From: Kev Quirk
To: Robb Knight
Subject: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 01 December 2023

Hey Robb,

Hope you're doing well? Thanks for agreeing to be my PenPal for December - I'm looking forward to getting to know you better. With Christmas coming up, I don't know how much opportunity we will have to email one another, but I hope it works out. If nothing else, we should have plenty to talk about. :-)

No point in beating around the bush...let's dive right in, shall we? Can you tell me a little bit about yourself please? I've been doing a bit of cyber stalking to see what I can learn about you, I don't know why, but I thought you were American. Looking at your Social.lol page it seems you're in Portsmouth? Being in the same timezone should make emailing a little easier.

I also see that you got married recently. Congratulations! My and I got married around 3.5 years ago, in the summer before the pandemic hit. We've been together for, like 16 years now I think, and we never really intended to get married. We decided to once we made the decision the adopt - we figured it would be less confusing for the kids if we all had the same surname. 🤷‍♂️

Romance is not dead in the Quirk household!

OK, I've held off long enough...please please please tell me about your site. I LOVE the design of it. The colours, the typography, the subtle texture on the background. It's just lovely. What are you using at the backend?

I notice you're using social.lol too; have you ever thought about using their platform to host your site? I have an account there too, more to explore it than anything else. The sheer number of services available for the price is great value, and they're always adding new stuff. I think if I ever left Fosstodon, I'd probably switch to their Mastodon instance.

I think this is more than enough to get us started. Looking forward to your reply.

Kev

From: Robb Knight
To: Kev Quirk
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 01 December 2023

Hi Kev,

Firstly, this is a nice bookend to the year because I started January with a similar project with Jason Becker.

You are right that I'm in Portsmouth. I was born here, then lived for most of my school years in Southampton, and moved back here afterwards. I work as a developer for a property software company here in Portsmouth. I live with my wife, cat, and nearly-nine month old daughter. We were supposed to get married in September 2020 but because of the event we moved it to May 2021. Then the restrictions made it difficult to have the day we wanted we decided to move house instead and so we got married this year. I would not recommend having a baby and getting married in the same year 😅

To your point about getting married for more "practical" reasons, we totally get that - if we'd been able to get deposits back from various vendors we may have gone for the cheaper registry office wedding instead of what we had. That said we had a great day even if it was the hottest day of the year.

Now, to the real questions: my website. We've crossed paths just as I pushed a new design. My previous design I had for a couple of years (which is archived here) and as much as I loved it, the "boxy" design was pushing me into a corner where I was struggling to make big changes to layouts so I knew I wanted a new design but I didn't know what I wanted. Until I saw the Cartridge font from Simplebits and I knew I wanted a site that was reminiscent of the Atari 2600-type designs from the game covers.

Speaking of design, a friend and I were discussing monogram logos recently and how we have awkward letters to make a nice monogram with. Then I remembered yours and showed it to her and she was furious at how good it is. I love it.

I'm using Eleventy for my site hosted on Digital Ocean and have done for maybe five years. I love the flexibility it gives me to pull in data from a bunch of different sources and manipulate it however I want. It's what I use for most of my side projects if I can. I'm a big fan of using as little as possible to build websites; if I can avoid a database or javascript, I will. Speaking of which, I recently used simple.css on a project and it saved me a lot of time so thanks for that.

How do you like Kirby? I saw your post about the custom forms for the penpals project and it looks like an excellent CMS but I've not had occasion to use it.

As for hosting my site on omg.lol I don't use it for similar reasons that you mentioned for not using micro.blog: I want a lot more control over everything I can. I like to automate things, like my now page, and generally be able to control as much as I can with my own code. Weblog.lol is an excellent blogging platform, but it's not for me. I do swear by social.lol as an instance though: I've been burned twice by instances (one Mastodon and one Lemmy) just shutting down overnight and not being able to export my data. I need to be on an instance where I know who's running it and that I can pay money to so that instance continues to run.

I can talk about open web protocols until the cows come home so I'll stop for now.

Speak soon,
Robb

From: Kev Quirk
To: Robb Knight
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 03 December 2023

Hey Robb,

Thanks for the reply. I originally said in the first post that I'd exchange 1 email per week with my PenPal, but if you're happy with whatever cadence suite our schedule at the time (i.e. we just email back and forth whenever it suits) I'm good with that if you are?

