Journal tags: nuremberg

After two days at border:none in Nuremberg, it was time for two days at Indie Web Camp, also in Nuremberg.

I hadn’t been to an Indie Web Camp since before The Situation. It felt very good to be back. I had almost forgotten how inspiring and productive they can be.

This one had a good turnout of around twenty people. We had ourselves an excellent first day of thought-provoking sessions. Then on day two it was time to put some of those ideas into action.

A little trick I like to do on the practical day is to have two tasks to attempt: one of them quite simple, and the other more ambitious. That way, as long as I get the simpler task done, I’ll always have at least something to demo at the end of the day.

This time I attempted three bits of home improvement on my website.

Autolinking Mastodon usernames

The first problem I set myself was ostensibly the simple one. But it involved regular expressions, so then I had two problems.

I wanted to automatically link up Mastodon usernames if I mentioned one in my notes. For example, during border:none I mentioned Brian’s mastodon username in a note: @briansuda@loðfíll.is.

That turned out to be an excellent test case. Those Icelandic characters made sure I wasn’t making unwarranted assumptions about character sets.

Here’s the regular expression I came up with. It’s not foolproof by any means. Basically it looks for @[email protected].

Good enough. Ship it.

Related posts

My next task was a bit more ambitious. It involved SQL queries, something I’m slightly better at than regular expressions but that’s a very low bar.

I wanted to show related posts when you get to the end of one of my blog posts.

I’ve been tagging all my blog posts for years so that’s the mechanism I used for finding similar posts. There’s probably a clever SQL statement that could do this, but I ended up brute-forcing it a bit.

I don’t feel too bad about the hacky clunky nature of my solution, because I cache blog post pages. That means only the first person to view the blog post (usually me) will suffer any performance impacts from my clunky database queries. After that everything’s available straight from a cached file.

Let’s say you’re reading a blog post of mine that I’ve tagged with ten different keywords. I make a separate SQL query for each keyword to get all the other posts that use that tag. Then it’s a matter of sorting through all the results.

I loop through the results of each tag and apply a score to the tagged post. If the post shares one tag with the post you’re looking at, it has a score of one. If it shares two tags, it has a score of two, and so on.

I decided that for a post to be considered related, it had to share at least three tags. I also decided to limit the list of related posts to a maximum of five.

It worked out pretty well. If you scroll down on my recent post about JavaScript, you’ll see links to related posts about JavaScript. If you read through a post on accessibility testing, you’ll find other posts about accessibility testing. If you make it to the end of this post about Mars colonisation you’ll see links to more posts about exploring our solar system.

Right now I’m just doing this for my blog but I’d like to do it for my links too. A job for a future Indie Web Camp.

Link rot

I was very inspired by Remy’s recent post on how he’s tackling link rot on his site. I wanted to do the same for mine.

On the first day at Indie Web Camp I led a session on link rot to gather ideas and alternative approaches. We had a really good discussion, though it’s always worth bearing in mind that there’ll never be a perfect solution. There’ll always be some false positives and some false negatives.

The other Jeremy at Indie Camp Nuremberg blogged about the session. Sebastian Greger was attending remotely and the session inspired him to spend the second day also tackling linkrot.

In the end I decided to stick with Remy’s two-pronged approach:

1. a client-side script that—as a progressive enhancement—intercepts outbound links and re-routes them to
2. a server-side script that redirects to the Internet Archive if the link is broken.

Here’s the JavaScript I wrote for the first part.

It’s very similar to Remy’s but with one little addition. I check to see if the clicked link is inside an h-entry and if it is, I pass on the date from the post’s dt-published value.

Here’s the PHP I wrote for the server-side redirector. The comments tell the story of what the code is doing:

• Check that the request is coming from my site.
• There also has to be a URL provided in the query string.
• Make a very quick curl request to get the response headers from the URL. The time limit is set to 1 second.
• If there was any error (like a time out), give up and go to the URL.
• Pick the response headers apart to get the HTTP status code.
• If the response is OK, go to the URL.
• If the response is a redirect, go around again but this time use the redirect URL.
• Construct the archive.org search endpoint.
• If we have a date, provide it. Otherwise ask for the latest snapshot.
• Ping that archive.org URL. This time there’s no time limit; this might take a while.
• If there’s an archived copy, redirect to that.
• There’s no archived copy. Give up and go the URL anyway.

