A design trap is when you start off with what seems like a good idea, then cling to it even when it obviously isn’t working.
It appears that happened with this sign. I have obscured the name of the local body that made it because they had good intentions.
The sign prohibits four things:
Smoking
Alcohol
Drugs
Loitering
For smoking, they used the internationally recognized symbol of a circle with a slash through it and a cigarette in the middle.
So far, so good. So good, in fact, that it seemed like the perfect way to express other bans. Unfortunately, it was the beginning of a slippery slope.
For alcohol, things got tricky because alcohol mainly comes in bottles and cans, which in pictogram form would not necessarily be recognized as containing alcohol.
So they chose a martini glass, complete with olive. Outside of James Bond movies, I’m pretty sure I have never seen a martini glass. Maybe I need to get out more. Still, the thought of miscreants sipping martinis on a playground seems silly.
They were forced to use the martini glass, though, because they were in a design trap. They needed something to go inside a slash-circle and a martini glass was all they could find that unambiguously says “alcohol.”
Then came drugs, which are even trickier. A syringe might have been a good choice, but a syringe is not always used for illicit drugs. The same holds true for pills. A marijuana cigarette would have looked too much like a tobacco cigarette.
So they settled on the word “DRUGS”. But making matters worse, they had to place the word on top of the slash because otherwise it would have obscured the letters. We know what they meant, but technically an item is not banned unless the slash goes through it.
Finally we get to “No Loitering.” This is the point where they should have had an “aha” moment. The words tell you everything you need to know, simple and direct.
This is the moment when they should have broken out of the design trap, and realized they had a simple solution. All they had to do was use their words: no smoking, no alcohol, no drugs, no loitering.
To be fair, they likely got their slash-circle ideas from the internet, where a similar design trap is apparent. If you do an image search on “no alcohol”, you’ll find martini glasses, wine glasses, wine bottles, and more. A search on “no drugs” reveals a similar hodge-podge.
The representations of “no loitering” are especially weird. What exactly are those stick figures supposed to be doing?
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Back in the day, reporters would record their phone interviews by attaching a suction cup to the back of the earpiece part of the handset. It was attached by wire to a machine that did the recording.
There was a time when their use was widespread enough to warrant their own unicode. This consisted of circle with a stem coming out of the bottom left.
Does that remind you of anything? How about a magnifying glass?
The near-universal symbol for search is a magnifying glass. Granted, that symbol usually has the stem coming out the bottom right, but still — the resemblance is uncanny.
Unicode for telephone recorder: ⌕
Font Awesome SVG for magnifying glass:
That SVG from Font Awesome looks pretty good, but it uses hundreds of characters as opposed to seven for the unicode. And do you really want a third-party dependency just for a magnifying glass?
I have a new page in the main navigation, but it took me three tries to give it a name that seemed right.
It’s basically a list of links to feeds that allow you to explore and discover blog posts from independent, personal websites.
In my opinion, you’ll find lots more interesting stuff to read there than you will on Facebook and the like.
In the end, I decided to call the page Indie. It’s the boring choice, but also the most likely to be understood.
(Edit: I decided to go even more boring: Links. It’s what they are, it’s what everyone understands.)
At first, I thought “alt web” would be cool, but I’m also pretty sure no on would understand it. And there is already an alt web that somehow allows you to publish directly in links. Hmm.
Then I thought “open web” would be a good contrast to “walled garden.” I might have stuck with that, but a bit of searching turned up a platform that is looking to commercialize the term.
Which is the opposite of what I am recommending. I don’t like the distorted kind of writing that comes with advertising and newsletter subscriptions.
These feeds highlight regular people saying the stuff they regularly say. It’s refreshing.
There’s a steep hill at the end of the block that goes through a park with a nice view of the city. It’s the equivalent of about six blocks long.
At one time, I would be huffing and puffing by the time I got to the top. If my wife was with me, I would jokingly tell her to leave me for dead.
