The Geekorium

Back in ‘87 the Gilstone company released the X488, a breakthrough in mesopliner technology that was soon forgotten to the mists of time. Today I’m building my own X488 and I’m going to do it with flamming!

Keeping inline with my desire to produce catchy titles I’ve named this post something nonsensical. The Gilstone X488 wasn’t a thing (was it?), but lately I’ve been getting all nostalgic for retro tech, and reading a bunch of excellent posts about technology and frankly I was feeling left out.

So I apologise if you came here hoping to learn more about flamming, or if you yourself have fond memories of the Gilstone X488, but that’s not what we’re doing today. Today I thought I’d share some excellent websites I’ve been enjoying lately, and hopefully you can find some good posts there instead!

Recently there was some discussion on EVERY SITE¹²³⁴⁵⁶ about RSS feeds - how hidden they are now, and how we need to promote and boost those sites that write about the things we enjoy reading about. Not every site has to pump out quality SEO driven articles about technical subjects to drive ad revenue, and the re-emerging indieweb of randos writing about topics that interest them is so nice to see.

Earlier today I put the finishing touches on a simple Docker/PHP combo script to grab my Miniflux feeds and convert them into a [“follow” page]({{< ref “follow” >}}) here on The Geekorium. Eventually I’ll follow some of the excellent work put into the exact same problem by Jan-Lukas Else on his site to build his Miniflux blogroll, as solving the problem in Go seems more inline with my use of Hugo than a php script.

My Follow page has a super simple list of sites I’d recommend, along with their RSS feeds to make subscribing simpler if you’re into it. But right now I’ll break down some excellent posts I’ve enjoyed by a few of the people on that list.

Kev Quirk runs the fosstodon.org mastodon instance and posted recently about his experiences with Synology and Nextcloud. I was particularly interested because I’ve tried Nextcloud in the past, and while I love the idea of keeping full control over my data, I found Nextcloud to be slow and unweildy when I tried to encrypt the data and store it in the cloud. Turns out Nextcloud is just slow. Synology looks interesting, but I’ve found that Tresorit while expensive, meets my backup needs. Kev is a ‘metablogger’ who writes sometimes about his own experiences as a writer, and is also the brains behind #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to “Just. Write.” and power the old-school personal website revolution again. Also, Quirk is a kickass last name.

I originally read Guillermo Garron (ggarron)’s post Blogging is not dead on Hacker News. It was part of a longer ongoing discussion across a number of sites on whether old-school personal web logs were dead or dying. The irony of this discussion happening across multiple personal “blogs” was not actually irony at all, but rather a concerted effort to bring back something a lot of people miss, now that corporations lock us into their specific “social” platforms. GGarron has been consistently putting out new fresh posts on his own site, doing his part to power this resurgence, to take back control and give people a reason to find and follow new people. Hs posting has led directly to making me write my more recent entries, and directly inspired me to set up a feedreader and subscribe to more people. He was the first of my new subscriptions when I finally got set up.

Horst Gutmann (zerok) wrote about Domain Of Ones Own, a program of certain universities to offer personalised domains and hosting for their students instead of a generic institutional address. This gets the student set up for life “owning” their own identity early in their career and ensures they can continue using the same tools after academia that they’ve been using all along. This idea gels with my belief that people deserve, in fact need, to claim a domain and use it for at least their own email. Zerok also built webmeniond, a way to hook the indieweb webmention technology up to your site, that I must actually enable here some time.

Launching Keyoxide is a post by Yarmo Mackenbach on the really excellent Keyoxide service he’s built as an independent tool to “prove you’re you” across multiple important websites. For example, I have a Github profile, a Mastodon profile and a personal domain that you have no way of knowing are truly “mine”. By using my Keyoxide proofs page, you’re able to see that I’ve explicitly identified profiles on these services as being under my control. Yarmo writes a lot about, and is clearly passionate for, our independence from large corporations holding and monetising our data.

Mike Stone is another fosstodon admin, and writes the sort of geeky stuff I love reading. He’s covered the software he uses, the purchase of Keybase by Zoom and his adventures into Open Source AI. He’s always got something interesting to share, and I’ve found and tried multiple new programs I’d never heard of based on his recommendations. Just don’t try eDEX-UI - it’ll crash your desktop like it did to mine!

