Notices by Richard MacManus (ricmac@mastodon.social), page 2

Admittedly outside my usual range for classic sites, but it really seems like Bluesky has been around for longer. I suppose because Jack went on and on about it starting around 2019, when it was a Twitter project. Anyway, it should be counted as #ClassicFedi I reckon. https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114632536444655319

If anyone has other ideas for #ClassicFedi screenshots, let me know! I figure it'd be good to show some of the history that eventually led to the #Fediverse and the #FediForum event this week.
https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114631692107973241

My 90s web design post is top of Hacker News — perhaps the only way I can get decent traffic these days. I do ok in Google Search (relatively speaking, since I don't have many years of Page Rank), but my site gets ignored by Google Discover and the other main traffic drivers these days. So...thank goodness for a real, human-focused network like HN. Join in the discussion (and an upvote wouldn't go astray either) if you have a Hacker News a/c: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44123852

It's pretty rare to find a tech publication/personality these days that doesn't still use, and by extension promote, X/Twitter. I'd wager that most of the indie web proponents whose names you know are still posting on X. So it was refreshing to discover today that @macstories is resolutely OFF X/Twitter and uses Mastodon & Bluesky. Frankly I think we need more of this 'walk the talk' behaviour. Kudos @viticci, @johnvoorhees and team.

1) I’ve been looking into Microsoft’s NLWeb, announced at its Build event, and described as a “natural language interface for websites using the model of their choice and their own data.” The idea, I think, is you can have a custom chatbot on your website. In theory, it sounds promising, but I'm not sure WHY I'd want to add this e.g. to my humble little internet history website. https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/company-news/introducing-nlweb-bringing-conversational-interfaces-directly-to-the-web/

Prior to #GoogleIO today, I talked to Ryan Salva from Google about the latest iteration of Gemini Code Assist — including its embrace of agents and how it differs from GitHub Copilot. https://thenewstack.io/inside-gemini-code-assist-googles-copilot-alternative/ #AIcoding

Apparently 86% of websites have “Low Contrast Text”, making it the most common #accessibility issue (even more than missing alt text). I’m quite surprised by this, as I thought most websites still have white background with black type. Maybe it’s a font size thing in many cases…Anybody have more info on this issue? https://accessibility.day/

@aardrian I meant...er, *more information*. The links you provide are helpful, yes, but don't answer my question: why are 86% of pages failing the 'low contrast text' test? Do you know?

@luke thankfully my website has no text contrast issues. I did discover, however, that there is an alert for "Redundant alternative text", which I didn't even know was a thing. Seems a bit odd to recommend no alt text, but I will bear it in mind going forward. #accessibility

I can’t quite get my head around this “no, actually you don’t always need alt text” thing. Seems to go against everything a certain type of Mastodon user yells at other Mastodon users about. Do they even know about this rule?! https://dewp.space/@matze/114513124884939890

Someone sent me their new website today, which at first glance looked like a Flash site — highly interactive, very snazzy. Turns out the site was built using Readymag (https://readymag.com/), which seems to be a modern take on Flash. The Readymag site itself uses a heck of a lot of JavaScript, and its homepage is over 12MB before first scroll. It's marketed as a "no code" site builder. I will look more into it...but it did strike me that *of course* the modern equivalent of Flash is JS-based.

20 years ago…how time flies. Also, I was Bloglines’ biggest fan. https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114480068009241767

@Gargron I think he was saying that, in enterprises at least, often it was the product manager that defined the business logic, and once that was done it would be passed to the developers to implement. And from my time (long ago, admittedly) working in IT departments, that was mostly how it worked. But now that AI can generate code, developers are being tasked more with business logic and architecture. YMMV I suppose, but that’s a trend a senior Field CTO is observing.

One trend I thought was notable from the discussion: developers are now acting more like architects, says Brian Wald from GitLab. In the AI era, devs are spending more time on upfront design, defining business logic, and creating high-context environments to guide AI-generated code. “So you become kind of the orchestrators of the code, versus the writers of the code,” he told me.

I realize there's a lot of AI-skepticism on Mastodon, but I think it's important to track how AI is being used more widely. So I spoke to GitLab's head of Field CTOs Brian Wald about how enterprises are implementing AI technology. Among other things, we discussed whether IT departments allow #VibeCoding, what types of AI #agents enterprises are building, how the #developer role is shifting to an architect-type role, and GitLab's own AI strategy. https://thenewstack.io/the-field-cto-view-ai-vibe-coding-and-developer-skillsets/

After a travel hiatus, Cybercultural is back with another sack of online memories from the 1990s -> Online music retail was thriving by 1996, thanks to sites like Music Boulevard and CDnow. But music downloads and streaming was more of a challenge — as David Bowie discovered in September 1996. https://cybercultural.com/p/online-music-distribution-1996/ #InternetHistory #OnlineMusic #1990s #BowieForever

While I was writing my Web 2.0 memoir, I realised that I didn’t have nearly enough screenshots from that era. The ones I did have were usually done with Skitch. I wish I’d used it more though! https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114248027432834035

@jdp23 I think the best thing about the fediverse is that YOU (the user) can choose which version of the fedi you want to live in. If you don’t want Meta, then choose an instance that blocks them out (or self-host). If you don’t want people searching your content, you can shut that off in your settings. If you don’t want “normies” here, then you can close the doors via your instance. What annoys me is people who want to make *their* version of the fedi the default.

Ah, the glory days of Plain Blue Links. Back when we knew how to link to each other. And of course, @davew improved that situation even more by building blogging tools and RSS. https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114205823193887379

I've moved my Mastodon account that posts screenshots of old websites to a new handle: @classicweb. It's a manually curated bot that posts memorable websites from the past, like this strange 2006 site that appeared out of nowhere (was it microblogging, was it a new form of txting? Nobody knew at that point...)
https://indieweb.social/@classicweb/114201528286279570