Ankit Gadiya

Wonders of Web Weaving Episodes

I added the Wonders of Web Weaving Podcast by James in my feed reader a couple of months ago when it was announced, but I didn't get to it until this weekend. The Podcast has 8 episodes so far, and I wanted to catch-up. While cleaning my apartment over the weekend, I finished listening to 3 episodes.

#3 Herman

Herman is the person behind Bearblog. The host talked to Herman about his personal experiences on the web and the Bearblog platform.

The host asked about how Bearblog came to be. Herman was looking to get into blogging, and was looking for a blog engine, but nothing seemed perfect, so he started building his own engine just for him at first. Then someone posted about it on Hackernews and within a short period, a lot of people signed up and started using it.

Herman had a very refreshing perspective about Bear, the product. He gave an analogy of Photoshop and its massive feature set that requires learning to use it. Then there is Procreate that focuses on a subset of features and builds an intuitive user interface. He wants Bearblog to be Procreate for building websites.

They also discussed the Discover feed on Bearblog. Herman talked about how he spent a lot of time fine tuning the algorithm so that it remains fair. It has grown into a community where people discover blogs and connect to others.

The Discover page shows the algorithm at the bottom.

#4 Marisabel

Marisabel runs the Confetti Explorations. They talked about different parts of her website and how she treats it as a Garden (not the conventional Digital Gardens). Here are some parts, I found interesting:

There are a lot of things really.

She always wants jumps to the next exciting thing and sometimes don't want to do the boring things. Both the host and I related with this sentiment. I learned that sometimes its ok to go with the flow and just enjoy the process.

She shared her joy of learning. She is not a programmer by profession, but continues to learn and maintain her website and its backend.

#5 Mike

Mike runs the Shellsharks. He talked about the origin story of his website and the domain name came from a cybersecurity club at his work.

The host asked about how he keeps the personal and professional separation on his website. Mike shared an interesting perspective here. He said that he does have separate tags and feeds for the professional content, but the personal content does have an impact on professional part as well. Mike talked about interviews, and one part during hiring is to check for the cultural fit. He learned that its fun to have a place for your entire self. His advice is to not to worry too much about separation.

The website has a newsletter called Scrolls of interesting links. Mike thinks of it as a manual curation of content for the Indieweb, and Fediverse community as opposed to the algorithm driven feeds on the popular social media.

Thoughts

The Podcast is fun and light listen, and each episode is 35-45 minutes long. James did a great job on inviting people with interesting stories to tell, and giving them space to talk about it. He doesn't try to force the conversation into structure, and let it flow freely. I'll continue listening to more episodes and try to post my notes here.