Weeknotes 2024W41

I spend a lot of time on the internet and on my computer. I’m not ashamed—I really love it here.

Added a table of contents and some posts to my website

Lots of website additions this week. First, I started with a table of contents on posts that I specify! Having a table of contents is great because:

• You can quickly jump to certain parts of a page. Usually when I’m looking at my own website, I usually know roughly where I wrote something down and I can find stuff much faster with a TOC.
• It lets readers know quickly what they are getting into. Subheadings should tell the story by themselves so the TOC is a really quick overview of what the post is about.

This has been on the todo list for a while but there wasn’t an easy way to do it how I wanted with my static site generator of choice. It can automatically generate a TOC but it would have to be part of the article and I wanted it to be next to the article. So, I did some HTML magic. When my website builds, it loops through all of the posts and does the following:

1. Checks for toc: true in the post front matter. If false skip else continue.
2. Inject a marker into the post that tells the generator to automatically create a TOC.
3. After the page is rendered, pull out the TOC HTML from the article HTML.

After that it’s just styling to make it look nice. I wanted the TOC to always be a touch away so on large screens, it stays stuck right next to the article after scrolling. It’s colored in a lower contrast color than the article so that it doesn’t distract from the article. On small screens, the TOC is hidden and only shown when a button is pressed. The button stays stuck to the upper left-hand corner so it’s out of the way but available when needed. It’s colored in a higher contrast here because it is visually on top of the article.

I had to write some stuff so people could see my hard TOC work. One post was about teaching and learning in a second language and what that ultimately means for access to information. That was a pretty fun one to write. It was a submission in this month’s IndieWeb carnival about multilingualism on a global web. I never thought I’d ever be multilingual but here I am writing about it.

The other post was an update to an online community I started a while back for my friends. The original vision of creating a small, private, highly-interconnected online community free of ads, algorithms, and performativity didn’t change but the actual platform did. In short, I’m now running a small forum.

Started a forum

You can read the full post for details but after spending time in a really friendly one, I decided forums are the best platform for communities. I replaced my community’s Mastodon instance with a forum. I thought the “speed” of Mastodon and microblogging would be perfect but Mastodon’s goals are different than mine. They’re trying to do social media right, connecting everybody to everybody else. I wanted a private community where there’s a small group of people connected to each other.

With that small of a group size, I think the space and intentionality of a forum are more appropriate. So, I shut down the Mastodon server and fired up a server running NodeBB. Modern forum software is really slick these days. I chose NodeBB because it is more fully featured than Flarum but lighter and snappier than Discourse.

The forum itself is running at um.heyjohn.social so the base domain was free. I quickly made a landing page that looks like a legal pad and I love it.

Bits and Bobs

• Discovered em dashes—they are nearly the perfect punctuation. They can replace semicolons, parentheses, and commas. Maybe I’ve been using them too much but I think they’re cool.
• Solved a treasure hunt that was hosted by Suntup Editions and told to me by foreverliketh.is. The challenge was to find 16 letters scattered randomly across the website. Once you find them, you unscramble them into a Latin phrase. There will be a write-up after the deadline is finished.
• Added new fonts to the website. The base font is Atkinson Hyperlegible because it’s, um, really legible. The headings are in Syne which pairs well (I think) and plays into that neobrutal vibe I’m going for.
• Did research on how to automate creating Open Graph images for my website. Most people start up a virtual browser and screenshot the page but that is slow and seems too “brute-force” to me. I think my options are to use libvips to add text to a base image or somehow run Satori from Ruby. Stay tuned.

Links

• HTML For People by Blake Watson. Anybody can make a website and this beautifully designed web book goes from “never coded before” to having your own. Everyone should have their own corner of the internet and this guide makes it accessible.
• how to buy shoes in the fediverse by Erin Kissane. Why it’s hard to find a home server on the fediverse. Server governance isn’t one-size-fits-all and they don’t all work for everyone.
• Typing Bowl. Race players by typing faster than them.
• The Static Site Paradox by Loris Cro. Static sites are faster, safer, and simpler. But making a dynamic one full of junk is much easier to make with a website builder. This leads to over-engineered websites that are way too complex for most people.
• A peasant woodland by Mandy Brown. Thoughts on why and how writers look for readers.

  We write because something needs to be expressed through us, and only by giving the writing to a reader is that need fulfilled.
  This is perhaps the greatest conundrum of our current technological era: the desperate need to connect with one another, because it is our only hope of survival; combined with the fact that nearly all the means of connection available to us are deeply—possibly irredeemably—fucked.

• I love your week notes and day notes and art and lists by Annie Mueller. Even when you think you are boring or have nothing to contribute, share anyways.

  I like your daily meandering thoughts. I like you describing your routine. I like hearing about the things outside of your routine, too. Did you go to the doctor’s? How did it go? Did you have an unexpected visitor? How was that for you? I’m interested. Tell us what’s on your mind. Tap away in the little keyboard and put part of your experience of the hour or day or week into words and share it with us.

• Write as you wish: a call to bring back the prose by Marisabel Munoz and Prose, circumlocution and cantinfleadas by Joel Chrono. Interesting thoughts on writing more verbose when it’s necessary. There is a time and a place for brevity and both the audience and the topic determine how you should communicate.

Created: 2024-10-14

Last modified: 2024-10-14