Musings

August 2022
  August 14
    I stumbled across this subdomain which hosts my Drummer blog. It made me log in to Drummer again. Boy, the outliner feels good. But I also know I can't make it my primary home.
January 2022
  January 1
    A new year, a lot of plans. But I am not certain what and how I want to execute it. With too many things churning in my mind, I must clear the haze first. What is it that I want to do? Some coding projects. A lot of writing ideas. Many more things waiting to be categorised. Hmm.
December 2021
  December 26
    I have many ideas floating around for my side projects. I had put brakes on them because I thought I was not spending enough time ruminating on stuff. My problem once I get deep into the coding, I just stop myself. I will stretch myself into nights, early mornings. Every routine goes for a toss. So, am always wary of starting any side projects. I guess not any more.
  December 16
    I feel I need to relook at the timeline on Twitter, there are very few posts here that I have any thoughts on. I am not following the right set of people. Few I am following because they follow me back. Few I do because every one follows them. I don't want any pressure any more. In its current form, the timeline is of no use to me. Time to reset the following list.
  December 15
    Just a week into putting a "Reply via Email" option below the posts on blog (sample), I have already received some pretty good responses to the posts. Email as the medium continues to attract people for communication. It's simple and needs no additional sign-up, which typically most commenting systems do. A wonderful experience!
  December 11
    Mission accomplished. Places I write at consolidated. Ghost droplet shut down.
  December 10
    The concept of instant outline in Drummer is so brilliant. I was unaware only because I never caught it updating live. Today I did and mind-was-blown. I can't put my finger to it exactly, but there can be so many tricky challenges this can address. What I find specially praiseworthy is how simple, uncomplicated it is behind the scene.
    At times, I think too much of the stuff I put online. Making sure things are correct. Links are correct. There are no mistakes. Or migrations don't break any links to my posts. I need not, but I do. It won't be healthy for blogging, right?
    Changing Blogging hosts I use
      I have migrated all my newsletter posts to Micro.blog now. I am not yet going to schedule any individual posts for delivery. I will do it once I am confident of how the system works. My hope is Manton manages to find and fix the pending bugs, if any. Till that time, I will hold on to posting, but not delivering.
      This gives me an opportunity to get rid of my Ghost deployment. It's a great system. But ridding it off means one less platform to maintain, something I have no interest in doing. It was great while it lasted.
      I have anyway got two systems for posting. Micro.blog has started supporting more and more features that I need. It can become my primary platform -- not that it wasn't. But with newsletters, it caters even my secondary requirement.
      Drummer being absolutely frictionless, is my system of choice for thoughts not yet fully baked.
  December 9
    I have never used Instagram. I was never a big user of Facebook. I didn't use Snapchat. Or TikTok. I have to use WhatsApp because I have family and friends using the platform. I participate in the Micro.blog timeline by choice -- it's the warmest community out there. I use Twitter because.. well there is no one reason. But I have always used it from early days and it helps me at times with the brands support teams.
    Deleting nodes shouldn't work when ruffled!
  December 8
    Why do I have a newsletter? Why does the medium of content delivery even exist? What is it about an email that one can't get from RSS? Is the problem RSS readers? Not wanting to own/install/use a new application? Time to think.
    I like write.as as a platform. It is very clean. But it unnecessarily complicates every aspect of blogging by making it its own service. Drafts is a service. Snaps is a service. Reader is a service. Soon replies would also be a service. I don't get the point behind that. Saving grace is all are add-ons once you purchase the pro plan. Not that I am going to.
    Thoughts on Tagging Interfaces
      I always find it fascinating to look at the way different blogging systems handle tags. For most, it is a particular field, a metadata around a post. That is so mundane, plain. It's high time we stopped thinking of tags as that.
      Why do we need tags? We need them so that we can group together posts that talk about an idea. When you ask it as a field while publishing, I have already written about the post. Let me decide what the post is about when I am writing them.
      A natural way we have accepted to that is through the way of #hashtags on Twitter. Include some identifier and let your blogging engine convert the linked word to a tag. I love this. It is natural to highlight a word while you are writing it. For example, I like to include tags for my #meta posts like this where I am talking about tools around blogging.
      But doing so is costly for blogging engines and many prefer not to do it. You have to process it post publishing and pull out the tags and update the backend. Write.as does it well. I wish more systems did it.
      How does this help the readers though? Sure, hashtags as part of body makes it easy for the author. But for a reader, displaying the tags as part of the body can be distracting if redirected to regular list interfaces. But I don't think there is a simpler solution. Another way is how Dave Winer did it on Scripting News (looks to be broken now) where he opens a dialog in which you can swipe through the posts. A nice interface to be frank. I would love to see other such design patterns for displaying grouped posts.
      What would I want? Add tags as hashtags, elements in the body used for grouping post publishing. When a tag is clicked on, don't redirect to a list - rather display the list along with post in some manner.
  December 7
    I have decided that I will stop maintaining the Ghost blog now. It is a wonderful system that I have no use for any more. Micro.blog serves most of my needs. So, where all do I blog? It is going to be one less place now. How long will it stay that way? No idea. There are more blogging engines being launched than there are bloggers, I guess.
