FeedCity

I’ve been following the news of late, and it is particularly depressing. Professionally, one of the things I hate the most is that philosophy of tearing everything down and then figuring out how to rebuild it, instead of coming up with a thoughtful and well researched plan and then slowly and deliberately implementing it. Not even getting into their views on why or what should replace it, the current US administration seems to want to tear everything down instead of coming up with a plan and then carefully executing.

When I think about designing my site, I ask myself: what do I want to explore? What themes are on my mind? What values do I want to bring into the design? How can I express those values with colour and imagery and layout? With every new page I design, I learn something new – ...

Recently I realised that I have coded things that I use every day. I use my web reader every day to follow along with blogs. I am increasingly using my edit button extension to edit web pages on sites I maintain. I use my website every day. In the middle of making something,...

I love finding new links to read. I especially love exploring lists of links. But I struggle to publish lists of links myself. When I’m exploring the web, I get immersed in reading and taking notes and navigating between websites. Publishing link lists is a discrete step. I...

I started the FeedCity blog with a first blog post.

Explore my love for Markdown editors, starting with Mou and evolving to ReText, a Python-based editor. Learn why Markdown is a powerful tool for writing, its pros and cons, and how to set up ReText on macOS using Python virtual environments (venv). Plus, discover tips like creating a minimal app bundle for easier use of Python apps on a Mac.

And another retroactive post. After this one. Actually written on 2 June but with a date of 28 May. Figure it out, historians! Love, Joe

the joy of: Evening conversations with friends. Making someone laugh while waiting for a coffee. Hearing a song that you haven’t heard yet written by an artist whose music you love. Someone waiting and holding the lift door open for you. Being reminded about an old project while chatting with a friend. Seeing art in surprising places. Humming a song you love. Hearing the birds sing on a warm spring day. The first coffee of the day. Hearing someone say “have a great day!” Seeing a fuschia-coloured car. Eating a good cookie.

The joy of looking out the window and seeing a beautiful sunset. The sun has set at the intersection of two hills. I am not sure I have seen the sun set at exactly this angle, at this time. A colorful pink hue paints the nearby sky — some clouds on the periphery have a faint lavender tint. The birds are singing. I feel relaxed. I tried to take a picture but my phone can’t express the colours. The world is too pretty.

Well, good luck debugging something in production, when your logging statements put out to debug, but your Rails.logger.level is set to info. Thanks for nothing, past-Daniel.

Had a handful of new FeedCity signups in the last 24 hours. Need to fix some code for the OPML imports (and still need to fix some bugs related to this). But from what I can see, it worked for most people. And they seemed to have tolerated my still very basic onboarding.

Lots more feeds in the DB now. For now, the feed-fetching still seems to cope.

But I need to adjust the workflow for validating feeds: I use the W3C Feed Validation Service, but you only get a very limited amount of validation requests (per day, I believe). I ran way past this limit in the last 24 hours, and - rightfully - get a lot of 429 responses. Really need to behave better, or run the validation process myself.

I have talked before about my mistrust of big platforms, and fear of digital video. Along those lines, an email I got 8 days ago: SUBJECT: Facebook’s Video Storage Policy Is Changing: Download Your Old Live Videos In The Next 7 Days Download your old Facebook Live videos by May 25. We are sending you...

As much as my CSS Battles are me, writing HTML and CSS and talking about it, sometimes I talk like I blog. From my video o May 25, 2025: …so much of any coding task is trying. And trying again and trying again and failing and failing and trying and trying and failing and failing...

At this weekend’s Homebrew Website Club, the topic of Taylor Swift came up (I wonder who brought that up!). One person shared the layers in the song exile; how they became more perceptible with different pieces of audio equipment. The song has layers. Today I have been liste...

During IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf this year, I implemented sending WebSub notifications, to immediately notify potential subscribers, whenever my feeds update. Here's how I implemented this.

An unfortunate sea lion As I left OB today I spotted a sea lion lying down up the beach. I approached it. It eyed me, its hindflippers twitched. I could see its ribs retracting as it breathed. It was in trouble. Before the session. Starfish and mussels on the pier. Before that? It was a...