Software History

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

Editor's note: I am starting a new series on this blog. Every so often, I'm going to feature an interview with a coffee blogger. In these interviews, I want to learn about how other coffee bloggers approach their work, and how they go from an idea to a final post.

With firm roots in history, Canary Girl Coffee Company is based not only on good coffee but also on promoting the contributions of women who played an important role in roasting coffee. Through the colourful brand, coffees named after women, and the stories of those women featured on the Canary Girl website, this roaster stands out from so many with whom I have spoken.

I was walking past a familiar park yesterday when I saw the sun beam on the trees in such a way where the trees appeared almost golden. There were leaves falling down, slowly. On the ground, leaves blew around. I heard the occasional crunch as leaves ran along the concrete of the street on which I was walking. I looked back and admired the trees, in awe of how beautiful the light made them.

When I see a piano that is unplayed, I feel jarred. An instrument from which you can make music, quiet. I wonder: there could be music here, but there isn't. There's nobody there to play. At the same time, I feel like the sound of music may cheer people up; surprise them, make them think, give them a little moment of joy. That, and my love of playing piano, is why I like to play music in public, at pianos that you will often find in train stations and airports.

Earlier this week, I evaluated whether I should create a Fun with Words series on this blog in which I talk about interesting and amusing words and phrases ^1. I was looking through my open tabs in Firefox on my phone and saw an idea for a Fun with Words theme: jargon in computer science comprised of two words that are not usually next to each other. Specific? Yes indeed. Fun? Yes!

I am working my way through reading a blog post by Peter Molnar where he talks about his project to retrieve his old websites. [1] Reading through this post has me thinking, again, about how I can archive my internet presence.

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.

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.

A few days ago, I released a coffee ratio calculator on this blog. The ratio calculator lets you figure out the simplest version of a coffee to water ratio. You can also figure out how much coffee you need to use to brew with a particular ratio and a certain amount of water, or you can figure out how much water you need to brew with a particular ratio and amount of coffee.

Over the last few months, I have spent quite a bit of time learning about the Scottish coffee industry. I know many cafes and roasteries in Scotland and I have even interviewed many people who own coffee businesses in Scotland. Alongside my learning about the Scottish coffee industry, I have ordered from various roasters as I have needed coffee. I like to explore new roasters as I often find interesting coffees sold by roasters from whom I do not regularly order.

What do you hear when you go into a coffee shop? This question came to mind earlier today as I sat in my local coffee shop. I have entertained this question before after discussing how the sensory experience of coffee is much greater than just taste. Making coffee involves all of your senses, from touch to sight. Consuming coffee involves sight, hearing, smelling, and of course tasting. There's even more to the experience of coffee than just the basic senses but I digress.

A member of the IndieWeb community, jeremycherfas.net, informed me that the text on my blog posts was hard to read. This was interesting because I pay a lot of attention to making sure content on my site is readable. Jeremy made me aware of something that I had not considered in the design of my blog post pages: the line width.

I use dark mode extensively across the web and indeed across my computer. The editor in which I am writing this blog post, Typora, is set up with a dark mode theme. My Ubuntu desktop has a dark mode theme. When I see the option to enable dark mode, I like to enable it. Anecdotally, I find dark mode easier on the eyes than bright modes.

My front-end web projects start as a HTML file, gradually expanding into JavaScript and CSS files as required. A few months ago, I found there was a way to auto-populate the boilerplate HTML code that gives the basic structure for a page in Visual Studio Code: the html, head, body tags, as well as some accompanying meta information in the head tag. When I first saw this feature, I was excited. I could save some time by using this! But, I could not recall how I triggered the code expansion.

For the first time in months, I attended the London / Europe IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club. I have enjoyed attending these events in the past because they bring together people who are doing interesting things with the web to varying extents. In the last meeting, we covered everything from digital music quality to digital copyright to printing one's blog. The topic of printing one's blog is one I would like to dive into further.

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.

I was reading a blog post by the prolific Cassidy Williams posted on CSS Tricks. The post was about how you should, to the extent you can, keep your projects simple. Here's my favourite part of the article, emphasis copied as is in the original article:

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 (!).

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.

I've been following the IndieWeb actively for close to two months. The time has flown. I have felt that way about every day this year. My relationship with the IndieWeb really puts time into perspective for me. I digress. In this time, I have tried out a lot of different IndieWeb setups. People have commented on the speed at which I build new features on my site. I've had a lot of fun building new extensions and trying out new ideas.

I have been thinking about building a static generator for a while. I enjoy using static site generation to build my site but up until now I have deferred the actual logic behind site generation to Jekyll. This was perfect at the beginning because my site was more about writing with the occasional page change. Now, however, I am interested in expanding my site with a bit more code.

A page for listing bookmarks written by hand. A personal fanfic home page. A web tool for working with PNG file headers. What do all of these three things have in common? They were built in an hour at the

I have been interested in the IndieWeb for a while. I took a break a few months ago because it was just something I had discovered. I didn't realize that it could become something bigger. Recently, I've been diving back into the IndieWeb as a source of inspiration for this website. I have found an excellent community of people who are all passionate about the web and programming.

I will be hosting a

I have spent quite a bit of time working on the design of my website. I didn't wake up one day and come up with a full idea for how I wanted every page on my site to look. As I have added new pages and features and learned more about the web, my thoughts on how my website should look have changed. For example, when I learned about focus styles and how they can help make a site more accessible, I added focus styles to my links (if you press

Maps were a dominant topic at yesterday's Homebrew Website Club London / Europe online meetup. I am not knowledgeable on maps so I sat back for a lot of the discussion and listened to others share their thoughts. In the meeting, we discussed everything from using maps on one's personal website to the inaccuracies of some country paths in the UK on open maps.

I am excited to announce that I have been appointed as a co-chair of the W3C Social Web Incubator Community Group (SWICG). This group is dedicated to advancing discussions around the social web, and prividing a forum for implementers to discuss specifications published by the former and separate W3C Social Web Working Group.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me how I built my website. When faced with this question, one of the first ideas that came to mind is that I should write a blog post exploring this topic in more depth so that all of my readers can learn how the site is built. As I understand that my readers might be a mixture of both coffee lovers, website lovers, and others, I thought I'd try to keep the description as simple as possible.