Notices by Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)

Well, that's it! I successfully spent 2019 reading and blogging about each of the first 365 RFCs.

I have more posts to come, including some related research that didn't quite fit with the RFC-a-day format, and an interview with the brilliant outgoing RFC series editor, Heather Flanagan.

https://write.as/365-rfcs/table-of-contents

October 29 is the 50th anniversary of the first message sent on the ARPANET!

The message was "LO", which was supposed to be LOGIN but the system crashed. (There are alternative stories that it was short for HELLO but contemporary records support the system crash story.)

https://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/internet_first_words.html

While I understand that in theory, a single page application done right enhances user experience:

- almost nobody does it right because it is way, way harder to write a SPA than a "traditional" web app
- almost every list of justifications I see for SPAs focuses more on benefits to DEVELOPERS rather than benefits to USERS
- SPAs seem to be optimizing for streamlining sites that are full of adtech

An awful thing about the new Eventbrite website is that if you load a page for an event, wait for the page to completely load, then switch tabs and switch back, you get a loading screen overlay???

Truly grateful for this age of Single Page Applications

NYC folks: if you'd like a free ticket to my day long workshop this Friday about, essentially, how to run a great Mastodon instance for your community, I have discount codes!

It's based on my https://runyourown.social guide but it uses the guide as a jumping off point and I get into some of the nitty gritty, including things like "how to stay on top of Mastodon releases and keep your community informed of new features if you don't know anything about programming"

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-networks-tickets-72061121755

Some fun issue titles from the Mastodon 3.0.0 release:

- Change trending hashtags to not disappear instantly after midnight

- Fix trending hashtags being fetched every 36 seconds instead of every hour

People have asked me if having local-only posting somehow discourages federated posting.

I finally did the actual queries on our instance database, and after about a year of having local-only as an option we are at almost exactly 50/50 local vs federated posts.

65% of our accounts have been active in the last month, which is on the high side of normal for an instance with 80 accounts.

We post about 2x more *federated* posts than other instances with ~40 active users.

Some of my favorite #NaNoGenMo novels include:

The Seeker by @li
Novel (PDF): https://github.com/thricedotted/theseeker/raw/master/the_seeker.pdf

I Waded in Clear Water by @aparrish
Site: https://www.decontextualize.com/2015/01/i-waded-in-clear-water/
Novel (PDF): http://aparrish.github.io/nanogenmo2014/final.pdf

Hannah and the Tower of Hanoi by Sean Barrett
Novel: http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/nothings/nanogenmo/blob/master/2014/hannah.html

The Annals of the Parrigues by Emily Short
Novel (PDF): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B97d5C256qbrOHFwSUhsZE4tU0k/view?usp=sharing

The League of Extraordinarily Dull Gentlemen by Chris Pressey
Novel: https://github.com/catseye/NaNoGenMo-Entries-2018/blob/master/generated/The%20League%20of%20Extraordinarily%20Dull%20Gentlemen.md

Idea: let google autocomplete write your blues lyrics

Just blogged about RFC-196, which is an early email-like protocol that is literally the opposite of those "think of the environment before printing this email" corporate signatures. Instead it explicitly encourages early ARPANET sites to have a printer constantly online and printing out all incoming mail messages!

https://write.as/365-rfcs/rfc-196

My Neighbor On'tottotononooo

I made a new bot called Handshake Meme Bot, you can follow it at @handshake! Will post 4x a day.

A huge thank you to @annika for introducing me to https://wiby.me/, a search engine based on user submitted listings that only accepts simple html/css sites

I was interviewed for Marketplace today about running your own social network site! You can catch me on NPR stations today or just listen/read here:

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace-tech/diy-build-your-own-social-media-site-guide/

I'm pleased to announce the v1.0.0 release of Hometown, my Mastodon fork! It's up to date with Mastodon v2.9.3, and unique features include:

- Local only posting
- Full support for rendering incoming `Article` posts from federated blogs like Write.As
- "Exclusive" lists that let you follow someone without clogging up your home timeline

For more info, including rationale for each new feature, check out our wiki:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki

And the release itself is here:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v1.0.0%2B2.9.3

I love using Friend Camp (the instance I administer) to test out features for Hometown (the Mastodon fork I'm running). This morning I deployed what I'm calling "Exclusive Lists" -- a list where, if you put an account on it, that account doesn't appear in your home timeline anymore.

Link to Hometown, since every time I mention it someone asks for the link: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

For people looking for an alternative to Facebook events that isn't spammy like evite and the like, I recommend checking out https://gath.io

It requires no login, basically you provide an email address, you get a unique editing URL, you make a nice looking event form, and people can RSVP there. Your event and all related info is deleted from their DB 2 weeks after the event is over.

Ah, the two genders.

(source: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc129.txt)

If you do a thing in an open source project, and you have a hard time doing it because it's not documented, after you finish doing the thing... document it. If the project has a wiki, put it in the wiki. If it has a docs repo you can write to, put it there. Or at least blog about it so search engines can index it.

Please don't leave the solution to languish in a chat log somewhere.

@mike This is so cool! It's the first instance I'm aware of that isn't my own.