Web Posts 📝

Every so often, I am reminded of the Command + K (Control + K on Windows) design pattern. Command + K usually triggers a search dialog in which a user can enter a query. I have seen it in email clients, as a standalone application, and in web sites. Most recently, I saw Supabase had added a Command + K search to their documentation.

Organisers at the W3C are working on various initiatives related to sustainability. Over the last few months, two new community groups (CGs) were started to focus on sustainability and how it pertains to the web and the W3C as an organisation. [^1] After doing some reading about the revived Sustainable Web (sustyweb) group, I decided to join and see how I could help.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Do you sometimes forget to water your plants when they are in need of some water? I am the sort of person that writes down "water plants" but forgets about it for a day or two before finally watering my plant. My plant is alive and well but I could do better. That's one reason why I decided to research if there were ways in which I could monitor the moisture levels in my plant soil. Moisture levels are directly correlated with when a plant needs watered: the drier the soil, the more the plant needs watered.

One of the IndieWeb words I hear every now and again is "Micropub." I must have heard it or seen it dozens of times before actually understanding what it was. The word went in one ear and out the other. I recently found myself with an interest in taking on a project related to this website. When thinking about what to do, I stumbled upon Micropub. I learned that Micropub is a standard that you can use to post content on your site. Micropub describes, in detail, how you can post to your personal website from a "client" as long as you have a "server" that can read requests from the client and translate them into posts.