“Neat” – as applied to drinks served in bars – refers to a shot of liquor poured directly from the bottle and into a glass. There is no chilling involved with a “neat” drink. There is never an additional ingredient in a drink served “neat”. Up, Neat, Straight Up, or On the Rocks The Custom Elements V1 spec has reached concensus and implementations are going well, which is all great news, but what I find surprising is the lack of VanillaJS custom elements on WebComponents.

I love custom elements! I've been building UIs with them since Polymer 0.5 was announced in 2014. One of the things that I've questioned with custom elements has been Shadow DOM and its relationship to CSS. This page is an experiment for comparing custom elements with and without Shadow DOM. Press the buttons below and 1,000 spinners will be displayed on the page, when 'Light' is pressed the custom element uses CSS defined for the whole page, and when 'Shadow' is pressed the custom elements have a style sheet attached to their Shadow DOM, and when 'External' is pressed the CSS for the element is still encapsulated in the Shadow DOM, but it is loaded as an external stylesheet.

Rats, I’m going to be travelling on the 28th and will miss this StartupGrind event: [https://www.startupgrind.com/events/details/startup-grind-triangle-presents-how-transloc-scaled-in-the-triangle-and-exited-to-ford#/](How Transloc Scaled in the Triangle and Exited to Ford).

Paul Kinlan’s A simple clientside templating langauge has a client side templating library using data- attributes, and the implementation comes in at around 25 lines of code. Definitely a great example to demystify templating and demonstrate that you don’t always need a framework or large library to get the functionality you want. Stamp is a similar library I put together a few years ago with the same goals in mind, but weights in at 250 lines of code.

Via TechCrunch: Ford acquires Autonomic and TransLoc as it evolves its mobility business It’s great to see another great North Carolina company get recognized.

One of the goals with my new blogging system has been a flow for getting hand drawn images onto the blog. I will admit this is purely driven by jealousy of the awesome drawings on the morning paper. I didn’t know if I’d ever find a setup I would like until I got to borrow a Google Pixelbook, which is just an amazing machine and deserves a writeup on its own, but has several key features, such as the ability to run Android apps and the ability to fold over and turn into a tablet, along with one of the best digital pens I’ve ever used.

Brid.gy has a cool feature for automatically posting blog posts to Twitter, which is interesting because it uses Webmentions to kick off the whole process. I.e. just including the link: <a href="https://brid.gy/publish/twitter"></a> The webmention sent to brig.gy triggers it to look back at the post, parse it and look for microformats indicating what content to publish, and then posts it to Twitter. Note that this also works for Facebook and Flickr, and you obviously need to authorize brid.

I just recently finished adding support for Twitter metadata to the blog, mostly motivaged by brid.gy’s ability to use Webmentions to automatically post my blog entries to Twitter. As I worked on the Twitter metadata I wondered if other silos had their own metadata they supported. Indeed they do, and Kevin Marks brilliantly demonstrates how ridiculous the situation is by creating a blog post that appears different in every silo.

This SingularityHub post brings a good perspective on the economics of asteroid mining: Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids Besides, the idea of our gateway to becoming a space faring civilization being bootstrapped from a space gas station is so much more Expanse level scifi that I can’t help but like it.

Looks like Google Cloud Platform now has a Free Tier. I know Google App Engine has always had a free tier, it’s nice to see Cloud Platform offer something similar. That explains why my monthly bill for hosting my blog went from $9/month to around 0.75$/month. The only thing I exceed the free tier on is egress bandwidth.

There’s a road under that, somewhere.

As Chris suggested, I have gone beyond my minimal webmentions, and thanks to the heavy lifting of Will Norris, I got to avoid handwriting a microformats parser in the process. This is what they should look like in action:

Underdash is neat project in the same vein as my VanillaJS. While VanillaJS shows you how to build common web framework sample apps using just vanilla JS, the Underdash site shows you how to make the most of JS intrinsics without the need for a JS utility library.

The End of Crowdsourcing With Russian bots on Twitter, the attack on Rotten Tomatoes scores, the deluge of fake comments sent to the FCC, and even attacks on a DARPA Network Challenge, I think 2018 is the beginning of the end for crowdsourcing. There are two problems to solve, the first is that some of these systems are trying to extract a signal from noisy data, and it only takes a small number of bad actors to intentionally inject a strong signal into that data stream and overwhelm the real signal.

Michael Singletary Hoping this post, syndication, and backfeeding works as expected! Welcome!

Chris Aldrich has the honor of being the first sender of an organic incoming Webmention received on bitworking.org, which you can see on this post. I say “organic” because I’ve been using all the testing tools listed on the indieweb.org site to test my implementation.

Chris Aldrich I suspect that next, with a tad bit of parsing using microformats, you can add some display elements to your webmentions to indicate the author, their url, date/time, and actually include the reply text to have a better UI for them. Indeed, my current implementation just shows the validated Webmention links, and my plan is to slowly enhance them over time. I think, just like in the case of the basic Webmention support, Will Norris may have my back again and have already done the heavy lifting for Microformats and Go.

Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21 Test 22 Test 23

Ryan Barrett celebrating over 1 Million Webmentions in the wild. Not bad for a specification that only became a recommendation a year ago.

Feel free to ignore, just testing WebMentions. Updated to include a second link,