jamesg

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:

To print the latest version of my blog, I used pandoc, a self-described

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.

A few days ago, I was searching for variations on the phrase

Good day, cool cats! (I admit that when I first spelled “cats” I spelled it with a “k”.) We’re back for another edition of Fun with Words.

To the Professor, mathematics is more than just a profession: it is a quest for the truths that govern the universe. The Professor talks of discoveries in mathematics like an event where one peeks into God's notebook. Up until reading The Housekeeper and The Professor, a Japanese work of fiction by Yoko Ogawa, I had never thought about the beauty of mathematics, how numbers can link together in interesting ways. While I cannot say I learned much about maths, I have a newfound appreciation for the work that goes into understanding numbers and how they relate to each other.

TL;DR: I now support searching my site using IndieWeb Search rather than my own custom search engine. You'll still be able to search my site as normal. But my search engine has moved to indieweb-search.jamesg.blog.

I love how Wikipedia shows you a preview of a page when you hover over a link to another page in a wiki entry. This makes Wikipedia more navigable for me, particularly if I am only looking for a definition of a term (text that appears in the preview) to help me better understand the contents on a page. This got me thinking about adding a hover feature to my website that would show you a preview of links that appear in my blog posts.

I am excited to announce stories.js, a HTML component that you can add to your website to create web stories.

As I have been building IndieWeb services, I have found some of the code I have written to be useful across multiple applications. For instance, I wrote logic that initialises and verifies an authentication request using IndieAuth. I copied this same code across my Webmention endpoint, Micropub server, and other tools with minor modifications. The downside to this was that every time I wanted to make a change to that logic, I had to make a change in several places.

Earlier this year, I was thinking a lot about preview images, both for personal websites and elsewhere on the web. I was inspired by GitHub and Product Hunt's meta images that are customised per repository and project, respectively. I was also inspired by the work that Zach Leatherman had done for screenshots on his personal website, for which he built a service that you can use to generate meta images that were a screenshot of a personal website.

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.

When I joined the IndieWeb community, I discovered the concept of

Hello everyone! The Chairs have set up two new web pages for use with the community:

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

A few months ago, GitHub introduced a feature that lets you create a custom README.md that shows on your profile homepage. I have known about this feature since it was first released but because I haven't been using GitHub very much of late (well, the desktop interface anyway) I have not given the custom README.md feature much thought. However, it came to mind and I decided to try and create my own README.md for my profile.

In a discussion with a friend, I mentioned how easy it is to overengineer solutions to problems. This weekend, I have been evaluating what it is that I want to do with my personal website. What matters most to me? In asking this question, I realize that I have been guilty of overengineering solutions to problems that may not actually be problems with which I should be concerned.

I have had a commitment to not track analytics on this site. I believe that tools such as Google Analytics are verbose. They track too much information about users. I do not intend to change my policy on this matter. I did see on the IndieWeb wiki and on GitHub that some people have built their own analytics tools. Many of these rely on the logs that are collected by a web server rather than on a client-side script.

I received an email yesterday from someone who has dipped their toe into the IndieWeb. They are not very active but they are a participant on the IndieWeb webring. This reminded me that the webring was what got me really interested in the IndieWeb. It is a directory of sites that adhere to IndieWeb principles. To be admitted into the webring, you must have a valid

After a discussion with Tantek in the IndieWeb chat [1], I decided to do more work towards my

I have worked on numerous projects that involve finding all of the URLs in the sitemaps associated with a website. For example, one of the first steps the IndieWeb Search crawler takes when it starts crawling a website is to find all of the URLs in all of the sitemaps. Separately, I have written scripts that validate the status codes of all the URLs in a sitemap.

One of my favourite types of blog posts to read are

Of Monsters and Men are one of my favourite bands. Their lead singer, Nanna, has released a new solo album, How to Start a Garden. I have been listening to the album on train rides. The music accompanies travelling and seeing nature around you well. Here is a link to the album on Spotify.

At this week’s Galactic Homebrew Website Club -- a bonus meeting of IndieWeb community members sporadically held on occasional weekends -- we discussed site layouts. We discussed sidebars and having different layouts for a homepage and other pages on one's site. Myself and another participant, Jeremy, both noted how we have different layouts for our home page and the rest of our sites.

Yesterday I had an idea: what kind of art could I make by using random numbers and a series of rules? I decided to write down a few notes on what my

I like seeing what people call the root folder in which they store their source code. This is the folder where all — or a lot of — your projects are stored. In my case, my programming projects go in a folder called src. (Although I have a strange habit of nesting personal projects that are related to each other. I believe my source code files are in need of a spring clean.)

After I wiped away the tears from reading Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, I wished that there was a second book. I felt like I had been there as patrons walked into Funiculi Funiciula, the cafe at the centre of the book, travelled back in time, and came to peace with their pasts. From the story of one character going back to see the boyfriend who departed before they could say they did not want them to go, to the story of a wife who wanted to see their husband before he lost his memory, I was hooked.

In cafe Funiculi Funicula, there is more than meets the eye. I'm not talking about the persistent sepia hue in the cafe or how the cafe is seemingly always the right temperature. I am talking about how patrons can, if they wish, travel back to a moment in time. To travel back in time, a patron must follow a series of rules, each more stringent than the last, and visualise the moment in time they want to visit.

I had an idea that I wanted to do a blog post with a title starting with

Porridge Overflow is not a delicious tale about a variant of stack overflows. Rather, porridge overflow is what just happened when I went to prepare a bowl of porridge. With an episode of Frasier in the background, I prepared some porridge using the microwave. After the microwave had chimed, indicating my bowl of deliciousness was ready, I opened the door to find... A porridge overflow.