Excursions avatar

Excursions

I was seriously considering buying a domain name in my daughter’s name today, who is still 5. I do not know if I plan to use it now, but I think if she ever needs one, she may not have it available. But then I also do not want to push my choice on her. I am being too crazy?

I just carried out my customary buy on Amazon Prime Day. And of course it is for an Amazon device. That’s the only stuff with good deals.

A nice post. Early this year, I too followed a similar path to take my web and social presence Indie - something that I control. The journal section on my website became the primary destination for microposts. I (selectively) route to Twitter via Micro.blog cross-posting feature. I receive and display all the interactions on the posts from different platforms using webmentions.

I make Hugo process and render such microposts differently. It’s custom now, and may follow any solution in future. But the intention would be my microposts would exist here.

This structure has also lent me the flexibility of the posting interface. My posts, social and long ones, originate from the app that’s convenient and relevant at the time of posting. Some originate at Micro.blog iOS app, some at quill, most replies and likes directly from Microsub clients (like this one from Monocle) and at times in text editor of my choice (iA Writer, Drafts). And that in itself is a huge benefit.

I like ring of “social” subdomain that Dan uses, especially for the reason that it can always act as the destination for my microposts, irrespective of what hosts them. I may explore that.

I dreamt a horror movie today. I think if produced it can be one of the best horror movies ever made. It sent shivers down my spine. 😧

User Discovery with Micro.threads

I had recently started working on updating Micro.threads application to focus on discovery, specifically user discovery. My social interactions on the internet have never been dull or frustrated since I joined Micro.blog. And it can largely be attributed to the extremely fine community of users that exists on the platform.

However, I had also realised that there were a lot many threads, many interactions that I was missing on, because finding new users was still not easy. Discover section exists, but it helped primarily to get new, interesting posts. There was a major section of the platform which could assist me to ease this problem. And that is people I follow and their posts in my stream.

Manton had recently updated the default behaviour of a user profile’s “Following” section to display only “a list of who someone is following that you aren’t following already”. That itself is a huge improvement in identifying new users. But, for me, that too was a bit troublesome. I wanted to focus not just on the follow status, but the interactions; not just focus on whom someone I already follow, follows, but rather whom they interact with frequently.

So it was only just to build a system, first of all for myself that will discover more amazing users that I can follow, that I can interact with and learn from. And so I did.

Micro.threads User Discovery

I have been playing around with the user discovery section of Micro.threads. And I think it will help others too. Just head over to the Micro.threads -> Discover section and give the application a try. You may find it helpful. You may not. But I think the feedback you share would be useful for me, and hopefully to the community too.

I believe this just acts as a placeholder until such discovery features are available in the official app itself. Till then, this would be a playground to identify more ways to discover interesting profiles and threads on Micro.blog.

I have made some key considerations at this point while developing and rolling this out.

  1. You will have to sign in with your Micro.blog user id and an app token, which is discarded the moment you log out. I have no intention to maintain any accounts or credentials. I plan to use the /account/signin API from micro.blog in future; for now, app token is the quickest, officially supported way to get going.
  2. I haven’t optimised the performance of discover algorithm to the fullest. I plan to get that done that gradually.
  3. I am inclined to keep the information shown itself improving, and also add more ways to unearth user profiles and threads.This is just a first version that I was satisfied with and could roll out. I am already working on the threads parsing and discovery which I think will get done this weekend itself.
  4. I do not think I can get this perfect or can stay focused without the feedback from you all. So, any and every feedback is welcome.

Interesting, thank you Ryan for sharing that. I for sure want to explore it more, just for the reason that it attempts to bring Microsub and regular feed readers together.

I’m planning an experiment. The only way I will consume news for next few days would be via my morning newspaper. I think I will be a bit less burdened by the constant pressure of staying in the know. It is not necessary and introduces a lot many distractions.

My hypothesis is with not a need to sought out the news, I would be a tad more focused on the work at hand. The primary source I reach out to for news has been Twitter for some time now. And I had to make that difficult. So I have uninstalled the Twitter client from my iPhone. I intend to use it only as a web app.

Pleasantly, this was an insight given by ScreenTime - so the system looks to be working. I pondered on the option to put app limit, but thought it would be better to just get rid of this distraction. And so I did.

Thank you Aaron. I am confident the consistency of Aperture will consistently grow with more edge cases covered. On client, I did try all the apps, both on web (Together) and iOS (Indigenous). I found Monocle to be the most stable one. I do not think my primary concerns around posts display are addressed by any. But anyway I will use these apps a bit longer. I want to use this system, really!

State of Microsub Servers and Client

I had recently expressed an excited opinion on Microsub, the “new” Indieweb spec. I could then see the potential of the standard and also the available solutions, the server and the clients, around it.

I have seen Monocle in action now and realise the power of Microsub standard. I do not think I can read feeds in any other manner now. This is fantastic!

The fact that there exists a hosted Microsub server in Aperture is a great start, it has given a chance to many to get started knowing the standard early. And I know people like Aaron Parecki are hard at work to continue improving the clients like Monocle. However, I think my excitement was premature.

