A geek, coder, gamer, tinkerer, husband, father, server admin, web developer, and American cyborg, though not necessarily in that order.
@movq It varies... We tend to prefer bowtie collars for all of our little boys, but they like to wrestle sometimes, and since they're indoor-only, they can go for months without collars at all.
@prologic Very cool! 😎
Just one question: when do you sleep? 😁
@movq Thanks...? 😄
I credit my subjects for how good they look. 😍
@movq Definitely silly in places (and the back-alley fistfight is AWESOME).
But it also wouldn't surprise me to find out that people like Bezzos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are actually ghoulish aliens here to keep us into a state of reduced consciousness while they extract what they can. "Their third-world."
It's like the bearded-man says: "We could be pets, we could be food, but all we really are is cattle."
@prologic Very cool! Like @movq, I don't think I'm the target audience for this (as I'm already a DevOps hobbyist managing a small server "victory garden"), but I love the idea.
Apologies for hitting it early, I initially overlooked the sign-up form and thought I would try it for 💩s and 😁s.
@https://maurice-renck.de/twtxt.txt Nice write-up. One of the things I was always impressed with is that the GPS system has to account for time dilation due to the effects of relativity (38 microseconds worth, per Wikipedia).
All that for a burger!
@prologic I look forward to hearing more about it.
@prologic Awesome work!
I've been thinking about learning Go for a while, maybe this will be the thing that finally gets me to do it.
@lyse @bender @prologic Oh, snap! 🤦 I am so sorry about that. I had no idea that was happening!
I'm working on a fix right now.
@lyse Bummer, but thanks for the heads-up. 🙂
Where are you seeing it? I remember running across a similar issue before, but I thought I already fixed it by falling back to the hash URL.
That having been said, I like your idea of defaulting to the subscribed / "following" URL.
Also, there appears to be an extra "r" in my handle in your mention (it's "itsericwoodward", not "itsericwoordward"). No big deal, just wanted to mention it.
@movq That's a great effect! 👍
@prologic Fair point, and I don't plan on doing it myself.
But I also understand raging against the broken social contract(s). It's like using Iocaine or zip-bombs against the scrapers. I don't do it, but I understand why someone would feel justified in doing so.
@prologic Productive? Maybe not, but it would certainly serve as a social signal...
@movq Related reading (if you're interested): Let's Talk about LLMs by James Bennett
First, it quotes the DORA report on the "State of AI-assisted Software Development":
The research reveals a critical truth: AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.
At the end, it quotes the late Fred Books:
The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.
@movq Wow, I'm sorry to hear about that. Permanent emergency mode sucks, I've been there, and it always felt like drowning.
Fortunately, at my current job, we've been given time to keep our technical debt from overtaking the project. Unfortunately, we've been forced to use AI (mostly in the form of GitHub Copilot). Of course, now that the tokens cost more than a developer's salary, they've been rethinking that position somewhat. 😁
In my experience, you are 100% correct - even in the best case, AI is a force multiplier. If the code is clean, it can speed you up. But if the code is a mess, it'll just multiply the mess.
@prologic @bender Thanks! Yeah, it already supports Twt Hash via twtxt-lib (both v1 and v2, when the time is right), plus most of the other features (multiline, user-agent, and metadata), and I'm working on (re-)implementing threading, mentions, and hash filtering (to make conversations easier to follow).
Here's a current snapshot of my local version, in case anyone is interested:
@bender Thank you, we think so too.
I'm glad you like it!
@lyse It's OK, it's still WIP. You're just helping make it more robust. 😁
@arne I'm similar... I use "I" most of the time (mostly in planning or trying to focus, ex: "I'm going to do X, then Y"), but I also use "you" when fussing at myself for my perceived faults or mistakes (that's my "lizard brain", we don't get along so well because he's kind of a jerk).
@lyse Just call me Little Eric {first_name}}. 😁
@movq Great find! Other than a couple of games I bought over the years, my 5.25" disks were always dark grey / black.
And 3.5" disks were another matter entirely... 😄
@movq Congrats, that's no small feat!
The blogosphere will never die!! 🤘
@prologic Wow, thanks everyone for the kind words! 😊
In answer to @movq and @bender: I'm sorry, it's just the default camera app on my Samsung Galaxy S23 phone with the "Portrait" mode turned on. It's a trick I learned from my wife, who used to work for a dog daycare and took pics of doggos for their FB page. It works well for humans, too. 😁
@tftp Greetings and salutations! 👋
@bender I sound like I'm dumping on the game, but it really is alot of fun, especially with the right people. It's just a whole different beast from D&D.
@bender Apologies, I'm still working through some layout issues with TwtStrm and frequently miss mentions...
Magic: the Gathering does not use a Game Master (although professional referees are often used in sanctioned events). While the game has alot of thematic crossover with with D&D (or fantasy games in general), the system is much more of an abstract, card-dueling system involving things like "the stack" and insanely specific rules on card timing and interactions.
Like, we joke about "I'm sending my army of (goblins / elves / angels / whatever) at you," but that's about as far into the "role-playing" element most magic games get in my experience (and most of the "official" competitive games I've played at my FLGS were even more abstract and less thematic, although it's been years since I played in one of those).
