Sep 21
I read note taking: analog and digital from lucky instar so I thought it’d be fun to write about taking notes. The question is: How do you take notes on things?
Physical Notes
The answer is it depends on what I need the notes for! For personal interests like books it’s always a legal pad and a pen. Before that I used a small Moleskine notebook but it’s cumbersome to lay flat on my desk and write on the left-hand pages, so I switched to legal pads and that’s what I use now. When I was in school I also took notes by hand during class. I always told myself one day I’d transcribe them for studying but that never happened. For assigned readings it was always easier to print out the pages and write in the margins.
On the legal pads today I write down unfamiliar words or interesting phrases. For example, this spring I was interested in collecting descriptions of sunsets, mostly inspired by my evening walks in the city before it started getting too hot. I also like jotting down authors I want to come back to or references that I don’t understand so I can research them later when I’m at the computer and that way I don’t break away from reading mid-chapter.
I like bringing legal pads for client meetings too, as it’s very easy to sketch out diagrams and hand it over if they want to add notes or comments. Most of my meetings are one-on-one, so it’s a good way to create a collaborative space that can change as the conversation evolves.
Digital Notes
Every day for the past six years I’ve kept a digital journal too. In it I save good quotes or code snippets and even write guides for myself so I can repeat a process when I’m working on a project.
It started off as a series of plaintext notes that slowly evolved into a Jekyll site and now it’s a dedicated Org mode file for every year once I began using Emacs. This has been the method that’s worked best for me. I don’t use any features from Org mode, it’s just paragraph after paragraph with top-level headings for every day. I don’t have categories or folders or tags or anything like that because it becomes extra work to make sure things are filed correctly, so I rely on M-x occur to find whatever I’m looking for.
The one variable in this method is the font! This week I’ve been testing out Maple Mono after learning about it from Anh’s weeknotes. Sometimes I switch to Helvetica Neue if my eyes are tired but more often than not I enjoy drafting in a monospaced font because it gives me that sense of malleability.
I like how Nicolas phrased it at The Jolly Teapot:
A draft set in a monospaced font feels like it can be further edited and chewed on furthermore, like a raw material, like code. It feels like a work in progress.
To me a serif or sans-serif font indicates final draft. And I need a visual signal for writing being “done” otherwise I’d keep editing it…
Sep 21
Kev Quirk, Do you use :visited on links?:
I’ve always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven’t been visited, and it seems that it’s the default behaviour across the web.
I was getting ready to draft a response saying how I do… but it looks like I don’t! A few weeks ago I redesigned my blog to use the green sidebar as the main navigation point and on every new design I scrap my old CSS file and start a new one from scratch. And it looks like I missed the visited links color…
So now as I write this I’m thinking what color to make the visited links. I’m a big fan of the default purple value most web browsers use, but dark mode is where I have to really think about it. I’m not a dark mode user at all, I can’t focus at all and I even find dark modes claustrophobic. I’d rather adjust my ambient lighting if I’m going to continue working when it’s dark. But let’s add some color to the visited links on this blog.
Let’s C-x p f to jump to style.css. Ahh, now I remember why I didn’t add it! As I look at my stylesheet I notice I’m using a purple color for code blocks in dark mode, and I didn’t want those colors to clash.
A few tweaks… and there it is! Purple for visited links. Some links of course I want them to stay the same color even when visited (like the ones in the navigation bar) so I added some rules for them. And I updated the color of code blocks in dark mode too.
Sep 21
ldstephens:
I often find a site I want to follow, only to discover that its RSS feed is hard to find. With RSS Lookup, you paste in the site’s URL and it searches for available feeds. There’s also a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmarks bar and use while you’re on a site.
This is a feature I use a lot! On Vivaldi this is a built-in feature and probably the one I miss the most since moving to Firefox, where I use this extension. I like that it finds multiple feeds on a site (e.g. one for posts, another for comments, one for each language, etc).
Fun fact: when I bought the powRSS domain, I used it for an RSS Lookup style app I had built! It was only after discovering Fred Rocha’s post about the small web that I repurposed the domain for what it is today.
Sep 20
Big title! I’ve been thinking a lot how nowadays I come across more blogs and articles in languages I don’t know. On regular social media very rarely do I see things in languages besides English / Spanish. The exception to this is often about the soccer players I follow, like with Armando González recently signing with Olympiacos FC and Mateo Chávez playing at AZ Alkmaar, so my feed sometimes has posts in Greek and Dutch.
When it comes to the fun reading I like doing online, more personal writing, slice of life, tech setups or cyberspace discoveries, I only get that from the Indieweb. And it seems like right now it’s the golden age of enjoying this content in other languages! I’m a fan of coming across posts in languages I don’t know at all. It’s always fun to go in without expectations and then I end up reading really cool stuff about a trip or an album review. I’ve added plenty of songs to my playlists this way. With modern technology and translation tools, I feel closer to the World Wide Web.
Are we in a golden age of global communication? I’ve had these conversations before with other writers. I remember talking to Stephen Max last year about this topic and we discussed Ruben’s post More multilingualism please over on Kedara, where he writes:
I’ll always love learning new languages. The words, intonation and melody of Swedish makes me happy for some reason. Some philosophical concepts are easier for me to grasp and remember using their Sanskrit words. I love reading the words and thoughts of people from all over the globe. Please continue sharing them. And when you do so, consider also sharing them in your own language, if it’s not English: it makes the web an even more vibrant place.
Sep 02
If you use Cloudflare, you may be blocking RSS users.
Came across this link on Mastodon today and I’m sharing it as a bit of a heads up:
Source: openrss.org
When enabling the tools, Cloudflare will evaluate each visit to your website and determine whether the visit is from an AI scraper or “bot” based on a score , which ironically Cloudflare uses AI to generate.
Then, when a user’s RSS reader attempts to read your website, Cloudflare presents it with a number of challenges that the reader would never be able to fulfill.
Consider unblocking RSS readers if you must use Cloudflare. For powRSS specifically, you can keep an eye out for the powRSS/<version> (+https://powrss.com) User-Agent.
