Here’s a muse; linking to external sites is probably one of the harder parts of blogging. Pages can go 404 and you won’t know exactly why, urls change even though they’re supposed to be immutable.

To blog while having pointers to disparate sources requires checking for dead links, and verifying that content relevancy hasn’t changed. The solution is to either archive everything (hard) or to not link at all (easy). High mutability is one reason why people take pictures of online content — it just works.

Of course in my case the social media applications within the Fediverse are not what’s most interesting. It’s the generality of its protocol. ActivityPub appears to have an easier time with different use cases than other protocols.

The link to a Fediverse server list in a previous post died but fediverse.party also shows the diverse types of applications that use the ActivityPub protocol.

Out of all front–ends for Mastodon/Pleroma the one with the funniest name is Soapbox (repo). Social media is a soapbox. Yes, this blog now has simple text animations :-)

Insularity is a term that shows up in the philosophy of the Fediverse every so often. Generally, the more insular a community, the more populous/extreme/niche. Some Fediverse indexes calculate insularity rates.

Imagine similar stats for the WWW. Like — what’s the URL and domain linking insularity within/between Facebook relative to other small/large islands? That would be extraordinary, especially for journalism which is pretty much dead.

This goes without saying but… any sufficiently ambitious group of business persons want more than just to be on the Internet, they want to own it completely, the Fediverse is no exception :)

Back when looking into JSON Feeds it didn’t link to its schema, but there’s one in SchemaStore/schemastore and sonicdoe/jsonfeed. You could validate a feed with a cli tool like check-jsonschema.

$ check-jsonschema --schemafile jsonfeed-v1.1.json feed.json
ok -- validation done

The upside of the JSON Feed is a lot more human than technical in the sense that it’s a mapping of RSS/Atom to the js world. There are many people who prefer JSON over XML.

Btw if anyone tells you that RSS is dead — they’re in a bubble. Bing is our witness; the hasfeed: prefix returns sites with a feed, the feed: prefix gives a direct feed link. No… I’m not a secret Microsoft™ agent — DuckDuckGo and others support this too ;-) 38B+ are big boy numbers.

‘One thing well’ is alive again. cbformat looks extremely useful — might just beat my current method of formatting code blocks in Markdown.

I think my practical notes on xslt/xml are mostly complete and could work as a blog post this month. I got distracted last month trying out syncthing’s newest features… if I get around to editing those notes, they could work as a blog post at some point too.

If you think about it, the HTML <abbr> tag is not that well thought out. Or rather, inconsistent interpretations of the title attribute on different displays limits <abbr> usefulness.

Sure, conditional media types allow auto expanding the title on touch or print displays.

But many semantic elements have similar quirks that are only noticeable with a good cross browser/display testing suite, which no one has btw.

Surprising quirky behaviour + real world “get it done now” business constraints = everything’s a <div> and/or a <span>.

Following a bunch of blogs always resurfaces interesting stuff — here’s an entertaining article and video summary of modern rope climbing. Article is 2y old – must have updated recently. I like the humour.

Even though I know the risk of losing viewers by discussing math and physics…