By “development” I mean web development, a big part of my work.
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Manalo & White’s new site is live. Fraser Muggeridge studio designed the site, and Sam and I built it. It was a lovely one to work on. Their work is great, and the sheer quantity of images makes the homepage pretty darn effective.
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Might be at a turning point in my career. A lot of my friends are expressing similar feelings. I think it has something to do with working for nearly 10 years.
This frame of mind has made me really interested in manifestos. Not anything strident really, more purpose-driven lists that can help guide everyday decision-making. Here are a few manifesto-y links I’ve identified with recently.
I’ll try to add more here as I come across them. Who knows, maybe I’ll add my own some day.
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Last night was my third Agorama Server Co-op meet up in Rebecca’s Flat, a delightfully dilapidated space at Raven Row. I think it was actually the fifth though, I missed the last two due to illness which was a real bummer. The weekend jam sounded particularly great.
This particular meetup was more informal and a little smaller than usual. It ended up being a really nice, wandering conversation on the multifaceted possibilities of the distributed web, what it could look like.
The notes below are a sort of a prompt dump, snippets I wrote down at the time because I didn’t want to forget it or wanted to look in to it more. See all Server Co-op write-ups here.
Dark Crystal is now up and running on Patchbay (ssb client). Got Samsung funding, woohoo! Possible to create bot that receives shard? Think they’re trying to avoid that, the human element is kind of critical.
What about physical crypto? Microdots are worth checking out. Microdot tattoos?
Asked what ppl think about potential threat of quantum computing to modern cryptography methods, response was a little not as I expected (this is why I come to these things!). Personally I’ve been feeling a little tin-foil-hat-y, but general consensus from the other voices in the room seemed to be pretty ambivalent since the theory far outstrips the practicalities currently. Which is true, but it also just feels kind of like an arms race (particularly since it involves hardware / infrastructure). Whoever cracks it first wins the golden goose unless we can come up with cryptography that works against it. GP then mentioned the post-quantum crypto contest with NIST due to end pretty soon, looks pretty promising. I didn’t realise there was that much going on with quantum resistant algorithm research, so that makes me feel a bit better. I guess my concern is still there though, to a big degree. Banks, for example, are on notoriously crappy tech that is rarely overhauled. What of them, and the other institutions we rely on? Oh lord, and voting tech…
Got talking about what I’d been up to (not much, see first para…) and mentioned that I ultimately decided not to move my site on to Dat, partly due to scale issues w/ static site generators (read more on this) but more to do with the fact that I think I’d rather use Dat for something new and neato, rather than just repurpose something that already exists and is doing ok in it’s current form. Then we started talking about static site generators more generally and someone mentioned Pelican, which I hadn’t come across before. It’s written in Python and originally released in 2010 (!), so up there with Jekyll as one of the earlier static site generators.
HL demoed his mother-of-all-apps for us, it looks *so great*! Absolutely something I would use. Really excited to see where he takes it. I need to look in to Hypercore and Expo a bit more. The first I’d heard of, the second not so much. Apparently Expo is a cross platform app framework built around React Native. Ppl could not say enough good things about it and honestly, it does look fantastic. Particularly as a tool to dip your toe in to app waters, so to speak.
Towards the end of the demo, the conversation wound through lots of different topics. Blockchain, platforms vs aggregators, a bunch of CS history (need to read more about that…), the sustainability of open source, etc. The rest of this note details snippets from this part of the conversation that I need to look in to more.
Services / apps / platforms I’d like to look in to a bit:
TMYK
A reading list. (Some of these links are painful to open, some orgs really need to cool their jets on the pop-ups and trackers):
Some soundbites. These are paraphrased points made by others that I found super-relevant. Bits in square brackets are added by me for clarity:
So many distributed / decentralised web conversations get quasi-evangelical about how this or that tech will save the world. Why does it have to be winner takes it all? Different needs require different technologies.
We recognise biodiversity as a fundamental requirement of a healthy, thriving biosphere. Why don’t we champion technodiversity in the same way? Embrace the chaos.
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I’ve been spending a bunch of time on the Host site recently and just wrote up some thoughts about working with Netlify CMS and GitHub Pages on SB-PH’s tucked-away blog.
TL;DR
Though it’s an unusual setup for a client site, I like the stack and would consider using it again for a similar project.
Edit 23 Jan 2019
I just deployed some small fixes (force curly quotes via the smartify filter, prevent Cards from showing if no image), but the site doesn’t seem to be updating. It’s updated if I navigate to https://hostofleyton.com/index.html but not https://hostofleyton.com. Kind of weird. This StackOverflow thread seems useful, as does GitHub’s own troubleshooting page.
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This was originally posted on sb-ph.com. I’ve moved it to my blog since we’ve decided to remove the blog from that site.
Heads up: this post is kind of old! I’ve got mixed feelings about this approach now for a few different reasons, in no small part due to Uploadcare’s new pricing. No dig at them, they gotta do what they gotta do, but it puts this out of most of my clients’ budgets. If you’re interested in additional thoughts on JAMstack CMSs, you might want to take a look at this post.
