I still think it's rude to return MBs of data if your client device might be an inexpensive mobile phone, but for things like server-to-server API responses I May have been being way too early 2000s in my thinking Turns out returning 10+ MB of JSON works fine these days!

We've been using our electric assist "mama-chari" a lot more recently. I've been taking it to a local coffee shop that I'd usually walk (15 minutes) or drive (5 minutes)to and it's been great. My wife has been taking it to her parent's house (5.5km away) where I'd either drive them round trip or we'd take the train. Travel time ends up being about the same regardless of the method of transport we take.

What I like the most about cycling is how you can travel quickly and you're not disconnected from your environment like you are with a car. It feels more human.

What’s cool about this: you can watch for mentions of whatever you want, and those come to you in the same app where your other feeds live.

It's a little bittersweet — on the one hand it feels good as I know that I have a new solution but, on the other, it feels a little sad that the fruits of so much time and effort are now redundant.

I just took a quick look at my server logs. And I see that there are some bots that are constantly crawling my site. If that would be search engines, feed readers etc. that wouldn’t be a problem. But this are crawlers by companies whose websites try to se

Today marks 10 years since 3/11, the great earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku that resulted in tens of thousands dead or missing and even more displaced from the nuclear accident in Fukushima. 3/11 was one of those days that I'll never forget and I still vividly remember.

A few months prior to 3/11 I had gotten married my wife in Japan and my parents were coming to meet her family for the first time. They had a direct flight from Houston, Texas, which is about 13 hours and were scheduled to land around 4pm on March 11th, 2011. I was riding the Narita Express to meet them at the airport and chatting with my old Japanese teacher in US on Messenger about horrible the earthquake was in New Zealand a couple weeks prior.

Initially when the train started shaking I had thought it was the usual movement of the train, people move around to get disembark quicker or driver's coming in a bit hot and has to brake a harder than usual. When it felt like the train had a very real possibility of tipping (it wasn't close, in retrospect) is when I realized this was something different.

The trains immediately shutdown and Shinagawa station was a madhouse. The engineers (I'm guessing) on a business trip on the train had the right idea, they immediately went to the nearest hotel and booked room. I wish I had done that.

My parents were still in the air, so I had no way to contact them. Apparently they circled Tokyo for a few, before re-fueling at Yokota airbase, before continuing on to Osaka – landing in the wrong part of the country.

After the earthquake you couldn't make a telephone call in Japan. All the circuits were busy all the time. But the internet and Twitter worked great. I had my laptop and a 3G modem with me. Using my US number on Skype, I could use US telephone circuits, which weren't overloaded, and contact other family in the US to let them know what was happening and that I was fine.

We found a hotel that'd let us stay in their lobby. We eventually left to go find food, but everything was sold out everywhere. The only place we found with food was a Yoshinoya with a long and slow moving line. After waiting for what felt like 30 minutes and making little progress we noticed that, despite this line not moving, people seemed to be coming and going. We were in the line for take-out. Eating in we could get service almost immediately. Due to the high volume of customers they were rationing beef – which they made sure we'd be ok with before we ordered.

After eating we returned to the hotel to stay the night on hard marble floors with a bunch of other stranded people. The morning it felt almost oddly normal. A couple of backpackers asked if we knew where the nearest hostel was, but we were of no use. We found a different hotel that was serving nice warm breakfast with the type of service that makes you feel like everything's gonna be all right.

My parents managed to find their way to the Shinkansen and made it to Shinyokohama. We attempted to ride the Tokaido-line to Yokohama but it was after seeing 3 trains come bursting at the seams packed with people, we looked for alternative routes to meet my parents. Funny enough, we also rode the Shinkansen to Shinyokohama. It was still standing room only, but at least you could breath. And the journey was only 7 or 8 minutes.

What I experienced on 3/11 pales in comparison to those that lost their lives and saw their homes and loved ones vanish before their eyes. 10 years later and while things look like they've rebuilt, they'll never be the same.

However, it’s not just about raw size, but about an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers.

I bookmarked this post over on the Tanzawa blog, but I felt this post was worth a proper response on my regular blog.

Ben's thinking about the small web overlaps a lot with what I think: the small web is beautiful. Not just small size (so it's fast, uses less power and so forth), but as he says an "ethos of small". He expands to say we should use smaller images and fewer scripts. (Consistent, no-nonsense, efficient and lazy loading images were actually a major motivating factor for me starting Tanzawa)

While Ben extends this ethos of small about caring about your users - I feel it goes a step further than that.
An "ethos of small" is about respecting your readers. Respect that they may not be on the latest and greatest machine. Respect they might be on a limit Internet plan. Respect they might be running on battery. Respect their (and your) privacy.

The small web is about "just enough". Just enough code. Just enough html/css/Javascript. Just enough infrastructure. We are the small web: Just enough.

I started working on replies in Tanzawa. Introducing Turbo to add some dynamism to admin interface. It’s turned into a bigger rabbit hole than expected. I imagine most rails devs are familiar with the basics of Turbo (Links) but as a Django dev, things like Turbo aren’t included, so there’s a bit of a learning curve for me to implement it properly. That said – it’s coming along.

With Australia moving to make the tech companies pay for news, Facebook took a hard line, while Google has struck deals to pay publishers.

Government services and NGOs and more getting blocked on Facebook so they don't need to pay journalists for the work. Another example of why shouldn't rely on free platforms. You need a site that you own and to encourage people to use it else your work just becomes "collateral damage".

The sooner the world stops using Mark's site as an internet portal the better.