Category: Internet Life

The Legitimate Web

I was watching a reel on Instagram from Martin Lewis (for the non UK lot – a very trustworthy financial journalist, campaigner and consumer rights activist). I’ve attached it below but it’s about one of his biggest gripes – online scam advertisments.

Away from his message (which I 100% support), I picked up on something that I found interesting – he calls non-social media “The Legitimate Web”.

I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but given the state of the internet and how things work, I like that phrase. Obviously, people can set up a blog or a forum and scam folks, but on the whole it’s a lot harder without the machines of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube behind you. Set something up, pump out ads, try to catch some poor unsuspecting granny to scam out of their life savings.

With a bit of work, you seem a bit more legitimate. You create your own vision to present, and invite people in – be it a blog or (in my case) professional WordPress development. It shows you are who you say you are, and therefore probably going to be around a lot more.

Doing the Standard.Site Thing

After seeing Andy Bell talk about it on his site, I’ve gone ahead and added the ATMosphere plugin to the site to try and publish the site over the ATProtocol (which integrates with Bluesky) using standard.site.

If this works well, reacting to this post on BlueSky will mean that likes/boosts/comments will feed through to the WordPress posts. In theory. So I’ve just posted a quick post to test.

We’ll see how it works!

Warp Point

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Web directories eh? Now that SEO spammers have stopped spamming them, they’re becoming cool again, and I was impressed with Warp Point: a web directory dedicated to one of my favourite subjects: video games.

I particularly like that every listing has an 88×31 gif and the widget is really cool.

Sadly, I don’t think I write enough on Retro Garden, nor write too many video game posts here (I’ve got like 3 Pico 8 ideas in my drafts) to justify my listings there, but I’m writing and sharing the site here to remember to come back and add a few sites to my RSS feeder. Maybe could be better with a random order of listings by default? Rather than “Aarons amazing website!” appearing top?

Anyway, top work Wes & Matt!

Garbage for Humans

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Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines…

This blog post on Unstory is short, but really impactful. 5 paragraphs, and will never rank for anything, but it’s hit me more than any blog post I remember in the past few months.

I often think about short blog posts. I was an attendee of the school of a minimum of 300 words to rank in search engines. Often filling up space and therefore losing impact. But it ranks. Shit. But it ranks.

Unstory talks about how their writing disappears, so I was thinking of quoting the entirety here. But will just leave it on their blog, and encourage you to read it there. I feel eventually the link above will disappear. But so be it. Click the first post and read it there.

Bubbles

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Bubbles appeared in my analytics today and it could be a fun little project.

It seems to be a version of Hacker News for personal and those sites that are non commercial. In short, it curates a bunch of feeds from a bunch of sources (see them here) and then people can upvote on the posts they like, and over time the ones that aren’t liked are eventually hidden. It feels like a natural way to read a bunch of blogs dead quick. William Parker hit the nail on the head – “Anyone who’s ever tried to “do RSS right” knows the trap: You either miss everything or you drown in it. Bubbles sidesteps that completely.”.

The theory is that “the good stuff bubbles to the top”. At least that’s the plan. And I like it. So consider this blog post a way to support this project. Ben (the developer) want folks to keep using it, and I hope to keep doing so.

Top work!