My high school reunion is coming up. I remain uncertain about going. Do I want to see people who, for the most part, cut ties after high school? Then I found out, in different rooms in the same venue space, the school is having 60th, 50th, 45th, 40th, 35th, 30th, 25th, 20th, 10th, and 5th reunions. That’s a lot of alumni in one place. Oddly, the 65th, 70th, and 75th get the day before. Wondering if it is worth revisiting the past.

My IndieWeb Journey – 10 Years Of IndieWeb

This was originally part of an introduction at IWC Online in 2020, but I’d never posted it. As my 10th anniversary of joining the Indieweb chat is today, I thought I’d post on it.

“Your high school’s yearbook club just graduated and knows HTML”—Chloe Weil

Photo of IWC 2014 East
IndieWebCamp 2014 East – June 28, 2014

 

Making an Appearance

Good Afternoon, I am interested in your philosophy and wish to subscribe to it. – First visit to the Indieweb chat room.

I first heard about the IndieWeb on March 6, 2014 when Amber Case, who co-founded IndieWebCamps, appeared episode 80 of the now defunct podcast, In Beta, talking about the upcoming IWC SF.

The ideas meshed with what I myself thought…you should have a website and post there. I’d flirted with websites, and by 2014, I had been writing blog entries elsewhere under a variety of different usernames and identities regularly for years. I had tried to resurrect my website because I was tired of the only identity people could find being one on someone else’s site.

 

My First IndieWebCamp

I found out that there was an upcoming Indiewebcamp in my area. So my involvement with the Indieweb physically began on April 26, 2014 when I visited my first IndieWebCamp, IWC NYC 2014.

IndieWebCamp NYC 2014 Day 1
IndieWebCamp NYC 2014 Day 1

 

IndieWebCamps

The original IndieWebCamp, in Portland Oregon, which was later renamed the IndieWeb Summit, has been going on since 2011. A UK event joined in 2012, but 2014, the year I joined, was the first year we really took the idea on the road. We had events at MIT, Online, San Francisco, New York, the UK, and for the first time, the Portland event had counterparts running concurrently in New York and Berlin.

I continued to participate in Indiewebcamps until 2020, when the pandemic put that on hold, and this past December, we finally got a US based one together again.

Evolution

Here is an early screenshot of my site from April 2014. My site has changed its look many times, but the data still remains the same.

This is what that post looks like today

What Has Changed

Not much. When I joined in 2014, I wasn’t much of a developer. I have gotten better, building my knowledge of IndieWeb and WordPress concepts and helping to maintain Indieweb plugins for WordPress.

As a community, when I started we had Microformats and Webmentions, IndieAuth was only something one person had implemented. We’ve added Micropub and Microsub and continued to iterate on the other building blocks.

So, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 2728…which notes that the taking of hostages is prohibited under international law and demands the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages. I don’t expect Hamas to do that, and I don’t think the U.N. Security Council does either. The other part of the demand is a ceasefire demand for the month of Ramadan, leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire. The U.N. Security Council does expect, I’d imagine, Israel to do that, despite the fact the last pause in the fighting was interrupted by Hamas.
Reposted Review: AirGradient Open Air Outdoor Air Quality Kit by David Shanske (Gadget Wisdom)

In my previous post, Finding The Right Outdoor Air Quality Monitor, I laid out my decision making process for purchasing the AirGradient Open Air outdoor air quality monitor kit.

Posted pictures of my new air quality sensor construction over at the tech site I contribute to. Excitedly hoping it doesn’t fail like the previous one.
Reposted https://twitter.com/SpencerGuard/status/1746725914312847646 by John Spencer (Twitter)

One of the biggest mistakes of critics of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is attempting to compare the war to a past modern war (post WWII) or battle that is not what Israel is conducting in Gaza. 🧵 pic.twitter.com/StGeCgcLra

This is probably the best analysis of why the situation in Gaza is often misconstrued by the international community that I’ve seen. I’ve tried to repost it below, with appropriate attribution, as it was sent out as a series of X/Twitter posts.

The Author is John Spencer, who according to his bio is an expert on Urban Warfare and the Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at the Modern Warfare Institute at West Point. Sounds like a man with the credentials to speak with authority on the subject.

One of the biggest mistakes of critics of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza is attempting to compare the war to a past modern war (post WWII) or battle that is not what Israel is conducting in Gaza.

Israel is not conducting a counterinsurgency, counter-terror campaign (it may later) in a semi-permissive environment with host nation support, or fighting a single battle against a small terror force that has temporarily seized an urban area.

Initially I too tried to explain that the closest comparison of Israel’s initial attack of Gaza City was the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul. As in a city attack of an enemy held city where the defenders were using human shields & had prepared a complex defense. But, even Mosul fails on multiple levels to compare in context to Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. None of the battles of Raqqa, Aleppo, Marawi, Mosul, or Fallujah are comparable to Israel’s operations for many reasons.

Again, Israel is not trying to find a few terrorists embedded in an urban environment where they have host-nation support and 90% of the civilians are not combatants or are not present such as 2004 Fallujah with 3,000 enemy fighters in a single city or the 2016-2017 Mosul with 5,000 ISIS fighters in a single city.

The IDF is fighting a full-scale war against a terrorist military of over 30,000 fighters with a massive arsenal of rockets, who has spent decades & millions of dollars digging an underground world of hundreds of miles of tunnels woven into the civilian society & with the design to reverse engineer the current laws of war (lawfare) to achieve their strategic goals.

Unlike other battles, the Hamas strategic goals are not to hold terrain or defeat Israel’s military but to sacrifice their civilians (so not human shields, but human sacrifices) to cause the international community to force Israel to stop their counter-attack.

No modern military has faced 13,000 plus rockets being launched over their heads at their homes while conducting their war/battle/operation.

Nor since World War II has a military fought in a situation where hundreds (now 136) of their own citizens (to include babies, women, elderly) are being illegally held hostage inside the combat area and a strategic factor in their timeline of the war.

Israel is not fighting in one city. It is fighting in five major cities. It is fighting a real and definable existential threat to the survival of their citizens and nation.

IMO, the fact is that Israel has followed the laws of war, has implemented civilian harm mitigation steps that no military has implemented in modern urban battles and people still attempt a moral equivalence with out of context battles.