I wrote a small post on the Tanzawa blog about My Goals for Tanzawa.
My Goal for Tanzawa
by
James
I realized while I've been blogging about the development of Tanzawa, I haven't talked much about my overall goals for the system. This post will dive a bit into what my goals are for the system and how I envision it working.
IndieWeb
My main goal for Tanzawa is to make a system that makes it enjoyable and easy to blog (be it micro, photo, articles, whatever) while maintaining ownership of your content. Yes, you can achieve this Wordpress, to a degree, but it's not made for it.
David Shanske and the other devs who've made the IndieWeb plugins for Wordpress have done fantastic work. It got me back into blogging and fighting for the open web. Tanzawa is my attempt to build upon the ideas in their work and push it forward.
Sustainability & Privacy
My other main goal for Tanzawa is to bring awareness and advocate for a sustainable web. Modern computer systems waste so many resources with poor design, unoptimized media, legacy formats - you name it. Tanzawa will always strive to have the lightest impact on your server, your network, and when rendered on your computer/phone.
To those ends Tanzawa uses minimal css styled with Tailwind - no large component frameworks. Image tags are written so browsers always choose the latest file format with the best compression so less data is transferred. What's more, we don't change file formats until it's first requested, saving your server from making and your disk from storing images that will never be served. We proudly use system fonts, avoiding megabytes of downloads.
A smaller, but still important goal for Tanzawa is to build a system that respects your privacy and the privacy of your visitors. We don't include any third-party libraries or scripts that track anything about you. We also strip all location and other exif from uploaded photos.
Own Your Data
One of the promises of the of POSSE and backfeeding is that you are in control. The current tooling works, but it feels too geeky. I either need to have a custom setup with a static site (which means writing Markdown and using a command line) or use Wordpress, and then you're stuck within the confines of Wordpress.
I want to make it simple to "tweet" from your blog. To backfeed from the silos into your blog. And I want to be able to remix this data together, to make new posts and pages, rather than having it locked in posts or behind an opaque API.
The recent resurgence of interest in blogging and RSS makes me hopeful that when Tanzawa is ready to general usage there's a chance it'll make a difference.
Interactions
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Was wondering what you were working on. Thanks 👍
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I realized while I've been blogging about the development of Tanzawa, I haven't talked about my goals for it. Here's that post. https://t.co
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@jamesvandyne Agree about the fantastic work that David, Matthias, etc. have put in on the WordPress plugins — it really reinvigorated my blogging. Also agree on being stuck within WordPress. I've been saying for years now that the indieweb is too complicated, the technologies are great but almost impossible to deploy for the average person beyond WordPress and even then awkward to get right. That's why I had to write some of my own to enhance what was there and add some quality of life touches. That's why I admire what @manton has done with micro.blog — it's the first step in bringing the indieweb to the masses but more needs to be done. My goal with my own blogging system was purely to get off of WordPress and have something tailored specifically to how I work. While it is possible to strip it back so that others could use it that was never really the intention. For you to be building a system that makes it easy and is designed for others to use is highly commendable and I applaud you f…
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@colinwalker Thank you - it's still a ways away from others being able to use it without me doing the install but it'll get there some day. I agree, @manton's work with micro.blog is a huge inspiration.
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@jamesvandyne @colinwalker Thanks y'all!
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@jamesvandyne @colinwalker I agree with Colin; it's always great to see more people working on the problem of making the independent web much more accessible to the average person. I look forward to further reading about your work, James. Good luck!
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@simonwoods Thanks!
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