Posts tagged "web":

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I'm not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don't like, particularly instance blocking.

How aesthetics influences my use of software and the web

It's hard to admit it, but if I look at my consumption habits on the internet, and of my use of software in general, I am definitely influenced by the way a site or an application looks. I will tend to prefer those that look attractive to me. I can point to various examples.

2022-07-13

I have been working at a snail's pace at the Hubzilla installation, with flagging enthusiasm as I'm not really convinced of the need for it. Zap would have been a better fit, but Hubzilla has better instructions. I just had a look at Friendica; which I once used, though never installed. I suppose that's another a candidate. There's no platform that really wows me. I have always thought that the best way to use social networks would be a desktop client like pidgin. Android clients exist, but I see nothing similar in Linux. Anyhow, I still need a server.

2022-07-02-new-server

After my recent problems with the phone company's new fiber network and its restrictive modem, I decided to look for a VPS for my hosting needs.

2022-06-22 Fiber | Israel-Palestine

Yesterday we were connected to the fiber infrastructure and, hopefully will receive more robust internet connection, though that flimsy wire hanging flapping about among the bushes, leaves me feeling rather doubtful. In the newer section of the village, the cables are buried; in the older section where we live, we depend on wires and poles, which occasionally get hit and pulled down by passing trucks. The phone company technicians are known for their resourcefulness. For years, our connection was dependent on cables twisted together inside an old coke bottle on our roof. I suppose the technician didn't have a proper connection box handy on his several visits.

2022-06-01 NGINX

Continuing my server odyssey, I managed to set up NGINX, eventually, after looking at several options for alternatives to Apache. Although I was drawn to Hiawatha (mentioned in yesterday's post), there were no current binaries available for Debian (the directory and repository came up blank). It would have been possible to compile it from source, but the instructions were long and complicated and its own documentation "strongly advises" using a binary.

2022-05-30 Wikis and web servers

I've been looking again at several aspects of the site. On the weekend I spent several hours trying to set up Epicyon, which is intended to be a simple social networking application based on the activity pub protocol, created by Bob Mottram. I previously had partial success setting up Epicyon, under Mottram's Freedombone (now called Libraserver, I think). It didn't work very well, then, but there is reason to hope that it is more mature now. Be that as it may, I failed in my attempts. Not because of Epicyon but because the instructions for setting it up are geared for the NGINX web server, and what I have installed is Apache. There's a method of installing NGINX as a reverse proxy for Apache, and that's what I was trying. By the end of several hours what I had was a server that served neither through NGINX nor Apache. So I shrugged my shoulders and disabled NGINX. Now the blog works again, happily.

2022-4-26 - olives, loquats | dealing with complexity | web fonts

The olives are in bloom, meaning many people will have allergies. It looks like there are many flowers this year: does that mean there will be many fruits? (Olives are famously biennial bearing).

2022-04-22 - Hubzilla | state of the web

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links - such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla's bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

2022-03-08 - Photos | Big Tech | Registration Walls | Telegram

I posted a new photo album from our walk last Saturday.