Software History

I check the word count after I have written every blog post. I do this because Typora, the markdown editor I use, displays a word count in the top left corner of the page. I'm not interested in the metric. It is difficult to avoid. At some point yesterday, my mind arrived at the idea that I should try to track the word count on my blog. I wanted to do this to improve my programming skills.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post brainstorming how to help place more pianos in airports. Pondering what airport -- and indeed any public -- pianos mean to me, I noted:

I've seen Standart Magazine pop up every now and again in the speciality coffee community. I read a city guide on their blog last year but I did not purchase an edition of their magazine. I have read quite a few coffee books and blogs lately and I started to feel like I needed a change.

I started my day with a dose of commentary on words. In my social reader today, I saw a post entitled Indeed... re:words by Ithika On My Mind. Seeing a post title start with the word

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

Back when I sat exams, I had an opportunity to apply to type my exams. My handwriting quality was verging on poor; the readability of my writing was essential to ensure my exams could be properly graded. I tend to think fast when I am writing; readability takes a second seat to getting my ideas down on paper as fast as possible.

This morning, on the final day of my holiday, I spent around two hours thinking through a way to auto-classify content on my blog, as part of a project to recommend tags to my posts. Most of my old posts don't have tags, and I wondered: could I build a system using embeddings and a classification algorithm to help recommend tags when I write a new post? It turns out that yes I can but the hours of work I put into

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.

I am writing a blog post every day from December 1st to December 24th, 2021, about a blogger whose writing or site I follow. My aim for this series is to help you discover new blogs and to help get the word out about content creators whose blogs I appreciate. You can read more about this series in the inaugural Day 1 post.

For the next 100 days, I am committing to ship something related to the IndieWeb each day. A

As I write, I am seated in a cafe. I was pondering the question

Last month I hosted the second edition of the IndieWeb Carnival, a challenge that invites you to write about a topic on your personal website in a given month. The IndieWeb Carnival rotates between hosts each month, who each choose their own topic. Last month's inaugural carnival, hosted by Sara, was on the theme of cooking. This month, Mark will be hosting, inviting anyone who wants to join to write about gardening on their blog.

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.

Assumed knowledge: This post assumes technical knowledge with microformats2. This post is most useful for someone debugging authorship relations on their h-feed or for community members who want to discuss documenting this pattern.

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

I have moved my blog to my own custom-made static site generator, letsjam. This change means that the way in which my site is created has changed significantly. A successful change is for all pages to look the same as they were before I switched to the new generator. I think the transition has gone smoothly thus far. But, a few readers have emailed me to report bugs or issues on the site.

One of the concepts in social readers I am really excited about is search. The specification upon which my social reader is built, Microsub, separates clients and servers. This means that there is plenty of opportunity for clients to experiment with search and come up with new ideas on how to help people find content and other websites. I have been exploring search for a while now so I was excited to think about what search would look like in a social reader.

I have been using Known for the last few weeks. Known is a publishing platform that adheres to many IndieWeb standards, from marking up posts with microformats to supporting post creation using Micropub clients. I decided to check out Known out of curiosity. I wanted to know what an IndieWeb-first, hosted social platform looked like. I have explored many IndieWeb tools and played around with them but Known was a notable exception.

Webmentions enable distributed social interactions over the web. Using webmentions, you can send replies, likes, and other interactions that were published on your site to respond to another web page. For example, I send Webmentions for all of the bookmarks I create on my website. If a site can receive Webmentions, they will be notified that I bookmarked their post for later.

Over the last month, I have been working with James Van Dyne on IndieWeb Utils, the Python library I published toward the end of last year. IndieWeb Utils aims to provide helper functions that are useful when building applications related to the IndieWeb. For instance, the library contains features like a function to send a webmention and a function to generate a reply context from a web page.

I used to have a section on my site where I shared a list of coffees I consumed. I was excited about this section because:

A few days ago I published a blog post on how I am using Micropub to post content to my site. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, Micropub is a standardised way to post content to your site. By using Micropub, I can post content to my site from any Micropub-compliant client (although I have chosen to use my own client because I have a few custom requirements).

Indexes has been on my mind of late. Yousef's introducing me of

A quick note: this post does contain quite a bit of IndieWeb jargon and may be confusing if you are only just getting started. Don't let my jargon deter you from the IndieWeb. This is an architectural discussion so I am asssuming readers have a good understanding of the standards incubated in the community.

A yawn. A hand lightly pressed against the cheek. Repositions as she goes to turn the page. Immersed in the book while we all wait. Looks up when someone comments on their flight time.

The results to my poll asking

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.

At a bonus edition of Homebrew Website Club this weekend, we discussed how to delete a Webmention. We talked about both how to and how not to delete a Webmention, and the ins-and-outs of implementations between different servers. I thought I should write about this on my blog just in case anyone else would find the information helpful.