October 2024: Leiden and low-tech
Hello, and happy October!
This newsletter is a way to keep up with what I’m doing, and for me to share some things I like. This is the first email going out to real subscribers – welcome!
What have I been up to?
October has been bookended by time spent with my siblings.
At the start of the month, I was in the Royal Albert Hall watching my sister play percussion with Flowers Band for the National Brass Band Championships. Because I don’t live nearby, I don’t get to see her perform as often as I’d like – it’s been lovely to do it twice this autumn. It was even lovelier when I heard the results, and Flowers were crowned the National Champion Band.
At the other end of the month, I was visiting my brother in the Netherlands. He’s doing a year of study in Leiden, and he took a few days to hang out and explore the city. He showed me the university library, the botanical gardens, and some pretty tram lines running along green and leafy tracks. I’ve done a lot of travelling for work this year, and it was nice to have a trip that was just for my own enjoyment.
I’ve been in maintenance mode the rest of the month – quietly tinkering and making small improvements. On the web, I’ve made some changes to my website to make it easier for me to write more. And at home, I’ve finally cleaned the garage, put in some new shelves, and thrown away the junk left by the previous owners. (A task that only took me four years.)
What have I been writing?
Here are my favourites from this month:
Using static websites for tiny archives. I wrote about how I’ve been creating small, hand-written websites to organise my files.
This post has been quite popular, and I hope I’ve inspired more people to consider this approach. It’s low-tech and low-fi, and that simplicity has a bunch of benefits for long-term preservation.
Putting history on the map. I wrote an article for the Flickr blog about the map feature we built for the Commons Explorer. This has been a fun way to find historical photos in the Flickr Commons.
Flickr Foundation at iPres 2024. I posted an article on the Flickr Foundation blog about our trip to iPres. I summarised the conversations we had about long-term preservation, and shared some photos from a day trip to a printing museum and city archive in Antwerp.
Here’s a few smaller articles:
Making alt text more visible – a little JavaScript snippet to show alt text below images as I’m writing blog posts
Two examples of hover styles on images – playing with CSS hover states, including a bug in WebKit
And these are my “today I learned” posts:
What is the author_name in the list of tags on a Flickr photo?
Making an “under construction” element in pure CSS – party like it’s the 1990s.
How do the ispublic, isfriend and isfamily flags work in the Flickr API?
Use std::io::IsTerminal to detect if you’re running in the terminal in Rust
Next month: I’m already working on an article for World Digital Preservation Day, I’ve finally started writing my reflections on Twitter, and I have some stuff to say about redesigning my blog.
What’s made me smile?
🧙🏻♀️ Agatha All Along. This is the best thing Marvel has made in years. The writing is clever, the jokes are funny, and it’s loud and queer.
I’ve read several interviews with Jac Schaeffer, the showrunner, and I’m struck by how often she names and praises other members of her team – there’s no pretence that this was a solo effort. (Variety, The Wrap, Deadline. Spoilers for s01e07.)
🔪 This Book Kills and Catch Your Death, by Ravena Guron. I read these two murder mysteries this month. They were fun, easy reads with twisty solutions that still felt satisfying. I thought I’d guessed the killers, and I was dead wrong in both books.
🏛️ The M.C. Escher museum in The Hague. I mostly know Escher for his impossible objects and optical illusions, so it was cool to see his wider body of work – repeating patterns, tessellating reptiles, and his own face in a reflecting sphere.
🎶 Dandelions (waltz), by Lucy Ellis. This is a beautiful cover that I’ve been listening to on repeat.
🍟 Cabel Sasser’s talk at XOXO 2024. This is a talk about a mural and the little-known artist behind it, but more than that, it’s a reminder to look for the beauty and joy around us. There are so many exciting things in the world, if we just take the time to stop and look.
I hope you have a restful November, and I’ll send you another newsletter when it’s over.
Best,
~ Alex