Software History

I get excited when I find new personal websites. I remember early on when I joined the IndieWeb community I thought the IndieWeb webring was one of the best sites on the web. Until I had seen most of the sites on the webring, every time I clicked I found something new. Interesting blogs to follow, browse, and explore. With every site I saw, I got more excited. There are many people out there maintaining personal websites, from written blogs to photo blogs to single-page profiles.

The goal of my blog search engine is to make content as easy to find on my website as possible. Before the latest update, you could use my search engine to find a page based on a term that appeared either in the URL, meta description, or title of a page. However, I kept thinking about how I could enhance the search engine to make content even easier to find. Since I started thinking about this, I have looked at my search engine and made a number of improvements. Most improvements are related to either code efficiency or content discovery. In this article, I'll share a bit about how I implemented TextRank on my site.

XKCD encapsulates a situation in standards development that we all want to avoid well in their epitome Standards comic:

This post is a brainstorm and a call for discussion. As discussion advances, I may publish more blog posts on this topic. If I write more on this topic, I will add links to my writings at the beginning of this post for reference.

While I was trying to figure out how to link a manifest.json file to my feed reader, I found myself looking at the source code behind Jeremy Keith's website home page. The fact that you can see the source code behind how a page loads is an amazing feature behind the web. You can see the code that tells a browser how a web page loads. Sometimes the source code behind a site is almost or completely illegible but there are plenty of sites out there whose code you can peruse.

Yesterday evening I was thinking about syntax for VisionScript, the programming language on which I am working. My goal is to make the syntax as intuitive as possible while retaining a clear structure. As an aside, VisionScript got to the front-page of Hacker News (HN). I was humbled, excited; indeed, elated. Thank you for being so amazing, HN community! If you haven't seen it, check out the demo for the language.

A year or so ago I read Takashi Hiraide's The Guest Cat, a work of fiction featuring a cat that brings joy to the lives of two people living together. With all of the cats in my neighbourhood, I sometimes feel as if I am living that book: being able to look out the window and see cats. Today, I gazed out the window and noticed two cats together. After being together for a few moments, one cat swiftly ran away, as if the other had asserted dominance and frightened the other cat.

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

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?

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

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

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.

Today I learned that Google Sheets has a sparkline feature called

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.

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

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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