Two new projects

I have put together a draft website for a local non-profit (our local cable access channel), check it out!

Also, I recently passed my Technician license exam, so I am an official radio amateur (call sign KI7ZHS) – woohoo!

Why praise Micro.blog?

My friend, John Philpin, responded (https://beyondbridges.net/2018/06/in-praise-of-micro-blog/) to my question about using Micro.blog (what makes it more than just another blogging service), and to me his response in a nutshell is “community”. One of the features of Micro.blog is the ability to find other Micro.blog users using the Discover /Users page (https://micro.blog/discover/users), then to “follow” them after selecting a user (a la Twitter), then seeing the posts of those users in the Timeline (a la Twitter), being able to respond quickly to them (a la Twitter), and creating Mentions by using the username of the user (a la Twitter). To me, this is the “killer feature” of Micro.blog. The posting abilities are pretty standard (editing, linking, etc.).

Perhaps another “killer feature” is that the Micro.blog staff perform curation and enforce community guidelines (http://macgenie.micro.blog/2018/04/10/a-guide-to.html), which results in higher signal-to-noise ratio for postings and conversations. I started this year with a goal of making some type of post every day, even if it was just a link. That lasted about six weeks, so I am trying to “get back in the saddle again” through this post.

I tend to use RSS for tracking posts of people I am interested in (my reading list page (http://readinglist.andysylvester.com/) is an example), and then engage as I see interesting posts. I can follow the posters at Micro.blog through RSS, and do follow a few people I know (John Philpin, Ron Chester, Frank McPherson). Sometimes I feel my reading time is limited, and this reading list gives me a single place to go to follow the people that interest me.

So, should I praise Micro.blog? As a service, it is still somewhat new. However, it appears to have attracted a number of followers, and has a possibly sustainable business model through hosting support. I think it deserves the opportunity to demonstrate how blogging can facilitate community through services paid for by users, and welcoming those (like myself) who are posting from afar…

Links for February 6, 2018

Rollbar: Top 10 Javascript errors from 1000+ projects and how to avoid them – I am not enough of a Javascript developer to say that I have seen most of these, but the writeups for the problems look very helpful.

Signal v Noise: Stimulus: a modest Javascript framework – my normal response would be  “yippee – another Javascript framework! NOT!”, but coming from the creator of Ruby on Rails, it may be worth a look.

Links for February 3, 2018

British Library: How to build a medieval manuscript – cool article with insight on the difficulty of creating books by hand

Bohdan Liashenko: How to promote your Github project – good info to know, but seems more like “marketing” to me

Eric Elliott: How one JIRA ticket made $1 million dollars – ideas on metrics to track to make sure that the software development being done has economic value.

First Contributions:  A project to help people get started making contributions to open source software.

Caches to Caches: My Workflow org-agenda – how to use the org application in Emacs for managing your work

Karl Voit: Organize Your Life with Org-Mode – Another person’s testimony to the usefulness of org-mode, I need to check this out..

 

 

Links for February 1, 2018

Remo Jansen: The most important thing about Javascript is accessibility. I think does make it easier for people to get started with the language. One thing that makes it more difficult to me is that Javascript tends to be only one part of designing or developing a web application (necessary but not sufficient ).