Category: Product & Tech

Tapestry

It’s a bold claim to say you can make a universal timeline for the Internet.

But you can. And we have.

This post will explain the technology behind Project Tapestry and how we tested it as a prototype. We’ll keep this discussion at a fairly basic level: if you’re a web or app developer, you’ll have no problems following along.

And if you think I’m going to describe RSS feeds now, think again! We’ve come up with something completely new.

The team at Iconfactory wrote a nice blog article on their project ‘Tapestry’. I backed this project on Kickstarter last week as I believe they are on to something with Tapestry. The article is worth the read if you are into product and tech and a bit tech savvy.

Website Update

I did some simple website updates this evening, including updating from the Independent Publisher Theme v1.8 to Independent Publisher 2.0. Both themes carry the same name and originate from the same developer, yet they function differently. Be aware of this if you when you ‘upgrade’.

Additional changes I applied tonight:

  • Custom RSS feeds for different types of posts that I place here.
  • Small background color update.
  • Font style changes to posts marked as ‘status’ posts. These are now in italic.
  • Updated the styling of Webmentions underneath the comments section of individual posts.

How I use iOS focus modes

I’m a fan of iOS focus modes and I use them every day for different activities that occur during my days.

Recently some people around me noticed this setup on my phone and started asking questions about it. Instead of explaining it offline only I thought it would be better to write a post about it too so that this can be shared with others.

I’m curious to understand if you use focus modes too, and if so what you do differently from me.

Continue reading “How I use iOS focus modes” →

I’m trying out Obsidian as my second brain in my new job. I appreciate how I can make mental notes during all my introduction meetings and how these are being linked together for me. All my notes are short bulleted sentences.

What I don’t know yet is if doing this digital will actually help me remember the details better versus writing them down in my notebook. Only time will tell I guess.

What I do like about Obsidian is that it doesn’t get in your way. It’s just plain text in a flat file.

Reactive Resume

A free and open-source resume builder that simplifies the process of creating, updating, and sharing your resume.

This is going to be a weekend side project to possibly replace the short resume that I’m hosting here. It’s not that I have huge need for an updated resume as I started a new job January 1st this year but, I do like the idea of keeping my resume updated easily.

Updating my resume last September after 8 years was quite a lot of work. More or less meaning I had to start over from scratch in Word and PowerPoint, as the last version of my resume was dating back to 2016 and looked ancient from a design perspective.

Curated RSS feeds

Last night I figured out that I can use my self-hosted FreshRSS instance to subscribe to OPML files containing RSS feeds from others. By doing so I can effectively subscribe to someone else’s Blogroll and have a form of curated RSS in my own feed reader. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Here are some of the OPML files that I subscribed too:

The next thing I now need to figure out is how I can have FreshRSS generate a dynamic OPML file of my own Blogroll / RSS favorites.

Filtering Mastodon posts in Ivory

Just like in the old days on Twitter, I have been applying filters to my Mastodon timeline since today. Not because I follow annoying people, but because I notice that some discussions, especially about politics and political parties, irritate me and are polarizing.

These are the Ivory RegEx filters that I have applied.

Annoying topics and people

(?i)(donald|trump|elon|musk|twitter|amazon|bezos|thierry|baudet|wilders)

Politics and Current Affairs

My political preference is in the middle. I prefer to read political positions on the left and right of the political spectrum in the newspaper and through columnists.

(?i)(extinction|rebellion|PVV|Groenlinks|PvdA|PvdD|SP|Bij1|FVD|JA21|Volt|BBB|OPNL|extreemrechts|domlinks)

Filter posts with more than 4 hashtags

(#[A-Za-z0-9]+[ ]*){4,}

FreshRSS

I’m still working on replacing public ‘free’ services I use, to versions I host myself. I worked on moving my Feedly RSS account to FreshRSS tonight. FreshRSS runs in a Docker on my Synology NAS, installing this was a fun ‘nerd’ project for this Sunday evening.

As an RSS reader I have been using Reeder.app for years, Reeder supports FreshRSS as a platform, so my user experience compared to Feedly has not changed at all which is an extra plus.