Not perfect by any means, but it works for the most common cases of link rot.

For the demo at the end of the day I went back into my archive of over 10,000 links and plucked out some old posts, like this one from December 2005. It takes a little while to do the rerouting but eventually you get to see the archived version from the same time period as when I linked to it.

Here’s another link from 2005. Here’s another. Those links are broken now, but with a little patience, you’ll still get to read them on the Internet Archive.

The Internet Archive’s wayback machine really is a gift. I can’t imagine how would it be even remotely possible to try to address link rot on my site without archive.org.

I will continue to donate money to the Internet Archive and I encourage you to do the same.

In 2013, I spoke at the border:none event in Nuremberg. I gave a talk called The Power of Simplicity.

It was a great little event. Most of the talks were, like mine, on technical topics; design, development, the usual conference material.

This year Joschi and Marc decided to have another border:none event ten years on from the first one. They invited back all the original speakers, as well as some new folks. They kept the ticket price the same as ten years ago—just thirty euros.

For us speakers from the previous event, the only brief they gave us was to consider what’s happened in the past decade. I played it pretty safe and talked about the web. I’ll post a transcript of my talk soon.

Some of the other speakers were far more ambitious. They spoke about themselves, the world, the meaning of life …my presentation was very tame in comparison.

I really, really admire the honesty and vulnerability that those people displayed. Tobias Baldauf in particular took my breath away. He delivered an intensely personal talk on generational trauma that was meticulously researched and took incredible bravery to deliver. It was worth going to Nuremberg just for the privilege of being present for that talk.

Other talks were refreshingly tech-free. There was a talk on cold-water swimming. There was a talk on paragliding. And I don’t mean they were saying “what designers can learn from cold-water swimming” or “how I became a better developer through paragliding.” The talks were literally about swimming and paragliding.

There was a great variety of speakers this time around, include age ranges from puberty to menopause (quite literally—that was the topic of one of the talks). I had the great pleasure of providing some coaching before the event to fifteen year old Maya who was delivering her first talk in English. She did a fantastic job! And the talk she gave—about how teachers in her school aren’t always trusting of the technology they provide to students—was directly relevant to what we’re seeing in the world of work. Give people autonomy, agency and trust.

There was a lot of trust at border:none. Everyone who bought a ticket did so on trust—they had no idea what to expect. Likewise, Marc and Joschi put their trust in the speakers. They gave the speakers the freedom to talk about whatever they wanted. That trust was repayed.

Florian took some superb pictures of the event. Matthias wrote up his experience. So did Tom. Valisis shared the gist of his excellent talk.

At the end of the event there was some joking about returning in 2033. I love the idea of a conference that happens once every ten years. Count me in!

Once I finished my workshop on evaluating technology I stayed in Nuremberg for that weekend’s Indie Web Camp.

Just as with Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf the weekend before, it was a fun two days—one day of discussions, followed by one day of making.

I spent most of the second day playing around with a new service that Aaron created called OwnYourSwarm. It’s very similar to his other service, OwnYourGram. Whereas OwnYourGram is all about posting pictures from Instagram to your own site, OwnYourSwarm is all about posting Swarm check-ins to your own site.

Usually I prefer to publish on my own site and then push copies out to other services like Twitter, Flickr, etc. (POSSE—Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). In the case of Instagram, that’s impossible because of their ludicrously restrictive API, so I have go the other way around (PESOS—Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site). When it comes to check-ins, I could do it from my own site, but I’d have to create my own databases of places to check into. I don’t fancy that much (yet) so I’m using OwnYourSwarm to PESOS check-ins.

The great thing about OwnYourSwarm is that I didn’t have to do anything. I already had the building blocks in place.

