ode - a simple personal publishing platform for the web

Think about what you need to do today to accomplish your goals. Plan around those things that you need to do. As part of that plan, reserve a little time for short term wants.

I don't believe there are shortcuts for accomplishing meaningful goals and by extension living a fulfilling life. That always involves a lot of hard work, and is never easy. Nor should we want our lives automated away or reduced to clicking a couple of buttons others have provided for us.

We maybe getting today what we want today. It turns out that might not be what we will have wanted a few years from now. In other words, maybe we should be focused on what we need, i.e. what's in our best interest, and then trust that what we want will follow, rather than buying into the easiest possible thing today.

Let's look at some easy things and some not so easy things:

• Meaningful relationships - not easy

• Learning - not easy

• Physical fitness - not easy

• Independence and self-sufficiency - not easy

• Adventure, exploration, and discovery - not easy

• Fast food - easy

• Accepting what we're told without questioning - easy

• Watching television (watching without doing in general) - easy

• Inactivity - easy

In general you could say that learning (and practicing), doing, and building (i.e. creating or engineering) are not easy. On the other hand not learning, not doing, and using rather than building are all easy.

Accomplishing a goal typically involves work, and as a result is not easy.

So why is it that we assume we want what's easy?

This post was inspired by a comment on the forum. I'll quote the short bit of that comment that's relevant to this post. As I have a tendency to do, I've sort of gone off track a little bit.

I am visually oriented ... having everything out were I can touch it feels better. (as opposed to it disappearing into a database)

I think there are a lot of us like this and for good reason too. We (i.e. people) are tuned to be 'visual thinkers'. Why fight it?

That question is not entirely rhetorical. There are lots of good uses for what we think of as databases BUT I would argue that there are fewer good ones than would be suggested by the number of databases in use.

Databases are like taking all of your stuff and putting it in a separate room. Next you hire a person to stand at the door and, when requested, go get stuff for you and put it back.

All of your stuff is available to you, but not directly. It saves you from having to arrange all of your things, because the person at the door handles that, but is that nec a good thing? After all, you don't get to arrange and interact with all of your stuff.

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Here's hoping for a great new year for this project and its participants.

There will be a new release this year, and hopefully lots of other activity too. Of course that's going to depend on all of us. So we'll see how it goes. (I'm as curious as you are.)

For my part, I'm going to spend as much time on Ode as I can, making improvements and expanding what it can do. As I've said before, we're only just scratching the surface.

Thanks to everyone who supports this project. I can't tell you how import you are to Ode. After all, that is what's beautiful about a small project like this, that each person involved can make a meaningful contribution. I believe that this ideal that is at the heart of the Wide Web, and it's the reason why Ode exists in the first place.

So thanks for all of your help to this point, and let's all do better in 2012. That's the promise of a new year - to improve what we are already doing well, and to fix what we've done wrong. A new year is the next best chance to get it right, and that time is now.

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What does that mean? It means exactly what it says. My official recommendation as that you find something else better suited to whatever it is that you want to do. Find something easier. Maybe something with a nice big button for you to click. Look for something that doesn't require anything of you except a profile, and permission to share that profile, along with your relationships, content, and interactions with present and future 'partners'. There are quite a few services that allow you to authenticate using your Facebook account. That sounds great. Or you could drop the middleman and just use Facebook. Really what do you need to do that you can't do on Facebook anyway? Maybe you should stop being such a pain in the ass and just get onboard.

Let's be honest, if you're like most people you don't know much of anything about the technology you use every day, and you don't see that as a problem. Find something that doesn't ask you to learn anything. Learning is hard. It makes you confront the fact that you don't know everything. Why would anyone want that? It may even give you a headache.

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The idea is that this will be the primary font used in logos which include text on t-shirts, the website (ode-is-simple.com), and wherever else we can use a custom font. As such, it should work well at various sizes and weights, especially larger (i.e. display) sizes.

I'm thinking that this should be a font that's easy to use directly on the web. Not only to make the font easy to work with, but also because it seems fitting that a project designed for the web would be represented by a web accessible font.

To me that means a font available from one of the web type services (e.g. TypeKit, Fontdeck, ...). However, it also makes sense for many reasons that the font be free to use. Those two qualifications have led me to Google Web Fonts.

Google Web Fonts

There is a decent selection of fonts here. Many of them include a number of variants, Unicode/extended character sets, and more than one alphabet. Also, all of these are available under some form of open license, and they are all both embeddable and downloadable. Most are OpenType fonts.

Katarine

Now, setting all that aside, there is one font I would really like to use. It's a font called 'Katarine' by Suitcase Type Foundry and is available from myfonts.com and fontshop.com. It's my favorite. But it's not open, and it's not licensed for use on the web.

