I went for a nice long walk this morning, about 5 miles, before breakfast. It was warmer than it has been lately but still cloudy. It's supposed to get warmer this week.
It was a good space to think about things - especially my desire to make some very simple automation for my blogging. Everything is so complicated and dominated by the various silos. I really ache for the kind of #indieweb vision of a server, under my control, running software that I understand fully and which only does the things that I want it to do, so that it serves me, rather than me having to bend my style of writing and capturing into someone else's way of thinking.
I walked for 45 minutes and then turned round (took a photo to remind me of how far I'd gone - above) and walked back, talking into my phone about the things that I'd been thinking about. It works so much better for me to record like that. I haven't listened back to it. It's likely to be atrocious quality, but it gives me the chance of getting something done before breakfast that I haven't done for a while. I'll see if I can get better at doing that - and better at grabbing bits of audio as I go, to avoid the gross feeling that comes when I think about making a podcast. In the meantime, I think I'll feed it to otter.ai and see what kind of transcription it can make of it.
I spent the rest of the day reading up and making notes on node.js and how it works. Patiently just plodding through the Hello World examples and seeing where I could break them or find ways that they didn't work as I expected so that I could see how they do work. Standard.
That gave me a bit more confidence reading some other people's code on GitHub and I realised that I have looked at similar things before, just given up when my brain started hurting and run away screaming. Much better these days. I got a couple of examples running on my Mac here and then spun up a cloud server to prove to myself that it really would work over the net :)
Still very early days and baby steps, but I'm much more confident that I can make something work. And that I can strip away pointless stuff in other people's software to just provide the functions I want - really old school, but also using the computers to do the hard work that they're suited to and not being dominated by some silo providers business model.
Nothing to show yet, but a good progress day.
