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I’m really liking Stimulus for JavaScript development. The fact that it gives me an easy way to add frontend logic with server-side rendering, instead of requiring me to code my entire UI in something like React, makes development more fun than I anticipated.
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I’m interested in starting a daily log, similar to what Dave Winer and a few others I follow on Micro.blog are doing. I’ve tried starting one using Little Outliner a few months ago, but I never got around to keeping it up to date. I’m hoping for something that is a bit more fit for purpose: as much as outliners are useful — I use them for keeping notes for work — I’m not sure it’s the best tool for me for daily logging. There are a few other features that I’m looking for: such as the ability to record private entries, and maybe some very to-do base features.
So, I spent some time today kicking off a new Buffalo project to build something that I think might work for me. I managed to get something running privately, although it’s pretty bare bones at the moment. We’ll see down the line if I’ll actually use it.
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I subscribe to a few blogs that are well known for posting daily. Today, one of them is late. “Why haven’t you posted today?”, I imagined asking them, slightly perturbed.
Then, I imagined them smiling and answering back: “Why haven’t you?”
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I took the plunge and purchased Logic Pro today. Although the purchase itself is not super interesting, the fact that I’m putting that much money into a piece of software that’s only available for macOS is an indication that I’m now all in on Apple’s desktop platform.
This is something that I’ve been quite tentative about for a while. I first came to macOS in 2017 after using Linux for my home setup. Linux was great for software development but I wanted to get back into music production, something that Linux is not known for. I’ve never really used the Mac at this stage but I knew that macOS was a decent platform for both activities, so moving to it was enticing. It also helped that I learnt about the user experience of the macOS from all the Apple tech podcasts that I listen to, like ATP and The Talk Show.
But I tend to hedge these sort of moves, so even though I started using a Mac Mini, I didn’t commit to purchasing any expensive software (say, anything more than $30-50) that only runs on Apple’s platforms. I had my doubts that I’ll actually go back to Linux (I knew I wasn’t going to Windows though); and after using a Linux laptop for a couple of months, I remembered how Linux has still got some way to go to provide a great user experience. Nevertheless, I always felt that I needed an exit.
Well, that door is now closed. Purchasing the Nova text editor last month was probably the first indication that I’m intending to stay, and the purchase of Logic Pro today seems to have solidified it.
So I guess now I’m officially a committed Mac user.
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Follow on from the last post, I also had the opportunity to spot a few trains. Here’s one on it’s way to Bendigo, taken just outside Woodend.
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Today is the last day of work for the year, and although I haven’t got much planned for the break, it would be good to have some time off.
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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.
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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. The result is a series of DNS records that have to be set up for each email domain; each one that needs to be done correctly, lest your emails get rejected or your domain gets blacklisted.
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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.”
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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. This means that, unlike languages that have exceptions, there is nothing like try/catch blocks; you are left with the standard control statements that are available.
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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.
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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. I can prove nothing, but something about using a browser offered for free by an advertising company made me feel uneasy.
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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. I’m not a web designer, so building the style from scratch would have taken a fair amount of time, which would have eaten into the amount of time I would have spent actually writing content. A close second was the need to add additional features to the CMS that were missing, like the ability to add extra pages, and a RSS feed. If I were to do this properly without taking any shortcuts, this too would have resulted in less time spent on content.
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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.
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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. These projects were more or less small personal things that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time maintaining, so doing something dramatic like rewriting the UI in React or Vue would have been overkill. jQuery was available to me but using it always required a bit of boilerplate to setup the bindings between the HTML and the JavaScript. Also, since Buffalo uses Webpack to produce a single, minified JavaScript file that is included on every page, it would also be nice to have a mechanism to selectively apply the JavaScript logic based on the attributes on the HTML itself.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
