markjgsmith

2023/10/15 #

• SSG's running in browser - One of the annoyances about my current setup is that I don't have a local copy of the website. I have the data and I have the unrendered website, but the rendering happens in a Github Action. It makes it quite tedious finding and reading old content. So getting the URL for an old post is a pain. I tried using iSH with nodejs installed, but it crashes when installing some npm modules.

  I'm hopeful that web assembly might at some stage offer a way to run CLI tools. I read somewhere or heard on a podcast that there had been some progress made getting nodejs running on web assembly. That would be awesome, though I'm unclear what that would look like exactly. Would there be a terminal running in browser, or a custom web interface to run my static site generator? #

• Google breaking the web again - Google announced recently they will be shutting down Google Podcasts. It's infuriating because there really isn't another website that has a clean uncomplicated playback interface to podcast episodes. It's important because there are many podcasters that don't have their own website, which makes it very difficult to share their work.

  Every week I put together the newsletter and am always shocked to discover how many podcasters rely on the directories for their show pages. Google Podcasts has been my go to site for getting episode links for shows that don't have their own website. I wonder what's going to happen to all the links I've published in the newsletter. Are they just going to let them rot?

  What's the replacement for Google Podcasts? I can't find anything comparable. Google makes really great websites but they do this again and again, people become reliant on them, then they just shutdown the service. If even Google can't run a Podcast Directory, what chance does anybody else have of doing it? They say they are all about the Open Web, so why do they keep breaking it? Remember Google Reader? RSS is still alive, but only just.

  I wish they would consider open sourcing the code, so someone else could try to run it. We need a canonical resource for podcast episodes. #

• Metamorphosis IDEs - This was an out there idea I had a few days ago while listening to the latest Goldie RA Mix. What if coding was a bit more like listening to music?

  I find that for music that I've been really into, where I was an active participant in the scene for a few years, where I have many memories in that area, that the experience of listening to said music can often feel like coding, or at least re-arranging ideas and memories.

  Coincidentally there was an article in the Irish Times around the same time that painted a picture through irish history via 100 short sentences with a goodbye theme. I love this kind of high level very abstract way of looking at things. That's how my brain works sometimes. You see the surface but underneath, there's so much depth to it, vaste amounts of human experience. I think that's another example of a Metamorphosis IDE.

  Perhaps with AI and AR/VR, the computer tools of the future will be more like that and less like looking at a laptop. #