Hi, I'm Jack

After migrating the guts of this blog into a brand new Tinderbox document, one thing remains…content. I’ve decided that bringing the old content in will be a ton of work. I reviewed some of it, and there’s not much there worth moving. That’s 991 notes that are going away. See ya, old notes!

You may have noticed that things have changed around here. It’s true! The Tinderbox document that has been managing this blog for years had become, well, messy. I got tired of working around all of the cruft, so I created a brand new document and built it up from scratch.

I wanted the same basic layout; Each day contains the individual posts for that day. It took forever to get that wrangled, but I think I’ve done it.

There’s a lot missing or broken, but I promised myself I’d ship by the end of the day, so here we are. I’ll start backfilling content…eventually.

Next up is search, the changelog, small post images, OpenGraph tags, etc. But not today.

The RSS feed is at /feed.xml. I’ll put in a redirect from the old one at some point. See? Lot’s to do, but it was fun.

Gruber writes about a small macOS utility that I’d forgotten about called HazeOver, the “Distraction Dimmer™ for Mac”. I’m happy to have been reminded of it, because it really does help distinguish active windows, which has become increasingly difficult in recent years.

Of course on Linux, KDE has this built in.

I had the bright idea this morning to start this Tinderbox-generated blog from scratch. The current document is littered with loose ends, copy/paste markup, outdated code, markup, etc.

4 hours later and I’ve bailed on that for now. There’s a lot going on here that would be difficult to recreate. Maybe I’ll try cleaning up this version instead.

I can’t imagine having a blog without daily notes. (Like this one). I’ve tried all sorts of ways of doing them. My favorites were Fargo (when it existed), TiddlyWiki (before I took it down), and now, Tinderbox. I like the one daily note container, with multiple individual notes within it..each with its own URL. It doesn’t hurt that the blog generated using Tinderbox is fully static. Anyway, you may have noticed this site is back to being generated using Tinderbox.

My views have never totally aligned with Ben Thompson’s, and his latest Stratechery piece reinforced that. Gruber asks:

Who sets our defense policies? Our democratically elected leaders, or the CEOs of corporate defense contractors?

Normally, I’d acknowledge that it should of course be the former, but lately, not so much. Is there a third option? I hate that I think like this, now. Thompson’s hypothetical is dumb, anyway.

All forms of cultural activity have collapsed into a single, overriding imperative: “getting attention.”

Pluralistic: Deplatform yourself

NOTE: I am now using Pagefind rather than Fuse.js.

After lamenting this morning that I didn’t feel like figuring out how to add search to this blog, I’ve added search to this blog. Here’s a short summary of what I did.

First, I used most of the UI and Fuse.js work from this post by Yihui Xie . (Thanks!)

To generate the index.json file, I created a page and new template in Tinderbox. The export inspector for the index generator looks like this:

Note the export file name and extension is set so that the output file is “index.json”

The parent template is simply a JSON array wrapper:

Each child is then rendered using the “search index item” template:

Note that that final if statement is necessary so that we don’t end up with an extra comma after the last item which would make the JSON invalid. (This is one reason I don’t like working with JSON. Can’t it forgive me that last comma? You know what I meant!

Anyway, the search page loads fuse.js and includes some JavaScript to handle the search (also thanks to Yihui Xie, see his post for details.)

Rendering the index.json file is a little time consuming, so I’ll do that manually every once in a while. This means the search won’t always include everything but we can live with that.

The search results aren’t pretty due to the raw HTML that is rendered, but it’s good enough for now. I don’t know why Tinderbox escapes everything multiple times when calling “jsonEncode()” but if you know why please let me know. Try it and let me know if it works! Search