I was emailing with Aaron Young tonight about his digital garden and why I like to follow RSS feeds for digital gardens.
Blogs these days are too polished and people don’t post enough on them. Old blogs used to be much more experimental and something that folks posted to multiple times a day without giving it a second thought.
Now public digital gardens are much more interesting, IMO. People capture what they are researching, working on, and thinking about, and I usually find RSS feeds for peoples digital gardens much more interesting than I find their blogs.
There is a much higher rate of discovering new things and interesting ideas in digital garden feeds than blog feeds. People generally write blogs for others first, whereas they write digital gardens for themselves first, and that is where the magic is 🪄
Sadly, a lot of really cool digital gardens don’t have RSS feeds. They should. Think of it as an interop layer for your notes, allowing not only you to make connections between your notes, but other people to make connections, too. They should have pingbacks or webmentions, too, so you can see those connections and links.
I’ve added all of this to notes.cagrimmett.com, my digital garden built on WordPress. Still, lots to improve there. I view it as a long-term project, something I want to exist for the rest of my life and hopefully beyond it, and I make it just a little bit better every day. I need even more interop on there as well, essentially being able to publish there from every other tool I use. I’ll get there.
Charlie had Monday off from daycare for the holiday, but Amanda and I had to work, so we switched off every couple hours. Charlie and I started off the morning by going to the coffee shop, picking up some cheese at the grocery store, and watching trains at the train station. We also played in the yard for a while before naptime. Charlie and Amanda decorated small pumpkins.
That evening some friends had us over to carve pumpkins and have a bonfire.
Neighbor spent all day lowering his car (a Subaru WRX, I think). Now he can’t get it in or out of the driveway without it bottoming out. So far he hasn’t lifted it back up, he just lets it scrape.
Reminder to change the cabin air filter in your car occasionally. You can usually buy them on Amazon and replace them yourself pretty easily.
This Wednesday was the last Wood Fired Wednesday at Pizzeria Baci. Of course we had to go. The pizza was excellent as always, and this week Charlie decided that he likes pepperoni, which is new. He didn’t like it two weeks ago, but now he loves it. My man. He is the latest in the long line of Grimmett men who love pepperoni pizza.
It helps that saying “pep per O knee” is kind of fun!
Charlie’s daycare had their annual Fall Fest on Thursday. We had fun hanging out with some of the other parents and watching the kids be in their element. There were hayrides, animals to pet, hotdogs, and an ice cream truck.
Charlie has been working really hard at figuring out the stairs without holding on to the rail. He is getting pretty good at it.
Charlie takes recycling very seriously.
Another Saturday, another walk in the rain. Seems like it has rained every Saturday recently. Charlie doesn’t mind. As long as we have our raincoat and boots, we are good.
This is Charlie’s walking stick.
Charlie has shown even more interest in music this week:
Jamming daily with a little keyboard
Watching videos of different kinds of instruments with Amanda. It keeps his attention longer than most videos!
Playing with a ukulele at a birthday party.
Saturday afternoon was Miles’s birthday party. Little guy turned two. We ran into Miles’s parents at the coffee shop when Amanda was ~30 weeks pregnant and Meg was ~22 weeks. Amanda used to work with Miles’s dad Jeremy and we didn’t know they moved up here to the Peekskill area. We’ve been hanging out ever since. When Charlie and Miles came along, they joined the hangouts. It is fun watching them grow up together.
I put in some water sensors so we get a bit of warning if our basement gets water. One in each low spot where water seeps in first and one under the sink in the kitchen. (I’m still wary of my plumbing work on the glass rinser.)
Decided to go with YoLink. I like that they use LoRA to connect to a hub that then connects to the internet instead of adding a bunch of new devices to my wifi network. There’s enough on there already.
Amanda takes horse riding lessons. This week Charlie went and got to ride a pony, which he loved. Maybe he will take lessons in a couple years, too!
Poor thing has its mane and tail dyed so he can dress up like a unicorn for parties. His name is Henry.
I’m maintaining a couple news products on FeedLand that pull in posts form a bunch of sources:
If you want to make one for your local area or for your niche interest, let me know!
I revamped my notetaking. (Yes, longtime reader, again.)
