Archive of posts from 2022/05 📝

The results to my poll asking "How much coffee do you drink in a day?" are in. Here are the votes cast:

After a discussion with Tantek in the IndieWeb chat [1], I decided to do more work towards my "own your links" project. My first pass at this was to create /github/ and /instagram/ links on this domain that take you to my GitHub and Instagram pages, respectively. The idea is that I can refer people to my profiles by using a link that I own rather than pointing to the platform-first link. It's a small difference but one that I care about.

I spent the weekend in York after making a somewhat spontaneous decision to visit the city this month. York is an excellent destination for people who enjoy history. There is religious, Roman, royal, political, governmental, and other roots of history to be found in the area. I am astounded at the age of many of the old buildings in the city. It's not every day you can say you saw a cathedral whose construction began over 800 years ago (York Minster).

Tantek shared that he has links on his website that post to other social media profiles he owns. This became a topic of discussion in the IndieWeb chat (if you are not a member and like talking about the web, you should definitely join us!). We have not yet fully arrived at a way to articulate the pattern of having a link on your site that takes you to another profile or resource you own on the web. The best we have right now is "own your links." I prepared a stub IndieWeb wiki page for this concept earlier today to keep the discussion going and encourage more thought on this topic.

While I was on a Zoom call two weeks ago, I noticed something that ignited a great sense of excitement. The parlor palm on my desk, which I have had since last year, started to grow leaves. This excited me because after months of few signs of growth, the plant was now changing.

I have gone down a mini rabbit hole. Unlike many rabbit holes, I can map out how I got here. I perused Adactio's blog, saw a link to a blog about writing, and clicked on an article that looked interesting. Then I read a piece of advice about writing more, saw a link to another site, then clicked on another article that looked interesting. I went through three different sites to find the article I found, all the while not seeking any piece of information in particular. Like all things, internet rabbit hole exploration can be fun and teach you a thing or two. Like all things too, moderation is advised.

Matthias Ott's recent article on writing caught my attention:

Today I learned that Google Sheets has a sparkline feature called "=SPARKLINE". The name is apt. This feature lets you create a trend line of data points over time. I saw this in use in a Google Sheet and loved it. My first thought was "it must have taken a lot of work to make those lines." Then I found out those lines were created with a built-in Sheets function. Isn't that cool? I thought back to all of the time I spent building sparklines for my blog, visible on my home page and category pages, to show trend lines in my publishing. I spent hours thinking through sparklines.

I wrote my first programs in PHP today (with a lot of help from the internet). It's always exciting to learn something new. I am getting excited because I like knowing how my programming logic -- how instructions combine to do something -- applies to different languages. It's cool seeing what features a language does have, doesn't have, and implements differently from those that I already know. For instance, I learned today that PHP doesn't have an explicit "dictionary" data structure. Instead, you can create a dictionary-like object using an array. (Whereas in Python array and dictionary are explicit and different.)

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