No doubt, the core technology behind Microsub is solid and it can eventually redefine the way feeds are subscribed to and consumed. And bundled with Micropub to post actions of the type like, reply, repost directly to your website right from your reading view makes it absolutely magical.

So I don’t blame myself that I got excited about the standard seeing the potential of what can be achieved when all these Indieweb standards work seamlessly together. Seamless is the key though. For the last few days, I have been trying to use Monocle as my primary feed reader. Unfortunately, the whole system has some way to go before I actually can. I am just noting down the frustrations I encountered using the system.

  1. Keeping the read status of the posts in sync is flaky. Many of the posts I have read already are shown again. Some of the posts that should have already popped up are not available for some time. When they finally are, they are available in bulk. If I understand the standard correctly, it is the server at fault here. And it is only a single client involved at this point.
  2. Subscribing to feeds with the server is not easy. Not user experience wise, but again in terms of the unreliability of the posts appearing in the stream. At times, there are 0 posts fetched; at other times, there is a bulk of hundreds of posts. It poses a challenge for the client.
  3. And to the client. I think we can learn from the available feed readers and focus on the must-have features - which are primarily around showing available posts. Monocle currently cannot be configured to show only the new posts. Filter options are limited. Sorting options are limited. Marking read/unread is unavailable. Subscribing to new feeds is not possible (even though spec has a follow API which I hope Aperture exposes). Few of these might be nitpicking, but they are important when the reference for most new users would be existing feed readers.
  4. The concept of Microsub server and client, former for maintaining the feeds and the later for displaying them, sounds great. However, to get people on board, we will need at least one application that does the job of both. Wish Monocle and Aperture were two components of a single application.

I know the standard is still a work in progress, especially the server and client applications. So no doubt there would be some kinks in the working. The intention of this post is in no way to demean the people involved or pinpoint at the failures. My intention is to capture my thoughts on why, even though I want to, I cannot yet use the current applications in place. The standard is making significant headway and I hope I would soon be able to benefit from the system. As Aaron says in his introductory post I referenced above -

My goal with this is to use this as my primary online dashboard to follow all kinds of content, as well as being able to interact with the content without leaving the interface.

Amen to that. Unfortunately, now is not the right time. So I am back to my search for that perfect feed reading service.

★ Liked “Shameless vs. shameful” by Seth Godin

Shaming a person is a senseless shortcut. When we say to someone, “you’re never going to amount to anything,” when we act like we want to lock them up and throw away the key, when we conflate the behavior with the human–we’ve hurt everyone. We’ve killed dreams, eliminated possibility and broken any chance for a connection.

What’s the feed reader service of choice amongst the community here? I remember many floating around, but always failed to note the recommendations.

After a really productive few days, I thought it was a good time to update what’s happening Now. And as I was journaling what I was involved in, I realised benefits of my recent blogging habit — I had my microposts as reference. That’s one big positive.

Though I agree with Daniel’s sentiment, it’s part of the overall cycle of creation — inspiration, ideation, implementation, appreciation, recognition. It is not must for all creations to pass through this, but it’s significant if one does.

So, AirPods remain the wireless earphones of choice for many, primarily due to the ease of use, design and comfort. Bluetooth is a hated technology amongst staunch audiophiles, Apple just made it bearable by making the experience frictionless.

One of the worst feeling is the helplessness you feel as you look into the painful eyes of your child down with fever, as they look back at you with a hope that you will abate this pain they are going through. Ah. Absolutely crushing! 😣

At times, I just wish I wasn’t following the technology space closely. My buying decisions would’ve been simpler, driven completely by what’s on display now. And not by the fear of roadmap, fear of remorse in future.

My MacBook is dying and I find nothing that can replace it.

I really liked this comment from a hacker news thread1 on a post around how Microservices architecture failed a product’s dev team.

Everytime (sic) you touch something under a repo, it affects everyone. You are forced to use existing code or improve it, or you risk breaking code for everyone else. What does this solve? This solves the fundamental problem a lot of leetcode/hackerrank monkeys miss, programming is a Social activity it is not a go into a cave and come out with a perfect solution in a month activity. More interaction among developers means Engineers are forced to account for trade offs. Software Engineering in its entirety is all about trade offs, unlike theoretical Comp Science. Anyway, this helps because as Engineers we must respect and account for other Engineers decisions.

Working on a shared code is indeed a social activity. And this principle is something I just can’t stress enough when amongst my team. There is a misguided view of coders as lone warriors, sitting in the dark corner somewhere, beating at their keyboards and delivering working software day and night.

Reality can’t be farther in most work environments, especially enterprises. Every coder needs to be accountable, extra cautious with each line of code he or she commits to the repository. If not, it might lead to a sleepless night of debugging for the whole team.

  1. I do not endorse the tone, of course. It’s from hacker news forum after all. May be people get trained to shout once you are in forum.↩

★ Liked Throwing and Catching by Seth Godin

We spend most of our time in catching mode. In dealing with the incoming. Putting out fires. Going to meetings that were called by other people. Reacting to whoever is shouting the loudest.

But if we learn a lesson from jugglers, we realize that the hard part isn’t catching, it’s throwing. Learn to throw, to initiate, to do with care and you’ll need to spend far less time worrying about catching in the first place.