This time I’m using Tiago Forte’s PARA method in Obsidian. Both seem to work better with my brain than previous approaches. I’m due to write a blog post about my Obsidian setup and which plugins and external capture tools I use.
I’ve been staying up very late every day this week. Haven’t gone to bed before 1am. Lots of irons in the fire and it feels good. It has taken two years, but Amanda and I are starting to feel like ourselves again, with the added bonus of having a sweet kid in our lives. (Contrast that with mostly feeling like caregivers the last two years.) Our energy and sleep are improved, which helps give space for our interests, projects, and new ideas.
When telling a friend that we wish our house had more space, they helpfully pointed out that the nice thing about small houses is that families spend more time together rather than each person going to a separate space most of the time. That is a good way to think about it. Yes, alone time is important, but so is spending time together as a family, and the constraint of limited space is a benefit in that respect.
Charlie is getting more adventurous, independent, and capable of advocating for himself. He expresses his wishes and needs more, tries new things, ventures further and further from us when out on walks, and spends longer periods of time in solo imaginative play.
This week a kid ran into him at the playground and Charlie turned around and loudly said, “Scuu Me!”
This phase does come with some challenges, especially when his wants conflict with what is possible, safe, reasonable, etc. Such is life.
One morning the trash truck came a little early and we slept in a little later than usual. Charlie heard it, got up, and shouted, “Momma! Trash truck! Wake UP!”
Trash trucks are serious business in this house.
Our new thing at the grocery store is having Charlie scan our groceries at the self checkout. He loves it.
It is interesting how our checkout habits have changed in the past two years. We went from only self-checkout pre-Charlie, to cashier checkout while Charlie was younger, and now back to self-checkout with Charlie scanning.
Some random play moments: Making a vacuum truck out of blocks, learning how to replace batteries with a screw driver, and vacuuming together.
I made some roasted red jalapeno pepper sauce this week with our garden jalapenos. It smells like roasted red peppers, but has a kick.
I made some Chile Verde Pork on Friday, and to my surprise Charlie seemed to like it. It is quick and easy to make, especially if we have salsa verde on-hand from our garden tomatillos. We like to serve it over rice with some sour cream and avocado.
We finally went to the Tuscana pasta factory in Peekskill and got some fresh ravioli, pasta, and sauce. We are very pleased. Why didn’t we go here sooner?! It is 5 minutes from our house.
We wanted to do some fall farm activities this weekend, and even though it rained we decided to make the best of it. We’re glad we did because we all had fun.
We had fun in the woods throwing leaves in the creek, exploring the textures of different kinds of bark, finding hickory nuts and acorns, and picking up sticks. 🍂
More fall stuff.
Reminder to myself to take the air conditioners out of the windows this week. Even though we had 85F weather this week, it now sufficiently cools down at night so we don’t need them.
A couple days ago I asked Dave Winer how he was able to point news.scripting.com to a FeedLandnews product, because CNAME records have to point to a hostname and can’t include a path. I wanted to point a subdomain at one of my own news products on FeedLand and couldn’t figure it out.
The answer was PageParkArchived Link, a simple web server he wrote in 2014 to park his unused domains, and later expanded to include useful tools like serving redirects, content from GitHub and S3, and aliasing content from another site.
I realized that I had to set that up for myself. I have a bunch of domains I don’t use, some old sites that I should just turn into a static archive and stick somewhere, and domains that I’d like to point to other services, such as FeedLand news products.
That night I decided to set up PageParkArchived Link on a DigitalOcean droplet. I thought I’d write out the steps in case I or anyone else want to set it up on DigitalOcean in the future.
Assuming you have a DigitalOcean account and are logged in:
Set up a NodeJS droplet. I used DO’s NodeJS droplet template, which as of the time of this writing uses Node 18.12.1 and Ubuntu 20.04. I don’t expect to need a high powered server due to the low traffic to these domains, so I started with a $4/mo basic shared 512MB CPU with 10GB SSD and 500GB transfer. Basically the lowest tier.
After the server came online, I SSH’d in.
