Portland is a truly beautiful city that I can't wait to get to know
better.
I'm still unpacking, but I really like where my wife
and I moved. I'm exhausted, sore, and I don't see it getting better
anytime soon, lol. Jeez, I have too much stuff.
The other day I joked on Mastodon
attempting to make a single feed of everything i post online. not for the public, but for my therapist. (via)
and then I foolishly followed it up with
ok i did it. it's only available as a jsonfeed because this is only for the real sickos. and my therapist. (via)
which may or may not have been what inspired me to write about the frustrations
of working with RSS feeds.
It takes a collection of my
posts from:
And that's it. I don't really do anything else in public anymore, but I
imagine I would add more if I did. This is super dorky, but a fun
weekend project. You can find the JSON feed at melaniekat.com/feed
I
also wanted to make a visual representation of the feed. I don't know
how to fit it in with the main content of my website yet, but you can
see it at melaniekat.com/timeline as I
continue to tweak it.
JSON Feeds have been around since
2017 but the adoption of them hasn't gone far enough. RSS became a thing in 1999,
Atom in
2005, and yet those are what most people use to this day. As a front-end
engineer, this sucks. Working with XML is a nightmare and drags down my
code's efficiency, but I do it because that's the best feed option
provided most of the time.
Working with JSON is just so much
more straightforward than working with XML. It's easier to make a JSON
feed. It's easier to read a JSON feed.
To underline my point
to get the latest feed item in XML it would look roughly like this:
import { XMLParser } from 'fast-xml-parser'
const parser = new XMLParser({
ignoreAttributes: false,
})
const parsedXML = parser.parse(xmlAsString, {})
if (parsedXML?.feed?.entry) {
// If the feed is Atom
console.log(parsedXML.feed.entry[0])
} else if (parsedXML?.rss?.channel?.item) {
// If the feed is RSS
console.log(parsedXML.rss.channel.item[0])
}
But with JSON Feed it's only:
console.log(myJsonFeed.items[0])
It's time to move on: no new RSS feeds in 2024
I recently wrote about my
decade in San Francisco on my main blog. It's funny, I spent the
decade prior to my decade here dreaming of moving to San Francisco. I
didn't think I would ever leave this city (by choice, at least). I also
never thought I would be homebound to my studio apartment for the last
three years or so by a global pandemic.
When one talks about
leaving San Francisco it's usually got some gross undertones of hating
the unhoused or made up crime statistics. Sure our mayor isn't great but
what else is new.
I saw an opportunity for something new and
I'm taking it.
A few times lately I have had the rare occurrence of waking up to a
handful of notifications from Mastodon. The time it takes for me to tap
on one of them before finding out why I got them is tense. All the
negative things a social media notification could mean run through my
head.
I should just turn them off entirely.
A hot take I have been mulling on since my wife got me to watch the 1993
Mario movie: Super Mario Bros. (1993) is better than The Super
Mario Bros. Movie (2023). While I recognize that the ‘90s movie
was a
mess to make, it tries so much harder than the ‘23
version. The newer film wasn't made for me, full stop. It wasn't
made for people who grew up with Mario, it was made for people who have
yet to grow up with Mario.
I imagine when you start a new
project in Final Draft it automatically inserts that the main character
will be played by Chris Pratt. Most people remember to change this
before turning in their work, but like a college english professor, you
can clearly see when someone leaves in the placeholder text.
I enjoy the creative (and wild) choices that the ‘93 film made. Maybe
the ‘23 film could have been improved by making any choice at all.
While migrating between apps can be a chore, I like that I can do it. I
like trying other apps from time to time.
Yesterday I
migrated all my bookmarks from Anybox
to GoodLinks. I bought GoodLinks
when it first came out but I didn't understand it. Was it a read later app or
was it a bookmarking
app? I got hung up on that. Anybox was the logical place for me to put
my links as it archived the articles, saved PDF copies of websites, and
supported all kinds of urls like bookmarklets and deeplinks. I was
worried about moving my stuff over, because the internet is in its very
nature both ephemeral and forever. I kept my Anybox data, since it's
just stored on iCloud, same as GoodLinks, so if GoodLinks didn't get
something I could go back to Anybox to check its archived copy.
I also changed my podcast app from Airshow, which I love, to Apple's
Podcasts, which I do not love. It's built in and supports transcriptions
now which is really cool. It will also recommend me a racist and
homophobic podcasts, so that's obviously not ideal. I don't know if I
will keep using Apple's Podcasts app, but it's so easy to just transfer
my data back and forth. Especially when I only listen to two podcasts.
Swapping out apps can be fun, it gives me a different perspective and
shows me what my options are.
Provided I have the money to spend at the time,
Wife: So this [HAL9000] is what every tech company is creating right
now?
Me: Yes
Wife: Why would you want to make
this?
Me: Because they saw the post that said "do not make
the torment nexus" and missed the point