Thinking About Search. A lot.
A couple of days ago I took the #Raleigh #OpenData dataset of trees and connected it to the #Wikipedia geolocation API and from there to a ChatGPT API prompt so the tree could talk about the things around it. Find tree, find things near tree, have tree describe itself and the things nearby. The results […]
This recent political stuff has impressed upon me that I should be doing more to connect politician data to local news data. Furthermore, as long as I’m doing that I should be making news monitoring tools. So that’s what I’ve been doodling around with today. Here’s how it works – currently I’m working on just […]
WordPress is great when you need to maintain an blog or some other kind of archive, but if you don’t need that functionality it can be annoying. None of the tools on SearchGizmos.com , for example, work on your phone due to some kind of conflict between my JavaScript and WordPress’ JavaScript. So I’ve been […]
August 24, 2023
Yesterday was a very big news day and I was curious to see how well Mastodon would keep me informed about breaking news as Twitter continues to crumble. I was disappointed. I run my own tiny instance populated by only about a dozen active users, so only a trickle of news was getting to my […]
I made a bookmarklet today! Do you know about bookmarklets? They’re like regular browser bookmarks, only souped-up with JavaScript. As you might imagine the addition of JavaScript makes bookmarklets much more powerful than regular bookmarks. The bookmarklet I made was to address a Mastodon annoyance. Because Mastodon is decentralized, following a user on a different […]
July 25, 2023
It used to be that if I found some online writing I really liked, I’d look up and follow the author on Twitter. Now I look up the author and follow them on LinkedIn. This opinion piece by Elizabeth Lopatto is first rate. I love it when an entire article resonates from the jump. ‘Get […]
I was really pleased with the way my Mastodon tool “Gift Article Gazette” turned out. It made me eager to do more hashtag-based Mastodon search tools, but I was worried about spam. After poking into the Mastodon API, though, I think I’ve found big possibilities. I didn’t realize exactly how much information the Mastodon API delivers. […]
I used to play Rimworld a lot in the evening, but since I started learning JavaScript, it’s much more interesting to make up my own games. Yesterday evening I pretended I had just started a Mastodon instance for a county fire and rescue and I was designing a tool to make their posts as useful […]
Curly and I have been playing a game called “How much information can you get with no information?” A fun field to play this on is Wikipedia’s top 1000 pages list, which provides a list of Wikipedia’s articles by pageviews on a specific date. The information I’m trying to get from such a list is […]