Lifestream

As mentioned previously, I recently converted my website over to Eleventy. I'm an IndieWeb participant and, moreover, my website is fairly complex so I ended up writing (or, in some cases, pilfering) a fair amount of code to make it all work together in an acceptable manner. I thought I would document the process via a series of blog posts in case anyone else finds it of value.

None of this is intended to be an Eleventy tutorial and you'll get the most from these posts if you already know something about how Eleventy works.

Read more »

After roughly five years, I've finally decided to switch my blog over from Pelican to Eleventy. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't at least partially swayed by the fact that all the cool kids seemed to be doing it but, with that in mind, I do have some (hopefully) legitimate reasons for making the switch.

Pelican bills itself as a static site generator, and so it is, but one that focuses more on traditional, single user blogs. Pelican can, of course, be used as a CMS, and you can certainly use it to create arbitrary, standalone pages and websites, but the features in support of this usage seem more bolted on than organic. There are certain assumptions built into Pelican that stem from its original purpose as a blogging engine that are occasionally irritating to circumvent.

Read more »

Like many Indieweb participants, I post bookmarks, likes and reposts to my website.

From a technical standpoint, there's virtually no difference between these kinds of posts; they're all permalinked h-entries which house another, usually external, URL and which often contain no other content beyond that link. They differ solely in the microformat which annotates the link, indicating the intent of the post.

And intent make all the difference here. A like is supposed to convey that the author actually enjoys or appreciates the content to which the post is linking. A repost is supposed to convey that the author wishes, for some reason, to share that content on their own feed. A bookmark is supposed to convey that the author...ugh...err...

Read more »

More generally, is there any advantage to hosting your albums on an #indieweb enabled website, as opposed to a dedicated application, assuming the app was under your control (in other words you still own your data)?

So what does the #indieweb use for storing photos/albums? I run a micropub media server on a remote machine, storing the photos on disk. Any advantage to switching to the cloud (a bucket, for example)?

If you're a programmer of a certain age, you've either read or know about Design Patterns, a book on software architecture popular in the 90s and early 2000's. The book was sort of like a repository of TV tropes for the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) world in that it provided a convenient vocabulary for describing what were usually eminently recognizable software engineering techniques that nonetheless often lacked punchy, easy to remember names.

Notably, the book was more descriptive than prescriptive. It described preexisting techniques that were already in use in the "wild", so to speak.

Read more »

Chicago, summer 2018. Not Greece, but I'll take it.

Taken in summer 2015. Wish I were there, in both space and time.

Though parts of the Wheel of Time TV series were maddeningly frustrating, I did enjoy it on the whole, though being a fan I was always going to be an easy sell. The people complaining about the diversity of the cast can get bent; the cast was one of the best parts.

I have a very hard time developing new habits. As I have not grown up with plants my whole life, this means that I cannot be trusted to keep a plant alive, as I will inevitably forget to water it.

I am grateful that Wordle exists if for no other reason than it gives me a reason to talk to my mother every day.

I understand the sentiment but really, what's wrong with garlic in your soul? Garlic is good.

Why does every Greek letter sound so ominous?

TIL I learned that the word "senate" is derived from the Latin word "senex" meaning "old man".

TIL that Betty White is older than sliced bread. Also, her and Rue McClanahan were originally offered their respective parts on The Golden Girls.

I know this sounds patronizing but the Spanish word for small (pequeño/a) is super cute.

Unoaked whiskey.  Isn't that just...vodka?

Tree Corridor. Mansonville, Quebec

Mansonville, Quebec

I'll admit I gave up on the series after...book11?  Still excited, though :-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fus4Xb_TLg

I've been doing Spanish on Duolingo since December of last year, and I STILL have trouble mentally translating "Yo tengo" as "I have" as opposed to "You tango?"

If I say that my professional life has spanned RCS, CVS, Mercurial and Git, this tell you something (depressing) about my age.

Like everyone else, I'm now a git user, but I still say that Mercurial was the most elegant of the bunch, at least in terms of its emmiently predictable and well-designed CLI, even if the software itself gave up the ghost years ago.

Back in the day, when version control systems were still duking it out, I used to try and defend Mercurial to rabid git fans, mostly to no avail. I always felt that I was at a bit of a disadvantage in those conversation (cue the git fans yelling "Yeah, cuz mercurial SUCKS!"), because I was always willing to concede, despite appreciating Mercurial's virtues, that git actually did have its strengths as well as its weaknesses, while the git fans were rarely so magnanimous with any other VCS.

Read more »

Borden-Carleton, Prince Edward island

Victoria by the Sea, Prince Edward Island

Lonely