We’ve recently been exploring a lightweight CMS setup for the Host site. This post summarises the thought process behind our decision to work with Netlify CMS and GitHub Pages.
TL;DR
Though it’s an unusual setup for a client site, I like the stack and would consider using it again for a similar project.
There are two potential downsides that would rule out Netlify CMS for most of our client projects. One is that user account setup isn’t super straightforward, the authentication method makes this a little more complicated than normal. The other is that the hosting “ownership” is tied to a GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket repository. All-in-all, this approach demands a slightly higher level of technical know-how from the client than most other CMSs we regularly use (Craft, Kirby, WordPress, etc.).
The upside is the relatively low cost to the client, both in the short and long term. Netlify CMS is free, as are a few selected static hosting providers (Netlify and GitHub Pages spring immediately to mind). The login authentication is the only step that requires a server, since the keys have to be kept secret. Previously, the server would be the big ongoing time and money sink. Certain platforms however, such as Netlify, offer selected webtasks / microservices / cloud functions for free.
When evaluating these pros and cons against the Host website requirements, it became apparent that it would be a pretty good fit. The original Host static site was built with Jekyll and jekyll-seo-tag, so we knew it would work nicely with GitHub Pages and Netlify CMS. GitHub recently introduced free private repositories for up to 3 users, so we felt less concerned about the site hosting being tied to a repository that we own since we could transfer it to Host at some point without feeling pressure to make the repository public. And the Host folks are a pretty tech savvy bunch, so I wasn’t worried about them being daunted by things like repositories or GitHub-linked authentication.
So I got started with Netlify CMS. The first thing I dove in to was the widget (field) configuration, and I was impressed. The widget configuration options are more fully-featured than I would have expected for a ~1.5 year-old CMS. While configuring the widgets I also gave the custom editor Preview components a try, however ultimately I abandoned that experiment and disabled the editor Preview. It’s out of the scope of this project, and the maintenance of these React components alongside a non-React site seems a little dicey. Something to explore separately at a later date perhaps.
Media management is a concern on static sites, and this one is no exception. We could have gotten away with hosting the images in a directory in the GitHub repo, but we wouldn’t have any nice image transforms for faster page speed and would have had to ask the client to do all of the heavy lifting with image resizing and optimisation. I would have also worried about the repository size spiraling out of control with overly-large image files. Netlify CMS v2.1.0 offers the Uploadcare media widget by default though. Uploadcare’s free tier seemed to be a very good fit for the Host website, so we got that set up as well. The implementation was pleasingly straightforward. As someone who has spent a lot of time debugging image transformations in more traditional CMSs, Uploadcare’s URL-based system is refreshing.
The final critical step was the authentication configuration. Netlify CMS offers a number of different methods. We knew we wanted to use GitHub Pages for hosting, so the two most likely options were Git Gateway with Netlify Identity or GitHub with Netlify. We went for the latter. It does require that all users have a GitHub account (unlike the former), however this ultimately feels like the right approach since much of the site documentation lives in the repo’s Readme file and we feel it gives the client a bit more ownership over and awareness of the inner workings of their site.
The authentication was a little more complicated than the rest of the Netlify CMS setup. I followed the GitHub Backend instructions, which are relatively minimal and more geared towards a site hosted on Netlify. I found this article more helpful since it addressed what we were after, a Netlify CMS-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages. One potential “gotcha” in these steps is that the OAuth application should be registered on whichever GitHub account owns the repo. I added it to my user account initially which was incorrect, since our organisation account owns the repo.
After following the GitHub backend instructions, I only ran in to two hiccups. I’m documenting them below since I didn’t find much related information elsewhere.
One problem was a post-login “dead end”. After clicking “Login with GitHub” and signing in successfully in the pop-up window, the user should be redirected to the Netlify CMS dashboard automatically. Instead, it just said “Authorized” and did nothing. This is because I hadn’t added the website URL to the Netlify project. I had assumed I didn’t have to add the URL since Netlify is not hosting the site, however the Netlify authorisation callback script checks the host URL against the custom domains. Once I added the URL to the project in Netlify, the issue resolved itself. Note that I did not repoint the DNS to Netlify since we still want to host the site on GitHub Pages, so it shows a little error / warning regarding the URL’s DNS records. This is not a problem.
So I was now being redirected successfully to the dashboard, but the dashboard was just a white screen. The console indicated an error with loading netlify-cms.js from Unpkg, specifically:
Refused to execute as script because "X-Content-Type: nosniff" was given and its Content-Type is not a script MIME type
This seemed possibly related to some security-related GitHub Pages headers, so I decided to grab the JS from the Unpkg URL and commit it to the repo and no longer use a CDN for the script. This immediately fixed the problem.
I’d like to do a bit more exploration of Netlify CMS moving forward since it could be appropriate for more use cases depending upon the developers’ roadmap. I will probably look at the Git Gateway with Netlify Identity route for authorisation as well. Besides Netlify CMS though, we’re really interested in exploring Kirby 3. Kirby 2 has been excellent for a number of small-ish websites (<5 stakeholders, not a ton of relational data), so we’re excited to see where they’ve taken the newest version and if it could work with projects of a slightly larger scale.
