Dear ~club:
Just to give myself some breathing room, I'm going to reduce these
workshops to one ever two weeks. I hope at least some of you are enjoying
them. They're moderately fun to write, in any case.
I have a different sort of idea for this workshop. Rather than all going
off and doing our own thing on our own pages, let's use this mailing list
to work collaboratively on something.
Yesterday's xkcd[0] was about putting some effort into a response to a pun
or similarly repellent joke by forming a sentence out of place names and
linking them together with driving directions. (And if you think that was
easy to explain in text, then you're wrong.) I think this is a great idea,
but I don't happen to have a list of word-to-place-names ready at hand.
How am I supposed to make witty comebacks without a list?
(Incidentally, you might call this list that links words to place names
a... map.)
My first thought was to try to come up with this list myself, but that's a
lot of work. Then I thought that lots of other readers of xkcd might want
a list, too. Why not distribute the work amongst us so that we all may
benefit? I'm sure there are already groups out there who are doing this
exact thing, but I say we give it a shot anyway.
~club, your challenge this bi-week is to reply to this message with some
common words or phrases expressed as place names. I'll start:
friend ---> Friend, Nebraska[1]
I'll keep track of the mappings we come up with---feel free to do the
same---and I'll post them on my tilde.club page. Also: bonus points if
you've been to any of the places you reply with or know something neat
about them!
If you're looking for ideas on what words to use, consider drawing from
the most common English words[2]. They'll be the most useful.
Good luck, ~club, and happy mapping,
Bradley
[0]: https://xkcd.com/2260/
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend,_Nebraska
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English
Dear ~club:
I hope you had fun folding---or at least trying to fold---a paper crane.
As I mentioned last week, it's a surprisingly calming activity, and I
recommend it if pixels (or any other things) are getting you down. You can
take a look at my first somewhat successful attempt [here][0]. (The
numeral "1" printed on its wing means that it's my first passable crane.)
That was a decently interesting excursion in meatspace, but now it's time
to return to a more familiar region. In fact, let's go all the way home
and talk about tilde.club.
I can only assume that if you're reading this, you've been to the
tilde.club website. It stands in striking contrast to the gelatinous
blobules of JavaScript that we call modern websites and acts as a reminder
of the simplicity of the early Web. It's enough to bring a tear to my eye.
But perhaps you, like me, have noticed that the water in your eyes
actually has less to do with nostalgia and more to do with the...
"striking" appearance of the website. It is---and let's be fair about
this---a bit orange.
~club, by special and specific request of the administrators of this
here tilde.club server, your task this week is to redesign the website. At
least one user (~maz)[1] has made a wonderful attempt which features 30%
less eye-searing orange, but don't let that stop you from using other
design features like "other colors" and "non-fixed width fonts".
I have reason to believe that particularly good designs will be considered
as potential replacements for the current one, so take that as motivation,
if you like. Just remember that whatever you design should contain the
same basic information as the current site. Other than that, it's up to
you.
Have fun,
Bradley
[0]: https://tilde.club/~bradley/assets/img/paper-crane.jpg
[1]: https://tilde.club/~maz/tilde.club/
Dear ~club:
I do hope you had some fun setting up or updating your blog. I wrote a
little thing myself to satisfy the criteria of this challenge, which you
can find [here][1]. If you want to, go ahead and reply with your own shiny
new blog or post on the previous thread. I didn't get a chance to see many
of them, and I'd like to check them out if I can.
Let's try something different. Up to now, pretty much all of the
challenges I've presented here have been to do a thing right here on
tilde.club. I have quite a few more of this kind listed in a file in my ~,
so don't you worry about that, but this week I want to go rogue and
challenge you to do something in meatspace.
Some weeks ago---quite on a whim---I decided to learn how to fold a paper
crane. Or, at least I *tried* to learn. I still haven't quite succeeded,
although the attempts I've made to date have come closer and closer to the
proper article. Anyway, I've been enjoying the sensation of folding and
the pride of completing something I didn't know how to do. These aren't
new sensations, really, but they're novel for me since they came from
something so simple and analog.