Despite that, I think it's fantastic. The SemiBold especially would make a great looking t-shirt and large display font.

Feedback

I've created a slideshow of the fonts that I think might work well, and a little form that I hope you will use to let me know which font(s) you like. As you can see, the form is a few questions. I ask you to pick a favorite, and also check off additional fonts you like. There is also a text entry field that you can use to provide any additional feedback you like.

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If you've read through the project site, this blog, or spent any time on the forum then you probably know that I believe Ode and other projects like it are important - both to the continued health of the open web, and to all of us who appreciate the importance of the contributions of individuals like you and me, and the value of our participation and content.

The 'social web' is making us all bit players, or extras, in our own online lives. Increasingly our content is channeled through sites and services that we don't understand let alone have any control of over. These sites (Facebook and others) rise to obscene valuations fueled by user contributions, and by taking advantage of the our individual expertise, authority, creativity, local presence, reputation, personal information, etc. and the inherent value of our relationships.

Freely sharing is great, as is any other equitable exchange (whether we're talking about ideas, news and information, or good and services). However, in my opinion there is nothing equitable about the lopsided nature of the exchange between many social sites and their users.

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Steven Rosenberg has written a little article mentioning various self-hosted blogging platforms including Flatpress, Blosxom, PyBlosxom, Ode and others. I wanted to address a couple of his questions about Ode.

Though you can probably follow this post on it's own, I do recommend that you start by reading Steven's FlatPress and other flat-file blogging systems first. I'll wait...

OK, are we all back?

As I've already said, I wanted to add a couple of things about Ode and along with my opinion about a static mode, security, and some of the other topics Steven brings up in his post.

About implementing a static mode

1. I'm experimenting with two different types of static rendering at the moment.

The first is something like 'on demand'/just-in-time static. It works the way that you might guess it does. A static page is generated when a page is first requested. Subsequent requests for the same page are served statically.

The second is a dedicated static mode with which the entire site is generated offline.

In the end, I'll probably do both because a) I like the just-in-time solution and b) offline static mode is an often requested feature. To way of thinking, a project like this is about serving the interests of the community, not just scratching a personal itch.

However, Steven's right, I'm not a big proponent of static mode operation in general for several reasons. I'll mention just two...

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As the year the project was officially released, 2010 will always be an important year for Ode. But this little project is still a baby. The good news is that after the first year I have every reason to believe the Ode is workable. Nothing has happened to make me change my mind about that, and that's really positive. The bad news, if you want to call it that, is a lot of work to do!

If Ode were an infant it would be taking its first tentative steps, and shifting to new kinds of play (from fine motor control to bigger movements). The advice would be that each baby is an individual and develops at his or her own pace. Though admittedly somewhat of a stretch, in this context I'd say Ode is right on track.

As some of you know I believe that while intentionally small and simple, I believe Ode is an important project representing a crucial point of view.

I'm a proponent of the open web, and you're at all interested in Ode I'm guessing you are too.

Access to information has never been more important - of course there has never been a time when I wouldn't have said the same thing. The point is that the open, distributed nature of the web makes it exceedingly important. What has been demonstrated in the last couple of decades is that open and distributed solutions that scale as the web has, both in terms of architecture and acceptance, is a very rare thing. We have it now, for once, and may not get it again any time soon. We should cherish it.

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Ode's dated themes are a trick I haven't seen in any other package. The ability to roll back the look and content of a site to exactly what it was at any point in time is unique. It's part of my goal to make Ode a personal publishing platform. The fact is that the web is immense and most sites are not visited frequently.

As in real life, most people will never be famous on the web. (The reason why fame is so valuable is because it is a very rare thing.)

So why have a site at all?

It's a question most people with a weblog or other site have struggled with at times. Sure, occasionally you'll have people stumble onto a particular post from a search results page, but it's very unlikely that person will become a regular visitor. It certainly doesn't justify all of the time and effort that goes into maintaining an active website.

So why do it then?

My answer to that question is a question, why get out of bed in the morning? Why do so many people go to soulless jobs, and in many other ways deal with the tedium of daily life? Well there are those of us driven by a cause to the near exclusion of everything else. But, for most of us, I would argue it's just that, us. We do it for ourselves, our friends, and families. I believe you are the best reason for you to maintain a website. Because it's interesting to you (whoever you are), your friends and family.

It's tremendously powerful to be able to take a look back at what you were doing, and what you were thinking about, a year or a decade ago. It's a wonderful thing to be able to share experiences with those few people who are genuinely interested in knowing about you and what you're doing. Some of the best weblogs are stories of personal experiences with photos, videos, links to news and other things of interest, surrounded by enough text to stitch together a narrative and provide context. Sure the story may be interesting to only a very niche audience, but for those few, it is likely to be one of their favorites.

I say forget social. Let's make the web personal!