It’s always useful for me at the end of the year to reflect back on the past year’s work. I think this has been a great year for the Web Origami project and the Origami language. Goals for 2024 At the start of the year I set some specific goals for the project, all in service of building awareness of the project. These were all in addition to the...
I’ve posted a new Origami intro screencast that covers some of the basics of the Origami language: This screencast doesn’t give a complete introduction yet, but I think the production process I’m using is itself interesting and worth sharing. Videos are a vital form of documentation but: Videos take forever to produce — for me, easily an hour or...
I’d love to find a few new people to try out the Origami programming language for creating websites — maybe you? Maybe you have any of these goals: Are thinking of making a site for a passion project but aren’t sure how Have an existing site you want to move off a platform (WordPress, say) to something you control Want to try rewriting a site to...
I am deeply touched by the warm response to my recent MomBoard: E-ink display for a parent with amnesia post. It got much more circulation on Mastodon that I usually get, and overnight someone posted it to Hacker News — where it shot to the #1 story. I discovered this after waking up and finding my inbox full of LinkedIn requests. The post stayed...
Today marks two years since I first set up an e-ink display in my mom’s apartment to help her live on her own with amnesia. The display has worked extremely well during those two years, so I’m sharing the basic set-up in case others find it useful for similar situations. Note: unless you have specific experience caring for someone who has amnesia...
I was able retire an old #Heroku site by copying the content to a completely #static #website. Instead of resurrecting the source project and rewriting it, I used the #WebOrigami crawl command to retrieve the static files. The @crawl picked up all but a few exotically-referenced resources that I copied over by hand. I dropped it all on Netlify....
The basic site auditing tool in #WebOrigami can work against a site defined in many ways: a data file, files in the file system, an Origami program — or a live #website running in production. In the video I show an audit of the unbelievably massive Space Jam. For a site with 350+ handwritten HTML files, it contains surprisingly few broken...
A simple protocol lets you make the contents of your #smallweb / #indieweb site more fully discoverable and explorable by interested users. This can also let site A see what resources site B offers. I’ve been working on this in the spirit of the web’s simple, venerable, and immensely valuable View Source facility. View Source just lets you view a...
I made a short video walking through how I generate OpenGraph images for the pages on my blog using Origami. This video is an experiment. It takes me ages to create polished documentation or videos — and that’s discouraged me from creating anything at all! I thought I’d try recording a video with only minimal rehearsal and no editing and see if...
I want to test RSS-to-Mastodon posting via MastoFeed, so here’s a test post with a photo of Mojo, who wants to come inside. Update: I couldn’t get MastoFeed to work, and ended up following these instructions for Pipedream instead.
To demonstrate that Origami is a good language for building #smallweb / #indieweb blogs, I built a fun sample blog reenvisioning Henry David Thoreau has a modern influencer with a lifestyle blog about off-grid living. Creating a site in Origami is completely different than creating a site in any other tool I know of. Origami isn’t a blog engine...
Each month this year I’m trying to post a sample website written in Origami, a declarative programming language at the level of #HTML and #CSS for defining websites. This month’s sample is Aventour Expeditions, a site for an outdoor travel company. It’s easy to have Origami call other template languages, so for this sample I used the Handlebars...
It’s useful to be able to apply templates written in a language like #Handlebars to things in the shell. The Origami #CLI lets you invoke JavaScript functions defined in .js files, but you can now also identify a handler for any file extension — like OS app file associations, but for a CLI....
Suppose you want a photo blog that’s not on Tumblr or Instagram. Maybe you don’t like being sold, or want to draw outside the lines, or want photos as part of your own site. What would a #smallweb alternative look like that let you post a photo and caption from your phone? I made a proof-of-concept street art photo blog that supports this...