Week 27, 2020

Over the weekend, I co-organized IndieWebCamp West 2020. This was a replacement for a physical event that I have attended for the last few years in Portland, Oregon. I attended many in-person IndieWebCamps last year, and it is looking like we won’t be having such things for the foreseeable future.

We’ve tried online IndieWebCamps before, but I felt we missed some opportunities in the past. So, we tried some new things. The whole event was conducted using Zoom.

• A Cook Your Own Dinner pre-party where we shared a meal together and socialized.
• A room serving as a ‘Hallway Track’ for off-topic chatting
• Two rooms with 4 each.

The sessions were a good mix of conversation types. And even afterward, I found myself sitting up each night after the event just chatting with people. It was the first time I feel we captured more of the in-person Indieweb feeling by adding in those social opportunities.

Hoping for an East Coast timezone event later this year, and some popup sessions in between, to keep things alive. If not for the current state of the world, we might have had one IndieWebCamp a month in 2020. We’d already had one in February, an Online one, and one in March that was converted into a remote event last minute.

This evening I released Simple Location 4.1.5. This was prompted by the realization that Wikimedia Maps was no longer permitting third-party usage.

• I replaced it with Yandex Maps, which doesn’t require an API key either for non-commercial use. I may additional Yandex services in future.
• I also added Geoapify as a map provider…I may also add in its geocoding service in future.
• Open Route Service, as it is an open initiative, is now supported as a geolocation/elevation provider.  I like to support any open source options when I can.
• Preliminary Moon Phase calculation, though the formula is not up to my standards and needs to be replaced. I spent 20 minutes on it and I spent a week learning enough about how to adjust the sunrise and sunset based on location and elevation.

In the last major update to Simple Location, 4.1, I added in additional icon sets. In this version, I redid the presentation of all of the widgets to show additional properties and standardized all the widgets so they use the same display logic.

So what is next:

• In a previous version, I switched to storing everything in metric(meters, celsius, etc).  I already convert back to imperial measurement for temperature if the configuration option is set. I still need to do so for other metrics…as I’m showing visibility and rain in metric still. I need to do the same on the backend. But as someone who uses Fahrenheit and Feet…I would use this.
• I also continue to think of what other weather parameters I can offer and display. Heat index, dewpoint, which are derived from the humidity and temperature, would be relatively easy to answer.
• Being able to pull in station data from my own weather station is still a goal. The issue with this is designing an implementation that is not limited to working only with my setup, and always pulls from my endpoint except if they are not available.
  • I have the concept of zones for location, which are areas around a location. Anything inside of a zone will be hidden on a post, and the label replaced with the zone name.
  • A long time ago, I declared I wanted to add venues for location, which would essentially be to allow for archive pages for locations.
  • Now I’m looking at stations, which would be a fixed weather location.

The above three things are too similar for me to feel comfortable going any further till I think about this. Zones may need to stay separate, as they are a privacy matter. But stations and venues are both public items…but no one posts from a weather station…they might post from a venue…so maybe I should build stations regardless.

If I do build the station model, it would likely merge custom stations like mine with station IDs from the Met Office, National Weather Service, OpenWeatherMap and AerisWeather, as well as any future services that support weather stations, and allow those to be kept in a list. It would then have to determine if it was close to such a station…and use that data. Not quite sure how to do that simply.