My personal blog, a static site built with Jekyll, is a bit of a frankenstein. I really need to write some posts that get into the dirtier details of how I’ve stitched various bits together (like webmentions, POSSE syndication, and so on). But for this installment I wanted to start with something I’m doing which I think is a bit unique.

So, backing up, as we all know, social media isn’t just about long-form articles on Medium, medium-length rants on Facebook, or short-form trollbait on Twitter. We also track what we read, what we listen to, what we watch, the games we’re playing, the exercise we engage in, the websites we’re bookmarking, and on and on. Basically, if there’s some human activity that we want to collectively experience, there’s probably a social platform somewhere.

I wanted to explore these same ideas, but in the context of my blog. First I started with replacing Goodreads. I’ve since followed that by blogging my cycling PESOS-style with Strava. In both cases I’ve used a combination of purpose built, locally hosted tools for collecting metadata, and then integrating those tools with my blog to enabling publishing the data to the world.

I won’t claim this is a friction-free approach. But it’s working pretty well for me, so I figured it was worth sharing!

Continue reading...

The books of The Stormlight Archive are certainly not short. In fact, because I’ve been reading them on my Kindle, I only just now realized that The Way of Kings and Words of Radiance are both over a thousand pages. But it was certainly evident that Oathbringer was longer than both, and at over one thousand, two hundred pages, I was definitely right.

But I have to admit, despite their sheer volume, every book in this series has felt well paced, moving along briskly between multiple plotlines, each of which carries a momentum that’s kept me interested. And in that regard, Oathbringer is no different. It’s length was only evident in that just so very much seems to happen in this book.

Having read the third volume in this series, I now see that each book focuses on a specific character journey. In the first book we see Kaladin go from lowly slave to bridgeman to leader to eventually becoming Radiant. In the second book we see Shallan follow her own path to bonding her spren and becoming a hero in her own right. In each case we are presented with a flawed character and a narrative in the present that shows their struggling to find their way to becoming something greater, along with flashbacks to their past meant to help us understand the traumas that have lead them to be who they are.

I’ll be blunt: in both cases, I found the stories… unconvincing. That, combined with the fact that I find both characters a little flat and uninteresting, meant that the character-driven aspects of these books left me feeling a little cold. Fortunately, the world of Roshar and the broader story arc kept me going.

Oathbringer, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

Continue reading...

IRC, or Internet Relay Chat, is unquestionably the progenitor of modern online chat systems. IRC preceded instant messaging platforms like ICQ or AOL Instant Messenger, and in doing so connected people in real-time in a way that would lay the groundwork, not for just those instant messaging platforms that would follow, but for modern social media platforms as we know them today. And today, while certainly diminished, IRC still plays an important role in connected communities of people, particularly in the IT space.

But IRC isn’t without its flaws, and those flaws created openings for many competitors:

1. Chatting is ephemeral. If you’re not connected there’s no way to receive messages that were sent while you were away.
2. Text-based. No images or giphy animations here, and file sharing is direct, client-to-client only.
3. The mobile story in general, and notifications in particular, are weak.

Now, the IRC community has worked hard to address the first problem with bouncers and changes to the IRC protocol (I’ll dig into this later).

Issue two… well, bluntly, I actually view that as a benefit rather than a drawback, but obviously that’s a matter of personal taste.

As for issue three, it’s still true that the mobile story isn’t great, though there is slow steady progress (Android now boasts a few pretty decent mobile IRC clients).

But IRC also has some enormous benefits:

1. It’s open and federated. Running a server yourself is trivial.
2. Clients are heavily customizable for power users.
3. It’s fast and lightweight.

And these various other products (like Slack, Signal, etc) have some mirror image drawbacks:

1. Closed walled gardens.
2. Zero ability to customize.
3. Heavy, memory- and CPU-intensive clients.

And then there is the fragmentation. My god the fragmentation. Every app is its own beast, with its own UX quirks, performance issues, bugs, and so on. Even the way they issue notifications varies from product to product. And some (I’m looking at you, Whatsapp) don’t offer a desktop client product at all.

I spend every day working with these messaging products, and I wanted to find out: Is there some way I could use an IRC client of my choice to interact with these various walled gardens (recognizing that, yes, that would come with some loss of functionality)?

Well, with a lot of hacking and elbow grease, I can definitely say the answer is yes! Though… this is, as is the case with many of my projects these days, probably not for the faint of heart…

Continue reading...