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Refactoring extinction.fyi

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Last weekend, I launched a new side project called extinction.fyi to share news about the climate emergency. The site looked like the screenshot below, because I wanted it to provoke a response in people.

Old version of extinction.link complete with skulls and strapline "Documenting the end times"

Several things then happened. Some people on the Fediverse, quite rightly, asked for an RSS feed. As I was just hand-coding a simple HTML file using GitHub pages served from a repository, I tried using a service that tried to parse the HTML into a feed. It was sub-optimal, to say the least.

In addition, and as I mentioned in the original post announcing this side project, my wife was not a fan of the skulls and the strapline ‘Documenting the end times’. She mentioned this on several occasions, so I thought it was probably worth doing something about it for the sake of marital harmony.

To cut a long story short, I’ve refactored the site in several ways to create a site that now looks like the image below. The page itself is a styled RSS feed meaning it no longer relies on a third-party service.

New version of extinction.link with new logo (earth on fire) and strapline "Documenting the climate emergency"

This took a much longer time to achieve than I anticipated, mainly because I had no clue what I was doing, had to look up everything, and experiment/fail along the way.

For those interested, here was my thought processes and the tools I used:

  1. I remembered that Firefox used to style RSS pages nicely, so I searched for how to do something similar. This post gave tantalising clues, but this one was more useful.
  2. I’ve never created a page in XML before and styled it using XSL, so that was a huge learning curve. In addition, XML is really fussy when it comes to structuring data and using special characters. So that was fun.
  3. I decided which fields to use in my XML by following the W3C guidelines and seeing what authors of the two blog posts referenced above did. There was a lot of trial-and-error, where the W3C feed validation service was invaluable.
  4. I’d been just using the GitHub web interface because it’s easier when switching between devices. However, this became annoying when moving and editing many files and folders, so I started using Atom again, which integrates nicely with GitHub workflows (push/pull, etc.)
  5. The logo is actually courtesy of my daughter, who showed me that on WhatsApp (which I don’t use) you can merge emojis. So I asked my wife to send me the combined emoji for fire and earth, which is displayed as a WebP file, to reduce the filesize.
  6. In terms of the strapline, I wanted to keep it brief, so I had a bit of a think and a play around with words and came up with “Documenting the climate emergency”.

The only other thing to mention is that I used opengraph.xyz to add previews for various social networks. That works well for the about and faq pages, but I haven’t got it to play nicely with the XML on the index page.

Copy/pasting the existing news from HTML to XML RSS format was tedious, so I’m glad I only had 30 items to convert!

If you’d like to suggest any changes to the site, please check out the code repository and send issues or pull request. You can visit the site itself at extinction.fyi and also subscribe via RSS by simply adding that URL to your feed reader.

This post is Day 95 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com. 

Your liberty will not survive combat drones

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Back in 2008, Vinay Gupta wrote The Second Amendment in Iraq, Combat Robotics, and the Future of Human Liberty. He shortened this long title in his blog sidebar to ‘your liberty will not survive combat robots’. I think he was spot on, but the technology is not robots, but drones.

Over the last couple of days I’ve seen tweets like these about fairly disturbing developments in the news:

https://twitter.com/cori_crider/status/640905374980288512

https://twitter.com/DronesUAVs/status/641436451691888640

I don’t want terrorists threatening the peace and stability of where I live any more than the next person. But I also don’t want a situation where a government I disagree with has the technology to hunt me down and kill me with drones.

As Vinay states in that article:

Developing robotic combat capabilities will have three effects. Firstly, it will enable governments to successfully fight insurgencies abroad… Secondly, those combat robotics capabilities are very similar technologically to the capabilities required to control and oppress the domestic population… Finally, use of these technologies in foreign wars will force those who wish to do battle with the US for their political autonomy to strike at the US civilian population, as there will be no effective way of combatting US foreign policy in the field.

Our liberties are being slowly eroded and chipped away in the name of convenience and the ‘war on terror’. And, right now, I (and many other people like me) feel pretty much powerless to stop it.

A Hacker News for education?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I visit Hacker News every day. It’s a great resource of technie-related things – not just code stuff but things that people who work in that kind of area are likely to be interested in.

I’ve created something similar: http://ednews.meteor.com

Eight years ago, Will Richardson tried to create a ‘Digg-like site’. For whatever reason, it didn’t work in the medium to long-term. But his reasoning still stands:

[Th]is is all stemming from a bigger burr in my brain of late that has to do with the seeming randomness of all of the really great work that people in this community are starting to create. It’s just feeling like it’s all over the place, and that if we could in some way get our collective act together, we could start creating an incredibly valuable resource. I know it’s all about small pieces loosely joined, but wouldn’t it be great to point the newcomers to one spot that was a clearinghouse for all of this work? Not to mention the value it would have to us old timers in terms of bringing people in. I mean all of a sudden, it seems like everyone has a wiki, and most all of them have great intent and good content. But there’s also a lot of duplication of effort, and more importantly, dis-connection, at least that what it feels like to me.

Yes, these days we have Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and many other social networks. But if the tech community find value in Hacker News (and they do!) why not one for education? I know there’s sites like Spigot but, while I find them useful, they’re not community-contributed links.

If there’s interest and it gains some traction, then I’ll work together with a few folks to deploy it to its own server/domain. 🙂

Try it! Add some links of your own: http://ednews.meteor.com

PS Let me know in the comments what you think (and if you have any problems with it!) I came up with the idea literally just now and did a quick search to see how I could deploy something today!

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