~club, I challenge you to fold a paper crane, or if you prefer, just
do an origami. When you're finished---or have had enough---post a photo of
what you made to your tilde.club page, or drop a link or path in IRC.
(Photos of failed attempts and franken-paper are welcomed and encouraged.)
[This site][2] was a good resource for me, but feel free to go above and
beyond (or stay below and well-within, if you like). Just have fun, and
let us all know how it goes.
Get foldin',
Bradley
[1]: https://tilde.club/~bradley/2020/01/09/rodents-snakes-and-adhesive.html
[2]: https://origami.me
Dear ~club:
Don't forget: the next biweekly IRC party is tomorrow night EST, or about
a day from now. Let's try to kick things off around 5:00, and we'll see
how far we get.
To quote Ben:
> You should be able to run "chat" from your shell to open weechat and
> connect to our network. You can reach our network on localhost port 6667
> from tilde.club itself or by connecting to irc.tilde.chat on port 6697
> with ssl externally.
>
> There's also a webchat at https://web.tilde.chat/
>
> Join the #club channel!
>
> Info on our wiki: http://tilde.club/wiki/chat.html#irc
Bring your finest keystrokes and casseroles to share. See you tomorrow
night!
Bradley
Dear ~club:
Did you successfully infiltrate the gopherhole? I didn't realize just how
fun gopher can be, and it was really nice to have a tiny fraction of the
feeling I got when I first learned basic HTML. I managed to write some
Python glue to translate my Jekyll blog to a gophermap. My script doesn't
support the Liquid templating that I sprinkle into some of my posts, and
the links and images are still to places on the Web, but the majority of
the content is there. I'm also looking for OC images of literal gophers to
post there. If you have any, please send them to me.
Speaking of blogs, have you got one? I run one on my personal site and
mirror it over here on ~club, and it's proven to be a nice place to put
words. It's a cute little static site, and it's just as minimal and
single-purpose as I want it to be. I don't even like writing that much,
but there's something nice about getting some of my thoughts out
somewhere.
This week, ~club, your challenge is to make a blog. Take that any way you
want to (long-form posts with Jekyll, Hugo, et. al., microblogs with some
other platform, homemade system, etc.). I've noticed that some of you have
your own versions of blogs and microblogs running here, and I think that's
great. In that case, your challenge is to update it. Make a new post,
change up the theme, whatever makes you happy.
In your excitement, don't forget the ~club rules: don't run a server or do
anything that takes up too much of any shared resource (disk, network,
memory). Shoot for a static site with optional JS and you'll be fine.
Once you've got something set up, please let us all know by replying here
with a link.
Happy blogging,
Bradley
Dear ~club:
I saw that many of you made (or are even currently making) it snow on your
pages. Well done. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to make it happen,
being that I approach CSS in much the same way a ferret approaches a game
of shuffleboard---that is, incoherently and more or less according to
chance---but at the last moment I managed to find a post online that was
simple enough for me to understand. The results are about as bad as
expected (complete illegibility), but alas, it's only exactly what I asked
for. I doubt it will last through the week on my page.
Well, ~club, here we are. The year of middle-distance predictions is upon
us. How many of us will turn out to have been wrong about what we thought
we'd be doing with ourselves in 2020? I remember reading an article in a
magazine about 15 years ago that claimed we'd all be rid of cables by now
because long-distance wireless charging would be ubiquitous. This and
similar drivel will fall to the slowly-advancing bulldozer blade of time
this year. A shame, really, since the only thing 2020 did wrong was be a
round number for futurists to pluck out of the timeline.
But! It's not all bad. New years mean new opportunities for learning,
growing, and all that stuff you learned on PBS. This week, I propose that
we look forward into the new year by pulling something out from the past
and taking it with us.
I'm not familiar with gopher, but some light reading has revealed that
it's a way of organizing information on the Internet that sort of got its
lunch eaten by the Web. Many of you have more grey in your beards than me
(visible or not) and know first-hand what gopher is like. In any case,
~club, your task this week is to do something with your gopher space here
on tilde.club. A "hello world" will suffice, but I encourage you to do
what you can to make it interesting. When you do, be sure to post it here
so we can all check it out!
