and good on you to everyone who has found their own, whatever it may be. But if you’re still looking for one, give MarsEdit a try.

So yeah, that’s this week’s goal essentially done! Tomorrow I’ll post a bunch of links I found useful throughout the week while working on this. And Sunday will be another weekly roundup.

No clue what next week will bring. I’ll think about it over the weekend. But I’m open to suggestions, and now you all have a way to send them. Just check out my Contact page 🙂

Laying Down the Cornerstones

~ Ryan

I’ll keep this one brief. Spent the day drafting up and ultimately posting the three cornerstone pages that I set out to do. Now I have an About page, a Contact page, and a /now page.

And I’m really happy with it! They’re just a start, but it was incredibly easy to get it done. I’ve been using Daniel Jalkut’s MarsEdit throughout this project, and imagine my delight when I discovered that you can draft and publish pages from MarsEdit just as easily as you can blog posts! Such an excellent piece of software that does one specific thing better than anything else out there.

One fun fact: I’m actually working on this personal website project across two different sites currently. I’ve got a Micro.blog-hosted site as well as a self-hosted WordPress site. I’ve been cross-posting to both sites (also easy thanks to MarsEdit) just to see how I like the outcome on each platform. I don’t know if I’ll ultimately choose one over the other, or if I’ll use them both but differently, or what. Right now I’m still just getting my sea legs.

Today I worked on setting up these three pages only on the Micro.blog instance. And it really was so easy. The only glitch I came across in the whole process was when I was putting together a test page, just to see how it’d work.

I drafted and published the test page through MarsEdit, and it showed up as expected on the Micro.blog site. Then I deleted the page through MarsEdit. But when I went back to my M.b page, I noticed that the Test page never went away. So I went into my admin portal, only to discover that the Test page wasn’t there. It was now some strange ephemeral ghost, only showing itself on the published site but unable to be altered.

I scratched my head over it all day. Ultimately, I decided to see if I could draft and publish another identical Test page at the same URL via MarsEdit. And it worked. Then I made a point to delete the page within the M.b admin portal. And that did the trick. So for anyone out there who may have or may in the future run into the same problem, here’s your fix. Learn from me!

Tomorrow I’ll work on getting the same pages up on the WordPress site. And of course I’ll let you all know how it goes. Feel free in the meantime to check out the new pages and let me know what you think. Because you can now. Because I’ve made a Contact page. 🙂

Down the IndieWeb Rabbit Hole

~ Ryan

So turns out, there are a LOT of great sources of inspiration on how to go about setting up some cornerstone pages out there.

I’ve spent most of the day happily falling down the IndieWeb rabbit hole once again. There were points where I completely forgot what I was even supposed to be doing, instead just enjoying all the awesome websites people have set up and call home. It’s honestly reassuring to see this much excellent effort being put into something as simple as a homepage.

And all the different colors! And fonts! And just unique approaches to how a website can look and be built. Some are simple templates, and still beautiful. Others are complex hand-rolled elaborate displays of CSS mastery, and just as equally awesome.

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me.

I know that I won’t get there overnight. I’m only trying to start right now. But man, there is some great stuff out there that I’d love to be able to do myself.

By far, the best starting point I found was via (of course) another personal website, ken.fyi. Specifically, this piece about building cornerstones, and the various options that are most commonly found across the web.

I mean, just go read that page. It’s so inspiring! So many great links to follow and examples to see and ways to make an afternoon completely disappear before your very eyes.

Reading the list of popular cornerstone pages out there, and following the links to all the great examples, I kept in the back of my head the constant question: which ones should I use? What should I build? And the voice that resides in the back of my head kept shouting back, “all of them, obviously! And stop storing your questions in my living room!”

And while all of them are great ideas (a Quotes page?!? Are you kidding me with how awesome that sounds and how much fun that would be to put together???), I think I’ve limited my starting options down to three.

I’m thinking I’ll start with an About page, because that seems to be a thing worth having. And it’s the page I find myself visiting most frequently on other people’s homepages.

Next I’ll put together a Contact page. I hesitate here, because I generally cringe at the idea of other people contacting me out of the blue. But that’s partially the whole point of this, isn’t it? Putting oneself out there and engaging with the world. So yeah, there’ll be a Contact page.

Lastly, I really like the Now pages I’ve been seeing. So I think I’ll try and throw one of those together as well. Seems like a great way of sharing things that are worth your time. Or a good way to explain why you have no free time. Or just to mark the passage of time. Whatever it does, I like the ones I’ve seen so I’m going to try it out.

And that is the goal for the next couple of days! Once I get the hang of it and have worked out how I want things to look, I’m sure there will be further expansion. But this is where I’ll start. Tomorrow.