Writings

It’s been a little bit over a month since I first arrived in Eindhoven. Since then, I have had time to explore the city, a bit of Rotterdam, and even find a Portuguese store with “Pastéis de Nata” in Helmond! I have also had time to study, but had to decrease my time at Protocol Labs due to my studies. With all of this, I haven’t had time to give much love to my blog.

We are living in an increasingly interconnected world. Today, 4.1 billion people have access to the internet. And with every passing year, millions more are born into the world as “digital natives” with digital technology and the World Wide Web at their fingertips from early childhood.

Last night before going to sleep… well actually while falling asleep I thought about writing this. It’s such a basic poem, but lemme just share it here.

Over the past months, I have been reading more and more posts where people are saying they miss the vibe of the 90s web. Even though I wasn’t alive to see how that web was, I still remember the website of my high school filled with overly saturated colors, GIFs and iframes. Not only that characterizes some of the pages of the early web, but also the pixelation and the footers saying to use X or Y browser.

I decided to make a few updates on my website - again. However, this are a bit more than visuals and I’m mostly reinventing the way I manage IndieWeb posts, namely likes, reposts, notes and replies.

For quite a few time, I used Bear as my go-to Notes application for two reasons: it was simple to use and the syntax was quite similar to markdown. However, it is not markdown and it does not support some things that’d like to see on such software: diagrams, mathematics, wiki-like links, etc.

Today, I decided to readd a watches page, but this time it isn’t built from hundreds of posts, but from the data that I get directly from Trakt’s API. I built a small tool called trakt-collector used to collect your history and save it in JSON format.

For quite some time, I have been getting more and more into the IndieWeb world and trying to own my own data. I have started publishing more to my website and using it as a place to store most of my public data, i.e., data I already published on other social media and platforms.

As Tom once said, it is now time to own my own reading log. Why? Despite all the reasons mentioned on Tom’s post, I also got bored of Goodreads and I ended up not using it as much as I should have.

In 2015, I started a project called http.hugo, which was a just a simple plugin for Caddy, a really fast web server built with Go with automatic HTTPS. At the time, the plugin was exclusive for Caddy and it provided a simple UI to edit your files in the server, rebuild the website and so on. They were just simple features.

After digressing a bit about building a Micropub endpoint for my website, I’ve been thinking about the next steps: if I should keep Hugo or move to some other system.

Recently, I have talked about restructuring the URLs of my website and adding IndieAuth so I could use my domain as my main online identity to login into services. Along those lines, I came across Micropub. In their own words:

This is going to be a quick post — I hope.

After updating the structure of the URLs on my website, I felt like the next step would be to implement IndieAuth because almost everything on the IndieWeb needs that.

I’m now working on making my website more IndieWeb friendly, which was triggered by my searches after writing my last post about owning our own data. It has been… harder than I though. But in a positive way!

Data, data, data.

Big data, buzz words. I have been wanting to write about data for quite a long time already, but I’ve never found a moment where that would be opportune for me. Data is one of the most important resources for companies right now even though we don’t acknowledge it most of the times.