Post Posts 📝

A key requirement for my social reader is for it to be usable on mobile. To accomplish this goal, I have added some progressive web application features to my reader, enabling its use as an app I can save to my home screen. I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how the social reader should look on mobile.

While I was trying to figure out how to link a manifest.json file to my feed reader, I found myself looking at the source code behind Jeremy Keith's website home page. The fact that you can see the source code behind how a page loads is an amazing feature behind the web. You can see the code that tells a browser how a web page loads. Sometimes the source code behind a site is almost or completely illegible but there are plenty of sites out there whose code you can peruse.

Jeremy Keith published an amazing article on how to install a progressive web application (PWA) on your phone. A PWA is a website that can technically be used as an application, as opposed to a regular website which is optimised only to be shown in a web browser. Jeremy's article is definitely worth a read if you want to install a progressive web application on your phone.

Over the holidays, I spent some time removing post types from my site in favour of publishing notes. Notes are short posts. So far, I have used notes to share my morning coffee, to ask about movies like The Matrix series, and more. I like being able to publish notes that are unstructured and free flow. Most of my thoughts are not long enough to turn into a blog post, even if they are something I would like to share.

There was a discussion going on in the IndieWeb chat yesterday about feed readers. One big point that I took away is that developers must abstract away from technical terms that mean little to nothing for those who might use a tool. Technical terms are useful for implementation: they help developers communicate. But end products should be as easy as possible for someone to use, requiring little to no technical knowledge.

I just read a delightful blog post called "An app can be a home-cooked meal". The author of the post, Robin, shares his story of making a personal messaging app just for him and his close family. The messaging app doesn't aim to do much other than let them communicate in a way they feel is natural. There are no ads, forced updates, or anything of that nature to worry about. Because Robin made the app himself, he chooses its direction.

IndieWeb Search has been intentionally designed to be open. The source code for the project is open. From the early days, there was a basic API that let you retrieve content and featured snippets from search results. I often chat about the search engine and how it is designed. The project is well documented. Another way in which the search engine is open is that all search result pages come with feeds. I hope to see more search engines do this too.

Over the holiday season, when I had some time off, I got back into watching films. Before then, I usually preferred putting on a sitcom like Seinfeld or watching Coronation Street if it was on the television. I decided to start watching movies because I had long spaces of time to use up. I started by watching the Christmas Chronicles movies. Those movies are now among my top recommendations for Christmas movies. Perhaps I shall issue a reminder later in the year about those movies. It's a bit too early to talk about Christmas movies, I think. Pardon my faux pas.

IndieWeb Search was intentionally designed to be open. All search result pages are structured as a microformats h-feed. This means you can use any microformats parser to read a search results page and extract information about each search result. Every search page also comes with jf2, RSS, and JSON Feed versions. You can also parse these programatically to get information about search results. Or you could even subscribe to a search page in a feed reader that supports any of the aforementioned formats.

IndieWeb Search, a search engine that indexes sites owned by IndieWeb community members and other related sites, has saved over 421,000 web documents. I maintain IndieWeb Search as a passion project. I wanted a place to search content from IndieWeb sites so that I could find articles and guides that were applicable to the community. Using the search engine, I'm able to get direct answers to niche, community-relevant queries such as how to set up webmentions with a static site or understanding what IRC is.