Young children seem like such hard work. Our boys are adopted - we decided early on in our relationship that we didn't want kids, but later decided that we wanted a family, but still didn't feel the need to have biological kids, so we decided to adopt - anyway, I digress...our kids are adopted and they came home when they were 5 and 2, so we never experienced the baby part of bringing up kids. Which feels like a double edge sword; on the one hand, se dodged all the long nights etc. but on the other, we missed out on making that early bond with them. So simultaneously envy and don't envy you. :)

Ah, don't get me started on how expensive weddings are. My wife and I decided early on that we wanted to keep it small, so we set the budget at £10k (ten thousand pounds for a single day!) and so we started looking at venues. Slowly but surely the budget began to creep up until we were having conversations about £30k weddings.

Luckily we both saw sense, reeled it back in and ended having a lovely wedding for around the original budget. Pissed it down the whole day though haha.

You previous "boxy" design is quite similar to the design I have now on my site, actually. I've considered using the box-shadow on things like cards etc. but decided against over-using them and just having them on buttons instead.

The Cartridge font is really nice - and not obnoxiously priced like many fonts. I've never heard of Simplebits before - they have some great fonts, and all seem to be very reasonably priced.

Thanks for the kind words about my monogram. I'm really happy with how it turned out, but I suppose K & Q are easy to put together in this way.

I'm similar to you - I prefer to use no JavaScript on my site. I've been thinking about introducing a colour switcher so it doesn't only rely on prefers-color-scheme so would need to introduce some JS for that, but I'm still on the fence. I used Jekyll when this site was on an SSG, but did consider a move to 11ty more than once. I'll definitely use it on a project at some point.

I'm really enjoying Kirby. Like really enjoying it. I always liked WP, but the sheer amount of noise in the control panel frustrated me. Kirby is really bare bones by default, and allows you to build panels that make sense to you.Once you have it nailed, it's like having a custom build CMS, just for you. And because it's not DB driven, if I want to create content in a text editor, I can do that too. It's so flexible, I really love it.

I'm with you on the omg.lol thing. I think it's a great out-of-box solution for someone who's just getting started, or someone who doesn't want to manage their own site. I'm going to be penpalling (is that even a word?) with Gabz in June; he used omg.lol for his blog for a while, so I'll be interested to hear what he says about it.

Oof this is SUCH a long email already, but I'd love to talk about open protocols too, so I'll just bullet out some of my thoughts and we can dig into them more (along with your thoughts) in our next exchange:

• I think ActivityPub has the potential to be great but I wonder how well it will scale. Fosstodon only has like 60k users and it's really expensive to run already. Goodness knows what it must cost Eugen to run .social
• If I were ever to run my own instance, I think I'd go with GoToSocial, as it seems to be quite lightweight and it supports most of the spec
• I don't understand why BlueSky tried to re-invent the wheel? Why not just on the AP bandwagon?
• I don't think Threads will ever support AP - that's just a pipedream
• I used to run the IndieWeb stack on my site, but it's so convoluted to plug it all together, that I decided to abandon it. I think if it's ever going to gain traction, there needs to be either a hosted solution that supports it natively, or it needs to be hugely simplified

Anyway, this email ended up being WAY longer than I intended it to be. Sorry about that. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the open protocols.

Kev

From: Robb Knight
To: Kev Quirk
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 10 December 2023

Hey Kev,

Firstly, our wedding came out around the same price as yours and that was considered "cheap" in comparison to some of my friends. I try not to think about the money and just remember the day which was wonderful.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you and Gabz talking about, he's a great guy.

Now onto the meaty stuff: open protocols.

Fosstodon only has like 60k users and it's really expensive to run

This was one of the reasons I built Bugle - I wanted something I could run easily on my server to create accounts for little side projects and such., Even for a single user who has a few hundred followers, or uploads a lot of photos, it can get expensive quick with Mastodon. The way it handles files and the duplication that happens is a huge problem in getting smaller instances up and running and probably why we see so many users on the main four or five instances. Building Bugle did give me a good insight into how a lot of the protocols work but it's hard. The lack of documentation, or more specifically, examples of how the spec should work make it difficult. The developer of Pixelfed, Dan, was incredibly helpful in pointing me in the right direction for things I was stuck on.

