Category: Web

Jeremy Keith posted about bookmarklets that he uses for testing websites where he specifically likes those that just pass on the current URL to a service. Those bookmarklets typically have a structure like:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?s='+escape(location.href)

I use those for my Friends WordPress plugin, too. That’s the one where you can follow people via RSS or ActivityPub and see the feed in a private section of your blog or even in Mastodon apps.

So, to follow the current website, you’d click on a bookmarklet like this:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?add-friend='+escape(location.href)

I have another WordPress plugin called Post Collection, where you can save articles to your blog. Both to be able to search them later, or, with my Send to E-Reader plugin, to send them to your favorite reading device as a compiled e-book with chapters. Although the bookmarklet that you’d typically install has some logic to post the whole current page body so that it also works on non-public posts, there is also a version that looks like this:

javascript:location.href='https://example.com?user=123&collect-post='+escape(location.href)

One particularly nice thing about these style of bookmarklets, is that while unfortunately they don’t (or didn’t?) work on Firefox Mobile, you can use an Android app called URL Forwarder to share a URL from any other app which comes in quite handy when you use other apps to discover interesting content (such as awesome the Glider app for Hacker News).

I have only added my two bookmarklets here, but most of the ones Jeremy mentioned could also be added.

By the way, I have some history with bookmarklets. In 2005, I created a bookmarklet manager called Blummy. It’s still alive but dormant (ping me if you want to try it, signups have been spammed to death).

Bookmarklets have come out of fashion but were very important back then. I wished browsers would support them better and make installing them a little less awkward. They are always like a little swiss army knife to me.

Members of my (some of them extended) family recently entered and left life, which is always an opportunity to think about my family. I’ve written before about my own efforts to keep family history in a wiki which is powered by my Family Wiki WordPress plugin (Github).

Every relative gets their own page, like on Wikipedia, just in private. This is why I am also not sharing screenshots, the plugin page has a few fake ones. Here is one screenshot of the editing page though (you can scroll away the bottom when you enter text):

It is not a very elaborate plugin but it was based on a born and died shortcode to create something like a family birthday calendar as well as a generally notable-dates calendar for your family.

In order to add some structure to this, I have now (manually) migrated this metadata to use Advanced Custom Fields through which you’d now not only enter the birth and death date but also parents and children.

With a new [name_with_bio] shortcode, you’ll then receive automatic output like this:

Name (born as Maiden name on January 1, 1900 in Place, died on March 31, 2000 (aged: 100) in Other Place; daughter of Father and Mother; sibling of Brother and Sister; parent of Daughter and Son)

This metadata might make it possible to render a family tree later on, since now the pages are interconnected with each other. Maybe something like this already exists for ACF, I looked a while back and there wasn’t.

Just to recap: my personal mission is to keep stories of my relatives alive, where and what they worked on, who they visited, what adventures they might have encountered. In general: anecdotes, maybe with some pictures. Also, for living relatives, their contact data.

This is why I deem a wiki format to be superior to all those geneaology sites. I don’t value the huge amout of connections to some far-removed relatives that they encourage to build. I care about those that I might have got to know or just missed.

And, having a WordPress blog (network) already, it’s easy to put this on WordPress vs. using a dedicated wiki (and actually it’s quite easy to find cheap WordPress hosting). I had the original versions on a Mediawiki but it was quite a hassle to maintain, now the data is just in a WordPress. Should my plugin no longer work, nothing is lost since the wiki pages are just plain WordPress pages. Some of the nicities will go away but the meat is in the writing.

Oh, and of course a benefit of a wiki is that other relatives can also contribute. In reality, it’s hard to get them to contribute but when they do, they add some details I didn’t know and that’s just worth so much for me!

I can highly recommend to try keeping family history in such a way. It’s a really nice way to pass this on to further generations of your family, and also for my own reference when my poor memory strikes again.

Reblog via Nathan Wrigley

The book Pull Requests and Code Review: Best Practices for Developers has been pointed out to me by my colleague Paulo Pinto, and I liked it.

I always find it hard to express what a makes a good code review, this book attempts to describe it. There are probably lots of other opinions about and for better recommendations but I liked this one for it trying to give some advice that I can agree with.

You can buy the book for “name-your-price” or check out the Github repo and download or build the format you want to read it in.

It has been a somewhat interesting coincidence that I am currently without voice because of a cold, and OpenAI has just released some really good Text-to-Speech voices with their Create speech API. So in preparation for a meeting today, I created a little script that will output the spoke audio what I typed.

Since the voice will read exactly what’s there, I added a spell fixer that will (through ChatGPT) automatically fix typos before it’s sent to the audio API.

$ php talk.php
Voice: echo
Fix spelling: off
Speed: 1.0
> hi everyone and welcoem to tis meetin
> sc
Fix spelling: on
> hi everyone and welcoem to tis meetin
Hi everyone and welcome to this meeting.
> s2
Speed: 2
> my voice is gone because of a pretty string cold that iv pickd up
My voice is gone because of a pretty strong cold that I've picked up.
> s1.1
Speed: 1.1
> my voice is gone because of a pretty string cold that iv pickd up
My voice is gone because of a pretty strong cold that I've picked up.
> turns out, even suing the streaming audio aip, typing and then waiting for the srsult is too lsow for a conversation. but it's been interesting
Turns out, even using the streaming audio API, typing and then waiting for the result is too slow for a conversation. But it's been interesting.
> sc
Fix spelling: off
> without spell fixer it's faster but for good intonation it only makes sense to send full sentences, not single words as soon as they have been typed. maybe that can also be solved, but that's for the next experiment

In any case, it’s been fun. Thanks Simon for highlighting the API.