Software History

Every so often, I procrastinate on my phone more than usual. I check sites that I know I have just checked to see if there is anything new, such as Hacker News and The Guardian. I check my notifications without hearing a sound indicative of a notification (I have disabled notifications on almost all non-messaging apps.) I start to feel restless and wonder: why am I doing this?

I regularly read articles on The Guardian. As I am not a paying subscriber to their digital edition, I see banners that prompt me to support them. The banners almost always catch my eye because they say how many articles I have

GROUNDHOG-DAY.com is the leading Groundhog Day data source: cataloging North America’s prognosticating animals and their yearly weather predictions.

Do you sometimes forget to water your plants when they are in need of some water? I am the sort of person that writes down

As of my starting to write this post, there are 25 minutes left until midnight here in the UK. This is the first year that I have actively thought about Groundhog Day throughout the day. It started with a reference to Groundhog Day from an the IndieWeb community member yesterday. The perpetual day being upon us was in the back of my mind, and then today I saw references to Groundhog Day across the web. I have thus far used

There used to be one tree outside my window. I was fascinated by the tree, although it was not particularly notable in any regard other than in my head. I watched the tree day after day. If I looked out the window, I would see it.

I have been thinking about how best to print my blog. In the first print run, I collated all of my coffee blog posts into a single Google Doc, formatted the doc appropriately, and then used Lulu, an online publishing platform, to print my book. The trouble with this process was that the work was very manual. I had to copy and paste my blog posts from my blog into the Google Doc by hand.

Today I learned that Google Sheets has a sparkline feature called

I recently entertained a question about why I decided to turn what was a search engine for my blog into an IndieWeb Search engine. My motive was not clear until someone shared an article with me written by jpreston.xyz. In this article, jpreston.xyz explains why they had embarked on a similar journey to build a search engine. Quoting from their article:

A few weeks ago I came across the Keybow, a small mechanical keyboard developed by Pimoroni that is powered by the Raspberry Pi Zero. After doing some digging, I realised that the Keybow was designed to be coded, meaning I could create my own custom keyboard functions using this device. I let the keyboard sit in the back of my mind for a few weeks until earlier this week when I decided that I was going to take the leap and give the Keybow a try.

I just typed

To print the latest version of my blog, I used pandoc, a self-described

NB: Since writing this post, I have moved my blog search engine into IndieWeb Search. The functionality should be similar but not exactly the same. With that said, the logic below is still accurate and I hope will be interesting to you.

Good day, cool cats! (I admit that when I first spelled “cats” I spelled it with a “k”.) We’re back for another edition of Fun with Words.

A few days ago, I was searching for variations on the phrase

TL;DR: I now support searching my site using IndieWeb Search rather than my own custom search engine. You'll still be able to search my site as normal. But my search engine has moved to indieweb-search.jamesg.blog.

To the Professor, mathematics is more than just a profession: it is a quest for the truths that govern the universe. The Professor talks of discoveries in mathematics like an event where one peeks into God's notebook. Up until reading The Housekeeper and The Professor, a Japanese work of fiction by Yoko Ogawa, I had never thought about the beauty of mathematics, how numbers can link together in interesting ways. While I cannot say I learned much about maths, I have a newfound appreciation for the work that goes into understanding numbers and how they relate to each other.

I love how Wikipedia shows you a preview of a page when you hover over a link to another page in a wiki entry. This makes Wikipedia more navigable for me, particularly if I am only looking for a definition of a term (text that appears in the preview) to help me better understand the contents on a page. This got me thinking about adding a hover feature to my website that would show you a preview of links that appear in my blog posts.

I am excited to announce stories.js, a HTML component that you can add to your website to create web stories.

As I have been building IndieWeb services, I have found some of the code I have written to be useful across multiple applications. For instance, I wrote logic that initialises and verifies an authentication request using IndieAuth. I copied this same code across my Webmention endpoint, Micropub server, and other tools with minor modifications. The downside to this was that every time I wanted to make a change to that logic, I had to make a change in several places.

Earlier this year, I was thinking a lot about preview images, both for personal websites and elsewhere on the web. I was inspired by GitHub and Product Hunt's meta images that are customised per repository and project, respectively. I was also inspired by the work that Zach Leatherman had done for screenshots on his personal website, for which he built a service that you can use to generate meta images that were a screenshot of a personal website.

In the last part of this series, I walked you through how to create a program that logs the moisture levels in your plants. If you haven't already read that tutorial, I'd recommend going back to it before reading on. If you have, you are ready to advance onto the next stage of your journey toward building a plant monitor dashboard: showing your plant data on pretty charts. That is the topic of this tutorial.

Hello everyone! The Chairs have set up two new web pages for use with the community:

When I joined the IndieWeb community, I discovered the concept of

Tantek shared that he has links on his website that post to other social media profiles he owns. This became a topic of discussion in the IndieWeb chat (if you are not a member and like talking about the web, you should definitely join us!). We have not yet fully arrived at a way to articulate the pattern of having a link on your site that takes you to another profile or resource you own on the web. The best we have right now is

A few months ago, GitHub introduced a feature that lets you create a custom README.md that shows on your profile homepage. I have known about this feature since it was first released but because I haven't been using GitHub very much of late (well, the desktop interface anyway) I have not given the custom README.md feature much thought. However, it came to mind and I decided to try and create my own README.md for my profile.

In a discussion with a friend, I mentioned how easy it is to overengineer solutions to problems. This weekend, I have been evaluating what it is that I want to do with my personal website. What matters most to me? In asking this question, I realize that I have been guilty of overengineering solutions to problems that may not actually be problems with which I should be concerned.

I have had a commitment to not track analytics on this site. I believe that tools such as Google Analytics are verbose. They track too much information about users. I do not intend to change my policy on this matter. I did see on the IndieWeb wiki and on GitHub that some people have built their own analytics tools. Many of these rely on the logs that are collected by a web server rather than on a client-side script.

I received an email yesterday from someone who has dipped their toe into the IndieWeb. They are not very active but they are a participant on the IndieWeb webring. This reminded me that the webring was what got me really interested in the IndieWeb. It is a directory of sites that adhere to IndieWeb principles. To be admitted into the webring, you must have a valid

After a discussion with Tantek in the IndieWeb chat [1], I decided to do more work towards my