First of all, I needed some way to authenticate as my website. IndieAuth takes care of all that. All I needed was rel="me" attributes pointing from my website to my profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Github, or any other services that provide OAuth. Then I can piggyback on their authentication flow (this is also how you sign in to the Indie Web wiki).

The other step is more involved. My site needs to provide an API endpoint so that services like OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm can post to it. That’s where micropub comes in. You can see the code for my minimal micropub endpoint if you like. If you want to test your own micropub endpoint, check out micropub.rocks—the companion to webmention.rocks.

Anyway, I already had IndieAuth and micropub set up on my site, so all I had to do was log in to OwnYourSwarm and I immediately started to get check-ins posted to my own site. They show up the same as any other note, so I decided to spend my time at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg making them look a bit different. I used Mapbox’s static map API to show an image of the location of the check-in. What’s really nice is that if I post a photo on Swarm, that gets posted to my own site too. I had fun playing around with the display of photo+map on my home page stream. I’ve made a page for keeping track of check-ins too.

All in all, a fun way to spend Indie Web Camp Nuremberg. But when it came time to demo, the one that really impressed me was Amber’s. She worked flat out on her site, getting to the second level on IndieWebify.me …including sending a webmention to my site!

After hacking away at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf, I stuck around for Beyond Tellerrand. I ended up giving a talk, stepping in for Ellen. I was a poor substitute, but I hope I entertained the lovely audience for 45 minutes.

After Beyond Tellerrand, I got on a train to Nuremberg …along with a dozen of my peers who were also at the event.

I arrived right in the middle of Web Week Nürnberg. Among the many events going on was a workshop that Joschi arranged for me to run called Evaluating Technology. The workshop version of my Beyond Tellerrand talk, basically.

This was an evolution of a workshop I ran a while back. I have to admit, I was a bit nervous going into this. I had no tangible material prepared; no slides, no handouts, nothing. Instead the workshop is a collaborative affair. In order for it to work, the attendees needed to jump in and co-create it with me. Luckily for me, I had a fantastic and enthusiastic group of people at my workshop.

We began with a complete braindump. “Name some tools and technologies,” I said. “Just shout ‘em out.” Shout ‘em out, they did. I struggled to keep up just writing down everything they said. This was great!

The next step was supposed to be dot-voting on which technologies to cover, but there were so many of them, we introduced an intermediate step: grouping the technologies together.

Once the technologies were grouped into categories like build tools, browser APIs, methodologies etc., we voted on which categories to cover, only then diving deeper into specific technologies.

I proposed a number of questions to ask of each technology we covered. First of all, who benefits from the technology? Is it a tool for designers and developers, or is it a tool for the end user? Build tools, task runners, version control systems, text editors, transpilers, and pattern libraries all fall into the first category—they make life easier for the people making websites. Browser features generally fall into the second category—they improve the experience for the end user.

Looking at user-facing technologies, we asked: how well do they fail? In other words, can you add this technology as an extra layer of enhancement on top of what you’re building or do you have to make it a foundational layer that’s potentially a single point of failure?

For both classes of technologies, we asked the question: what are the assumptions? What fundamental philosophy has been baked into the technology?

Now, the point of this workshop is not for me to answer those questions. I have a limited range of experience with the huge amount of web technologies out there. But collectively all of us attending the workshop will have a good range of experience and knowledge.

Interesting then that the technologies people voted for were:

• service workers,
• progressive web apps,
• AMP,
• web components,
• pattern libraries and design systems.

Those are topics I actually do have some experience with. Lots of the attendees had heard of these things, they were really interested in finding out more about them, but they hadn’t necessarily used them yet.

And so I ended up doing a lot of the talking …which wasn’t the plan at all! That was just the way things worked out. I was more than happy to share my opinions on those topics, but it was of a shame that I ended up monopolising the discussion. I felt for everyone having to listen to me ramble on.

Still, by the end of the day we had covered quite a few topics. Better yet, we had a good framework for categorising and evaluating web technologies. The specific technologies we covered were interesting enough, but the general approach provided the lasting value.

All in all, a great day with a great group of people.

I’m already looking forward to running this workshop again. If you think it would be valuable for your company, get in touch.