Weekly Notes 2024 W13

In his Weekly notes for Week 12, 2024 Thejesh writes how Weekly Notes has grown into a community, a social media of sorts, but this time it is deliberate, user-owned, and uses existing infrastructure and open protocols. Thej also linked to Dave Winer’s blogroll experiment. Dave too talks about how his Blogroll experiment can be used to bootstrap a new kind of social media. This is fascinating. I have been thinking about this. This note by Denise (Who also writes Weekly Notes) is also relevant tangentially.

Below are a few things in the back of my mind that I want to dig a bit deeper next week. These are not necessarily problems, given the deliberate and slow nature of this social network. It may even be inappropriate to impose these social-media-esque feature expectations.

Integrated Publish and Read flow

My current workflow involves using Hugo as my static site generator, served through S3+Cloudfront. I write in my text editor and deploy with GitHub workflow. I read my RSS feeds on Miniflux. It would be nice if I could write my blog posts and read from others in the same place. It would be nice to structure this and make it an integrated, seamless experience. I found that the Indieweb movement has some solutions. This article by Aaron Parecki seems exciting.

Discoverability

In the absence of an underlying centralized algorithm, or even actively talking decentralized servers like Mastodon, what would be an easy way to discover new and interesting people? We already have blogrolls (as a concept that is. I don’t have one yet on this website), where one person links to the other - so we can navigate the “network”. Maybe Indieweb folks have some protocols making it easier to identify blogrolls?

I also want both of these features to work with open protocols and be backward-compatible - anyone with a basic RSS reader should also be able to make sense of things, instead of having to install whatever I have.

Now with Activity Pub and Fediverse, it seems very intriguing to see, if and how all of these may tie together.

I want to explore Indieweb.Org and see what it has to offer in this regard.

This is yet another week, where it is a blur. It is not like I did much. On the work front, there hasn’t been much improvement. I continue to have bad sleep.

I continue to follow my C25K plan. I ran 3 times this week. I missed 2 out of 3 gym group classes due to scheduling conflicts.

This week, the results from the color-negative film roll I had shot on my nephew’s birthday arrived. The images look okay. I am happy that I have not messed up much except maybe a few dark images. I’ll probably upload some of them to SilverHalide.

TVS Ronin booked by my Org arrived this Friday. We are in the process of moving to a new office. All these years, I have been spoilt by having my place of stay and place of work walking distance apart. Now with this office shift, I’ll have about approx 15km of commute everyday. This is still not much wrt Bangalore standards. Hoping that this new vehicle makes the commute easier. Looking forward to the new office.

Friday evening, some of my colleagues had booked a football turf. Our entire team turned up, and we played for a couple of hours. I have trauma with sports because of childhood incidents. I have not played sports as a kid because of the toxic masculinity traits and overt competitiveness that many bring to the ground. Of course, I was not aware of this then, and is something I realized later. This always made me feel small, and the overtly competitive nature of people would mean any beginner would not really have a chance to make progress. I enjoyed playing with my colleagues this time though. I was on the football turf for the first time in my life, and I enjoyed it. I’m thankful to have considerate people in my life. We then ended the day with dinner at Al-Daaz.

Saturday was the last class of my Taraqqi, Progress level Urdu course. We read letters written in Urdu by Safiya Akthar, the mother of the famous Bollywood Lyricist Javed Akthar. I am really enamored by Safia’s writing. It is concise, yet so full of emotions. I hope to read more.

On Sunday morning, I went for my running practice along the Intermediate Ring Road. I met Orpa midway. She was there with her bicycle.

We then walked our way back from Ejipura to Indiranagar. We enjoyed the cherry blossom-like pink flowering trees that have bloomed along the IRR. These and other green covers that are the signature of Bangalore are the result of the efforts by earlier rulers and administrators, including the British, Wodeyars, Tippu Sultan, Hyder Ali, and all the way to Kempegowda, who all worked towards increasing the green cover, horticulture diversity and beauty of the city. You can read here about these cherry blossom-like trees from South America, and how they came to be in Namma Bangalore.

We had our brunch at Maverick and Farmer, Ulsoor. I liked how this cafe opens to green turf. Their coffee is good, and they are also a specialty coffee chain. We tried their Turkish Eggs and Eggs Benedict, both of which were great.

Orange, the office cat continues to heal. The doctor has recommended complete rest for a week, but it has been hard to make her do that. At any given chance, she wants to jump around or escape.

In Other News

  1. End of this week, I can do a lap of 3, with each lap having 5 minutes of running and 3 minutes of walking. This is the first time that my run duration exceeds my walk duration.
  2. I found the personal website of James Van Dyne where he tracks the runs he has had. My guess is somehow the data is being synced from Strava. This looks beautiful and is something I too would want to build into my website. James Vandyne also writes weekly notes.
  3. I share some of the analog images I create on Instagram and Pixelfeed. I also want to post them on my blog here, along with some form of write-ups about why I took each image, how it made me feel, etc. I tried making some changes to the blog to support this, but it is still in progress.
  4. I also read about POSSE and PESOS. However, since Instagram is a closed garden, there is no easy way to either POSSE or PESOS it to or from Instagram. My plan is to first manually post it on my blog here and then link it in Pixelfeed. Instagram descriptions or comments do not support links, so I will have to either copy the content there or skip it entirely.

Till next week -