The Strays

I’ve needed to curate my media intake more thoughtfully for awhile and the US fall election, recent inauguration, and media around them both reminded me time is of the essence. I started by getting off Twitter and moving to Bluesky. I brought most of my follows with me. And while I like all my follows, my Bluesky feed basically just looks like my Twitter feed pre-Musk, which was usually informative but often overwelming.

I’ll be closely following how/if the atproto Bluesky is built on really takes off and launches a whole ecosystem of apps. As the link below shows, they’ve put a significant amount of effort into giving would-be developers some docs on how to start building. Seems like their heart is in the right, but it will be interesting to see where they are in a year.

https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

I also started using an RSS reader to follow my favorite bloggers, magazines, and other outlets. I even have the Associated Press in there. I use Inoreader for those who want to know. I’m currently on the free tier, which I can stay at until I reach 150 feeds and I’m almost half way there (73 at the time of writing). It’s refreshing to exert such control over what I read and follow on the web. And I feel like I’m seeing such random, cool stuff! I added Hacker News and I think I saw the link below there. This is a site where someone explains and gives examples of every HTML element currently in use.

https://iamwillwang.com/dollar/every-html-element/

Curating my feed more towards my nerdy software interests lengthened my already overflowing potential projects list. I’ve also felt the urge to tinker with my site more and forunately have carried out some updates like:

• adding logos for the tools used in my portfolio projects
• fixing an error in my hugo build by straightening out the template structure
• surfacing my rss feeds for my blogs and poems
• updating my resume to reflect my promotion (I’m a senior swe now, baby!)

But all that of course has not stopped me from wanting more. Nor should it! I love this stuff. And I hope to one day be running this site on a server and hardware that I own; ideally solar powered, but one step at a time. Mira Welner was nice enough to write a very accessible post on standing up an Apache server using a Raspbery Pi. I hope to one day go through it and scratch another project off my list.

https://mirawelner.com/posts/website_howto.html#backups