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Day 37: color tweaks

Minor thing, but... I feel lighter these days, so I wanted my site to reflect that. I always thought of <a href="/category/eee">#eee</a> as the lightest of grays, because there is only <a href="/category/fff">#fff</a> (white) as the next step. The six-digit notation was too granular for me. But it turns out that, for a background color, <a href="/category/f6f6f6">#f6f6f6</a> actually gives a whole different feeling. It's so much clearer!


Another thing you might have noticed, it that I broke the streak of consecutive #100daysofindieweb. This has to do with the lightness, I guess. I came home after a nice evening of talking about writing, and I just didn't want to get into the coding state of mind again. So I decided to leave it that night.

The returning problem with 100daysofindieweb, for me, is that I haven't figured out all the things I want from it yet. In the last entry, for example, I used Aaronpk's emoji library to display reacji in a certain way. While this is a nice thingy, there is an underlying question that I did not ask myself: do I need this?

For me, it was a recurring theme, remembering to do something IndieWeb around 0:30 at night, and just inventing 'problems' to solve, preferably small problems with quick solutions. I implemented a lot of stuff I think is useful, but also a lot of things just because other people did it before me.

A few days ago, I noticed that Whatsapp added the 'photo stories' feature, invented by Snapchat and copied by Instagram. My first reaction was: hm, how can I do this on my own site? While that is a nice question to ask oneself, it is useful to also ask the question wether you actually need to have such a thing on your site. Photo stories are hard to copy, because you can only add a new photo to them if you take that photo directly from the app. Also, the discoverability and way of viewing them is 80% of the feature. Their temporary nature also makes them less suited for the web. All in all, I shouldn't rush into this, and post photo's that disappear after 24 hours, just because I have a day to fill.

I will continue the 100 days. I will just sometimes take some time in between days, to think about the route I want to follow. To ask myself the question: do I need this? Minor tweaks make big changes over time, and it's okay to redo some stuff you did before. That's the way your understanding grows. But no more big new things for me now. I more or less have what I need, I just need to improve some things.

Day 36: reacji

A few days ago, Aaron Parecki made an emoji detector for PHP. I felt I had to reply to that in style by using it.

So, now my site supports reacji, a reply which contains only of one emoji. In theory, it did already support this, of course, but now I show them as a 'shortpost', next to likes and other things I use icons for:

Hurray for Aaron's detector 🎉

Day 35: in reply to author name

Today, I replied to some people on Twitter, and I was surprised to see 'twitter.com' turn up on my site as the author of the post I was replying to. I now have XRay with Twitter vision, right? Why didn't it work?

It turned out I only use XRay for likes, bookmarks and reposts, but this reply context relied on an old piece of code I wrote myself. It fetches a h-card for the URL, which works for IndieWeb sites with Microformats, but not for Twitter posts.

So I fixed that: now XRay fetches context for replies too:

This is the first step in actually displaying the full reply context on the permalink page. The data is there now!

(Mijn huidige aanpak van Twitter-discussies is zwaar over de 140 tekens gaan en dan naar mijn blog linken. Ik weet niet of het echt werkt.)

Day 34: added a privacy policy

Today is a (almost) no code day. I wrote a privacy policy.

Now that I have ways to log in to my site, I kind of need a page, because I am handling with personal information. I believe it's even required for the Twitter login thing, so here it is.

It feels more formal than I want it to be, so I tried to keep it informal. I also translated the Dutch version into English, because I have embarked on this multilingual thing now with this 100days series and English visitors need a privacy policy too. The document just comes down to explaining what I do, and asking to contact me if one disagrees. I don't do crazy stuff, so I think it's fine.

The bit of 'code' I wrote is in the footer, where there's now a link to the privacy policy.

Ik wil best de stemwijzer doen, maar ik weet niet wat ik ga stemmen. Dat maakt de haha-kijk-helemaal-fout-screenshot aan het eind zo lastig.

Day 33: timezones

At some point while building the foundation for this site, I decided to save all dates in UTC. I like UTC, I like timezones in general, and here in Europe we're not that much off UTC either.

In about a month from now, though, the gab between UTC and CET will grow again with one hour, due to 'zomertijd'. And even though there was an explicit 'UTC' behind all the times, it was still confusing for Dutch visitors, who where expecting 'normal' times.

I now show times in Central European Time. There's an explicit 'CET' behind all the times. The Microformats times are still on UTC though, but I added an explicit +0000 behind all the timestamps, to make clear that it's UTC.

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