How do you find running an instance with that many users? Does moderation take up a lot of time or is it generally pretty good for Fosstodon?

I hadn't heard of GoToSocial until you mentioned it but that looks much closer to what I was trying to achieve with Bugle and I"m adding that to my list to investigate. I don't have much to say on BlueSky or Threads, neither of them interest me if they don't support AP so I don't pay them much attention (although I do have accounts on both). The one thing I do like with Bluesky is the domain-as-a-username. That is something that does excite me and I know Mastodon has talked about implementing something similar in the future.

I agree with you on the IndieWeb stuff, I've implemented webventions and recently some other metadata-type things, but like AP it just doesn't feel like it's that well documented. IndieKit looks promising in that it's runs separately from your site and handles all the IndieWeb stuff one might need. It doesn't have everything yet but it's one to keep an eye on.

We are now just about two weeks from Christmas, how are you plans coming along for the day?

Speak soon,
Robb

From: Kev Quirk
To: Robb Knight
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 12 December 2023

Hey Robb,

It's crazy how expensive weddings can get. My sister-in-law is married to an Indian and they had a traditional Indian wedding, with a TONNE of people. I dread to think how much theirs cost.

Scalability of Mastodon does concern me. The way in which is caches everything from every server/account it's connected to means things spiral quickly. I remember speaking with Hugo, who runs Masto.host, and he said with me having around 26k followers, a single-user instance would be around $50/month just because of the amount of other instances it would have to connect to.

When Mike and I started Fosstodon, we decided early on to go with a hosted solution, as it would be one less thing for us to worry about. Turns out it was the best decision, as I really wouldn't want to be managing the infrastructure myself with so many people relying on it. We've since grown out the moderation team so that Mike and I can take a step back from the moderation stuff and can focus on other things, like dealing with the various parts that make up the service etc.

At the same time, we also decided to go invite-only. Mainly to force people to go to other servers, and we're far bigger than we ever thought we would be, and honestly, it worries me. I don't want to be responsible for the social network of so many people. But also for moderation - previously we were approving every account that signed up, and we moderate heavily. It's a large burden, but it keeps the timeline (I think) clean and friendly. I have a test account on .social and local timeline over there is a hot mess.

I was listening Ruminate this morning on my way to work; you and Johnny were talking about blog posts vs micro/social posts and what belongs where. Have you ever thought about integrating social with your blog?

I decided that they're 2 different use cases, and I personally dislike it when my RSS feeds contain multiple hot takes per day, as that's not what I want it for - my RSS feeds are for longer form content. I enjoy both hot takes and longer articles, but I have to be in a different frame of mind to consume each, so mangling them both together makes no sense to me.

Ah, Christmas. We're doing ok. There's still a few presents to buy, and a lot to wrap, but we're pretty close, I think. We do things a bit differently on Christmas day. Instead of having a big fancy roast dinner, we cook a simple curry and enjoy that instead. That way, we're not slaving in the kitchen all day and can enjoy the day as a family. Hows about you? You all sorted yet?

Look forward to talking soon.

Kev

From: Robb Knight
To: Kev Quirk
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 22 December 2023

Hey Kev,

Been a while since I replied, we've had a hectic week over at the Knight household with illnesses going round everyone.

Have you ever thought about integrating social with your blog

I think about this all the time. I do have a mirror of my Mastodon feed on my site as a sort of backup, but I would like to get to a point of proper POSSE. For that to work for me I really need to be able to post from mobile, which means integrating a CMS of some kind. I'm looking at Kirby as well as Wordpress but also considering building my own. "The developer curse" as I like to call it.

I agree having them in one feed (long posts and short posts) isn't what I'd like from someone else's site so I certainly wouldn't be doing that on mine. I also want to split out some things to services more suited to the media; right now I post photos directly on Mastodon but I think Pixelfed would make a lot more sense for me. They are releasing "Solo", a single-user version of Pixelfed soon so I'll be checking that out as soon as it's available.

