in the web, poetry words of meaning at a pace, no hurry stories, screening. | Continue reading
from the aroma, memories, wrote the poet in his worn notebook, on a warm spring day. He had went outside to look at the sky, expecting to find delight in the clouds and to ponder the weather for the day. Instead, he but was instead blessed with another of Nature's delights: the a … | Continue reading
When I was designing my new static site generator, I noticed that my last attempt at the software involved coupling a lot of project-specific logic with functions in the system. This made it hard to make the tool general enough to use with multiple projects. I updated core functi … | Continue reading
he saw himself traveling the world but then realised there was nothing more beautiful than the home rose, the sunrise in the valley. | Continue reading
When I started building my new static site generator, I had a few goals in mind, including: (i) to use the knowledge I had learned in the years since my last attempt at building a generator to make something that was easier to understand, and; (ii) to make my site generate as fas … | Continue reading
My website takes a few seconds to generate with the static site generator I made, Aurora. This is because thousands of pages need to be generated, each inheriting from multiple templates with custom logic. When I make a change on my site, it takes a few seconds for me to rebuild … | Continue reading
This weekend, I have been working on my static site generator, Aurora. Aurora stores many objects in memory to achieve high performance. For example, metadata from all posts on my blog are stored into memory while Aurora generates my website. This allows any page to enumerate pos … | Continue reading
Immersed in flora and fauna; I am in a new world. wrote the poet, deftfully, in his leather notebook. This was a status report from his walk. The poet likes to walk on familiar paths, for he is delighted by all of the small scenes and moments to notice. He has observed that summe … | Continue reading
Early in your journey to start a personal website, there is a daunting question you must answer: what hosting tool should I use to run my website? This question is consequential: your choice of tool will decide on the degree to which you can customise the design of your site, the … | Continue reading
After I have drank a cup of tea, I like to cusp my hand around the cup. I sometimes cusp two hands around a cup so I can feel all of the heat. Sometimes, I cusp one hand around the cup, and rest the other hand on my lap. Many times, the warmth of the cup on my hand brings back me … | Continue reading
The midnight pianist is relaxing at the end of the day. I should listen to a song, he says, after the sun has set and the only light is artificial. With the sound of the soft piano in the background of a ballad radiating through the air, the midnight pianist leaps into motion, pa … | Continue reading
JUnited, proposed by Robert Birming, is a challenge described as a "blog love letter". Throughout the month of June, participants are invited to share one blog post a day from another blogger that they have read and enjoyed and collect them in a list for others to read. Robert su … | Continue reading
How should a website change with the seasons?, I wrote in my notes earlier today. This follows on from an experience last night where, as bed time started to approach, I found myself bleary-eyed and wondering: could a website be different as time passes? Could a website adapt to … | Continue reading
I am building a tool that retrieves the meta descriptions from a web page. Because sites mark up descriptions differently, there are a few different checks you need to run to ascertain a description. These checks should be ordered: what a site sets as its description is probably … | Continue reading
I have been confused several times by errors related to RSS. RSS is wonderful given its wide support, but authorship of RSS feeds is difficult. I find HTML easier to work with than XML, which is why I write all my feeds in h-feed. h-feed is a feed format that is marked up in HTML … | Continue reading
What do you do when you feel uninspired?, I asked a fellow writer earlier this week. I was excited to start writing, but was unsure what to say. I was yearning to put the metaphorical pen to the paper, but it was unclear on what topics I wanted to speak. This is a familiar place … | Continue reading
As I have been designing a tool to publish blog posts on this website, I have been thinking about how the tool can adapt to my workflows. I have thus been able to implement several custom features that are useful for how I work. For example, there is a button that lets me format … | Continue reading
I spend a lot of time writing. For every place I put my writing, there is a maintenance cost: if I post something on a website, I need to maintain that, if I post something on social media, I need to maintain it. I recently noted the following in the IndieWeb chat: As time has pa … | Continue reading
In my blog post brainstorming a new indie web search engine, I noted that running a web search engine is hard. With that in mind, I started to think that I haven't written too much about what I learned about web crawling when running IndieWeb Search, a search engine for the indie … | Continue reading
I would like for there to be more tiny search engines that are focused on a particular topic. It would be cool if I could type in "coffee" into an indie web search engine and see what other bloggers have written about on the topic. A few years ago, I built an IndieWeb search engi … | Continue reading
I have been working on a feed reader for academic research. This project has been divided into four main parts: identifying data sources, aggregating data, defining a user experience, and ranking information retrieved from data sources. When I went into this project, I knew of se … | Continue reading
Image maps let you make images where you can click on different regions to open web pages. For example, you could have an image map of a whiteboard with sticky notes where every sticky note linked to a document about that note. I use image maps across my site, such as on my explo … | Continue reading
TL;DR: If you are designing an API that loads data into a standard format, consider the from_ and to_ syntax to describe data loaders. from_ data loaders should read data and serialise it into a class for processing, and to_ data loaders should convert data to another format, or … | Continue reading
TL;DR: If you are designing an API that loads data into a standard format, consider the from_ and to_ syntax to describe data loaders. from_ data loaders should read data and serialise it into a class for processing, and to_ data loaders should convert data to another format, or … | Continue reading
I have been reading more research papers lately, but I am running into many points of friction. Staying up to date in a single field of interest, for example, is difficult. I am not striving to stay up to date with everything, nor is that necessarily attainable according to what … | Continue reading
I have been reading more research papers lately, but I am running into many points of friction. Staying up to date in a single field of interest, for example, is difficult. I am not striving to stay up to date with everything, nor is that necessarily attainable according to what … | Continue reading
Within the indie web community, the terms "indie web", "IndieWeb", "small web", "fediverse", among others are used almost interchangeably to express yearning for a people-focused web: a web where you have the freedom to create without large platforms having undue control over how … | Continue reading
Within the indie web community, the terms "indie web", "IndieWeb", "small web", "fediverse", among others are used almost interchangeably to express yearning for a people-focused web: a web where you have the freedom to create without large platforms having undue control over how … | Continue reading
I have travelled thousands of miles by train over the last few years, on which WiFi access and capability has ranged from reasonable to inaccessible. I am regularly on trains where pages take several seconds to load, if they load at all. In these times, I am appreciative of websi … | Continue reading
I have travelled thousands of miles by train over the last few years, on which WiFi access and capability has ranged from reasonable to inaccessible. I am regularly on trains where pages take several seconds to load, if they load at all. In these times, I am appreciative of websi … | Continue reading
On a bus ride a few weeks ago, I was listening to music by Hilltop Hoods, a band I love, on shuffle. Many months had passed since I had listened to many of their songs, so I was delighted by each one playing. When Exit Sign, performed by Hilltop Hoods with Illy and Ecca Vandal, p … | Continue reading
might the idea be like a rose: precious pink petals -- radiant beauty -- emerge with time, and weathers. | Continue reading