Software History

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 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 (!).

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'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.

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.

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 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

I will be hosting a

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.

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 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.

I like when websites provide direct links to headings on the page. In Mozilla Developer Network documentation, headings are clickable. When clicked, the URL of the page changes to include a hashtag (#) at the end. This hashtag corresponds to the HTML ID of the heading on a page. When you visit the URL directly, the page loads then moves you to the heading you clicked on.

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.

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.

One of the main reasons I wanted a Macbook was to build applications for iOS. In 2014, I watched many lectures from Stanford University's Developing iOS 7 Apps series ^1. The series covered Object-Oriented Objective-C. I was 11-12 at the time when I was watching the course. I cannot recall much of the material today, nor can I attest to how much I retained from that lecture series.

A few weeks ago, I composed a zine called Quiet Edinburgh, a photo essay based on my experience visiting Edinburgh coming out of lockdown. The zine contains photos taken between April, days after travel restrictions were eased allowing for people to travel outside of their council areas, and June. I composed this zine shortly after taking a break from travelling due to rising COVID cases.

On my desk rests a large book, verging on a tome. The title reads Chicago Manual of Style, the seventeenth edition in the series. ^1 Earlier this week, I took great joy surfing the pages, discussing with friends at Homebrew Website Club how to navigate the book using the code numbers (i.e. 2.XXX) and the index. The topic de jour was text formatting on the web and the Chicago Manual of Style -- herein referred to as CMoS, a shorthand for the publication -- was an incredibly useful book.

My website has been hosted on a number of platforms over the years. Last year was my year of using CMS tools to publish my website. I used WordPress initially because it was easy for me to set up. I wanted a website over which I had more control and WordPress looked like a good option. At the time, I was not as comfortable with web development as I am now. I could build a website but I didn't feel ready to create my blog from scratch.

The goal of IndieWeb Utils is to make it easier for you to add IndieWeb features to your application in Python. In v0.3.0, released earlier this week, we added a lot of new features to the library. But, there were some features that were almost ready that did not make their way into the release. Today, we are releasing those features as part of v0.4.0, in addition to a few minor bug fixes that I discovered since the launch of the last version.

Jess (@peachymist@colorid.es on Mastodon) wrote a post (Tooted, if that is the terminology in the world of Mastodon) that caught my eye:

I have spent a lot of time thinking about creative ways to work with embeddings. Embeddings are numeric representations of data, such as text or an image. Embeddings are

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.

A young boy hoisted on the shoulders of a parent waves at a departing train.

At the start of October, I participated in a virtual cupping with Steampunk Coffee. One of the coffees I got to try was from Uganda, which was perhaps the most distinct between all of the five coffees on the table. The coffee reminded me of tropical fruit, a characteristic I had not tasted in coffee up until that session.

Building websites is one of my favourite pastimes. I built this website to share some of my thoughts about coffee and then I started to share some coding tutorials on the site. While building a website can get complicated, I believe that anyone who puts in some time can create their own web page from scratch. You can build a web page that shows some of your interests to the world on the internet.

This weekend, I attended the State of the Browser conference in London, an event run by the London Web Standards community. I stayed in the city for a few days to attend the event. One of the highlights of my trip, aside from the delightful and engaging conversations at the State of the Browser event, were my London sunrise walks.

Machina Coffee roasts coffee, sells coffee equipment, and serves coffee from their cafe Brougham Place, Tollcross, Edinburgh. I have been following their business for a while and I had a few questions about how they roast coffee (which is particularly relevant now that they are roasting some special coffee as part of their Filter Map series).