#web
Archiving in an emergency
We wrote this guidance to help you decide whether to collect in relation to unprecedented or unforeseen situations and events. We recognise that people reading this guidance may be in challenging circumstances. Please know that you are not alone. You can reach out to the Archive Sector Leadership Team through asl@nationalarchives.gov.uk. You may find the health and wellbeing guidance from the Archive and Records Association helpful.
Links, July 2023
I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let's be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you've figured that out, why don't you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It's time for a vibe shift. The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and...
Links, February 2023
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I've been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that's the only real giveaway that I've moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I've completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?) and I've generally reduced my intake of UK news to a minimum. In other non-English news, AI has been used...
Taking down Goodreads
London, United Kingdom
TL;DR I'm switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code). I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it's owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for...
Mask misinformation
— How a bizarre claim about masks has lived on for months, Olga Khazan in The Atlantic
The Internet Is For End Users
— The Internet Is For End Users, Mark Nottingham in Internet Architecture Board RFCs
Accessible Buzzfeed
This article was originally published on the BuzzFeed Tech Blog Last month, external accessibility experts certified buzzfeed.com as compliant with the best accessibility practices for the web. That simple statement, ripped straight from the headlines of a boilerplate internal email, does not do justice to the two-year process that brought us to that point. Nor does it embody what the achievement means to our team, especially myself, on a personal level. In 2004, I watched my grandad build a remote control plane from scratch in his garage. I sat cross-legged at his feet on the grubby floor, ten years old....
Getting off of Netlify
I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week. I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of "build minutes" on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the "Photo"...
How this site works
Note: There's a follow up to this because I've since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more. I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following: My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple....
PearShaped Magazine Archive
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed. I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine's content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn't lost forever. It's the PearShaped Magazine Archive.
That Accessibility Thing
Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly. My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals. His garage is really just a workshop, with a half dozen of those huge tool cabinets, full of...
Is The Internet A Rhizome?
How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet... Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure. However, challenges to this application of the rhizome are prominent. In this essay, I will explore just one of these challenges: examining the hegemonic nature...