Since I don't personally know much about gopher, I haven't even checked to
see if anyone is using it on this server. I haven't seen anyone mention
it, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. If you've already got
something going over there, great! I'll see you there. If not, then I
encourage you to take this small step with me.
To the gopherhole!
Bradley
Dear ~club:
You are cordially invited to a tilde.club IRC party. The party will take
place in #club and run tomorrow, Saturday 28 December 2019, through the
evening on America's east coast (approx. 1700--0100 EST, 2200--0600 UTC).
All are encouraged to bring their typing fingers, some topics of
conversation, and a covered dish.
The purpose of this event is to increase synchronous, real-time traffic
between ~clubbers on IRC. Currently, not enough people are on at the same
time to make IRC much fun, but if we collect ourselves at appointed times,
then we can maybe fix that.
If this goes well, then maybe we can make it a weekly event. I'm open to
different dates and times for this sort of thing to accommodate different
schedules and time zones. Feel free to propose them in this thread.
I hope to see you all there. No RSVP required, but comments on this idea
(positive or negative) are encouraged.
Bradley
Dear ~club:
The Top 8 experiment is complete, and now it's time to compile all of the
data. What did we learn? Well:
- We found out that it's apparently totally possible for a website to run
on [solar energy](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/). --- ~pk
- We stumbled upon [a DnD podcast](http://friendsatthetable.net/), just as
I was making progress on my backlog. --- ~schussat
- We learned that it's important to [be
prepared](https://www.universalhub.com/french-toast) for severe weather.
--- ~pk
- Some other neat stuff, too.
I encourage all ~clubbers to update their Top 8 every once in a while and
share it with others. (Reply to this thread or the one from last week!) I
had a lot of fun poking around the links you dug up, and I didn't even get
through all of them. If you want to take a look at mine, [go
here](https://tilde.club/~bradley/2019/12/24/weekly-webpage-workshops.html)
Well, ~club, the winter holidays are here. For me, that's Christmas and
New Year's, but whatever you're celebrating, I hope it works out well for
you. Where I grew up, one near-given at this time of year is snow. Only a
few times was there a total lack of the white stuff on the ground when
Christmas came, and a few times we even had snow falling on the actual
day. It was some real Currier & Ives stuff.
Anyway, one of the things I miss about the old web is pixellated snow
falling down the screen. Do you remember that? Little white circles
dancing from top to bottom, getting in the way of whatever you came there
to read or see. Granted, I think I'd get tired of it pretty quickly if it
suddenly appeared everywhere, but right now the nostalgia is too strong to
allow for silly things like facts.
~club, your task is to **make it snow on your webpage.** Animate it if
you like, maybe even make it accumulate at the bottom of the screen if
you're feeling fancy. Even a GIF of some snow falling will do. Just make
it snowy and wholesome.
Good luck, ~club, and merry Christmas or whatever,
Bradley
Dear ~club:
I don't have any sense of how much you all participated in last week's
workshop, since I couldn't think of a neat little command to run to scan
/home/ for wikis. As far as I can tell, there wasn't much interest, so
perhaps I'll try to a different sort of prompt this week.
Do you remember MySpace? Me neither. I happen to be young enough to have
more or less missed the rise of MySpace and instead been tempted by
somewhat early Facebook circa 2007. (That's another story.)
Based on echos in preserved popular culture from the period and other
forms of archaeology, I have concluded that there was once a way for
MySpace users to define an in-group on their page known as the Top 8.
Apparently, the decisions surrounding who was in a person's Top 8 and who
wasn't were serious ones with long-lasting social consequences, at least
for some. Of course, this is a ridiculous idea to us evolved humans of the
almost 2020s. We would never be dragged down into arguments with strangers
on the Internet over essentially meaningless tribal drivel, right?
...right?
~club, your task this week is to recreate MySpace's Top 8 somewhere on
your own set of pages. Just one catch: no people. To try to avoid
recreating the apparent angst that comes with publicly defining in-groups
and out-groups, let's pick instead from the vast selection of topics,
languages (natural and artificial), technologies, forms and genres of
music, and other inanimate stuff of interest. This way, we might avoid the
toxicity and end up sharing our interests with each other instead.
