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Reflections on Two Years of #Indieweb

Really good debriefing on two years of progress in the #indieweb. I found this rather familiar:While learning all of the requisite skills was challenging, the real struggle in joining the indieweb was piecing all the components together to hold a mental image in my head of what an indiewebsite should be. I spent a great deal of time trawling through the wiki and absorbing all of the ideas on disparate pages. At the time, there were many pages which would all have slightly different variations of the similar information.There’s still a ways to go, mind. When I did this reply to automatically, the title of the entry came though as “kongaloosh”. I added the correct title by hand myself. The entry title is there, as p-name and I cannot tell whether the issue is at my end (WithKnown) or at Alex’s end.link

The value of explaining yourself

My father was devoted to cryptic crossword puzzles. He was good, too, but every now and then a clue would stump him. If I was around, he would read the clue aloud to me and, more often than not, before I’d even had time to think about it, he had solved it.There’s something about the act of saying it aloud that makes a different kind of thinking possible.So it was last night, during the Homebrew Web Club virtual meeting in Europe. There was only me and Zegnat, much of the time, and first we explored further his comment, during the recent Indieweb Summit talk about Events, that “most of the things discussed are already available and possible with the current IndieWeb building blocks”. So I fired up WithKnown and created an event for the virtual HWC and he replied and the reply was received and published. Just like that. Of course there are some things that could be improved, but it does Just Work.Thinking more about improving things, I shamelessly took advantage by asking a lot of ill-informed questions about how to move further in the indiewebification of my presence on the web. Martijn was so helpful and patient with me, and I learned a lot. But the truth is also that just by asking the questions out loud, and having to think clearly about how to do so, I was able to see more clearly how things might work.It’s still pretty cryptic, but I’m getting there.

Why the Price of Food has Nothing to do with the Price of Food – and why science has been corrupted, by Colin Tudge

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.Not that anyone who needs to is listening.