Archive of posts from 2021/09 📝

Based in Stirling, HBW Coffee is a speciality coffee shop offering coffee, donuts, and vegan and vegetarian food. Their owner, Conor, has worked tirelessly to design a food and drinks menu that meets the needs of his customers. In this interview, I chat with Conor about his role as owner of HBW Coffee, what his typical day at work looks like, and how he designed the HBW food and drink offering. I hope you enjoy our chat.

In parts one and two of this series, we built a program to monitor the moisture level in a plant and a program to convert our readings into a chart. The final step is to create a web page that lets us see our chart and download our logging file. That's what we are going to cover in this tutorial. If you have not already read parts one and two, I'd recommend doing that before continuing. You can find links to these tutorials at the end of this post. Without any further ado, let's get started.

One of my favourite types of blog posts to read are "Weeknotes." These are blog posts where people share some details about their week. I like reading these posts because they afford me the opportunity to learn about some of the things that go on in the day-to-day lives of the bloggers I follow.

A couple of months ago, I started to work on my own webmention receiver. Instead of relying on webmention.io, a service commonly used to receive webmentions, I wanted to challenge myself to create a receiver from scratch. To do so, I realised I would have to read, understand, and interpret a W3C specification, something I had not done up until the point of deciding to work on a webmention receiver. While I knew there would be challenges, I wanted to take control over how I received webmentions and build my own service.

In the last part of this series, I walked you through how to create a program that logs the moisture levels in your plants. If you haven't already read that tutorial, I'd recommend going back to it before reading on. If you have, you are ready to advance onto the next stage of your journey toward building a plant monitor dashboard: showing your plant data on pretty charts. That is the topic of this tutorial.

Over the last few months, I have spent a lot of time thinking about, talking about, and building a search engine. The search engine was first designed for my blog and then I expanded it into IndieWeb Search, a search engine for the IndieWeb community. Working on this project has been interesting but also challenging. Search involves solving many different problems, even if your intention is only to build a search engine for your own website.

I recently entertained a question about why I decided to turn what was a search engine for my blog into an IndieWeb Search engine. My motive was not clear until someone shared an article with me written by jpreston.xyz. In this article, jpreston.xyz explains why they had embarked on a similar journey to build a search engine. Quoting from their article:

I saw a post on Instagram yesterday by Starbucks advertising their Pumpkin Spiced Latte and a pumpkin spiced cold foam drink. Autumn must be imminent, despite my wish for the summer to go on longer. The foam drink caught my eye. At Starbucks, you can order some "cold foam" drinks which are essentially coffees with some milk foam on the top. Starbucks offers a wide range of foams and flavours but I prefer to keep my coffee to two main ingredients: high-quality, speciality coffee, and milk when I am in the mood for it.

A few days ago I published a blog post on how I am using Micropub to post content to my site. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, Micropub is a standardised way to post content to your site. By using Micropub, I can post content to my site from any Micropub-compliant client (although I have chosen to use my own client because I have a few custom requirements).

NB: Since writing this post, I have moved my blog search engine into IndieWeb Search. The functionality should be similar but not exactly the same. With that said, the logic below is still accurate and I hope will be interesting to you.