Micro.Blog

There are 222 posts filed in Micro.Blog (this is page 6 of 23).

Completion of the Kamala Campaign Timeline project

With Election Day in the US come and gone, I have completed updates to the Kamala Campaign Timeline website. This site covered the day-by day events of the Harris-Walz campaign from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race through Election Day. Each daily entry contains a link to the CNN daily blog for that day, links to other press coverage of the campaign, and links to videos of campaign events.

Having covered topical events before (see my Portland Protest News site), I was familiar with tracking down stories and links. The CNN daily blog was very helpful as a starting point for finding other coverage. During the development of the site, CNN began to restrict the number of page views to their site, and to reserve content for subscribers. Whenever this happened, I looked for other coverage.

As with the Portland Protest News site, I found it difficult to make time everyday for site updates. Since I was using a static site generator, I was able to catch up and still keep the consecutive date timeline. I have seen some recent comments about creating news streams. I have created a few streams myself, but aggregating feeds still depends on someone creating those feeds. Kamala Campaign Timeline was such a site (although the template did not support generation of a RSS feed – darn!). To me, the best site of this kind is Political Wire. However, it takes time to sift through the news, pick out the stories of note, and post cogent summaries/quotes, and to do it day in and day out. The DailyKos site is probably the best known Democratic/Progressive news site, and they have a staff supporting their efforts. Similarly, keeping the @kamalahq Threads account going took some effort, and someone, somewhere was paying for that. So, my opinion is that it is a tough job for a single person to carry that kind of load, but maybe there is someone out there who can handle it, or organize it (like Election Law Blog has a set of guest editors).

Anyway, I enjoyed having another shot at creating a daily news site, and hope that this serves as a historical record of a unique campaign. I’m just sorry that Harris and Walz didn’t win.

The circle of life – squirrel edition

This morning, I was walking my dog, and as we arrived home, I saw a baby squirrel in the grass in front of our home. He was not moving, so after I got my dog inside, I went and checked on the baby. Its head was moving and its eyes were open, but the baby was staying still in the grass. I assumed it had fallen from the trees in the front yard.

My wife and I checked on some animal rescue groups, and found one that was open (on Labor Day!). I called, and they said they would take the squirrel. The volunteer also gave me a summary of general things to do, and that the best solution was if the baby’s parents would come to take care of the squirrel. I checked on the baby, it had moved further into the grass, and was making little squeaks. I went inside and got a box ready, then went outside to get the baby, but it was no longer visible. I paused and listened to see if I could hear any squeaks. What I heard was the chattering of an adult squirrel, and I wondered if another squirrel had come to take care of the baby. The adult squirrel then ran to a bush underneath the tree, and I then heard some little squeaks. The baby squirrel was near the base of the bush – to me, the adult squirrel must have picked it up and put it there, and was watching from the tree when I came out again to look for the baby.

After a few seconds, the adult squirrel picked up the baby by the scruff of its neck, and ran off, running up another tree, then jumping on our courtyard wall, then going into the courtyard. I went inside to tell my wife, and we put off our visit to the rescue center. We will keep an eye on the courtyard to see if anything else develops, but I feel that the squirrels are taking care of their own, and that is a good feeling.

Irritating inconsistencies in Chai framework versions

This week, I spent some time working to understand how to use the Mocha testing tool and the Chai assertion tool in developing apps using Node.js. I found two articles that I was going to use to get started, and I decided to set up my package.json file to use the latest version of the tools. What I found was that I could not use the example code in the two articles, and kept getting error messages that I could not find answers for, except that several people recommended using an older version of the Chai assertion tool. I took a look at the Chai website releases page, and found that in version 5, only ECMAScript Modules were supported. Previously, ECMAScript Modules and CommonJS Modules were allowed. However, this change meant that I would have to change the example code I was using to run the latest version of Chai. I tried numerous combinations of changes, but none were totally successful. After an hour of trial and error, I decided to reinstall version 4.3.7 of Chai in my test project, and everything now worked as I expected. UGH! Onward!

Oliver Willis, in a recent Substack post, goes into further details on Sources Go Direct, and how the Harris campaign is doing this (via Dave Winer). The last paragraph is the best:

Frankly, the relationship between Trump and the press, which follows in the footsteps of the relationship George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had with many of the same outlets, shows that you can just wait them out. Like a toddler who has a tantrum, let them complain and bellow and fume, and then they will lose interest. They are attracted to shiny, loud objects, not substance, and by generating her own heat, Harris can do what’s best for the people, not the elites who ultimately do not care about our well-being at all.

Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift makes excellent points about how the mainstream media wants access to Harris so they can tear her down. It makes total sense that she is “going direct” with her message. Trump gets a pass with the mainstream media for having two incoherent “media availability” sessions – why bother with the press?

Ramblin’ “In The Car Podcast”

A 12-13 minute rambler, here are links to sites mentioned:

Portland Protest News

Making Your Own Media

KamalaCampaignTimeline.com (not live yet)

Molly White

Eleventy

Web3 Is Going Great

RTOWatch.com

Molly’s timeline site template

Steve Tockey/Construx Software

How To Engineer Software

Newer model-based development project for Javascript

Older model-based development project for Javascript

Eric Elliott on AI-assisted development

Sudolang

My prompt experiments

James Shore TDD Intro

Making your own media

A few days ago, Dave Winer talked about “making your own media”, meaning that individuals could create lists of sources and distribute them. Dave called for Democratic podcasts, but he has a podcast “river of news” site with multiple podcasts. I thought – why not create a river of news site for some other list of sources as an example?

I recently became aware of a blogging challenge called Blaugust (during the month of August, natch!). On their media page, they had a link to an OPML file of all the participants. I copied that file, added it to my River5 subscription list, and created a river of news site for that list of bloggers. I have instructions on how to do this for yourself – so get busy!