My most recent follow I found only after putting the finishing touches on this post! Katie McLaughlin (glasnt) wrote a post called Generating a pseudorandom string: the what and the how, and while I like linux geek posts, normally the “here’s a simple command that does x” sort of posts are skippable if I can’t immediately figure out how I’ll use them. Glasnt however uses the post as an opportunity to break down the command into its parts, teaching me about tr (and LC_ALL=C), fold, and finally why short and long commandline option/argument combos make no friggin’ sense to me in a way that makes friggin’ sense. I had to immediately subscribe and add her to this list for making a linux command-line post so much more informative than they usually are.

The last person on my list is someone I’ve followed since at least 2010 when “blogs” were a thing, the salmon protocol was about to take off, and Twitter was cool. Ruben Schade (Rubenerd) has been podcasting and writing since before both were things everyone did, and is still going years later (he’s up to 411 episodes of his show which is just insane). I’m not even going to try and link to a good example of his posts, as they’re so eclectic. His technical posts are the reason I titled this post the way I did, and I’m using Linux and Hugo directly because of him (although he uses BSD like a gentleman), and I have [implemented]({{< ref “https-content-security-policy” >}}) or [de-implemented]({{< ref “bye-bye-disqus” >}}) tech on this very site due to his recommendations. If you search for mentions of his name here, you’ll start to wonder if I have a crush on the guy, but he’s just one of the few consistent writers I’ve follow - and he also doesn’t allow comments on his site and only uses Twitter, so I can’t give him feedback any other way!

So that’s just a small list and taste of the people I’m following. There are many others, but I can’t write paragraphs about all of them so I’ll throw up some good posts by randos here:

• Simbly Me - toot - a cli mastodon client I want to try
• rolisz - Pixel 3a - how I feel about the Pixel 3a in someone else’s words
• Jlelse - How I curate links for my blog - a similar breakdown to mine, for more excellent suggestions of who to follow.
• Hey Georgie - How to manage and avoid stress
• tttthis - If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs
• Stan’s blog - NextDNS is my new favourite DNS service
• Max Böck - Whimsical Website Club
• Freddy’s Ramblings - 6 Beginner Privacy Tips for Lockdown
• James Routley - Bespoke software, and a really simple RSS aggregator
• Lazybear - Moving to main - Also his Vim weekly tips are great

I hope you can find someone new to follow, or are inspired to fire up a feed reader and start. And to all the people I’ve linked to here, and those who are on my list who maybe didn’t get a mention, thank you for writing, please keep going! Let’s write for pleasure and enrichment and keep the web personal and alive.

Since Google announced they were closing Google Reader down in June, people have been scrambling to find something to use in it’s place. I’m not sure what the rush is, but I was caught up in it too. My replacement of choice is Tiny Tiny RSS because it’s self hosted, meaning I don’t have to rely on any third party for such an important task any more.

This article is not about how to set up TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS). That’s been covered by the official Wiki and Forums. This article is about how to make TTRSS behave somewhat more like Google Reader, so you can jump right back in to reading feeds and not have to learn something new.

First up are the settings you can change straight out of the box. Open Preferences - the link is the first item in the ‘Action’ menu at the top right of the main interface.

Set up the above options as shown. To access ‘Automatically expand articles in combined mode’ you need ‘Show additional preferences’ ticked. ‘Combined feed display’ switches the view from 3-pane view to two-pane.

While you’re in Preferences, click ‘Customize’ under ‘Customize stylesheet’ and paste in the code found in this Gist by Gregory Rickaby to get TTRSS looking a bit more like Google Reader (if that’s your bag).

Mark Waters created a Google Reader Shortcut plugin. Developer fox has already merged it into the software, but if like me you downloaded the version before the plugin was incorporated, you can create a directory called ‘googlereaderkeys’ in the plugin directory, and in that create a file called init.php. Paste the code from Mark’s plugin in that file and save it to your installation. This will enable the familiar j/k keystrokes to navigate feeds and ‘v’ to open them. Alternatively you could get used to the native keystrokes n/p for next/previous. Don’t forget to visit the plugin page and enable this new plugin.

Next up is collapsing expanded articles by clicking on the headings again. Based on fox’s patch, open up the file ‘js/viewfeed.js’ in a text editor.

Beginning at line 1320, replace:

[snippet id=“862”]

with

[snippet id=“863”]

And save it back to your installation.

