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  3. Notes vs Articles, again

    After deliberating a little about how to “do” a composite homepage feed, whether or not I should forget about having “notes”, “music” and “articles” and just merge them all, coupled with the fact that I already use notes for replies, I have reached a simple conclusion, of which this post is the first demonstration.

    /notes/ and what used to be “Notes” is now my de-facto dump for short-medium length chronological posts of all types. This covers notes, replies, checkins, short articles (basically named notes with more structure) and so on. Posts with a name live at /notes/DDD-name, those without names live at /notes/DDDSSS.

    /articles/ retains all content which lived there in the past. Going forward it might become more of a wiki, or a place for very long things like Data Export.

    /music/ will retain all it’s content, and be where I post standard musical notation tunes. Audio recordings of those tunes will be posted as audio posts with a link to the relevant tune.

    Hopefully these changes, along with improved templating (post-type-specific DOM templates here I come) will make finding, posting and reading posts on a much more pleasant experience.

  4. So I got in-stream reply contexts showing — perhaps summaries of comments next? I like Facebook’s approach of showing the last 4, a total count and a “show me more” button, which could be implemented simply as a link to the note page initially.

    Reply context stream example: http://waterpigs.co.uk/notes?tagged=reply

    Still TODO: make the ↪ a link to the in-replied-to page, add the datetime to the title for that link, remove the in-reply-to info from the bottom of in-stream notes as it’s noise now

  5. I’m loving the feedback loop of using the things I build.

    Wasn’t blogging much → improved typography, design → want to write more and better.

    Started using my tune stream → discovered a bunch of problems → fixed them, now I can practise more effectively.

    Lessons?

    1. Hacking on stuff does have a wider beneficial effect on life, provided you’re making stuff which matters.
    2. Stuff which matters doesn’t have to be life changing in order to matter

  7. Posting a note from a partly-disembowelled machine in Hakkavelin, Reykjavik. : IP-based location approximation and/or geocoding, i.e. I enter the address and OSM tells me what the lat/long is. Potentially some redundancy between the two could be applied.

  8. Why is structured querying of your personal data important? Self-reflection.

    Example in point: seeing what I’ve quoted, from who, about what, and what I’ve said about the quotes. How it’s changed over time. How I talk about it and present it in my personal context. From a technical point of view; how I mark it up.

    Twitter does the opposite of this, and encourages us to throw away our history, much less peruse it and learn from it. Facebook aims to present a glorified timeline emphasising the most “important” events in our life. I feel neither are particularly valuable.

  10. ↪ Sandeep Shetty: @BarnabyWalters So you have 3 types of tags (from an interface perspective): note body, meta data (visible) & machine tags (invisible)?

    sandeepshetty yep, this is certainly something I need to document on the wiki.

    In fact most of the machine tags were a hack to add schemaless data to my MySQL-managed schema, but as I move to flat files + ad hoc indexes I might migrate some of my machine tags to “real” data — it’s not like they’re doing much good where they are at the moment.

    The main benefit is easy editing — I just use my tag editing UI instead of building another UI for each different bit of data.

  11. Just hooked up my notes to Brennan Novak’s rather awesome @emoome sentiment analysis API! So all my notes will have automated emotion/language analysis applied now, which I can query through machine tags.

    At the moment I’m not publicly showing this data, but if you can read HTML it’s in the source (machine tags not shown by default) and if you can read JSON, add .json onto the end of the URL.

  12. Finally decided that symfony Security component is way too complicated for my little , so ditching it — but I’ve learnt a lot from digging through it and my further efforts will try to provide some of the amazing flexibility it gives whilst being more performant and easier to understand #php

  14. I got tired of WPSM looking and working the way it does (I wrote it when I was 13 and learning PHP), so I’ve taken the data and started building the Music module. Live here. Major but already looking and working better than the old one!

  15. ↪ superfeedr: @BarnabyWalters Thanks Barnaby :) [Also, I could not log into your site with indieAuth :/]

    superfeedr yeah, there’s a weird bug where logging in only works the second time round — I haven’t fixed it yet as I rarely have to log in! At the mo there is little benefit to others logging in but I may add private content/collaborative features in the future. Crowd-sourced typo fixing FTW ;)