At the root, I cloned the PagePark repo: git clone https://github.com/scripting/pagePark.git
Go into the pagePark directory: cd pagePark
Install the app and dependencies: npm install
Start the app: sudo -u root pm2 start pagepark.js
Edit the nginx config to serve the app to the world. The default hello.js app that comes with the droplet is set to serve from port 3000. PagePark is set to serve from 1339, so we need to edit the location / block in nginx:
That second to last line, proxy_pass http://localhost:3000; is what we want to edit. Simple change 3000 to 1339. The line should now read: proxy_pass http://localhost:1339;
Exit and save: ^X to exit, y to confirm save, hit enter to save it to the same filename
Restart nginx: sudo systemctl restart nginx
Delete the default app included with the droplet: sudo -u root pm2 delete hello
Schedule the PagePark app to run at launch and stop the default hello app from running at launch: sudo -u root pm2 save
Point a domain at the droplet to use for easy CNAME pointing for other domains. I used pagepark.cagrimmett.com and pointed it via A record to the IP address listed in the DO dashboard under the project I added the droplet to > Resources > Domains.
Back on the server, I went to ~/pagePark/domains and added a folder for pagepark.cagrimmett.com, then added an index.html with a simple message to test my setup. I also moved the ~/pagePark/prefs/error.html and ~/pagePark/templates/* to the pagepark.cagrimmett.com folder to make the accessible, then edited them and changed the path for the ~/pagePark/config.json keys for the following items to serve them from this server rather than Dave’s:
urlDefaultMarkdownTemplate
urlDefaultOpmlTemplate
urlDefaultErrorPage
That was it! pagepark.cagrimmett.com started working, then I set up a couple more domains by adding new folders to the domains folder (follow the docsArchived Link) and adding a cname record for the domains to pagepark.cagrimmett.com.
peekskill.cagrimmett.com shows my Peekskill news product, running on FeedLand. It pulls in feeds from local news sources and the City of Peekskill.
behindtheart.xyz – an interview website I set up on WordPress where I interviewed generative artists in 2021, then abandoned. I want the interviews to stay live, but I’m probably not going to do them anymore, so I generated a static site and put the HTML files here instead of keeping the WP site live. I’m probably going to do this with a few more old WP sites.
More to come soon!
Thanks for open sourcing PagePark, Dave! I’m already finding it useful.
Our remote team had an online social hour today that I hosted. We used to do a freewrite when I first joined the team (where everyone writes for 30 minutes then shares), so I decided to reboot that with this prompt:
What non-standard items do you always travel with?
Of course I have the regular stuff like Advil and my computer, but here are the things I travel with that I think are non-standard:
This is electrolyte drink mix powder. I am chronically dehydrated, even moreso when I’m away from home and don’t have the constant reminder of a water bottle on my desk, so I drink one of these every morning when I’m traveling to stay hydrated.
I go with either the Orange or Grapefruit.
Instant Coffee
Airport coffee, hotel coffee, and airplane coffee is terrible. I used to bring a hand grinder and AeroPress, but now instant coffee is much better than it used to be.
Nothing worse than spilling coffee on your shirt first thing in the morning and having to go to a bunch of meetings like that. Shout wipes are an essential part of my backpack.
These are fun, mini versions of the NYTimes crosswords collected in a book. Amanda and I have passed a lot of time in airports, on airplanes, on trains, and on ferries doing these mini crosswords together. This is one of those things that is better in the physical format than on the phone, IMO.
If I’m traveling by car for more than an hour:
Small tool kit
Multi-bit screwdriver
Ratchet set
Pliers
Zip ties
Duct tape
Super glue
Utility knife
Flashlight
AC recharger
Ever been on a roadtrip and the AC stops working? It is easy to recharge, so I keep one in the car.
Beach towel
To be honest, this mostly gets used at the playground to wipe off wet slides that Charlie wants to go down, but it is also useful for cleaning up spills, etc.
Picnic blanket
Never know when you need to hang out for a little while outside. Chilling at a playground, impromptu meals outside, sitting on the beach, etc.
We have a Yeti Lowlands blanket. Soft on one side and canvas (waterproof) on the other.
Regular blanket
We keep a fleece blanket in the car. It can double as a picnic blanket if needed, but nice to be able to have a blanket if you get stuck or are just outside and it gets chilly. Or if someone wants to take a nap on a long drive.
