Henrik Carlsson's Blog

All things me.

What should I do? How should I prioritize my free time?

posted this on and tagged it with River of News Silos The open web

I’m having a problem. I currently feel like I need to ”accomplish” something, and that I haven’t done that in quite a while.

In reality this is so not true. For the last five weeks I’ve been on vacation and most of that time have been spent raising my baby daughter. Before that I worked and raised my baby daughter. So off course I’ve accomplished something. I’m in the middle of raising a human being!

But that doesn’t make the feeling of needing to accomplish something less urgent. What I mean in this case is that I feel that I should create something, something that is visible online.

I have a lot of ideas of things to do and a lot of started projects that doesn’t seem to ever go anywhere. Here are some of the things I want to do/have begun doing:

Make and iOS app and publish it to the App Store.

Last summer I finally managed to carve out the time to learn how to use Objective-C and how to code iOS apps.

I’ve made two apps that kind of works that’s only been used by me and my girlfriend.1 However I’ve not managed to get them polished up to the point where I’ve felt comfortable posting them to the App Store.

This is very common for me. I start something and it gets ”good enough” for me to use it, but then I never make it good enough for others to use.#

The apps are a photo app to create time-lapse photos of something that slowly changes (like a pregnant woman’s belly) and a private photo sharing app that uses WordPress as a backend.

I also have an idea for a River of News based RSS reader.

Remake this blog/website.

Lately I’ve been really interested in the idea of owning your content, in ”POSSE” and the whole indie web, or silo-less web or whatever you want to call it. That has gotten me to start changing things around on this blog to accommodate ”microblog”, ”link blogs” etc. etc. (I’m also highly anticipating Manton Reece’s upcoming microblogging service.)

This has led to some progress but also to a cluttered site, both in terms of the content but mostly in terms of the underlying code and the services I use (for instance IFTTT and Radio3) to make this happen.

I would like to clean up the code and at the same time move forward in adding functionality, like webmentions and some sort of backfeed of comments from Twitter and App.Net.

At the moment it seems like it would be faster to actually start creating a new theme from scratch (although with the same basic look) rather than refactoring the one I’m using. But it also feels like a drag to do that. It feels like I once again start over in something rather then polishing something up. (Do you see a pattern here?)

On the other hand, working on the theme might result in some open source code and that would really be me making something.

Do something cool with one or more River(s) of News

A couple of days ago I installed a River of News aggregator on my computer and I got blown away by it. Unlike other forms of RSS aggregation this seems like the perfect way to consume a large number of current topics via RSS. I also have a strong feeling that rivers of news will be important in a possible future with a more open web. Hell, Twitter is basically a bunch of rivers of news!

Today I also read a post that, among other things, requested a better way for blogs to recommend each other to readers and to curate content from each others blogs. This is likely accomplished by rivers and the OPML files that are the foundations of the rivers.

So I have multiple ideas of things to do involving rivers.

Playing Zelda

Or, I could just continue to Zelda: Majora’s Mask 3D. Sometimes playing a video game can feel like I’m accomplishing things.

Read a book

I really, really, love to read but I read way to seldom. So maybe I should just continue reading Spook Country.

So, what do I do?

I don’t know. Hopefully something productive. I guess time will tell.

  1. Or should I call Linn my domestic partner? Or my fiancé? We are engaged but have no actual plans of getting married. We’ve been a couple for well over a decade, we’ve lived together for eight years and we have a daughter. I this case the English language is really lacking for not having an equivalent to the Swedish word ”sambo”. ↩
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I’m taking back my content

posted this on and tagged it with Silos The open web

Or how Dave Winer got me to post frequently on this blog again.

Almost a year ago I wrote about how it was time for me to take back my data. In that post I announced that I planned to switch most of my search engine use from Google to DuckDuck Go. That has worked out fine and DuckDuck Go is still my main search engine. Yay! (I also said I planned to switch away from Dropbox as well. That has not happened, thus far.)

Now it is time to start doing the same conscious effort to take back my content!

What do I mean by that? Well, if you follow this blog you know I very rarely post to it. However if you also follow me on Twitter you know that I post short status updates and links there quite often. I also occasionally post to my Instagram account. Lately I’ve started questioning why I spend so much time and energy creating content for other peoples website instead of my own. At the same time I’ve seen Dave Winer, the father of RSS and so many other great things, launch his new project Radio3.

Radio3 is a web app that lets the user post status updates or link blog style posts to Facebook, Twitter and an RSS feed.

The idea is to start a great flow of news to these services, while enabling new networks to boot up on the open web, building on the RSS support. So when you post using Radio3, you’re helping the web news system reboot. It’s like using solar or wind energy, or riding a bike instead of driving. It’s good for the environment. ;-)

– Dave Winer, Radio3 mail list

I love this philosophy! The idea that I don’t have to chose between Twitter and my blog and that both will still be ”first class citizens” of my digital presence is really compelling.

