Archive of posts from 2022/12 📝

I participated in IndieWeb Create Day, an online event during which people in the IndieWeb come together to work on personal projects, this Boxing Day. I decided to start on a new project. I wanted to build a tool that would let me highlight specific pieces of text on my website and send those highlights to someone else for them. I have previously built a tool, fragmention.js, that lets you link to a specific paragraph of text, but this tool has its limitations: I can't link to multiple parts of a web page, I can only link to full paragraphs.

On my website home page, I have a "sparkline" that shows all of my contributions to the IndieWeb wiki. The sparkline doesn't show any specific values. The goal is to show my activity and trends contributing to the wiki as opposed to showing exactly how many contributions I have made. I enjoy this visualization. Every time I go to my home page I get a quick reminder about how often I have contributed to the IndieWeb wiki. Sometimes I look and realise I contributed a lot; sometimes I see I contribute more in bursts.

My favourite category of television show is 90s sitcoms. I greatly enjoy Frasier and Seinfeld. I have watched both series many times, although on many occasions I have had the show on in the background before I go to sleep. I enjoy going to sleep after watching something funny. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic at the beginning of the pandemic that spoke about the comfort of watching shows you have already seen before. This idea just came to mind again.

I was just reading a post by Rach Smith on "hedonic adaptation" with GitHub Copilot and a few other developer tools. In the post, Rach makes a thought-provoking statement with regard to improvements in developer experience over the last few years:

I change the emojis next to my website name in the top right corner of my website and on my home page during certain events. This December, I changed the coffee emoji to a snowflake. During the month of Halloween, I changed the emoji to a pumpkin. I enjoyed making these changes manually, but I would regularly forget to change the emoji back to a coffee mug after an event was over. That is why you may have noticed my website showed a pumpkin emoji until the end of November (!).

The IndieWeb has a friendly bot called Loqi that is connected with a community wiki hosted on MediaWiki. The community extensively documents information, ranging from plans for upcoming events to UX patterns for applications relevant to the IndieWeb. The wiki continuously evolves. I regularly find myself saying "Happy newsletter day!" on Friday, celebrating the compliation of all of the information published on the wiki into a single newsletter post.

I was sad to see that the Beaker Browser project has now been sunsetted. Beaker did great work on building concepts related to a read-write decentralized web. Beaker showed that there is a lot of room for exploration in browsers. The notice that the project had been sunsetted, while unfortunate, was a pleasant read.

As I write, I am in a comfortable armchair in an Edinburgh cafe, looking out on a rainy street. It has been rainy all day. I have been writing a lot of blog posts this morning, and an idea popped in to my head that I haven't thought about in a while: I would like for there to be a cappuccino emoji.

What is Webmention? What can I build on top of the Webmention protocol? How do I start sending and receiving Webmentions? These are three questions I'm going to answer in my upcoming talk on Codementor Events: Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention.

Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI's new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats are, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I'd share the result I got for the prompt "What is the IndieWeb?":