    Micro.blog now supports email newsletters. I really like how it is implemented, it can email every long-form posts and or a weekly/monthly digest. Currently, it is either-or. But I wish it would soon be both - long-form posts as they happen, digest for microposts. Well, it was an easy upgrade to premium for me with this feature in.
  December 6
    Yesterday, I wrote about the idea for a service that helps people manage their static files separately. I got some feedback and it is great. I also got some interest, which is wonderful. But I also have no idea at this point whether this would make sense as a service or just let everyone host for their own. I would have to answer that for myself first.
    I get rid of the posts from the past month from my outline at the start of a month. I wonder if I can keep those outlines as public outlines in Drummer. I do not want it to impact working of the Old School blog in any manner. Time to find out.
    Yesterday has been pretty productive in terms of thought archive and feedback around it. A lot of churning happened within. A lot of feedback received outside. I can't speak more than that.
  December 5
    I backed up all my November posts to Github as per a regular monthly ritual now. The `blog.opml` is back to being clean again. I like it this way. I am so glad this option exists, otherwise this outline would be unmanageable.
    I envy all the folks who write with extreme clarity. They don't feel a need to explain what they write. They write enough words, and only those. No less, no more. And yet the reader in me connects with the emotion. Derek Sivers is one such writer.
    Idea: Hosting Service for Static Blog Contents
      I want to build a service that serves static contents for independent blogs. For example, serve all images for your blog posts.
      Why? Well, every CMS or blogging engine handles images differently. So, no wonder that images break first when you migrate between these backends. And there is no easy way to fix them. Benefit of a separate engine for images is that you don't need to change the image links once you migrate. They stay the same in the post.
      I have built one for myself, I use it here. And at other places. So, I have a working backend. I need to put effort/need help in building the front-end.
  December 2
    I have started using PublicFolder application again - the recent change to not delete a file from S3 was an important update for me. Without that, the app kept deleting the files that I added from a different machine. However, because this is not a default behaviour, the first run of the updated app did delete the files which were added earlier. I should have made the change to the `config` file first. But I forgot the path to the data directory. I have tagged it now. Sigh! Anyway what's lost is lost, now. I am not going back.
  December 1
    Thoughts on Web3
      I don't fully understand what's Web3 yet. I have read a few posts about it, but they didn't make complete sense to me. All I know is there is blockchain involved in some way. So here I am digging [a bit](https://www.wired.com/story/web3-gavin-wood-interview/) [more](https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-is-web3/) and captured my thoughts as I learned along.
      * Web 1.0 was decentralised, with individual ownership and control over their internet entities, mostly static webpages. You visited those when you found them. Web 2.0 was an era of centralisation ruled by closed platforms. Web3 intends to bring us back to the decentralised, based on blockchain.
      * Was Web 2.0 all about centralisation and failure of regulatory bodies to regulate these central entities? That view feels confined by the assumptions that centralisation is what we were after in Web 2.0. I am not convinced that is the case.
      * Gavin Wood coined the term Web3 in 2014. But his pitch for the existence of this iteration is philosophical. Definition and enforcing of trust through technology as complicated as blockchain is not going to be easy. I am still not convinced of how the tech makes things simpler for the common users of the internet.
      * Web3 needs all users to understand programming? That doesn't sound right. What it might mean is possibly whoever wants freedom is expected to own the relevant aspects via a bit programming. But then how's that different from hosting your own website today?
      * *A dating app through which you can send someone virtual flower* shouldn't be the showcase of Web3. That's such a limited view again. What's powerful about it? It doesn't get me all excited for this future.
      * A key idea that gets lost in all the philosophical pitch is peer-to-peer nature. Each node in the Internet decides what it hosts and serves that. The reference [image below from Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-is-web3/) denotes this well.
      ![Each node in Web3 network decides what they server](https://s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/static.amitgawande.com/images/2021/web3-nodes.png)
      * A Decentralised Identifier (DID), an individual public key, that establishes one's identity online is a powerful concept. Proving you are registered to a college by sharing the DID the college provided is a lot more valuable use case than the online dating that Grant Wood narrates.
      * [Ethereum](https://ethereum.org/en/what-is-ethereum/) and [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/#how) are the open protocols that Web3 aims to build upon. Both are pretty core to the blockchain and cryptography.
      I believe the below condensed summarization captures the why of Web3 pretty well.
      > The early Web was static. Then Web 2.0 came to provide interactiveness and service we use daily at the cost of centralisation. Web3 is a trend that tries to challenge this. With distributed networks built on open protocols, users of the web are empowered to participate.
      Even though I have a better understanding now of *what* we are targeting with Web3, the *how* part is still an unknown to me. As [Robin Sloan notes](https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/notes-on-web3/), we have seen the promise of Web 2.0 - "the exchange of data in modular, permissive ways between platforms" - was unattained.
      Being "an era of centralisation" was never a goal of Web 2.0. But the necessity to make the dream of interactions across nodes more approachable, accessible and fathomable for the non-technical users on the Internet birthed the centralised platforms. Without them, the growth we see wouldn't have been the reality. How do we make sure Web3 doesn't follow a similar path?