I had to change my wordpress username as it contained characters that were fine back when I started this blog in 2005, but didn’t work for federation. So this is a test to see if the post will properly federate now that I’ve changed the username. Here’s hoping!

You can now follow the blog on Mastodon by searching for:

blog@www.ericsbinaryworld.com

Then you can follow and see all of the blog’s posts. There is a bit of an error with my author posts, but since I’m the only author on this blog (I think there are maybe 2 posts by my brother), it’s not a big deal. I’m not sure what the etiquette / norms are if someone has a blog on the Fediverse. Is it gauche for me to also post about those my blog posts on my own Mastodon account? I expect the norms will evolve along with the Fediverse, especially as it expands to include Facebook and Tumblr (assuming their owners go along with that idea). For now I’m probably going to post a limited number of blog posts on my Mastodon account - I guess as a way of boosting. Or maybe I’ll just boost my blog’s posts? Again, I imagine it’s going to evolve for all of us as time goes on. (Although, as I wrote that previous sentence, I guess boosting it makes the most sense)

I started off the year mostly working on Python projects. For January and February I finally started making some great progress with understanding modern web frameworks and use of CSS frameworks rather than rolling my own. This not only helped with the Prophecy Practicum project, but would form the backbone to a lot of coding this year. I also wrote a utility to tally up my videos for my end of year video game roundup, saving me literal hours of time. As you can read from following the link above, I also worked on my long-running Extra Life Donation Tracker code.

November was not a huge programming month for me. On the weekends I was a little more focused with family stuff and videogames. But I did manage work on a couple projects.

Ever since 2010, I’ve been been using Python to automatically post my top 3 artists to Twitter. In 2020, it even became my first package on Pypi. With activity picking up on Mastodon, I ported the code over to that site. I also used the opportunity to clean up the code bit to my more modern coding standards. I haven’t created a package yet, but may soon enough.
I also did some work on my Extra Life Donation Tracker. I’d pulled out the API so that others could build on it, but, as a result, I was creating a Team object from the API rather than the inheritance version. I did a workaround to make it work, but I’m going to have to work at the code a bit more to make it less clunky.

I was on Identi.ca back when it first launched and I joined Mastodon a few years ago. Identi.ca had a decent number of FLOSS devs at the time, but by the time of Mastodon, Twitter was ascendant. So “no one” was on Mastodon. Even a few of the FLOSS developers I followed on Mastodon never posted on there. Network effects - it’s the reason almost everyone who threatens to leave Facebook never does; social media is only useful if you can be social (ie your friends/acquaintances are on it).