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My Goal for Tanzawa
by JamesI 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. -
by JamesStill getting the hang of working with Turbo and Stimulus, so not much visible progress today. However, I maanged to automate submitting the reply-to url and refactored the design of the reply page.
Refactored Reply Form -
by JamesI've got a basic Turbo-powered response form built. Using extruct to extract the meta schemas from the page is really simple.
A basic response form in Tanzawa -
by JamesNothing too big to show yet, but I've started integrating Turbo for use with replies.
The new reply form
The basic idea is you paste in the URL you're replying to, Tanzawa will fetch the page and extract the meta information and display it in a form along with an area for you to input your response. -
by JamesYou always notice small bugs once you ship things. Fixed the order of recent posts in the dashboard and only opening webmentions / drafts if there's actual content to display.
Dashboard tweaks -
Thinking about Bookmarks & Replies
by JamesWith support for articles shipped in Tanzawa (this is the first one! ๐ ) 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,ย 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.ย On my current Wordpress site they look like a note with a link to site and maybe an excerpt for whichย we're replying.A reply on my current Wordpress site
Bookmarks look quite similar. Infact they're exactly the same, except I opted to put the link emoji for bookmarks.A bookmark on my current Wordpress site
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.
Differentiating Replies and Bookmarks in Tanzawaย
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. -
by JamesRounding out the dashboard a bit. I've added a lot of all draft posts and the 5 most recent published posts. Webmentions only display if there's less than 3. If there's more than 3, they'll be hidden by default like below.
Drafts post kind is also at half-opacity to help visually separate them from published posts. I'm not sure if that's extra visual noise or not...what do you think?
ยRounding out the dashboard -
Checkin to ใใฉใฏใผใฉใณใ
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by JamesToday I started working on cleaning up the post list interface for the admin. As I can now post articles or statuses it doesn't make sense to show a menu on the left that says "Status" when I really want to show all posts.
Post lists in Tanzawa
Each post shows an icon indicating the type of post that it is, the name (if it has one), date created, a preview of the content, and links to edit or view the post. I also got to re-use my post dropdown menu component yesterday.
Just a couple more tweaks and I think I can release articles. -
The Week #33
by James- Covid numbers are down to numbers we haven't seen since November. The vaccine is approved and they've started inoculating people. The weather's warming up and early bloomer cherry blossoms are starting to bloom. I'm optimistic.
- Meanwhile in Texas, it's been the exact opposite with a huge cold front (thanks climate change!) and a deregulated energy industry decided to not invest in weatherizing their natural gas and coal plant despite regulators saying they should caused people to lose power/heat for days in freezing temperatures. Then the (republican) leadership goes and tries to blame the entire thing on the wind and solar farms in west Texas, when those were unaffected by the cold. Never elect a man to office who says government doesn't work, because they might win and prove it. Thankfully my family made it through unscathed (though hopefully they didn't get a $16,000 electricity bill like some did)
- I used to listen to a lot of Japanese music when I was younger. These days, not really. Mostly electronic/punk when I'm working and Josh Rouse when I'm not. Lucky Old Sun is a new (to me) Japanese group I found lately. You should give it a listen. I like the last track on this EP a lot, but they're all good.
- I went to Chigasaki Sagtoyama Park on my four day weekend. It was my second visit. There's this large slide that's above the trees and goes downhill with rollers on it. I usually ride down with Leo in my lap because he wants to ride it, but it's a bit scary for him. As it was a regular work-day and I took the day off the park was fairly empty. So I went down by myself. Take a ride down the best slide in the world.
At the bottom of the hill/slide there's a couple of big white bouncy mounds that the children like to jump and play on. There was an older (double (half)) kid who looked similar to Leo. Which Leo noticed and kept on copying what he was doing when jumping. It was too cute.
