The best part of GOOG411 was that they would connect you to the phone number, free of charge, across borders.
List a business with a Google voice number and you can call in, check messages, and _dial out_ from Google voice. Free international calls!
I was in school in Canada where we had a payphone in a hallway. People heard me randomly saying "Funny Business Name, City State ... Connect me" into the phone so much, it became a running joke.
When I eventually got my own phone, I transferred the number and I still have it.
This is super neat!
Here are some of the things I noticed:
My site link of
> Avi Perl's personal site!
Shows as
> Avi Perl's personal site!
On the edit page, there's no link to my homepage where the links are shown. In fact, it wasn't obvious that that's where I needed to visit in order to see my links. It was a guess that brought me to my page.
The confirmation links are going to spam in Gmail.
Perhaps the confirmation page can have a link to redirect me to my edit page, or my homepage?
With a very long bio, on mobile, the last button is floating over your text on the bottom which doesn't look great.
On mobile, the text on the bottom of the page is also a bit off-kilter in its centering.
Idea: If each entry had its own short name, you could also operate as a URL shorter. If I could add "p" as the "short name" for my personal site, lynx.boo/aviperl/p could function as an alternative to tinyurl. Combined with an option to hide the URL from my homepage, I never need those services again. :)
What happens when you need to reclaim a URL for the site that someone has already set up as a user? As the owner of your about page, I guess I'll find out :D https://lynx.boo/about
1) Not rendering special characters (especially basic punctuation) is a rookie mistake. Good catch.
2) confirmation links will go to spam in pretty much all mail clients. I'm investigating more because I have all the things an email should but also it's on a no reputation ip and I would bet my neighbours don't have perfect records. But as part of the whole "internet the way it used to be" thing I'm not using these SMTP operators.
3) I noticed the issue with the footer last night before bed. Luckily that's an easy enough fix.
5) your saying the footer text is off centre? I'll have to look at why..
4) redirect to the page is going in today. Before I had it as an unstyled text notification but that was too minimal for me. I haven't added a bunch of logic yet.
(I accidently read those out of order)
6) funnily enough, I have a 90% finished "bit.ly but minimal" site that I started before this which has QR support and basic analytics but I ADHD'd into this idea. I'm going to launch that as part of this minimalist suite. That doesn't mean things can't be borrowed though.
7) Actually I think there are much cooler domains to snag. You can use single characters, you can use emojis, you can do a lot. I did reserve a handful but where would I draw the line? If you are purposefully exploiting it trying to pretend to BE LynxBoo we would have problems but otherwise I want to reward creativity and I hope people grab all sorts of fun names.
Another note: in the email, it's totally not clear what I'm "approving" which is not really a huge issue. But it might be nice to include the username in the email.
Structured/JSON saves a tonne of time building regex parsers. The regex parsing at query-time is also pretty expensive. This is where Splunk excels - dealing with the noise with powerful querying. ClickHouse is also very performant at this, we hear. It's an expensive task though (computationally and cost wise)
Charity, CTO of Honeycomb has strong views (which we enjoy a lot): https://charity.wtf/tag/observability-2-0/ - they come at it from a tracing/OT angle which is Honeycomb's forte, but we agree a lot on the intended outcomes - actionable (not spammy/noisy) + make it easy to gather the variable/state context in the context of a single event.
An easy way to do this that I've used is to cache web requests. This way, I can run the part of the code that gets the data again with say a modification to grab data from additional urls, and I'm not unnecessarily rerunning my existing URLs. With this method, I don't need to modify existing code either, best of both worlds.
By default it works as a simple redesign of an existing set of gists. But gist hosted configuration files and compiling gist data to a static site can turn it into something much more rich, seo friendly, etc.
I've been doing more or less this with a small pocket size notebook since October. I admit that I initially fell for the romance of the idea and made an impulse purchase, but started to use them a couple of weeks after I bought them.
I tried different formats and pre-planning and have basically made peace with my reality, that I don't know what I'll be doing in it on any given day. So I operate like a log, whatever is next comes next. Sequentially. But I'll also jump to a page, or two-page spread, for notes on a particular project.
Here's what I use:
Moleskine Cahier Journal, Soft Cover, Pocket (3.5" x 5.5") Dotted, Black, 64 Pages (Set of 3) https://a.co/d/9jXRxNt
I also use a 4 color flexion erasable pen, but I can't recommend that since you're liable to lose all your notes if you leave it in a hot car. Not so bad though, it comes back if you stick it in the freezer. No joke.
With zero extra effort, you get a simple blog. With configuration via settings files stored in a secret gist or on a gist itself, a rich blogging experience.
I'm hoping that the GitHub graphQL API might let me get list of gists with their file content, in which case, no outside build step would be needed to provide the full experience for a GitHub user.
What I mean here by "full experience" is adding a title, image, tags, etc.
This is a neat idea! I had a similar idea but with github repos instead of gists - it'd be possible to use tags to just check out blogs you're interested in. I built mine as a neovim plugin rather than a standalone site though. Gists definitely make it easier for shorter blogs.
If you provide me with your username and the id of a secret gist for configuration, I'll add your username to the list of users to precompile pages and use the full features.
Making something _actually useful_. Creating a to-do app teaches me how to use tools, creating a web scraper that sent me an email when clothing my wife missed the chance to buy was back in stock filled me with confidence.
