FeedCity

This has been one of my favorite events for the past two years, and after a rough 2025, this is a great way to cap off the year.  Even better, Tantek has already suggested a session on card catalogs that’s right up my alley: https://indieweb.org/2025/SD#Session_ideas. 

BTW, one of the areas of breakage is in our handling of source:markdown. What changed? There are now feeds I didn't create (ie "in the wild") that have source:markdown elements. This bug is 100% my doing. The feeds are fine. These are the kinds of bugs you like to find, and fix.

📕 Finished reading Art & Fear by David Bayles, Ted Orland ISBN: 9780961454739

I'm looking into the problem in feedlanddatabase I mentioned yesterday. I bet it'll turn out there are a bunch of issues that have been there for a long time, but don't show up in the user interface of the product. I'm still developing good techniques for debugging Node.js server apps. Recently, I've developed new tools that make these bugs show themselves, like socketdemo. I added some new capabilities to it in the JavaScript console that make the updates visible. If you open the console in the debugger while it's running you'll see what I'm talking about, screen shot. Sometimes to debug a problem that doesn't have a UI you have to give it a UI.

Wow, Eugen Rochko stepping down as Mastodon CEO. Congrats to him on all the success in helping the open web move forward! This part also resonated with me:

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources.

I find Brian Eno to be a fascinating chap. His music isn’t my cup of tea, but I really enjoy hearing his thoughts on art, creativity, and culture. I’ve always loved this short piece he wrote about singing with other people. I’ve passed that link onto multiple people who hav...

Front page of the BBC right now.

The first section is on the rules of alphabetization and indexing to standardize the space of ordering cards for both people’s names and company names. The second section covers some history on basic filing techniques and then goes into alphabetic, geographic, numeric, and subject indexing methods. The final sections cover the L.B Automatic (Library Bureau), … Continue reading

Watched: Frankenstein. I liked this more than I was expecting. Some visually great scenes… Wish I had seen it in the theater instead of Netflix. 🍿

Watching people online chat, ask questions, and generally get excited about their planners for 2026, I thought I would spend a few minutes to set up my Memindex-inspired planner version using 4 x 6″ index cards and tabbed dividers. It’s amazing how useful a $2.50 block of 500 index cards can be for planning out … Continue reading

Trail just east of I-35.

Homebrew Website Club/Eastern at 6pm EST on Wednesday. We talk websites and such over Zoom, if you have questions about personal websites, webdev stuff and suchlike you’re welcome to join, folks tend to get something useful + chitchat. There are a fair number of regulars but I often learn new stuff and when I have questions I get solid answers about tech old and new. More at events.indieweb.org

Homebrew Website Club/Eastern at 6pm EST on Wednesday. We talk websites and such over Zoom, if you have questions about personal websites, webdev stuff and suchlike you’re welcome to join, folks tend to get something useful + chitchat. There are a fair number of regulars but I often learn new stuff and when I have...

Good interview at Wired with Fidji Simo. I didn’t know she had an illness that forces her to work remotely most of the time:

I care a lot as part of my own mission about everybody realizing their full potential. I want a world where health conditions don’t get in the way. Either because we can cure them or because companies accommodate them. We can have technologies that make it easier.

Hi Joe Crawford, We’ll soon enable automatic dubbing on your channel. This means that YouTube will automatically generate translated audio tracks in different languages, making your content accessible to more viewers. No action is needed — we’ll enable this on your channel in the coming weeks. Once enabled, when you upload a new video, we’ll...

I don’t think Disney live-action remakes really need to exist, but the new Moana could work well. Also, there are occasional new songs that I would love to see re-cut into the original animated versions: for Beauty and the Beast, take out Human Again and put in Evermore; for Aladdin, add Speechless.

Alex said in their prompt for IndieWeb Blog Carnival: Let’s talk about cycles and fluctuations and give our world just a little more grace. Yes! I said the other day in some melancholy: I feel sad there will be rain as it may keep me out of the ocean as freshwater drains pollutants down to...

"In hindsight I don't think any reasonable person can say that we're collectively better off. Democracy is losing, and tech is playing an undeniably outsized part in that."

I'm chasing down what appears to be a bug in feedlanddatabase. Items that haven't updated are being reported as having updated. Fairly sure there is a problem here. Next up, will add debugging code so I can see if my theory is correct.

The month is half over. Go read Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and post that fact to yr website and let me know and I’ll add it to the #IndieWeb Book Club page. It’s in libraries! It’s online! Go! Read! Post!