{"id":2180,"date":"2020-11-22T17:34:21","date_gmt":"2020-11-22T17:34:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/?page_id=2180"},"modified":"2023-01-04T17:17:26","modified_gmt":"2023-01-04T17:17:26","slug":"nerdy-things","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/makings-meanderings\/nerdy-things\/","title":{"rendered":"Nerdy things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The word &#8220;nerd&#8221; is a bit disappointing. I mean, nerds rule the world, of course, but still it feels a bit dismissive. Anyway, I&#8217;m slowly growing a list of projects here which I&#8217;ll flesh out in more detail where it might be interesting to do so. Almost of all of them are half-baked and never quite A Thing, but fun to think about nonetheless&#8230;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So, in no particular order:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>Some fiddlings with Telegram bots, which are fun and super-easy to develop against:\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve got one for local tides which twangs an Admiralty API, and returns a friendly response. The same codebase is being used as an iOS shortcut &#8211; so I can say &#8220;Siri: tides&#8221; and it&#8217;ll tell me whether the next tide is high \/ low and when it is&#8230;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8230;and another very silly one which updates <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/playingwith.variousbits.net\/utilities\/telegram\/budeshedbot\/display\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/playingwith.variousbits.net\/utilities\/telegram\/budeshedbot\/display\/\" target=\"_blank\">a web page<\/a> when a bot is given a message to display. The biggest problem with this was how to get the page to re-display without caching, but I solved it in the end using <a href=\"https:\/\/htmx.org\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/htmx.org\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">htmx<\/a> (which is great!) coupled with a timestamp in the file call.<br><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>ContentSifter: a theoretically simple but ever-growing idea about how to bring together disparate web content. There&#8217;s a web thing over at <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/contentsifter.com\" target=\"_blank\">contentsifter.com<\/a> and we use it with many of our clients, but it&#8217;s still a WiP.<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>The <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/rant.variousbits.net\/\" target=\"_blank\">RANTIMATOR<\/a>, a sort of anti-Twitter I built that lets me vent, mainly about the &#8216;tories and that twat Trump<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A tool that you point at a WordPress API which sucks in all the content then publishes it as flat files. I can&#8217;t figure out whether this should just be a part of ContentSifter or if it&#8217;s a separate thing, but I like where it&#8217;s going. I&#8217;ve built a couple of prototypes of this which work well (well enough to use for initial content population of client websites) &#8211; but have also commissioned A Proper Developer to make this in Laravel. Will keep you updated when things move on&#8230;<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A WordPress plugin for managing content flow. Again, not sure whether this will ultimately be wrapped into ContentSifter or if it will just be better as a simple standalone thing. <br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A snags plugin which I&#8217;m working on with the excellent <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/marcjenkins.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\">Marc Jenkins<\/a> and the equally excellent <a href=\"https:\/\/adamwilson.co.uk\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/adamwilson.co.uk\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Adam Wilson<\/a><br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>A now retired idea (I never really got if off the ground) related to foreign language SaaS platforms<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I have a bit of an obsession with web scraping, originally around museum collections (my position then was that cross-collections searching, the holy grail of many in museum land, could be done far easier top-down than bottom-up. Dan Zambonini and I did a bunch of work on this way back &#8211; our original paper is <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.archimuse.com\/mw2009\/abstracts\/prg_335001935.html\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.archimuse.com\/mw2009\/abstracts\/prg_335001935.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.) Since then I have become a bit more interested in how to copy \/ move retrieve web content &#8211; particularly as part of migration or new site builds. So, again, this kind of might be a part of ContentSifter. Or might not. <br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Web Heist: an idea about stealing web content. It&#8217;s got a museum angle, and a collections angle, and I like it cos it&#8217;s fun.<br><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Web Stories: a sort of workflow tool to hook together disparate websites and content sources to create a narrative structure<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The word &#8220;nerd&#8221; is a bit disappointing. I mean, nerds rule the world, of course, but still it feels a bit dismissive. Anyway, I&#8217;m slowly growing a list of projects here which I&#8217;ll flesh out in more detail where it might be interesting to do so. Almost of all of them are half-baked and never &#8230; <a title=\"Nerdy things\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/makings-meanderings\/nerdy-things\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Nerdy things\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2158,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2180"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2180"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2180\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2636,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2180\/revisions\/2636"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/variousbits.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}