Software History

You know the feeling when you are immersed in thought and something suddenly stands out to you? I was walking past a park when I noticed a squirrel close by. The squirrel was scouring through the leaves. I speculate it was in search for food. My mind gravitated from human computer interaction -- the topic about which I was thinking -- to the squirrel. I walked slowly, gazing at the park. I noticed another squirrel. Then another. Then another.

I usually write cohesive thoughts on this blog, diving deep into a subject that I find interesting. Today, to spice things up a little bit, I'm going to go for a different format. I am going to write down a list of things that I am either thinking about or have been thinking about over the last few days. I am going to leverage bullet points for this, lest I begin writing one sentence in a new paragaph and turn that paragraph into a whole section.

Unorthodox Roasters caught my eye as soon as I learned about them. They are a roastery based in Kinross, Scotland. They are unorthodox. The names of their coffees are all Scottish. I looked around their website and I thought I should try one of their coffees. Wee Stoater caught me eye, which I believe is their signature coffee.

I wrote a blog post for the Steampunk Coffee blog on what I've learned using the Kalita Wave to brew pour-over coffee.

What equipment do I use to brew with the Kalita Wave?

I was reading a reflection on loneliness and writing. The author, Polina, stated:

Early this morning, I set myself an intention for the day: take note of some of the little things that happen today that bring you joy. My inspiration was my first

Williams and Johnson are a well-known name in the Scottish coffee industry, offering seasonally-rotated coffees. I have been following their presence online for a little while and I had a few questions about their roastery. Kindly, Todd Johnson, one of the founders, reached out to answer the questions I had over email. This interview was an absolute pleasure to do and I hope you enjoy reading it.

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Before I went to sleep, I looked out the window and saw the stars. One shone brighter than the others. This star was almost invitation to gaze out and admire the night. It was midnight. I looked and saw many more stars. I angled my head up high, looking for stars. I crouched down slightly, eager to see if there were more visible.

Last week, I visited the US for the first time. I travelled to New Orleans. After two connecting flights from Scotland and almost a full day of travel, I arrived greeted by warmth, despite the late hour. I couldn't believe how warm the weather was. I took a few photos on the trip that I want to share here on my blog.

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 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'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.

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.

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.

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.