Have fun, ~club, and I'm sorry this one was a little late.
Bradley
Dear ~club:
Did you enjoy creating a custom 404 page? I didn't end up with a lot of
time this week, so I threw mine together a bit hastily. Still, I
managed to embed a video of someone playing (or perhaps simulating) a
perfect game of Snake. I had hoped that maybe I could implement an
actual self-playing Snake game in JavaScript, but for now this will do.
My hope is that someone who stumbles upon it may at least briefly be
amused by the pleasing motion of the pixelated reptile.
Many of you did a much better job than me. Thanks to the work of
~benharri and ~deepend, I was able to pull a list of ~clubbers who
created a "404.html" in their "~/public_html" using `find` and check
them all out for myself. Some of you are quite talented with CSS
(whether by craftsmanship or theft), and I congratulate you on your
efforts.
Here's a list of the 404 pages I found, if you'd care to check them out
for yourself, in alphabetical order by username. Well done all:
- [benharri](https://tilde.club/~benharri/404.html)
- [bradley](https://tilde.club/~bradley/404.html)
- [bvh](https://tilde.club/~bvh/404.html)
- [deepend](https://tilde.club/~deepend/404.html)
- [gikiski](https://tilde.club/~gikiski/404.html)
- [inchingfwd](https://tilde.club/~inchingfwd/404.html)
- [jcjordyn120[(https://tilde.club/~jcjordyn120/404.html)
- [micah](https://tilde.club/~micah/404.html)
- [mpnordland](https://tilde.club/~mpnordland/404.html)
- [rarguello](https://tilde.club/~rarguello/404.html)
- [schussat](https://tilde.club/~schussat/404.html)
If you don't see your 404 page on the list, feel free to leave a reply.
----------
That's enough about the past. Following the success and surprisingly
high turnout of last week's inaugural WWW, I think an increase in
challenge complexity is in order. My aim is to mostly present relatively
simple workshop objectives, but occasionally I'd like to throw in a
thinker. You may find that this week's is one of those.
Wikipedia is perhaps the greatest project of good will on the web. If
you want to know about it, chances are that Wikipedia has some
information about it. Unfortunately, many of you have likely been
interrupted while browsing this digital oracle by an increasingly
obtrusive plea for money. (Incidentally, I encourage all of you who are
able to donate what you can to this outstanding resource.) It's obvious
that Wikipedia lives and dies on donations from its users, but what if
we could improve Wikipedia's financial situation from the other end, by
reducing operating costs?
Well, we can't. At least, not meaningfully. But we sure can pretend.
This holiday season (read: this week), I implore you to...
**Adopt a Wikipedia page**
What does this mean? You see, dear reader:
> Every contribution to the English Wikipedia has been licensed for
> re-use, including commercial, for-profit websites. Republication is
> not necessarily a breach of copyright, so long as the appropriate
> licenses are complied with.
[Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks#Things_yo…
Therefore, rehosting of Wikipedia content is allowed, provided that it's
done correctly. (Read the rest of that linked page for details.) If we
each adopt a Wikipedia page (that is, host it in our ~club directories),
then we will be helping Wikipedia out by reducing the load on their
servers (marginally) and helping them stay afloat. It's a holiday
miracle!
Two suggestions on how to do this, if you're not sure where to start:
1. Consider using your favorite modern web browser's "Save Page"
feature, which will do some of the parsing and link re-jiggering
for you. It will also probably put the image assets in a neat
little sidecar folder for you, like a dog bringing in the paper.
2. When doing so, also consider appending "&printable=yes" to your
page's URL to get a simpler, less-styled version that might look
a little more like what we want on ~club. Up to you.
**Important note:** please don't use this silly email as a way to
attempt to justify breaking license terms or the ~club server. Keep your
resource footprint low (try to stay under 1 MB of disk, I'd say), don't
make anybody mad, do your research, and play nice. I am not a lawyer.
Go to work, ~club. The future of open knowledge depends on you, or
whatever. Oh, and choose your page wisely.
Bradley
