Like many folks who keep a blog, I like to fiddle with setups and reorganize my “online presence” every so often. But I've come to realize that the problem with fiddling is that it's a distraction from doing. And if I want to do more (of whatever), then I've got to not only reduce the fiddling, but the friction as well.

Hugo is an excellent static site generator, and I've had a lot of fun building the Indigo theme that powers this site (as well as a few others!) — but it's time to retire it. If I want to write more (and I do!), being tied to a desktop and having to run incantations on the terminal to create a draft and publish the final article is… well, it's a pain. Yes, I can keep my drafts in Drafts or any other cross-platform writing app, but the fact remains that I still have to get to my Mac to publish. And if that Mac has to go in for servicing, then I need to find another machine, deploy all the fiddle bits that generate and publish the site, and hope that I remembered to commit any changes I'd made, either to the theme or the content.

It's a headache.

The way things are set up, I also need to switch contexts if I choose to publish a short, title-less “update” — for a few years now, long-form posts have been published to angelostavrow.com, and short posts have been published to Micro.blog, with some additional plumbing set up to get each feed into the other site, as well as everything pushed out to various communities that I like to engage in.

Fact is, nothing takes the fun out of creating a thing more than having to maintain it.

So, in the interest of offloading the work that I'd taken upon myself, let's discuss how things will be changing.

Since late November, I've been writing everything —that is, both long-form articles and short updates— on angelostavrow.blog, which is a Write.as-hosted blog. This will be the new home for my writing; the RSS feed is pushed to my Micro.blog account, where the cross-posting bot syndicates that content out to my Twitter and Mastodon accounts. I really like the focus Write.as puts on writing, but I like the communities with which I share my writing too, and this works really well to combine frictionless writing with frictionless sharing.

(Disclaimer: I've been working with their team building the official iOS app for WriteFreely, the open-source software that powers the Write.as service.)

I'm going to slowly import all posts on the old blog and Micro.blog to this new blog, and I'm going to try to make sure that old permalinks continue to work. Then, I'll be free to do a bit of re-working of my online presence:

• My dot-com site will become a landing page of sorts, hosting some info about me and links to the various social networks I like to participate in.
• My dot-dev site is already a landing page for software-development-related links, but I'm going to take some time to improve it a little bit.
• I'm not decided yet whether I'll simply archive the Indigo theme, or see if someone else wants to take it over. I don't need to make this decision now, but I will share this in the GitHub repo.

So there you go. Happy New Year, friends, and if you'd like, consider updating your feed readers to the new blog's RSS feed.

#news #indigo

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Today, I published the v1.4.0 release of Indigo, my theme for the Hugo static site generator (which powers this site as well).

What's Web Monetization?

Web Monetization is a draft Web API spec that lets the user agent (i.e., your browser) stream payments to a website. I got to speak with a few people on their team, and the idea of a privacy-focused, patron-driven way for creators to generate revenue really spoke to me.

I then promptly got caught up in a bunch of other stuff, so when a couple of posts that were recently shared by Chen Hui Jing (1, 2) showed up in my feed reader, it reminded me that I wanted to add it to Indigo (as well as my own site).

Hui Jing explains it all in great detail, but in essence, the way this works is as follows:

• Someone signs up as a creator with a web monetization provider, like Coil, and creates a wallet with an associated provider.
• The wallet provider generates a payment pointer for the creator.
• The creator adds this payment pointer to a specific <meta name="monetization"> tag to the head of their site.

Once that's set up, anyone that's got a Coil subscription and is using a compatible browser will now micropayments to that creator whenever they visit that site. Hui Jing's site is monetized, as are some others you may know.

How to enable web monetization in Indigo

First, make sure you update the theme to v1.4.0, just as you would update any Hugo theme:

$ cd path/to/your/hugo-site
$ cd themes/indigo
$ git pull origin v1.4.0

Then, open your site's config.toml file and, under the [params] section, add:

paymentPointer = "$your.payment.pointer/here"

Build and deploy your site, and you're ready to go! If you've got any comments or questions, don't hesitate to reach out and let me know.

#indigo #projects

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