Excursions

Had a brilliant ambience at the bistro we visited today. Perfect for a chatty evening with family.

It’s been some time now that I have started again to regularly write, post my thoughts. Long and short. One of the key reason for this change in my behaviour, my returned inclination to write has been the changed follow behavior. I am reading interesting posts that make me think, that make me question my beliefs. And for each such question, I have a reaction — a post.

It is all thanks to the community at Micro.blog for convincing me that every post, irrespective of how short it is, is worth putting out there. It is a way to be social. I was doing so on other social networks like Twitter anyway - through all the likes, tweets and retweets. Why not take it to the next level and do the same on, as Brent Simmons had called it, the social network - the web?

But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together.

And so that is what I have been doing. Reading from the web, reacting on the web - my website.

IndieWeb also played a huge part in helping me to go social on web though. It allowed me to post to my site my reactions to what I was reading on web. I could easily like a post, reply to it or even repost part of it and that in itself became a new post on my site - I called them the social posts. So as long as I had the posts tagged with appropriate microformats and was able to send a webmention to a site, I was interacting on web.

I need not be part of any siloed platform, I need not shout. All that mattered was I expressed. And just with that, I have been the most social I ever was online.

Watching the #MadeByGoogle event live today would be like going to that one movie which you’ve discussed and debated and heard narration for from many folks, those you know and those you don’t. It’d be a real event if Google manages to surprise anyone. Would still watch though.

Just came across Mixnode which as per the folks behind “turns the web into a giant database”. So basically you can fire SQL-like queries to fetch URLs as response. Man, I’ve so many questions - mainly how the bloody hell will it scale. But I guess I will hold the judgement back.

Another of those articles that triggers a heated debate on how and when to adopt a microservices-driven architecture. It’s one of those topics that is better not discussed in generic terms, but is way too often.

I hate shopping - especially shopping for clothes. Especially clothing for myself. I would argue so much mental energy in “wasted” on making decisions for clothes.

Is something wrong with the link between webmentions.io and micro.blog? I used to get replies on m.b as webmentions - but have stopped getting them recently. Just me or anyone else is observing the issue? I believe I had seen @Eli too brought it up recently. cc @manton

This story from John C Dvorak is indeed a cautionary tale - for both writers with publishers and the readers of the large publications. Especially this “Native advertising is a most insidious concept and should be rejected by every publisher.”

Best thing I like about Castro is how it handles chapters. It lists down all the chapters (with easy access to sponsors links), how much time each chapter runs for and also let’s you select which chapters you are interested in. Such a well thought out app this.

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King

Such a wonderful read. I wonder how the hell have I not yet read this a hundred times. King teaches as he shares fascinating tidbits from his life. There’s so much to learn, about him and mainly about writing. About being honest.