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.

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.

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.

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.

With support for articles shipped in Tanzawa (this is the first one! 🎉 ) I'm taking a day off coding and doing a day of thinking about the next post kind(s) I want in Tanzawa: bookmarks & replies.

Why group them? Well,  they're quite similar in my mind. A "reply" is a blog post that is a reply to some other page or post on the internet.  On my current Wordpress site they look like a note with a link to site and maybe an excerpt for which  we're replying.

Bookmarks look quite similar. Infact they're exactly the same, except I opted to put the link emoji for bookmarks.

Just looking at the two different post kinds the only difference is in the webmention that's sent. In replies there's a `u-in-reply-to` while in a bookmark there isn't. Part of the reason why they're the same is because how I treat bookmarks.

When I bookmark something publicly on my blog I've write a note as to why I'm bookmarking it. It's less of a reply and more of an aside. However, reflecting on this behavior while writing this post, I think I've been using bookmarks in this manner because I've been using Wordpress. The interface for posting bookmarks and replies (and statuses and articles) is the same and so you're encouraged to treat them the same.

Both bookmarks and replies will need a field for inputting the url that we're bookmarking or replying too. And both kinds will need to dynamically load the page, extract title / author / summary information. And in both types users should be able to correct the extracted information.

I think the major difference must be made in how they're displayed in a list. Bookmarks should be displayed completely differently than other post kinds. They should only display the page title / link / date bookmarked / post permalink. Each bookmark's detail page can show the extra meta information: a note, an excerpt, and so forth.

Replies will display much like status i.e. there's no post title. But it will begin with a link and excerpt for the reply to setup the context for the post followed by our note. RSS feeds for bookmarks and replies should be the same: linked site meta info followed by a note.

My bet is that bookmarks and replies display much differently in your streams on the site that even though the publishing interface may be similar, your usage will change.