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Response to
by JamesUrban transportation is central to the effort to slow climate change. It can’t be done by just switching to electric cars. Several cities are starting to electrify mass transit.
It's really great to see how varied the methods of transport they're installing are. The photos are also really great.
Yokohama trialed some fully electric buses recently, but they found trouble with the hills and battery life. I think it was as these were retrofitted buses using 3-old Nissan Leaf batteries. I hope they switch the fleet over to electric asap though, as the noise and fumes at the bus centers are horrible.“It has become a reasonable position to advocate for less space for cars,” said Felix Creutzig, a transportation specialist at the Mercator Research Center in Berlin. “Ten years ago, it was not even allowed to be said. But now you can say it.”
My favorite quote and I am happy this is becoming the case. Felix, welcome to The War on Cars. -
Response to
by JamesBut even after that era, as search engines started to become a reliable and powerful way to navigate the wealth of content on the growing Web, links still dominated our exploration. Following a link from a resource that was linked to by somebody you know carried the weight of a “web of trust”, and you’d quickly come to learn whose links were consistently valuable and on what subjects. They also provided a sense of community and interconnectivity that paralleled the organic, chaotic networks of acquaintances people form out in the real world.
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The net result is that Internet users use fewer different websites today than they did 20 years ago, and spend most of their “Web” time in app versions of websites [..] Truly exploring the Web now requires extra effort, like exercising an underused muscle.This article by Dan articulates perfectly what I was feeling when browsing blogs on the Wayback Machine earlier. -
Response to
by JamesFor younger folk: this photo is from the farcical Web 1.0 Summit to make fun of those using the "Web 2.0" moniker for their own marketing ambitions. In other words, history repeating itself. https://laughingsquid.com/web-1-summit/ The photos are gold: https://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/sets/1084819/
It really did feel like anything was possible in the early 2000's on the internet. These days it's different.- People don't sit down at computers, so you "need" a web app and a mobile app (which requires submitting apps to stores with arbitrary rules).
- People don't want to create logins (so you need to integrate with the tech giants for login)
- Services keep (your) data tight within walls.
- Search results often favor the big incumbents.
- Most every online interaction is somehow linked to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Twitter.
Communities like the IndieWeb community give me hope. Hope that, while it may never return to the way it was, there's enough people that remember the promise of the internet and care enough to try keep it alive. -
Response to
by JamesAt the moment, I don’t need a new laptop. But should I ever need one (which will probably be someday), it will be the Framework Laptop.It really is the best and most sustainable laptop concept I’ve ever seen.
Agree 100%. I’ve been looking for excuses to buy one since I’ve heard of them. Buying one would be my first non-Mac since 2003. Maybe once my 2014 mbp dies on me.
The only thing that gives me pause is the intel chips and how they compare to the M1 / AMD chips. But who knows how things will develop until then, it’s mostly a moot point. -
Response to
by JamesFor so long, it felt like I could only tell half the story of how we make software for the web at Basecamp. Too many of the chapters about our front-end approach were missing key pages. Sure, we had some of it out there. Turbolinks, for example, hark back to 2012, when I was inspired by Chris Wanstrath's ideas in pjax, and took them fu...
I’m using Hotwire for parts of Tanzawa and I’ve enjoyed it. I really should spend the time to fully flesh it out so it’s smooth as butter everywhere. -
Response to
by JamesTaken together, the collections of servers around the world that push bits to us, both for business and for our pleasure, suck up more energy than is used by a nation with a population of over 65 million. That was five years ago. You can bet that the situation is even worse in 2021.
Originally linked to by Jamie. A good reminder that digital isn't green. It still takes power to run the servers, AC to cool them, and countless switches and hubs between us and any given sever for this all to work.
Gaining control of my digital footprint was a large factor in deciding to build Tanzawa, though it's been less of a focus for these past months as I add more fun features. -
Response to
by JamesI'd donate to you for a theme decoupling. This is high on my list! :)
I appreciate the sentiment 😃. It's not money that's preventing me, it's time.
I've been thinking about how to handle theming for Tanzawa properly. It's a big task, but not impossible. There's 2 different ways to think of theming: 1) css only changes theme support, 2) complete theme support (i.e. colors and layout). The move from css only changes wouldn't be much less work than allowing full customization.
Roughly here's what I think would be required:- Extract all mentions of tailwind colors from templates/public (e.g. bg-negroni-700 ) and replace them with a common name – perhaps role based?
- Create a record / setting somewhere ( django-admin?) to track the active theme.
- Create a custom template loader (or other shim) that will prioritize rendering with the selected theme's public themes.
- Set Tanzawa to only include the css of the selected theme.
- Document how to make a custom theme.
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Response to
by JamesCurating a set of RSS feeds is like stepping away from the agoras and finding a little café, somewhere to sit and watch from a distance, to gather the words of the other patrons. Somewhere familiar where we recognise the regulars. We might never interact beyond a nod of appreciation but, in our own way, we come to know these people or, at least, what they allow us to know.
This is such a good way to think of RSS. Your RSS reader is your neighborhood coffee shop.
There really is something magical about being able to connect with people over time on the web that's separate from the noise machines. -
Response to
by JamesThe more I think and write about tech, the more I'm convinced that the tech doesn't really matter all that much without the correct mindset. If people are not having more interesting and profound interactions online, it is not for lack of tools. It's for lack of good intentions.
For as long as there's been the internet there's been "poor" interactions online. Humans, at least part of the time, find a way to argue some of the time.
The correct mindset can help you have better interactions online. But keeping the correct mindset is quite difficult when you're up against an algorithm that optimizes to keep you enraged and anxious.
The tech absolutely matters, but only in so much as it allows unadulterated communications and community. You can't find that on the big social networks without really trying hard, but you can find that on the IndieWeb. -
Response to
by JamesThen improve it.
Then write something else.
Repeat this process until you have a post.
Then post it.Exactly what I needed to hear about a post I've been drafting slowly.
