Software History

Cairngorm Coffee is a speciality coffee roastery that owns two cafes in the City of Edinburgh, well-known for serving delicious toasties at its locations.

This interview series actually started with me chatting with coffee bloggers, who represented the intersection of three of my interests: websites, writing, and coffee. Earlier this year, I saw that there was a new speciality coffee blog on the scene, Mandy's Daily Grind, and I had to reach out to learn more about the project.

When I say

I consume a large percentage of my online content using RSS. It was not always this way. For a long time, I relied on algorithms to tell me what to read. I put my faith in social media and believed that if I scrolled long enough I'd eventually find something interesting to read. I did sometimes find good articles. Mostly, I found articles that were popular. I didn't discover any real gems.

On a cold Sunday morning, Finca La Esperanza, a coffee sourced from Guatemala and sold by Steampunk Coffee, kept me warm. While it may be too icy to go out for a walk, I was more than happy to relax and ponder a new Guatemalan coffee I've been trying recently.

When I read

Note: I wrote this blog post before Christmas 2020 and never got around to publishing it at the time.

This evening, a contestant on The Chase UK (one of my favourite television programmes) was asked the following question:

Peet's Coffee, Tea and Spices was one of the inspirations behind Starbucks. I have read this from many sources. Indeed, the Starbucks we know today does not resemble the initial company. It was Howard Schultz who pioneered the idea of rapid growth. The founders of Starbucks based their vision of the business on what they had seen from Alfred Peet, the owner of Peet's based in Berkeley, California. But I had no idea that Starbucks was only one of many businesses who benefited—directly or indirectly—from Alfred Peet and his devotion to selling high-quality coffee.

In The Song, published earlier today, I noted:

I love interjecting facts about Scotland into discussions where I can. Recently, I was in a discussion about trees, where I noted my favourite type of tree is the palm tree. I would be remiss if I didn't note that Scotland has a few palm trees.

With the taste of a packaged okonomiyaki in my mouth, I am excited to announce I am starting a podcast. [^1]

In the Bonus Homebrew Website Club meeting last weekend, I was reminded of the IndieWeb social polls idea I had a while back. I cannot quite remember what reminded me of the idea but I mentioned it in the meeting anyway. My idea was to use webmentions to support social polling. By using Webmentions, I could accept votes to a poll from individual personal websites. My site, or perhaps a third-party service I create, would then aggregate those polls and produce a clean report showing the number and percentage of votes each option in the poll had earned.

The Blue Bottle Craft of Coffee is the latest addition to my growing collection of coffee books. This one was lesser mentioned than many other coffee books I have encountered. I wanted to give it a read because I like different perspectives on coffee. I find that every book has its own take on topics from roasting to processing and, after reading this book, I found that Craft of Coffee was no exception.

As I write, I am sitting in a cafe, watching people walk by from a window seat. Through the power of Spotify, Taylor Swift is singing through my ear. the last great american dynasty. I have finished up improvements to bsky.link and mf2.link, my services that make it easy to embed Bluesky and Mastodon posts, respectively, into articles.

A few weeks ago, I came across a site that lets you create embedded links for Mastodon posts [^1]. This inspired me to start thinking about Bluesky, an implementation of the distributed social networking protocol AT Protocol. I see more and more discussion on Bluesky every day, but their web interface is still in the early stages. There is no intuitive tool to create an embedded link to a single Bluesky post without linking to the whole post. This is not ideal in many situations, particularly in journalism or blogging where being able to embed a focused representation of a social media post is desired to ensure the readability of an article.

This week, I have been working away at an expansion to bsky.link ^1, a service for generating embeddable links to Bluesky posts, that generates feeds to which you can subscribe for user profiles. As Bluesky becomes more popular, I want it to be as easy as possible for me to follow users in the feed reader I use for blogs and other websites.

Note: I wrote this blog post before Christmas 2020 and never got around to publishing it at the time.

I posed my Instagram followers a question via Instagram Stories: what questions do you have about my blog? The second question I was asked was what made me start this blog, which deserves a blog post in itself to answer properly.

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.

Earlier this year I participated in an online coffee cupping session hosted by Steampunk Coffee. It was marketed as a crash course in coffee cupping because it is quite difficult to replicate the strict standards of cupping at home without the right equipment. Grinding various samples of coffee to a particular degree within a certain period of time is not easy; every cup needs to be the same, and so on. But it is to be expected that online cupping will not be perfect. I signed up to learn a lot about cupping. I learned how things should be done and various ways to do those things at home.

During this trip to San Francisco, I have visited many coffee shops. One of the coffee shops at the top of my mental list of places to go was Blue Bottle Coffee. On my most recent trip there -- during which time I had a delicious coffee -- I felt down. People were talking in the background, but the environment felt cold. Some people came in and picked up a pre-made coffee and left the store. It was relatively quiet. There were no opportunities to chat with new people.

The V60 and Kalita Wave are both pour-over brewing devices but each has a unique design and required technique. In my most recent post for the Steampunk Coffee Blog, I dive deep into the similarities and differences between the V60 and the Kalita Wave, with reference to the design, technique, and cup profiles associated with each brewer.

While both the Chemex and the V60 are both cone-shaped pour-over devices, the devices are distinct, both in terms of design and the final cup profile. In my latest blog post for Steampunk Coffee, I talk about the similarities and differences between the V60 and Chemex. I also share some of my experiences from using both of these devices.

This post was going to begin with

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.

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.

Over the last few weeks, I have been cupping at home by myself to help me refine my palate. But, I have found myself thinking about how nice it would be to have someone else with whom to cup. I recently attended a Steampunk Coffee online cupping session which brought this idea to life. During the cupping, I learned a lot about how to taste coffee, how coffee is purchased and processed, and more.

In my second post for Steampunk Coffee, I shared a few thoughts on cupping at home and what I learned from one of my recent home cuppings.

What are the advantages of grinding coffee yourself? How do electric and hand grinders compare? What should you think about when you make a decision on what grinder to buy? These are the questions I address in my latest article for the Steampunk Coffee Blog.