Tag: IndieWeb

User Interface to Indicate Posting Activity

User Interface to Indicate Posting Activity by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Boffo Socko)

Today I saw a note that led me to the Internet Archive which I know has recently had a redesign. I’m not sure if the functionality I saw was part of this redesign, but it’s pretty awesome. I’m not sure quite what to call this sort of circular bar chart given what it does, but circular widthmap seems vaguely appropriate.

Instead of using color gradations to indicate a relative number of posts, the UI is measuring things via width in ever increasing concentric circles. The innermost circle indicates the root domain and successive levels out add additional paths from my site. Because I’m using dated archive paths, there’s a level of circle by year (2019, 2018, 2017, etc.) then another level outside that by months (April 2019, March 2019, etc.), and finally the outermost circle which indicates individual posts. As a result, the width of a particular year or month indicates relatively how active that time frame was on my website (or at least how active Archive.org thinks it was based on its robot crawler.)

I enjoyed the idea of these heatmaps and charting. I added the sparkline graph last week after I saw them on Chris's website. I may create a separate web site page to keep these. I don't know how useful they are, but they are just cool. I would also love a way to display some of the JetPack graphs.

These are the yearly JetPack stats from 2010, the year Automattic first offered the, to 2019.

2013 was the best year for this website.

But I get more "responses" that I did in earlier years. I suspect more of these are from semantic responses on other platforms, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram since. It's, and the time I started using some of the IndieWeb software.

Below is the Internet Archive graph for 2018, compared to 2012. Traffic has fallen off.

2013 Internet Archive Circular Widthmaps
Graph
2018 Internet Archive Circular Widthmaps

You Can't Start the Revolution from the Web Country Club

You Can't Start the Revolution from the Country Club by Anil Dash

The current fashion amongst alpha geeks is to reinvent many of the building blocks of the social web. Given that I’ve been obsessed with that particular intersection of technology and culture for a dozen years, I should be unequivocal in my excitement. But this time it’s complicated. Because we’re shutting some people out.
There are a few philosophical underpinnings that have informed the development of blogging and social media since their inception. These core values of the social web can be summed up as three simple goals. It’s important to understand them because they are what’s enabled the social web to be so radically transformative of society and culture.

...

But I’ve been through this phase in the web’s evolution before, alongside some of the same folks who are building these tools today. The last time, the simple tools we all built exceeded our most outlandish predictions of their social impact in every regard. What matters this time is that we learn from what we got wrong before. And we won’t kick ourselves for having bugs in the software, or for not being compliant enough with the technical preferences of a small, geeky crowd. We will regret if we just give power to ourselves and to the existing institutions again.

I think Anil Dash is prescient. His post is from 2012.

The hyperbole around micro.blog and mastodon etc. bothers me. The cycle continues.