testing twitter syndication via Bridgy

It was a beautiful 50F degree day today, so Jon and I decided to go for a row on the Croton River.

We went out at high tide and rowed roughly three miles round trip. The water was quite swift today and we had some difficulty navigating a few bends in the river where the current picked up. Quite a workout!

I did some design updates on my blog this weekend during Charlie’s nap.

• Made new archive templates for the Likes and Microblog sections
• Made new single post templates for Likes and Microblog posts
• Updated the navigation across the site to finally include Likes and Microblog
• Added Likes, Microblog, and regular navigation to the homepage.

There is finally a birria truck in Peekskill! Paradise Taqueria Birrieria, parked on Brown St. Saturdays and Sundays. The standard quesabirria + consume is delicious, as are their salsas. Amanda likes the green salsa and I like the smokey red salsa.

Good post, Tom. I agree, we need more user-friendly tools to power use cases like this.

I love when people publish open CSVs on GitHub and have an associated GitHub Pages site where that data is displayed, but that takes some technical know-how. Heck, publish a SQLite file and I’ll be happy, but the moment the database isn’t viewable on the web, you’ve lost 98% of people.

Kaggle’s open datasets and notebooks are a partial solution, but more focused on data science. I’ve discovered some cool stuff in there, though. ObservableHQ comes to mind, too. You already mentioned Datasette, which I love, and it is also worth mentioning tools like Flatfile and OpenRefine

I’m not optimistic about storing niche databases like the ones you describe in Airtable or Notion because I don’t expect them to be around long-term or keep a consistent link structure with redirects while they are around. Are.na is nice for image collection, but not super sortable/filterable/searchable.

Regarding making a database of Brooklyn Artists and keeping it up to date, if you can find 1-2 profiles they all have in common (LinkedIn, GitHub, Instagram, Dribbble, Twitter), building a tool to occasionally check for updates would be a lot easier than free-form web scraping and parsing.

For a general use case: Since WordPress is my tool of choice (I work at Automattic on the WordPress Special Projects Team), I’ll explain how I’d go about setting up a niche collection of resources on WordPress.

• I’d start with setting up a custom post type with the appropriate fields for your collection.
  • There are two ways of doing things as the WP world transitions to Gutenberg. I think the Block way (where everything is added via blocks) is the best long-term, but there really aren’t tools for setting up custom collection blocks that do this sort of thing, so right now I’d still advise people to go the Custom Post Type UI + Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) or Pods route to set up the structure without code. Leverage things like Tags and Categories as much as possible to use the built-in functionality WordPress already has for these concepts.
  • Everything gets its own permalink.
• For outputting the content, you can use core blocks like the Query Loop for much of it, or leverage some of the blocks that ACF or Pods provides.
• Need auto tagging and more powerful term management? Use TaxoPress.
• For searching and filtering, use something like ACF Better Search and Search & Filter. Jetpack Search is really great, though a bit pricey for hobby projects.

I’m glad Buzzfeed is using ChatGPT now. Search engines and social platforms are going to demote it, as they should have long ago.

What is novel to you is just another Thursday for someone else.

• Having a baby is one of the biggest days of your life, but doctors and nurses in the maternity ward deliver multiple babies a day.
• Your huge data migration is small to Stripe, who handles bigger clients than you multiple times a day.
• Your website redesign project might be the biggest project you are working on right now, but the development team has 113 rebuilds in-flight right now.
• The garage tries to churn through as many tire changes as they can in a day.

All a matter of perspective.

Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots is what I’ve been waiting for. I was a long-time Tweetbot user and it was my favorite third party Twitter app. Even the early version of Ivory is better than the other Mastodon apps out there.

Wind chimes are a secret natural stress reducer for me. I love them. We recently got a beautiful set of Corinthian Bells from Wind River that I can hear from the kitchen, dining room, and my office.

I just finished Blake Crouch’s Recursion and it really pulled me in and made me think about time. Recommended. It was a nice return to sci-fi after not reading that genre in five months.

While recovering from the flu I’ve decided to review my Reddit subscriptions. I’ve been spending more time there recently because of niche communities like /r/Tiki, and removing subscriptions is about all the mental work I can handle right now with this stabbing headache.

Communities I used to love that didn’t make the cut:

• /r/castiron – Used to be a great place to source and identify cast iron 10 years ago, but now is full of people making the same stupid jokes. Also full of misinformation.
• /r/kombucha – I used to make a lot of kombucha, but I’ve mostly stopped because I’m the only one who likes it in our house. It seems like every post is a blurry image of a scoby with a dot on it and the caption, “Is this mold?”
• /r/HelloInternet – The podcast clearly is never coming back. Farewell my old friend.
• /r/DataIsBeautiful – I joined this for inspiration when I was learning data visualization and messing around with D3.js. I’m not into that as much anymore, but also the visualizations are becoming more complicated than they need to be. The more complicated ones get the upvotes, the actual nice simple ones that I prefer get left in the dust.

I also removed some of the default communities that I hadn’t gotten around to removing yet. Nice to clean up that timeline a bit.

Protip: For any free Substack, the feed is at [newslettername].substack.com/feed

I’m going through and unsubscribing from their emails and instead subscribing to their RSS feeds. I haven’t yet found a way to get a feed for paid newsletters, so I still route those from email to RSS with Feedbin.

The process was pretty quick. I went to https://substack.com/library, opened up the console, did a document.querySelectorAll() for the anchor tag for each publication (my selector will be different than yours so I didn’t include it–yay React!), then extracted the URLs and appended /feed with some quick regex in VSCode. I popped that list into https://opml-gen.ovh/, then imported the OPML into NetNewsWire.

TIL that the default feed cache when you are using fetch_feed() in WordPress is 12 hours and you can override it with a hook: wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime

Hmm, this posted to Twitter by going through Bridgy. I know I use a micropub token to push to Bridgy, but since I don’t see anything in Twitter’s docs about micropub, I assume Bridgy uses the standard API for third party clients.

Twitter’s API for third party clients seems to be down, and it is unclear whether that is a bug or a policy decision. Writing this to test and see if micropub tokens are down, too.

Charlie’s symptoms match RSV and it is no joke. This poor kid has been very sick since Monday and wants to be held 24/7 (normally when he is awake he is very busy and does not want to be held). He seems miserable, but with none of the warning signs of needing to go to the doctor.

He’s been sick a lot in the last 6 months, but nothing like this.

I’m thankful that Amanda and I both have flexible jobs and can trade off days holding him so the other can work. Lots of feverish working during his naps, too.

Map of tiki bars!

Far more interesting than most data visualizations is the follow-up article about how they collected, normalized, and analyzed the data, the tools they used, and how they used them.

Emily Weil recommends checking out this resource before diving in to The Book of Shaders.