Software History

One of my favourite places in York is the Museum Gardens. In the gardens, there is a mix of old buildings and nature. St. Mary’s Abbey is an eye-catching centerpiece to the gardens; the remains standing tall and evoking curiosity about the quality of old architecture.

I have been playing around a lot with my thermal printer. While I have accomplished the initial goals I had in mind when I purchased the printer (create a program that prints my webmentions and print myself a daily update), I know there is still more that I can do with this device. Seeing how creative the Little Printer community was, I have been thinking up new modules to add to my thermal printer.

I sent my first webmention yesterday. Well, that's not completely true. I have sent one or two in the past but they were just test-runs. Yesterday was the real deal. I had some thoughts on a blog post I read and I decided that I'd share them with a webmention.

Breakfast and Coffee (b&c), a wiki that aggregates breakfast and coffee recommendations, is now over one year old. I published a blog post announcing b&c on February 3rd, 2022. Since then, I have syndicated most of my coffee shop recommendations to the wiki and have made a number of improvements. b&c has been the subject of numerous discussions in the IndieWeb community, resulting in new ideas on how to improve the site.

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.

1517 Fund posted an interesting question on their Twitter account:

I was just reading a post by Rach Smith on

For a moment a few days ago, I was tempted to build a server-side application for my website. What stopped me from doing so was my memories from building my personal website with Next.js. My site worked. It looked nice. My site lacked one thing. I didn't really know how it worked. There were too many abstractions away from the code itself. I was often confused about why I had made certain programming decisions.

A few days ago, I decided to purchase the Adafruit Thermal Printer, which was compatible with the Raspberry Pi. This thermal printer has been on my mind for a while but this week a reason for buying one came to mind (aside from the fun of experimenting with a thermal printer which was obvious to me). I decided that I wanted to generate a random Aeropress recipe that I could then print. I thought this would be both fun to create and, upon further reflection, good excuse for me to try new Aeropress recipes that I might otherwise not use. So this project would have been a nudge to help me get out of my Aeropress recipe rut.

Try the demo of my project (only works in Chrome and Safari due to Web Speech API compatability issues with Firefox) | See the project source code

At the

A key part of my

One of the IndieWeb words I hear every now and again is

Update 2022-08-11: The guestbook mentioned in this article is no longer active.

I have seen articles and posts and messages about Micropub a number of times. It's hard to avoid at least seeing the term

This morning I was close to giving up on my micropub endpoint. It has taken a significant amount of time to get the project to the stage I am at now. There is still more to do. I have not yet completed the server deployment. I'm having issues with wsgi that I have not yet fixed. I thought that maybe a command line interface would be more appropriate, seeing as how most of the idea behind setting up a micropub endpoint was to make it easier for me to share bookmarks. I then remembered why I am building the micropub endpoint.

Earlier this evening, I had an idea: what if I could use OpenAI's GPT-3 model to generate an appropriate emoji for a commit message? I have seen emojis used in commit messages and I am curious about the visual representation of the information with which they are associated.

A thoughtful, interconnected site structure is great for both people and search engines. There are many components of designing the structure of a site, from choosing the right URLs to creating breadcrumbs to help people navigate around your site. Linking to relevant content -- from similar articles that together form a linear track to linking to related editorial content -- helps people understand what you have to offer on your site, and helps search engines discover new pages on your site.

This is the seventh post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

I have been using the webmention.io dashboard to check my webmentions. This is all I needed in a webmention reader. I'd check my webmentions every now and again because it was uncommon that I would receive one. When I did receive a webmention, I'd add writing a response to my mental to-do list and I would get around to sending one whenever I could. I like the manual process. It's fun to write and send a webmention.

This is the sixth post in the Advent of Technical Writing series, wherein I will share something I have learned from my experience as a technical writer. My experience is primarily in software technical writing, but what you read may apply to different fields, too. View all posts in the series.

At this week's Homebrew Website Club meeting, we had a discussion about Raspberry Pis. Most of the people in attendance had a Raspberry Pi. We all showed each other our Pis and where we had them set up. It was fascinating. I had to admit to everyone that my Pi has been sitting lonely in a drawer for a while. I haven't done much with it. I have a Sense HAT. The Sense Hat sits on top of the Pi.

While designing my LLM-powered chatbot that is designed to answer questions with reference to a limited subset of my writing, I have been thinking about source attribution. The intent is to help people better evaluate the veracity, balance, and context associated with an answer returned by a model. Hallucination and it’s implications are at the forefront of my mind. I want to do what I can to ensure people can easily fact check the outputs of an LLM retrieval system.

A few weeks ago, I learned that the IndieWeb community aims to archive all of the Etherpad documents from meetups on the wiki. Etherpad documents are made available at online meetups so participants can document ideas and what happened in the call. Archiving these documents to the wiki makes them easily searchable and ensures their contents are preserved not only in a document that could be edited further down the line.

During the

On my website home page, I have a

As a programmer, I often feel tempted to brainstorm ideas for

The reason this blog still exists today, after going through so many iterations, is that I always self-dogfood. This is a term in the IndieWeb community that means that I use my own creations. On my blog, everything has been built by me, for me. I haven't thought about whether my code could be used by other people. It probably could. It's all on GitHub for anyone to use. I have licensed my code under an MIT license so anyone can use it.

The IndieWeb is all about scratching itches. When I think about what I want this site to become, I often say to myself that I am building a home for myself on the internet. Starting on the IndieWeb, this was enough. I needed to let my creative spirits run wild. I needed to try out different ideas. I looked at other people's websites and thought about what I could implement.

Have you ever wondered