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New year, new lick of paint. See previous version of this site in the internet archive. It isn’t perfect, but I’m happy with where it’s going. The colour remains an ongoing experiment. The years archive on the Browse page is probably the site’s most vibrant manifestation at the moment.
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Surfing with coffee #5. Order of exploration:
A
Noticed that HB starred Samiz-Dat on GitHub (↓B)(↓C)(↓D)
B
Hyperreadings (↓G)
C
Distributed, a book from OPEN Editions that “focusses attention on the act of distribution as a subject for serious creative consideration and one of great social and economic importance”. (↓D)
D
bradhaylock.com (↓E)(↓F)
E
Searched for Brad Haylock on Twitter. (↓L)
F
Surpllus (↓H)
G
Kenneth Goldsmith reflecting on the current state and possible future of UbuWeb after 15 years. Also relevant to the Whyspace event last Wednesday. “For the moment, we have no competition, a fact we’re not happy about. We’re distressed that there is only one UbuWeb: why aren’t there dozens like it?” (↓I)
H
Searched for Surpllus on Twitter. (↓L)
I
UbuWeb Twitter feed (↓J)(↓L)
J
RIP Filmstruck (↓K)
K
A wild, multi-armed internet search for an independent video rental hole-in-the-wall I went to probably around 5-6 years ago. Spent 20 minutes searching and couldn’t find it. Asked SB and he figured it out in about 30 seconds, see The Film Shop in Stoke Newington. Looks like it has probably gone the way of most other video shops though. :(
L
Hate how heavily I rely on Twitter to keep up with interesting peoples’ activity, especially after this past Saturday. Look in to alternative methods of creating/curating feeds outside of the social media rat race. (↓M)(↓N)(↓O)
M
Hardly Everything, “your feed with a cadence”.
N
Reeder for iOS and Mac (I think this is what SB uses).
O
Search for self-hosted RSS, came across Awesome self-hosted repo. See Feed Readers section specifically.
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SB and I went to Mozfest for the first time last Saturday. What a lovely day! Took some haphazard notes throughout, see below for a dump of notes/links related to the sessions I attended. The bits in brackets are mostly thoughts that bounced around my head while taking notes during talks. All quotes are paraphrased.
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I finally got round to exploring Homebase yesterday (jump straight to setup steps). My original intention was to get the SB-PH site on Dat + HTTPS à la this blog post by Tara Vancil. As far as I can tell though, without multi-writer support in Dat this setup would effectively lock Sam out of being able to quickly deploy changes. We’re interested in making that site a little bit more of a collaborative sandbox, so making deployment harder than it is currently is not the right step to take there.
So though I definitely want to get the SB-PH site on Dat eventually, we’re putting that on hold for now and I’m pivoting towards my site. In this blog’s earliest incarnation it was on Tumblr, and for a long while now has been a pretty standard WordPress site. The big task in moving to Dat, besides figuring out Homebase, is converting my site from WordPress to a static site via Jekyll/Hugo/Eleventy/GatsbyJS or something similar. It’s taking a while, I didn’t realise quite how much content has accumulated (1000+ tags?!) and there are a few WordPress-y features that I definitely want to build in (“more” tags, descriptions for tags+categories, proper pagination, etc.). More on that in a separate note.
So yesterday I put that aside and focused on getting Homebase up and running on a DigitalOcean droplet. Overall, setting up Homebase wasn’t too bad. The most involved part of the process was setting up the server. I kind of like tinkering with server stuff, so that’s cool. I 100% agree with the caveat at the top of the Homebase README, you should consider Homebase only if you’re comfortable with and interested in server administration. I would add that your interest should be *ongoing*. Servers take maintenance (related, see note on serverless setups). It’s your responsibility if a process stops running, or the software is out of date, or the Let’s Encrypt certificate doesn’t renew, etc. Hashbase looks like a great alternative for those that want the final result but don’t want to deal with the server configuration/maintenance.
The rest of this note is an outline of the steps I took to get Homebase working. Where good documentation exists elsewhere, I have linked to that instead of elaborating.
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This past Thursday 18 October was the second Server Co-op meetup in Rebecca’s Flat at Raven Row. See all Server Co-op notes.
I didn’t take as many notes this time, wasn’t feeling fantastic. Very sketchy notes below.
click public button twice if the Patchwork feed seems stuck after first install
how to have Scuttlebutt on multiple devices?
eh, maybe not worth the hassle, just use one device
“sameAs” is currently being worked on by devs in Scuttlebutt community
identity = private + public + network key combo
lib sodium
back up private key and gossip.json
dark crystal for backing up private key using social network
“shamir’s secrets” algorithm
kind of like horcruxes!
with Scuttlebutt, your friends are your cloud/datacentre
nothing is ever deleted (same as Dat)
could technically have multiple identities, but functionality isn’t implemented currently. Would have to swap .ssb directories