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Read Nothing Fails Like Success by Jeffrey Zeldman

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

#Let’sFixThis To tell the truth, I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Jeffrey Zeldman in Nothing Fails Like Success, but as someone who participates in the IndieWeb, and who has seen nothing but benefit from it, both personally and professionally, I have to hope that we can fix what we’ve broken. Not only that, I think we have to fix it, both because this is the only web we have, and because, really, we’re the ones who convinced the general public to use things like Twitter and Facebook and the like. We turned them onto these things, it wasn’t just marketers. I’m not suggesting that any of us should succumb to paralyzing guilt over any of this, and that includes Zuckerberg. For one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to see what’s wrong in the rear-view mirror than it is through the windshield, and for another, paralyzing built would prevent us from doing the fixing. We need to be clear-eyed when it comes to what we’re fixing, and in my opinion there’s a hell of a lot of things that need fixing.

If we have any hope of repair, I think we as designers and developers need to start with ourselves and our industry. We need to get our act together and start behaving like we’re a profession, and we need to discontinue the pervasive practice of rewarding all the wrong things. Those are just for starters, and they’re large undertakings in themselves. And once we get our own house in order, we’ll need to spend some time doing some seriously hard work convincing the genereal public that the content we convinced them to start putting in the hands of the big social media networks is in fact valuable enough to own and control. Next comes making it easier to own and control. Despite every word of criticism I’ve leveled against WordPress’s new editor, I believe Matt Mullenweg is on the right track, at least as far as the concept goes, because I believe the new editor will make it easier for the average, non-technical person to own and control their content, and at the end of the day, average non-technical people are the majority, not designers and developers.

I have to hope we can accomplish all these tasks. Otherewise, the only thing left is to burn everything to the ground. I hate to think we might be at that point. I’m still optimistic about the web, about its openness and independence, about it’s fundamental accessibility, and I’m optimistic about fixing it and making it easier for everyone to participate in the web. To that end, I hope to have at least a small part in fixing it.

Read The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch by Alex Russell

We cannot continue to use as much JavaScript as is now “normal” and expect the web to flourish. At the same time, most developers experience no constraint on their use of JS…until it’s too late. “JS neutral” (or negative) tools are here, but we’re stuck in a rhetorical rut. We need to reset our conversation about “developer experience” to factor in the asymmetric cost of JS.

Read VPN – a Very Precarious Narrative by Dennis Schubert

A very long article about commercial VPNs, their marketing strategies, and the truth behind their privacy and security claims.

[…] another worrying aspect of today’s market of VPN services is the large amount of misinformation end users are exposed to, which makes it hard for them to properly tell apart vague and bold claims typical of product advertisement campaigns with actual facts.

That quote is four years old, and just as relevant today as it was when it was written. The article I’m linking here does a really good job explaining what a VPN (virtual private network) is and what it is not, and it makes sure to use as few technical terms as possible. It also goes into detail about what a VPN is good for, not just what they’re not good for.

Read Stop Throwing Away Your Content by Adrian Roselli

It is not uncommon for individuals and even entire organizations to rely on some third party platform to host all their thought-leadering. Medium is the common choice, but many use other platforms as well, such as LinkedIn.
While many argue that the reach is better and it is easier than self-hosting, few consider what will happen when their chosen platform goes away (or the platform chooses to purge you). After all, the web is littered with the corpses of platforms populated by content that you wrote and that we will never see again.

The death of GooglePlus earlier this week is the perfect time to re-up this from Adrian. With the rate of site deaths or just general data loss, like in the case of MySpace and all the music, this will never stop being evergreen content. Seriously, listen to Adrian and do what he tells you. Start taking control and ownership of the content you create.