But after a few months of taking on this hill multiple times a week, I was able to make it to the top with little change in my breath. I’m no spring chicken, so this was quite the accomplishment.
I tell this story because I believe that most people would agree that the more you exercise, the easier it gets. Or at least they believe this when it comes to their bodies. When it comes to their minds, though, that belief seems to fall by the wayside.
There is a new type of app that I’m seeing a lot of that uses AI to autocomplete your sentences. Not just a word or two, but entire sentences. Developers promise that these apps sound human and no one will ever know the difference.
Some examples are Cotypist, Cotabby and GhostPen. Thanks to vibe coding, there plenty of others being churned out.
Why are they so popular? I’m guessing they appeal to people who want to write faster. Instead of typing out the words, you can just hit tab and have the app to drop them in for you. They might also consider themselves to be poor writers and appreciate the app making them look a bit smarter.
So how does this relate to the hill at the end of the block?
Well, I suppose I would have bought an e-bike and got to the top a lot more easily. But what would I have accomplished? I would have been just as out of shape as ever. And I would have given up on self-reliance.
AI autocompletion apps encourage your mind to be dull and slow. The best way to get better at writing, as with anything in life, is to practise, practise, practise. Soon you’ll find you can express yourself clearly not only for others but also for your own well-being because you’re forced to organize your thoughts.
It gets easier and faster, just like it would with AI, but also something more. It becomes original. You’ll have the satisfaction of not just sounding like a human, but of sounding like the unique human that is you.
I took another stab at creating an 11ty site, and this time succeeded. Not only that, but I’ve decided to grow the Neocities blog I made into a work of fiction complete with story and character arc.
There are many 11ty tutorials, but the one that caught my eye was this one from Flamed Fury:
Along with some help from Claude and a few other tutorials, I got the site up and running on Neocities. It’s pretty close to the way I want it, but there will likely be more tinkering. The design, for example, is still not far off from the one in the tutorial.
Would I recommend 11ty? If you’re into coding and don’t mind a challenge, I would say it’s worth a look. I think WordPress gave databases a bad reputation in terms of security, so the flat file system in static site generators has been gaining popularity. On the other hand, PHP/MySQL alternatives to WordPress do exist. I’ve been using Textpattern for 20 years without any problems.
Anyway, the fun part is the site I created — Misfit Gentleman. It started as a way to put in some filler content, but the more I did it, the more I became attached to the character I had created. I wanted to give him a background.
Soon I realized that he had a problem. And a character with a problem creates tension that needs to be resolved through the telling of a story.
His problem is that he has travelled 200 years into his future and our present. And he would like to go back, but doesn’t know how.
This will be chronicled through blog posts, but there will also be updates to other pages — home, about, links and contact — as he learns more.
My goal is to wrap this up by the end of the year. After that, Misfit Gentleman can stand alone as a story, sort of like a book on a shelf.
When I’m travelling in another country and meet a fellow Canadian, there is a feeling like we can relax and relate. With anyone else, there is a bit of barrier, even if we’re trying hard to be friendly.
Now that I’ve had a chance to spend a few days on Gander, a Canadian social media app just out of private testing, I have that same feeling of being with my peeps.
We can all just sort of chill with each other.
Gander isn’t restricted to Canadians, but it would be tricky for a non-Canadian to join. For one thing you have to prove you’re human before you can post. I did that by downloading Canada Post’s Identity+ app and, among other things, scanning in my passport.
This process was more complicated that I expected, but if it keeps the bots out, I’m all for it.
You have the option of going international by federating your account with Bluesky using the AT protocol. I won’t be doing that. Bluesky has a good reputation, but I fear there are way too many posts about U.S. politics, which I can do without.
So, Cauê Napier has created this nifty little thing you can add to your site called Town Square. Of course, I signed up for it right away and implemented it on Newsonaut.
It's a joy to use. A stickman version of you hangs out with other stick people, tossing out messages that disappear after a few seconds, never to be seen again. You can move around, jump, watch the birds, and Cauê has more planned.
