kixiQu

Meeting people where they are with technology is so important, and I love that this lets the grandchildren message from their phones as is presumably convenient for them.

The tricky thing is that far more people have outdated browsers that don't support all the cool HTML/CSS stuff I want to do (and that the author also does a lot of).... but even so, I check up on how my site looks on Lynx every now and again.

(via josh)

Well, hell.

I don't get new versions of things but I'm still fully that person.

Interactive fiction at a solo dev scale is often really really linear. This game structures around that well, I felt -- the repetitive nature of what you're doing is the point, what makes it meaningful even in the absence of alternative choice.

This link argues no. I would argue yes, because of a technical solution and a phenomenon I've observed.

The technical problem:

It’s not enough to interleave their posts into a “river” or “stream” paradigm, where only the most recent N items are shown in one big, combined, reverse-chronological list (much like a Twitter timeline), because many of them would get buried in the noise of higher-volume feeds and people’s tweets.

One of the really nice things about RSS is what it doesn't do. It doesn't order your content by obscure algorithms aiming to vacuum you further and further into an advertising-driven time suck, as Twitter now does.

That doesn't mean, however, that your only option is to present behavior chronologically.

The technical solution: I have my RSS reader do a round-robin ordering for each page displayed, so the higher-volume feeds pool at the bottom. This effect is more noted with a larger page size. For me, this works well enough. I don't see why marking "read all" is a bad thing, and I do it decently regularly.

The phenomenon: Navigating directly to lifehacker.com or whatever other high-volume site feels like gambling. All the colorful previews are engaging, and it all seems to grab me more than my staid feed reader's presentation. It's tempting to roll the dice and see if there's something new. It makes me less this to consume everything in my feed reader is what I guess I'm saying. That's valuable to me.

Here is the picture of the effect.

I would pay for source of all the weird site stuff Gwern has commissioned / developed over the years. I am never sure how much of it it's worth it to emulate in my own site; for instance, cool sidenotes of the kind he and tufte-css have wouldn't fall back as neatly for text-only browsers as the stuff I have now. (counterpoint: I am pretty sure I'm the only person I know to have visited my site with a text-only browser)

Probably better to focus on my content, but by gosh it's cool to see people making this stuff happen.

Recently in a chatroom I know people have been discussing using HTML and CSS only without any kind of other markup / templating / build script.

I am not into it.

I do wish there were a better way to define my own mini-extensions to markdown to have the markdown be the properly Canonical form of my content; I have an oembed liquid tag and a linkpreview liquid tag and ideally that'd just be a presentation detail rather than embedded within my markup with liquid... but as it is, I'm quite happy with the flexibility Jekyll gives me given that even my weirdest stuff is easy to express as "turn some markdown into a chunk of html and put that html into a different piece of html" (yes you can see some poorly rendered markdown there, no I do not care enough to fix it)

I really wish I'd known about this deck during its funding.

Doesn't it scream for some patterned Mylar foiling?

I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but... I find that Miniflux is maybe a little too "minimalist" and "opinionated" for my taste? Anyway, I've got a few Tampermonkey userscripts for it now and this is the first one I've cleaned up.

The other puts sort buttons on the feed page for absolute number of unread entries descending, and unread:read ratio descending. If anyone wants that one I'll clean it up and put it up too.

Does anyone know good resources around framing this whole thing positively emotionally? All the news coverage and even health guidance I see makes me want to emit a low, ceaseless gurgling sound. Even the "aren't our health workers brave" aspect makes me despair at how poorly we're handling the safety net of it all.

My problem switching off of gmail is that I'd really like to start moving to an alias-based approach (so, you know, lemmy@maya.land for Lemmy emails, etc.) but this then conflates two issues so I solve neither.

I wish Google Takeout were required to maintain consistent formats so people could develop tools against it. I could make a lot of progress by pulling out the decade of history I have with them and not maintaining more than a couple months of data inside their stuff at any given time.

My brain is broken. Broken, I tell you.

Tom Stoppard!

Rosencrantz!

Sean Connery!

Guildenstern!

I like reading Tom Stoppard plays even though they suffer from the "ah this woman was written by a man" aura.