Preamble

It’s been a busy week-and-a-bit in chez The Underground, so I missed a few slots I had pencilled-in to publish some posts. One of the most important parts of any blog, I find, is the initial momentum and impetus; lose it, and things go rapidly downhill. As much as this is “an experiment,” I would like for it to last in some manner for the long haul.

So, what’s been happening? Well, there’s been the festive preparations, and some birthdays, work - oh, and an exam.

For a bunch of boring reasons I won’t get into, we have our main festive gathering in the middle of December, about a week or so “early”. It means the latter part of December is wonderfully chill and relaxing, but on the flipside the first half is stressful due to the compressed timeline. This year we had three households visiting, some coming from the other end of the country. It was nice to get everyone together under one roof for a day.

But it’s done now, and that means I’m finally able to start winding down for the end of the year. I have two and a half days left of work this year, with most of my colleagues already out of office - so unless something catastrophic happens it should be a relatively quiet time. If I were superstitious then I would probably think I’ve just jinxed myself.

My plans for the next 3 weeks are to decompress and relax. I want to tidy up as many loose ends from projects started this year as I can. Some of those will be online, but a lot of them are offline. It will be nice to spend an extended time away from the computer.

Your Questions, Answered (or not)

I’m spectacularly behind on posts in my feed reader, so I don’t have a list of links for you today. Instead, I thought I’d write up a mini “FAQ” about The Underground and some of the feedback I’ve received over the last few weeks. Some of this will be pulled from responses I’ve given others already.

First off, why?

Why not? The web is the ultimate playground, and it’s at it’s best when people are building new things, or trying things out of the norm. Whether The Underground “works” or not is for others to decide, but I wanted to try it. So I did.

I don’t get it/I don’t like it

That’s fine. Not everything has to be to everyone’s tastes. I’m OK if you don’t subscribe because it’s not “for” you.

How do people respond to your posts?

You can’t respond directly - by which I mean comment on the page - and you can’t webmention or pingback an individual post^[1]. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still write about what was written.

Anything that’s shared on The Underground is considered “out there” in public and open for discussion, even if you can’t directly link to the post as part of that discussion. My intent with The Underground is to simply publish in a particular format, and I don’t necessarily feel I need to be part of any ensuing conversation. If someone does want to loop me in, there are other channels to reach me on where I can take part. At the bottom of each post so far I have linked to my Mastodon and given an email address for sending me feedback.

Isn’t this hostile to the open web?

Is it? I don’t think it is. The format is open, nothing is locked behind a paywall or registration system, people can choose the tool of their choice to read the content. It’s just a different experience to what you’re used to. People have been experimenting with “RSS-only” posts for a while now and I view The Underground as just an evolution of that premise.

For me, “the open web” is an expression of the promise that every one can publish information, and that information can be freely accessed for as long as it’s online; it’s not necessarily an implementation of any particular “thing” we see on open websites. If we start limiting ourselves to a particular publishing format then every website looks and acts the same – which would be fine in the short term but get boring eventually. I accept I might be wrong about this, but I also worry that we sometimes conflate “the open web” with doing things like we did in the 90’s/early 2000’s before every other website became an app, and not trying new things.

The Underground (in my view) is open. It’s just doing it in a different way.

Is this Ephemeral Blogging?

Yes and no? It’s not intentionally Ephemeral Blogging - ideally a feed reader would load all posts going back to the first when it imports the feed - but I can’t control that. I also can’t control how long a feed reader stores any given post, so I have to accept that for some people posts might be ephemeral in nature. I’m slowly growing more comfortable with this.

Your feed isn’t Atom spec-compliant

I know, I hate it too. But spec-compliant IDs have to be fully-formed, preferrably-unique URIs and I don’t publish posts to web pages, so there are no valid URIs to use as IDs. Replacing the URI with a hash seemed the best choice because then people don’t accidentally get sent to pages which don’t exist. It’s a “lesser of two evils” choice.

Signing Off

That’s a wrap for this entry. There may or may not be another post before the end of the year - it just depends on how much time I spend online over the festive break. I hope you have a happy and safe time over the next few weeks, no matter how you choose to spend it. As always, if you do have any feedback or ideas for the future, you can reach out on Mastodon, or email feedback@theunderground.blog