@bender You got me there. Mine is mildly passive-aggressive, but ultimately supportive. Yours sounds... less helpful. 😀
@lyse That's crazy! If you don't mind me asking, what browser are you using when you see this?
@bender Glad to hear it, I've neglected a Safari test thus far.
Thank you both for checking.
@lyse For reasons I can't fully explain, we have a bunch of courses in the area, most in public parks (they integrate nicely since they can be built with the existing landscape, only adding some yellow baskets, concrete starting pads, and maybe signs).
In my experience, the main difference between a disc golfer and a frisbee thrower is that the disc golfer will often have a bag full of different shapes of discs (including drivers of varying ranges and/or putters). Even in my small bag, I've got some long range drivers (a Beast, a Cheetah, a Valkyrie, and a Wraith), my aforementioned MRV (Mid-Range Vector), an ultralight Aero (which feels similar to a "standard" frisbee), and 2 "rubber" putters (softer plastic, less "bouncy").
@bender Thanks, and you are correct: MRV stands for Mid-Range Vector (I think) as it is a stable mid-range driver (it says so on the disc): https://itsericwoodward.com/images/520b231931b8d8569d400e40e6fcc805b0bbee35e04b2ce5e35df0848852c807.jpg
@falsifian Congrats! That's no small feat.
@lyse Thanks (again) for the heads-up!. I'm not sure why you were seeing black text, but I just pushed a new version of the library (v0.10.1) with some updated colors in the demo's themes (which should hopefully address the contrast issues).
The dark mode was an aesthetic choice by a designer with a strong preference for dark mode (and who thought the maroon looked better as a background color), but in the interest of being supportive of my audience, I added a localstorage-backed memory to the theme toggle (so when you turn it to light mode, it should remember for future visits).
@lyse Thanks for the heads-up.
It lead me to publish an updated version of twtxt-lib (v0.10.0) which supports the v2 hashing algorithm: https://twtxt-lib.itsericwoodward.com/
@bender Thanks for that as well, I've removed the extraneous letter and it now (correctly) points to https://www.itsericwoodward.com (I am a developer of webs, so I tend to have many webs in development at any given moment).
@bender Thanks for the tip-off, fixed!
I hope to have some time this weekend to tease apart my current setup and build a couple of example sites with it (while also writing some docs along the way). But given the rate I've been going, it'll probably be another month. 😢
@bender Correctamundo! In this case, it's available for the browser as a single (optionally-minified) JavaScript file, or for Node via NPM (as JS) and JSR.io (as "native" TypeScript).
I had to do it that way because I wanted a library I could use in both an Express server (for TwtKpr and TwtStrm) and the browser (for my website and... TwtStrm).
Hopefully, I'll have more to share about those other projects soon...
@bender Wow, you're good.
It was an edit, within a minute or two of posting. I didn't think anyone would notice.
That's what I call on it. 😀
@lyse Yeah, those are my bad.
A couple of weeks ago, I added CORS support, which is the source of the OPTIONS call. What I didn't do was store the result so it stops trying to make further attempts. I'll get that in tomorrow.
As for the "If-Modified-Since" header, the server-based component of TwtStrm should be sending that (along with its user-agent tag and my user info). I wasn't sure if that could be sent with CORS requests, so I'll need to look into that a bit more.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback!
It still needs some cleaning (and some slight UX improvements), but overall, I'm happy with it.
BTW - I promise, I intended it to be pronounced like "TweetStream" (or as written, "TwtStrm"), rather than "TweetStorm". Sorry again. 😊
@prologic That zs looks pretty cool! I love simple static site generators, and look forward to trying it on my next web site project. Kudos!
@lyse Thanks, I think I fixed it now. Sorry for the spam.
@bender Thanks for asking!
So, I've been working on 2 main twtxt-related projects.
The first is small Node / express application that serves up a twtxt file while allowing its owner to add twts to it (or edit it outright), and I've been testing it on my site since the night I made that post. It's still very much an MVP, and I've been intermittently adding features, improving security, and streamlining the code, with an eye to release it after I get an MVP done of project #2 (the reader).
But that's where I've been struggling. The idea seems simple enough - another Node / express app (this one with a Vite-powered front-end) that reads a public twtxt file, parses the "follow" list, grabs (and parses) those twtxt files, and then creates a river of twts out of the result. The pieces work fine in seclusion (and with dummy data), but I keep running into weird issues when reading real-live twtxt files, so some twts come through, while others get lost in the ether. I'll figure it out eventually, but for now, I've been spending far more time than I anticipated just trying to get it to work end-to-end.
On top of it, the 2 projects wound up turning into 4 (so far), as I've been spinning out little libraries to use across both apps (like https://jsr.io/@itsericwoodward/fluent-dom-esm, and a forthcoming twtxt helper library).
In the end, I'm hoping to have project 1 (the editor) into beta by the end of October, and project 2 (the reader) into beta sometime after that, but we'll see.
I hope this has satisfied your curiosity, but if you'd like to know more, please reach out!
Timeline Sandbox 
