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This Page is Designed to Last

jeffhuang.com

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Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#391

Post by lmm »

chrismorgan wrote: post #315
lmm wrote: post #133

HTML is a terrible authoring format. CSS is a terrible everything. If you want something to last, the thing that will last is the human-created source - probably markdown. I'm not worried about my blog posts sitting in their git repository being lost. The Jekyll pipeline that adds a Javascript header/footer might go away, as might the Javascript that pretifies my raw posts, but the markdown is durable, and a future a…

No, I trust HTML and CSS to stand the test of time far more than Markdown. Do you know how many different variants of Markdown there are, how they affect the interpretation and appearance of the content, how they can break surprisingly much? And when it comes down to it, as soon as you want to do anything even remotely interesting in Markdown, you have to drop straight HTML in there, and pray that the Markdown engine…

> Do you know how many different variants of Markdown there are, how they affect the interpretation and appearance of the content, how they can break surprisingly much?

One plus a bunch of non-standard extensions. Do you know how many different variants of HTML there are, how rare it is for real-world HTML to actually conform to any of them, and how many different interpretations of that there are. (To say nothing of CSS, the standard so complex that it's never actually been implemented).

> And when it comes down to it, as soon as you want to do anything even remotely interesting in Markdown, you have to drop straight HTML in there

Just say no. If your goal is writing something intended to last, you should be able to convey it in mostly-plain text.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#392

Post by rsync »

SamBam wrote: post #379
rsync wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""Prefer one page over several" is diametrically opposed to the hypertext model. Please don't do this." I think I agree with you here, in that much of the power of hypertext lies in the hierarchical "tree" model. And yet, I think it has not been used properly up to this point ... I hesitate to post this as this is not quite finished[1], but here goes - this is something called an "Iceberg Article": http://john.kozubi…

I don't see how that's fundamentally different from a Wikipedia article, which is basically (1) a single, self-contained page, (2) that is just the "tip", and (3) linked within it is all the stuff mentioned That site has various opinions about the "tip" being uncluttered of links, etc, but that's just an opinion (and one I disagree with).

The thinking here is that the "tip" is Wikipedia articles can be quite long (and justifiably so) - perhaps scrolling many pages.

The "tip" of an "Iceberg Article" is ".. a single page of writing ..."

Perhaps confusing because I don't mean a "single (web)page" I mean, an actual single page.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#393

Post by vxNsr »

hk__2 wrote: post #175
ryanfox wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been building an application to do this, except for everything on your computer! It’s called APSE[0], short for A Personal Search Engine. [0] https://apse.io

Having to pay $15/month ($180/yr!) to be able to search stuff on my own computer for years seems awfully expensive. I'd rather depend on some simple open-source piece of software that I can understand and maintain if necessary.

Yup, I could see paying $180 one time for something like this. but at $180 a year for a self hosted product... that's just very steep.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#394

Post by _57jb »

tempestn wrote: post #81
shasheene wrote: post #7

There's no reason why a web browser bookmark action doesn't automatically create a WARC (web archive) format. Heck, with the cost of storage so low, recording every webpage you ever visit in searchable format is also very realistic. Imagine having the last 30 years of web browsing history saved on your local machine. This would especially be useful when in research mode and deep diving a topic. [1] https://github.com…

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

You just opened up a world for me I hadn't thought about!

So simple! Thank you!

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#395

Post by chaostheory »

akho wrote: post #209
chaostheory wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This problem has been solved a long time ago if you use Pinboard. https://pinboard.in/ Just pay the yearly subscription so pinboard can cache your bookmarks.

I do not see how using a web thing is a solution to web things going away.

Then what do you propose the answer is? The blog post just proposes using “web things” differently

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#396

Post by tempestn »

_57jb wrote: post #394
tempestn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was what made me convert from bookmarking to clipping pages into Evernote around 6-7 years ago. I realized I had this huge archive of reference bookmarks that were almost useless because 1) I could rarely find what I was looking for, if I even remembered I'd bookmarked something in the first place, and 2) if I did, it was likely gone anyway. With Evernote I can full text search anything I've clipped in the past…

You just opened up a world for me I hadn't thought about! So simple! Thank you!

You're welcome! If you're interested in getting into GTD in Evernote (which I highly recommend), I wrote a blog post a while back about my setup: https://www.tempestblog.com/2017/08/16/how-i-stay-organized-...

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#397

Post by every »

xwowsersx wrote: post #64

Maybe I'm dense, but I'm having trouble understanding what is so difficult about keeping content around. It seems like the issue of webpack and node and all the other things he mentions on the article aren't really problems with content per se. You can just publish your thoughts as a plain text file or markdown or whatever and you're good to go. I'm having a hard time thinking of types of content that are really tied…

"I'd love to see an extreeeemely minimal tool which lets you drop some files in a folder and then create an index page that links to those."

I use the tree command on BSD to do just that. It has the option of creating html output with a number of additional options.

An example: tree -P *.txt -FC -H http://baseHREF -T 'Your Title' -o index.html

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#398

Post by ant6n »

mmsimanga wrote: post #288
atoav wrote: post #264

When I studied media science one of the most lasting experiences I had was a talk with one lady of the viennese film museum (on of the few film museums that store actual films instead of film props). As a digital native I never gave it a thought, but she told me that there is a collective memory gap in films that have been shot or stored digitally. With stuff that has been stored on film, there was always soem copy i…

Interesting analogy. I am having opposite problem. I have a shoe box half filled with miniDV tapes. Camera is long gone. I would like to transfer these to hard drive. Services that offer service digitize your tapes just too expensive for me. Most of the tapes probably just goofing around and there is issue of privacy. With current camcorder I just plug the SD card into computer and copy across.

Get an old minidv player which can transit the video over FireWire: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-best-way-to-transfer-mini-...

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#399

Post by lunchables »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #239

A shift to independent publishing is needed. I used to have sites that died because the upkeep became tiresome, and if - a professional developer with almost 25 years experience of writing web applications - find it tiresome, can we blame people for wanting to use the big platforms? I think using a static site generator might be OK. Common headers and footers help, and RSS might definitely be a good thing, but that s…

I use a combination of asciidoc and hugo to generate my static website. It means that I can easily regenerate the website using whatever tool I want in the future or even just easily update the template for the existing site. If something happens to asciidoc, there are lots of converters that would allow me to move to another format or presumably some format in the future. Markdown and restructuretext are also really good options.

Re: This Page is Designed to Last

#400

Post by lunchables »

whack wrote: post #371
winfred wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Let's be honest with ourselves. The best way to make your content last for a long time is to host it on a platform that is free and very successful. For example, whatever photos I posted on Facebook 12 years ago? Still alive and kicking. The articles I've published on wordpress.com 7 years ago? Still in mint condition, with 0 maintenance required. You view on timeline is too short. We're not talking about keeping so…

> The question is, is wordpress going to be around in 70 years? No one knows. But that static HTML page will still render fine The question isn't whether wordpress will be around in 70 years, but whether it will outlast your self-hosted website. Anything that is self-hosted requires significantly more financial/logistical maintenance, and what is the likelihood of someone continuing to do that for 70 years?

For me it's very easy because those domains are also tied to my email and all of my other hosted services (gitea, tt-rss, etc.) all use the same domain. So it's very easy to remember to keep them all alive and active. I've had domain names active far longer than Wordpress has existed.
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