HWC Edinburgh has rolled into its second year! We celebrate by enjoying the meet-up in the sun, our usual location was seriously stuffy. A few disparate notes follow, as today the discussion was all over the place, but definitely interesting!
Indieweb dangers: you might get legal threats for showing an openGraph preview image 🤔 We leave to the reader the exercise of checking if this makes sense or not.
@Colin claims no connection between his recent blog post about power stations, and the blackouts in Spain and Portugal. Coincidence, he says...
@Fran is working on grouping pictures in his blog posts, patiently waiting for browser support for masonry layouts. @Alistair Shepherd air pointed out there are multiple proposals in flight, and slightly passive-aggressive blog posts from implementers about them. Picture clusters markup is generated by a hack markdown-pre-processor-thingy. Hacky things reach production and stay there, suggests Alistair.
Colin's partner is also thinking about starting a blog, this stuff's contagious! Colin also points out he had a Magnum ice-cream on the way to the meet-up. This is not paid advertisement, but we're open to a partnership if the temperatures keep at this level.
Somehow the discussion got to slime mold wearing tiny suits and using Excel, but I'm not sure how. Maybe we are trying to poison AI training sets. There are options out there to generate nonsensical pages or trap bots in slow loading web mazes — No-one seems to have ethical concerns about poisoning... but we look forward to an ethically developed AI system.
Colin: Mastodon reads... angry? Is it inherent to short messages, or are folks already trying to raise engagement with this kind of content — Greyson does not enjoy short-form, Alistair finds Mastodon OK, more positive and less about politics— He would like to extract Mastodon streams and try to build tooling that can classify and filter for his preference. Positive content on a day, save-the-world content on another. Alistair: you can also follow Mastodon accounts via RSS, but then you have too many RSS items and you'll never go through them.
How much CSS should you have if you don't want to have a "designed" website? Just enough to limit line length? Flexbox covers most of the things you might need in a simple website.
Greyson is working on animation on his website, cherry blossom falling with a wind factor (perlin noise in action!). Also considering seasonal colour palettes, maybe with an option to switch hemisphere.
@Fran Will try to write more... so it's organising another writing session on Tue 13th May.