So I started playing around with Radio3 yesterday. My initial idea was the use its RSS feed to post to my blog via IFTTT. For some reason that did not work out at all. Instead of investing a lot of time into trying to find out why I reached out to Dave on Twitter and asked if he had any plans to add support for WordPress in Radio3. The answer was that it was coming the very same day.

So I waited for a couple of hours and then it arrived. When I tried it out I realized it worked, but not in the way I wanted to. As of today (and yesterday) Radio3 doesn’t give me the ability to chose what post type or post format the post will be posted as on my blog and since I’d like any link post to be of the post format link and any short text post to be of the post format status that’s a problem. It’s a small problem that I could possibly overlook but then there was another thing: The text of my Radio3 post was posted on my blog as title of a blog post, not as a posts content. This is not the way I want it.

Both of these ”problems” are small problems that I could live with, but combined they really bugged me.

However I had invested to much time1 into Radio3 to give up that easily so I picked up my hammer, my screwdriver and a whole lot of duct tape and started cobbling something together. After a lot of frustration with WordPress’ XMLRPC-API i finally managed to hack a solution where I post in Radio3. That gets published on Twitter and in my Radio3 RSS feed. That feed is then fetched and parsed every five minutes by a script on one of my servers. If that script finds any new items in the feed they will be posted to my blog as the correct post format and with the text as post content, not post title.

This way it works the way I want and I’ve used it a couple of times today and I’m very pleased with the result.

So this is my long-winding way of saying that I am going to post here a lot more often since everything that in the past just became a tweet will now be a tweet and a tweet-length blog post.2

So thank you Dave Winer, for giving me the necessary kick in the butt to actually revise the way I post to social networks.

  1. In reality maybe an hour, so not that long. ↩
  2. Since the road to hell is paved with cross-posting I’ve turned of the IFTTT recipe that auto-posts to Twitter every time something new is posted on this blog. There is no need to bug you, dear reader, with to much cross-posting. If you want to stay up to date on when things happen on this blog, please use its RSS feed. ↩
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The closed nature of Google+

posted this on and tagged it with Google Social Networks The open web

I’ve never used Google+. This article is solely based on me reading other sources.

The word ”open” is often used by Google, and even more often by Google’s proponents, as an argument for why Google and their products are better than others (especially better than Apple, but occasionally Microsoft). In my opinion though that has always been about business strategy and marketing, not ideology (and that’s fine). Google is a company that wants to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. This is not going to be an Apple fanboy’s assault on Google. It’s going to be reflecting on the not so open world of Google+ and a concerned look at some of the not-so-great-in-fact-really-bad things about Google+ and it’s lack of ”openness”.

The semantics

The HTML of Google+ is an absolute nightmare. It’s <div> in <div> in <div> in <div> (repeat indefinitely). And the class names makes no semantic sense what so ever. On episode #32 of Build and Analyze Marco Arment speculates that this could be because the code itself is actually written in a higher level language and compiled into the HTML that makes up the page. That may be the case, but it’s still a complete disregard of everything that the Web Standards-people and the Microformats community (and others) have fought for over the years.

Semantics and well-structured HTML that validates can easily become a religion. Breaking these dogmas is not a problem for the sake of it. It’s a problem because it partially locks down the content on Google+ and makes it harder for parsers and crawlers to do something meaningful with it. Instapaper for instance had to have a completely specialized parsing algorithm written for it (again Build and Analyze #32). One of the main purposes of the new elements in HTML5 was to give developers simpler tool to mark up content in a way that makes sense semantically. Google has previously made a big deal about HTML5 so why not follow its semantics as well?

URL from hell

The urls for peoples pages on Google+ is horrible. People are identified by a long string of digits, not by a username or anything that’s easily rememberable. In practice this means that the most popular way to find people’s Google+ sites is likely to use Google Search to find them. Thereby Google, who makes its money from advertising, gets yet another chance to show you its ads.

With a bit of a tin-foil hat-mind this could be seen as a slightly anticompetitive move, but there are other search engines too, right?

Everything is a JavaScript

Every single part of the content of a Google+ page is generated with javascript. This is unfortunately not something unique; Twitter does it, I think Facebook does it etc. However, just because you are in good company does not mean you’re doing the right thing. Here’s some reasons why javascript-generated content is bad:

End game

I want to once again state that this is not an Apple Fanboy’s rant against a threat to the all mighty fruit, it’s a web developer who’s concerned about some of the directions being taken by one of the largest web companies in the world, and one that explicitly uses the word open time after time to tout its own greatness.

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