Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)Roam Research should really be going the Zebra route and not the VC funding route. If the 11 person company is truly self-supporting with its current user base and there’s so much upside for growth, they’d be far better off to keep that value internally.
The only reason for VC funding is if they…
Happy to be in the process of moving my personal sites to a server at GreenHost. I used to be on cloudvault.me which was excellent but disappeared about 3 months ago… I chucked everything over to Digital Ocean to get it back up again. But keen to get off.
GreenHost has stellar environmental and ethical creds, and really not that far off the cost of a basic DO droplet.
Salman Ansari has a nice video here discussing a couple of things he’s been pondering about his digital garden.
I like his use case of pulling his newsletter back in to his garden. I do the same with my microblog stream. I think it makes perfect sense to do this – gardens are where we cultivate our thoughts over time, but streams are a great (the best?) source for the seeds for the garden.
He also talks about pulling his notes back in to his main homepage. I’ve been thinking about this too. I have two separate sites at the moment, https://doubleloop.net and https://commonplace.doubleloop.net, that look kind of different and feel a bit disparate. It’s not that big of a deal. They are different rooms in my home on the web, so they don’t need to look identical – but it might make sense for people to find them both via the same front door and hallway…
This is a good article on digital gardens in the MIT Technology Review.
Here’s a nice quote:
“Gardens … lie between farmland and wilderness,” he wrote. “The garden is farmland that delights the senses, designed for delight rather than commodity.”
As strypey points out though… the article is basically describing personal websites.
My personal site is a repository for my memories, experiences, feelings, recipes, tips, photos, and more. […] it is an ever-growing extension of myself that I have total control over, my mirror and memory aid. I want to be able to look back at this when I’m eighty and thank my past self for surfacing things that I otherwise would have forgotten.
Hmm, reading this and also Amy Hoy’s post recently (How the Blog Broke the Web) is making me think a bit different about how I refer to my site(s). Think I’ll think of it a bit more as having a personal site, rather than framing it as I have a ‘blog’ or a ‘wiki’. Both of which are great technologies, but I want to be a little bit freer about how I think about what my home on the web is and how I structure it.
he chided me by saying that he didn’t really understand why so many leftists seemed to think of themselves as pessimists. “After all, we all do incredibly, insanely optimistic things all the time”.
– The Opposite of a Cynic: David Graeber, 1961-2020 | Novara Media
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world,” Graeber once wrote, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
– The anarchist: How David Graeber became the left’s most influential thinker
Interesting thought on how having generic tools for publishing lost us some of the fun of hand-crafted homepages.
once you are given a tool that operates effortlessly — but only in a certain way — every choice that deviates from the standard represents a major cost.
I hear that – publishing through WordPress got me lots of IndieWeb goodness, but I feel a bit restricted in other ways sometimes. That said, you definitely should have tooling available for people who can’t/don’t want to hand-roll everything.