State of the Browser was electric. This is how I summarised my experience at the annual State of the Browser event in London in my notes. I like to capture moments as they happen, then write about them later. The note is the essence of a blog post; the starting point. The note blossoms at home.State of the Browser...

I am writing about a few paintings to help me build my description skills. My analyses are not formal or comprehensive. If nothing else, I hope that you enjoy the painting that I feature!The warm colours in Monet’s The Church at Varengeville (1882) stood out to me the moment I saw them in a corner of the Courtauld...

I am using Duolingo to learn a bit of German. I have been using the app for a while and enjoy the exercises. With that said, I am not a fan of Duolingo’s changing application icons on iOS.I don’t like that an application can set its own home screen icon without my permission. I further do not appreciate that there...

Museums and galleries are places we can go to learn about the past, think about the present, and consider the future. Museums are places we can connect: with times, people, and place. We can have conversations in museums. We learn in museums. We can explore.The topic I have chosen for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival...

When I was in high school, I used to keep a pencil or pen up my sleeve. I don’t remember anyone else doing it, or why I started. But if I had a pen up my sleeve, I would at least know I had one nearby for when I’d need one. (I may be mis-remembering whether having a pen up my sleeve actually helped me remember one...

Last year I was introduced to the idea of “Dopplr colours” in the IndieWeb community. This refers to an accent colour assigned to cities on the now-defunct travel website Dopplr. You can see examples by clicking through different Dopplr city pages in the Internet Archive and paying attention to the borders of the...

Search is one of my favourite disciplines in computing. In 2024 I spent a lot of time working on a NoSQL engine that I called JameSQL. This tool now powers the search engine on my website.Designing search engine ranking systems is tricky to say the least. When I use my blog search engine, I sometimes notice that the...

When I announced Artemis in 2024, I titled the announcement “Artemis, a calm web reader, is available (in beta)”. So central to the philosophy of how I build the software is the principle “calm” that, when I write about Artemis, I still use the phrase “a calm web reader” to describe what the software is.While...

Recently, a feed a few users – including myself – were following with Artemis published a “bookmark”-like post. The markup in the corresponding feed was a bit different than expected, so Artemis ended up linking directly to the bookmarked post rather than to the author’s post itself.I fixed the underlying bug in...

This evening I added an idea I have had for a while to Artemis: a "dense" layout.By default, the Artemis interface appears in a single-column layout. The dense layout creates several columns. Each column from left-to-right shows posts for a given day. You can scroll down to the next row of columns to see posts from...

Artemis lets you subscribe to ActivityPub feeds (i.e. accounts on Mastodon). To do this, you can type in an ActivityPub handle like @jamesg.blog@jamesg.blog [1] on the “Add a website” page.When you subscribe to a feed using an ActivityPub handle, Artemis can use the information in the feed to determine if a post is...

The IndieWeb community chat has a feature that lets you create a wiki page from a chat interaction. You can say “what is {term}?” in the chat and, if there is a definition on the community wiki, the definition will be returned by a bot. Otherwise, the bot, Loqi, will say that you can send a message in the form...