I started learning JavaScript in Mayish 2022. I wanted to make tools to address some of the things I disliked about Google search, and after looking around it seemed like JavaScript was the best solution. So I signed up for a course, thrashed and flailed my way through 50 of the 59 lessons, and then […]
I Talk to the Treeeeessss… with a ChatGPT API Call
I’ve learned enough since last October that I can revisit my project of having Raleigh’s trees act as tour guides for surrounding areas. The city of Raleigh offers an open dataset of city trees. Not every last tree in the city, of course, mostly trees on city property. My old program searched the tree database, […]
AI Is Better With Human Attention As Search Context
Human attention as context for Internet search is immensely powerful. Having an understanding of WHEN a topic was of particular interest allows you to create date-bounded searches that provide more information-rich results and less junk. Which is why it drives me absolutely bonkers that we have a gold mine of human attention records in the […]
Mixing Mojeek and Wikipedia
I really am trying to not get distracted by the Mojeek API, but people keep saying how bad Web search is right now, and the more they say that the more I think of other options. I very much like the way Mojeek offers the ability to “focus” your search by limiting it to a […]
Gossip Machine As An Information Trap
Hot diggity! I made my first Web monitoring tool! If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve heard me talk about Gossip Machine. At its core, Gossip Machine analyzes a Wikipedia article’s page views over a given time period and identifies days with unusually high page views. The idea is that audience attention […]
Tinkering With WikiTwister
I’m using the holiday to work on WikiTwister, which is a utility site with tools designed to extract information from Wikipedia. This will be my SIXTH (!) hand-coded Web site this year (what the heck, Calishain.) Every time I make a site I try to make it one step better than the one before. With […]
Making the Trees Talk
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 […]
Making a MegaGladys
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 […]
Turning A Wikipedia Popularity List Into a News Search
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 […]