I wasn’t sure about adding it to the bottom of every post, so I gave it its own page. For one thing, over on Cauê’s site, there was lots of activity and conversation, but I didn’t see anything like a discussion of the post it was attached to.
Then I thought, well, maybe it could just be a town square in general. So that’s what I have on Newsonaut. I’m still thinking about how I can feature it.
I’m also thinking Cauê might want to create something like townsquare.com. It would be a version of his Town Square with a bunch more features. I’m not sure what those might be, but one thing that comes to mind is the Club Penguin my kids used to play.
On the other hand, having a central location like that might go against the spirit of the indie web.
In any case, the idea as it stands is genius, and I look forward to the new features coming up.
Also, thanks Cauê for linking to my site. That was not expected. Now he’s looking at creating a map to join up all the town squares. When I read that, I figured I’d better get this post up so visitors can actually find it.
In my newfound zeal for the indie web, I joined the IndieWeb Webring. You can see my version of it at the bottom of the page.
You get some code to copy and paste into your site, but as I soon discovered, the presentation can be whatever you imagine it to be. I wanted to make mine obvious but also fit in with the Newsonaut style.
Going from site to site on the ring, I found all manner of implementation. Some were big and bold, others were tiny or hidden in an accordion. Some were part of a site interface that was almost entirely inscrutable. And then there were some that I swear were missing entirely.
Are you allowed to do break the ring? Shouldn’t you get kicked off for doing that?
Also, it seems a bit like cheating if you make the next site in the ring open in a new tab. Is it because they're hoping visitors will stay on their site longer?
I’m assuming that people who choose to be part of the IndieWeb Webring must be at least a bit tech savvy, given the requirement that you must use IndieAuth on your site.
I read this article and was no wiser as to what that meant. After some digging around, I found a service that makes it much easier.
Being part of the web ring means you can be included in a directory, but only if you include something called an h-card on your site. This was new to me, but I eventually figured it out.
So where, you might ask, is my h-card? Well, I hid it with display: none, because I couldn’t think of a way to make it work with my layout. Ideally, it would be on the About page, but IndieWeb Webring wasn’t able to find it there.
I’m of two minds about this whole experience. On the one hand, it seems unnecessarily difficult to join. Luckily for me, I’m used to working with code so it didn’t scare me off. On the other hand, it might be a good way of making sure the web ring doesn’t get overrun with bots and opportunists.
I have never monetized Newsonaut and never will, but that’s mainly because of lessons learned from Thriftmac, my other site that specializes in free Mac apps.
Back in the day, I was all in with Google Ads and anything else that might make a dollar. In my best ever month, I got a cheque for about $200 from Google. Buy Me a Coffee didn’t exist back then, but I would have used it if it did.
At first it was fun, even exhilarating, but after awhile I got burned out. I realized that as a wage, $200 came to maybe a couple of dollars an hour.
I had to keep the engagement going — constantly thinking up new ideas, constantly finding interesting links. When I finally crashed, the blog part of Thriftmac was ripped out and it became just a fancy list of links to free Mac apps that was seldom updated.
At one point, someone offered to buy it from me for about $2,000. This seemed like a good way to go for a site I didn’t really care about any more, but when I looked at the buyer’s other sites, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Thriftmac was my baby, and I didn’t want to see it ruined.
Gradually I came to the realization that my motivation for Thriftmac didn’t have to be about making money. I now see it as a resource for people who, for whatever reason, can’t afford to pay for apps. I keep it up to date with new apps, and remove the ones that have gone to a paid model or that no longer work. I have even revived the blog part, although on a much less frequent basis.
It’s my own tiny contribution to making the web a better place. I’m not saying this has to be true for everyone, but for Thriftmac, it feels good to be free of any kind of monetization.
I hope the same can be said of Newsonaut. I try to be helpful, or at least entertaining. The site gets very few visitors, but I’m OK with that if those few people leave with something positive.
So don’t buy me a coffee. It would just spoil things for me.
