-
I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee ever imagined that we would be using the web as a replacement for things like phones, radios, and televisions.
-
A Tour of Domain Records for Email
There are growing concerns, in the circles that I travel in, about the use of “free” email services like Gmail, that lock you into a service that may not have your whole interest in mind. The remedy for this is to use an email address with a domain that you control. Setting one up can seem a little daunting for those have haven’t done this: thanks to the wild west that is email, a hodgepodge of technologies have grown up in an attempt to stop the occurrences of spam and impersonations. Continue reading →
-
Follow up from yesterday’s post about my non-reading habits, a colleague of mine shared this article about the topic. It looks like the condition I have is tsundoku, which is “a Japanese term used to describe a person who owns a lot of unread literature.”
-
Dealing With Errors in Go
There’s a lot to like about Go, and I’ll happily admit being a huge fan of the language. But it will be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that some aspects of programming in Go results in more code than the equivalent in another language. My guess is that the best example of this is how Go programs deal with errors. For those unfamiliar with how errors work in Go, the short version is that they are just like any other type that you deal with — like strings and integers — and they have no special control structure to handle them in any specific way. Continue reading →
-
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve got this annoying habit of seeing an article that looks interesting, and I decide to… just not read it. Instead I “save it for later”. The result: I end up never reading the article at all.
-
Vivaldi - My Recommended Alternative to Chrome
I’m seeing a few people on Micro.blog post about how Chrome Is Bad. Instead of replying to each one with my recommendations, I figured it would be better just to post my story here. I became unhappy with Chrome about two years ago. I can’t remember exactly why, but I know it was because Google was doing something that I found distasteful. I was also getting concerned about how much data I was making available to Google in general. Continue reading →
-
Revisiting the decision to build a CMS
It’s been almost a month since I wrote about my decision to write a CMS for a blog that I was planning. I figured it might be time for an update. In short, and for the second time this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that maintaining a CMS is not a good use of my time. The largest issue was the amount of effort that would have been needed in order to work on the things that don’t relate to content, such as styling. Continue reading →
-
It’s a shame that more and more bloggers are moving to email newsletters in leau of RSS. Even for bloggers that don’t charge for their content, I’m seeing more blogs that are encouraging readers to sign up to an email newsletter, instead of providing a link to an RSS feed.
I can see why they do this. Email addresses are valuable, and sites like Stratechery and services like Substack show that it’s possible to have a viable business writing a daily newsletter to people willing to pay for it. But one thing Ben Thompson offers that Substack doesn’t is a private RSS feed for subscribers, so they can read the daily updates within a feed reader. This is how I use to consume Stratechery, before the release of the daily update podcast.
So email subscriptions makes sense for those writing for a living, but I’m not sure it makes sense for those maintaining a free blog. If your content is available without charge, then it makes sense to me to offer an RSS feed to those that prefer to read your content within a feed reader. The reading experience in NetNewsWire is preferable to the one offered by my email client, and I don’t need to see all the emails that I’m trying to avoid. By all means offer email subscriptions as well, but don’t require one just so that I can see your latest updates.
-
A Brief Look at Stimulus
Over the last several months, I’ve been doing a bit of development using Buffalo, which is a rapid web development framework in Go, similar to Ruby on Rails. Like Ruby on Rails, the front-end layer is very simple: server-side rendered HTML with a bit of jQuery augmenting the otherwise static web-pages. After a bit of time, I wanted to add a bit of dynamic flare to the frontend, like automatically fetch and update elements on the page. Continue reading →
-
Some uninformed thoughts about Salesforce acquiring Slack
John Gruber raised an interesting point about the future of Slack after being purchased by Salesforce: First, my take presupposes that the point of Slack is to be a genuinely good service and experience. […] To succeed by appealing to people who care about quality. Slack, as a public company, has been under immense pressure to do whatever it takes to make its stock price go up in the face of competition from Microsoft’s Teams. Continue reading →
-
I love the idea of events like Microblogvember to help reinforce the act of writing frequently. I will admit it was difficult at times, but I definitely find it beneficial participating in these events when they come around. #mbnov
-
It’s interesting how the activities that would have seen quite pedestrian before the lock-down, like going to a cafe, are quite novel after the lock-down. #mbnov
-
It’s surprising how quickly you can get use to a mask outside when you’re required to wear one, and then get use to not wearing one outside when you’re not. #mbnov
-
My dilemma for today is whether to buy a blender, and which one would work for me. Something suitable for smoothies and that is easy to clean are features that I’m looking for. I’m also considering a coffee grinder. #mbnov
-
Passed by what I think is a Norfolk Island Pine tree. Incidentally, Norfolk Island is one of the few places outside the US to celebrate Thanksgiving.
-
I’ve just setup a subscription to Climeworks, which is a startup building plants for capturing and storing CO2 underground. I could argue about the price, but I think we need to adjust our thinking about these things if we’re ever going to mitigate this climate crisis. #mbnov
-
Even in these Covid times when I’m home 95% of the time, deciding whether and when to go for a walk such that I’ll be home to receive a delivery is still a surprisingly tricky call to make. #mbnov
-
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to work at a federal government agency. There was a lot to like about the experience, but one negative was the time it took to provision a virtual machine for us to run our code. The record for longest wait was about a year. #mbnov
-
Sunset over the suburbs, taken 2 weeks ago. You can get some pretty nice sunsets around this time of year. It’s a shame my camera and photo-taking skills are not good enough to capture how nice the light was that evening. #mbnov
-
During the second coronavirus wave in Melbourne, a “ring of steel” was imposed, encircling the metropolitan in an attempt to contain the outbreak. That border dropped a few weeks ago, and today we crossed it for the first time since June. #mbnov
-
One feature of living in the Southern Hemisphere is that you get to see winter decorations in shopping centres twice a year. First when it’s actually winter, and the second around this time of year, with the lead up to Christmas. #mbnov
-
It’s getting harder to go on lunchtime walks without having to slap on sunscreen or a hat. I may need to move to evening walks, when the intensity of the sunlight starts to fade. #mbnov (Today’s was a tricky one).
-
After dealing with Apple Developer Certificates and Provisioning Profiles for a single app for work, I feel for all the macOS and iOS developers out there that need to deal with this on a regular basis.
-
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I find all these online services that push you these A.I. driven “recommendations” of things to follow, watch, read, etc. really distasteful. I wish it was possible to turn some of these off. #mbnov
-
Why I'm Considering Building A Blogging CMS
I’m planning to start a new blog about Go development and one of the things that I’m currently torn on is how to host it. The choice look to be either using a service like blot.im or micro.blog or some other hosting service, using a static site generation tool like Hugo, or building my own CMS for it. I know that one of the things people tell you about blogging is that building your CMS is not worth your time: I myself even described it as “second cardinal sin of programming” on my first post to micro. Continue reading →