As for Christmas we're all sorted now, the food is in the fridge ready, chocolates are scattered around the house in bowls for grabbing as we walk past, and my daughter has met Santa for the first time. This year will be the first time I've cooked for my dad so I'm pulling out all the stops.

If I don't speak to you again before Christmas (because apparently it's only 3 days away 😱) have a good one and I'll speak to you soon.

Robb

From: Kev Quirk
To: Robb Knight
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 24 December 2023

Hey Robb,

Good to hear from you and hope you and the family are all feeling better now!

Thanks for you help on the Echo thing - that really helped, but has had the undesired effect of making me explore POSSE again and whether I should start posting "notes" to my blog and have them syndicate to Masto. Problem is, I then go down this rabbit hole of "but I won't have replies..." so then I start looking at webmentions and the whole thing gets so complicated.

I'm also considered adding a bookmarks page to my site. Kinda like a self-hosted read later type thing. Or just a resource that people can use to see what I've found interesting or useful. But I don't know whether I'm going to implement that. If I do, I'll probably switch my about page to my home page, then have my posts served from /blog/ as the site will be far more than just a blog at that point. I dunno what I'll do ultimately, but it's so much fun playing with this stuff.

I see you're looking at TinaCMS - I was keeping an eye on that project when I was running Jekyll. It's looks really good, but was only in beta when I switched, so never explored it further.

You know, we have a distinct lack of chocolate in casa Quirk this year, which is disappointing. I think my wife hasn't bothered because of all the work I've put in losing weight, but I'm happy to put on a few KG over the next couple weeks. I might have to nip the shops for a couple boxes! :)

Cooking Christmas dinner is so much pressure. Good luck cooking for your old man! We tend to have a quiet Christmas, where we don't even have a roast dinner actually. Our tradition is to cook a curry. The kids don't really like roast dinners, so seems silly to spend all day in the kitchen for a meal they won't enjoy.

Anyway, it's the big day tomorrow. Hope you and the family have a great one and that there's no problems with dinner.

Talks soon,

Kev

From: Robb Knight
To: Kev Quirk
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 30 December 2023

Hey Kev, 

Hope your Christmas went well. The cooking for my dad went well, he was very impressed so much so that he said he’s never cooking on Christmas and I have to do every year. I’ll be getting my roast potato recipe up on the blog hopefully tomorrow. 

If you subscribe my RSS feed you might have seen a sneak peek at what I plan to build next year, but I’m still torn on bookmarks, POSSE notes, etc. It’s a hard problem to solve or at least come up with something I’m happy with. 

I am completely chocolated (and cheesed) out now so we’re back to proper dinners and mealtimes. We have been having bacon and egg sandwiches every morning this week which has been nice treat. 

No plans for new years here, I expect we’ll watch some movies and wait until midnight when I’m sure Baby Knight will wake up because of the fireworks. Do you have any fun plans at all? 

I guess this will likely be the last exchange for this month’s letters. I’m looking forward to seeing who you’ve got lined up for next year. This has been a lot of fun and I’ll definitely be asking for your opinions on all this POSSE stuff in the next few months as I try and get to grips with it all. 

Speak soon, 

Robb

From: Kev Quirk
To: Robb Knight
Subject: RE: PenPals - December 2023
Date: 30 December 2023

Hey Robb,

Yeah, Christmas was great thanks. Just very chilled and lots of family time. I still have another week off work, so only halfway through the holiday yet. Sounds like you're on he hook for all the Christmas dinners from now on...no pressure!

I do subscribe to your RSS feed - I'm looking forward to seeing what comes of it all. Personally, I'm still undecided. Integrating notes into the site would be trivial at this point, but I really don't know whether the juice is worth the squeeze.

I've been eating so much crap the last week or so, as I'm writing this very email, I'm chomping on a pack of Kettle chips. 🤦‍♂️ Oh well, I'll get back on the wagon after the holidays.

It's actually my mum's birthday tomorrow, so I'll go up and see her for a few hours, then I think we're going to our neighbours house for a few drink tomorrow evening. 

Yeah, this is likely going to be the last exchange. Thanks so much for taking the time to be my PenPal for this last month, it's been great getting to know you better and I'm looking forward to continuing to get to know you better in the future.

Happy new year, and talk soon!

Kev