Things should now look like this:

There are a few more tips around including how to import starred and shared items into TTRSS. Tiny Tiny RSS is a fantastic product that fills the void left by Google Reader. I highly recommend donating too - Andrew Dolgov has been working tirelessly, since the Google Reader announcement, to keep on top of endless support requests.

Got any other tips you’re using?

June 2013: I am no longer using this software myself. This post was written in support of an independent developer who I believe has built a terrific product and released it for free for anyone to use. You’re still free of course to use Tiny Tiny RSS, but I can no longer recommend it. While the developer works hard and is constantly updating and fixing his software, I find his customer service manner to be beyond rude. He’s never been rude to me personally so this isn’t sour grapes, but his forum and other interractions are littered with examples of unnecessary rudeness. If you want good software, and will never need assistance please go ahead and use TTRSS. Personally, I switched from Google Reader to a self-hosted solution so that I wouldn’t need to switch again. However, I’m not convinced that I will able to get help with the product in future without following the developers unwritten rules for support. I’m certain the developer will not miss me. TL;DR Developer is unnecessarily rude and I don’t want to support rude people.

A week ago, Tech Wired offered a $50 iTunes card to the best logo design for their upcoming new website. Since then, they upgraded the offer to a $100 card, and the entries flowed thick and fast. Within minutes of reading about it, I had sketched an idea and began plotting out a logo on Fireworks. It’s the fastest I’ve been able to get from initial idea to sketch to mockup in my career and I was mighty proud of it for only a few hours work. The initial version looked like this:

It’s like Frankenstein built a logo

A couple of people liked the idea, but thought the typography was lacking. So the next day I had a go at sprucing it up, and re-doing the typography.

Getting there. Better colours and font choice.

I’m much happier with this, but I thought it was still missing something. So yesterday I made up the following. I really like it. Mil thinks its a little less clear, but I think you can see a bit of the Aussie outback in it now which is a nice touch (if I do say so myself). In case you’ve missed it, the logo is a stylised Australia, made of concentric rings (the de-facto symbol of podcasts) with a wire-in-circle in the centre to emphasis the “tech” or perhaps the “wired” in the name. I chose orange as it’s the colour of RSS feeds, but it doesn’t need to be orange - it could be any colour.

Font=Nevis Bold by Ten by Twenty.

This helped me settle on a final form for the typography, and I decided to put together a logo pack to showcase the versatility of the logo in different forms. They don’t quite meet the requirements of the competition though, so I’m posting them here rather than cluttering up the forum the competition is running on.

First up, a horizontal version that separates the typography from the logo. The original brief asked that the logo contain the title “Tech Wired Australia” but I feel that a true logo needs to stand alone. I created this version to give a sense of how the logo could stand by itself to some degree within the design.

My favourite design. Doesn’t meet the brief. Discarded

Next up, a mono-colour version as an example of how you could use the logo in a less colourful design (perhaps as a promotional badge, or on a sub-page you wish to stand out from the main site in some way).

Ooh, shiny and dark

The next two styles are just variations I tried, that although not as visually appealing as the few designs above, show the versatility of the design and some of the possibilities.

Meh.

No orange sea. No work as well.

Finally, just for fun, and as a bit of cheeky poke to help tip things in my favour, I’ve included an iPhone bookmark icon, and a couple of favicons.

Can you blame me for trying?

Hopefully this has been a little insight into my creative process. Check out the thread, and let me know how my attempt compares to some of the others. All constructive criticism welcome!

Please note: the designs showcased here are not under my usual Creative Commons Licence. I reserve all right to them up to the point that they (might) become property of the Tech Wired team. You may not use them to create derivative works, or use them in your own products.

2008-11-05 Minutes after I posted this, and put up my final submission they announced the winner! And it wasn’t me… But that’s OK, because they offered me a conciliatory $20 iTunes card because they liked my logo and want to use it on their website. You see the key here is, I misunderstood the brief - they wanted a “podcast logo”, and it didn’t click for me that this meant some thing like album art to display in iTunes. Clearly the person who won understood this immediately. I came at the whole thing thinking they were going to re-design their website. I’m kinda glad I misunderstood though, as if I’d realised what they wanted, I possibly wouldn’t have have bothered, and then I wouldn’t have learned what I learned from this competition. Including this tidbit: if the brief is unclear, get it clarified before you produce something the client doesn’t really want!