Furniture blanket
Useful to kneel on if you need to change a tire, also useful to throw down to protect your seats if you need to move something.
Backup clothes
Sometimes toddlers puke on themselves or you. Or they jump in mud and then get it on you. Backup clothes are essential for everyone in the car.
Tourniquet/bleeding control kit
This is a recent addition to my car on the recommendation of Christie WrightArchived Link. Her pitch: When are you most likely to get into or witness an accident that causes severe blood loss? In the car!
Given the diversity and expertise of the Macarthur genius grant recipients you’ve listed, here’s a selection of works or major contributions from each of them that you might consider exploring:
Her research papers are mainly technical in nature. You can refer to her Google Scholar Profile for her most cited works.
Ian Bassin:
As a lawyer and advocate, Bassin’s impact comes through his contributions to legislation and policy. Check out Protect Democracy, an organization he co-founded.
We are pretty much recovered from COVID, though we still fatigue faster than normal and food still isn’t tasting quite right.
This week was a long and tiring one. Amanda had to work in Houston, TX, from Monday to Thursday, so between the COVID fatigue and Charlie’s momma separation anxiety, it was a struggle. Even so, Charlie and I got a lot of bonding time, and he seemed happy to get back to his regular daycare routine.
After daycare, we usually had dinner right away, went out for a walk if the weather was nice, and then watched a couple episodes of Trash Truck before getting ready for bed.
We tried out a new burger place that opened this week in Peekskill. It was pretty good! It is right across from the train station, which is one of Charlie’s favorite spots to hang out (where else can you see trains, busses, tow trucks, and boats from one location?).
Some work news: Our team saved the Blogs.Harvard network from being shut down back in July and now host an archived version of it on Automattic’s infrastructure. We see it as a major win to keep this important piece of internet history available, and keep links from 2003 still working.
We upgraded the network from WordPress 4.8.1 and PHP 5.5.9 to WordPress 6.3.1 and PHP 8.2. No small feat with ~1500 blogs with tons of themes and plugins.
We had another crazy rainstorm on Friday that flooded the region for something like the 3rd time this year. There was too much water in our basement this time to only use the shopvac, so I bought a non-submersible transfer pump and ran it every 20 mins or so for about 4 hours until water stopped seeping up through the floor.
I don’t think this weather pattern is going to get any better, so the first call I’m making on Monday morning is to a sump pump guy and get that on the calendar.
Amanda’s college sorority little, Kat, visited us this weekend, in from London for a wedding in upstate NY this week. We hung around this general area, made dinner, drank wine, visited Muscoot Farm, walked along the riverfront with Charlie, and caught up after 4 years like no time has passed. Kat give us a couple of book recommendations:
At the farm I liked the pitch forks made from single branches. I’d like to try to make one. Charlie liked the tractor and the mud puddles the best.
We have a lot of apples right now, so apple desserts are the thing right now. Apple galletes and apple sauce are always good, and I made this apple crisp, which employs pecans for the topping. Better than oats, IMO. 🍎
I changed my mind on something this week: We decided to hire cleaners once a month to help us clean the house. Until now I’ve been against it, probably because of my midwestern work ethic and Appalachian self sufficiency (family roots run deep!), thinking that we should save the money and take care of it ourselves. After all, we had the time and I thought it was lazy to not do it ourselves.
What changed my mind was struggling to do the base-level things like mopping, dusting, kitchen grime, etc, after we had Charlie. Not only do we have less time now, but he also creates more messes than Amanda and I combined. When he was 3 months old we had someone come babysit him while we cleaned all day, but that has our priorities backwards. Why not pay someone to clean so we can spend that time with Charlie instead?
Needing to get the house ready for a guest while Amanda was traveling and I had a busy week at work pushed me over edge. It was more affordable than I expected and they did a great job in a couple hours while I was working. We’ll probably have them come once a month.
I’m thinking about changing my permalink structure to no longer include the category slug. We’ll see. I just need to make sure my redirects will work as expected.
I fixed a spacing issue around images and galleries with adjacent text that has been bothering me for a while on this site. The answer was sibling selectors.
p ~ figure, p ~ div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery {
margin-top: 1rem;
}
figure ~ p, div.wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery ~ p {
margin-top: 1rem;
}
