| personal website | https://simonbc.com |
| jottit | https://jottit.org |
| tinypost | https://tinypost.blog |
Simon B. Carstensen
@simoncarstensen
- 19 Followers
- 36 Following
- 46 Posts
Rebuilding Jottit, a tool for simple web publishing I originally built with Aaron Swartz in 2007. Trying to bring a little of the old web spirit back.
Andy BaioZe Frank's The Show was self-hosted QuickTime videos on a blog with comments and an RSS feed. A community forum, wiki, and series of interactive web pages tied it all together. Social media was a bunch of blogs linking to each other. Facebook opened to everyone in September of that year, Google bought YouTube in November, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone in January 2007. Twitter blew up at SXSW in March and iPhone came out in June, the beginning of the end for the dominant open social web.
Self-expression matters deeply in the IndieWeb community, and for good reason. But customization easily becomes complexity. How much is too much?
I landed on two settings for Tinypost: light or dark, plus an accent color. The accent runs through your links, your subscribe button, your whole site. Enough to feel like yours. Not enough to turn into a site builder. Hopefully :) https://tinypost.blog #tinypost #indieweb #blogging
I landed on two settings for Tinypost: light or dark, plus an accent color. The accent runs through your links, your subscribe button, your whole site. Enough to feel like yours. Not enough to turn into a site builder. Hopefully :) https://tinypost.blog #tinypost #indieweb #blogging
Redesigned the blogroll on Tinypost today. Single column now, sorted by latest activity, with favicons pulled from RSS feeds. The blogroll also moved into the profile header as a row of stacked avatars linking to the full list. Much more compact than the old two-column grid. https://tinypost.blog #tinypost #indieweb #blogging
I just redesigned the Tinypost signup process and this is how a newly created blog on Tinypost now looks like. #jottit #indieweb #blogging
I made another attempt at getting some attention on Hacker News yesterday, but fell flat again. 5 points and 2 comments. Moving on now and betting on organic growth from there on.
I redesigned Jottit's URLs. Instead of yourname.jottit.org, pages now live at jottit.org/@username/page-slug. It's a small change but it shifts the whole feel: less "here's a site" and more "here's a person writing something." My own page now lives at https://jottit.org/@sbc #jottit #indieweb
Finally posted Jottit to Hacker News today. Was genuinely nervous about it. Spent ages on the wording.
90 minutes later: zero points.
I'm laughing at myself. All that build-up for nothing. Going to try again tomorrow.
I had a small revelation about Jottit recently. I'd been thinking of it as a site builder: create pages, add a menu, set up a subdomain. Then someone on micro.blog just created a post and shared it with me, and it clicked.
Jottit is for putting stuff on the web. You create a page, share it. Claim it and it shows up on your profile. More like a blog than a site builder. So I spent the weekend redesigning Jottit.
https://jottit.org
#indieweb #openweb #blogging #smallweb
Jottit is for putting stuff on the web. You create a page, share it. Claim it and it shows up on your profile. More like a blog than a site builder. So I spent the weekend redesigning Jottit.
https://jottit.org
#indieweb #openweb #blogging #smallweb
I wrote about loss, the old web, and why I rebuilt Jottit. https://simonbc.com/rebuilding-jottit #jottit #indieweb
