Highlights

• I added 88 new programmatically-generated articles to Is It Keto.
• With 100k monthly pageviews, it’s time to explore new ways of working with Is It Keto’s audience.
• I created a KVM over IP device that requires <$100 in hardware.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

Add 100 new articles to Is It Keto

• Result: Added 88 new articles to Is It Keto
• Grade: B

Programmatically generating content is harder than I expected. It’s easy to generate the score and nutrition data, but it’s tough to templatize lots of text that fits a wide range of products.

In part one, I described my arduous journey to capture my old home movies in digital format and divide them into individual scenes. After processing all the clips, I wanted the experience of exploring them to be as simple as looking up clips on YouTube. Because these videos are my family’s private memories, actual YouTube is too public. I needed a way to share them that was both user-friendly and secure.

Goal

This tutorial shows you how to edit digitized video captures into smaller clips that you can publish on your own password-protected MediaGoblin server. You’ll use a free Heroku dyno, so your only ongoing cost for running this private media server is the cost of storage on Google Cloud Storage, which is 2.3 cents per GB.

I used this workflow to edit and share my family’s home videos at a cost of only $0.77 per month. For the detailed backstory, check out the blog post, “My Eight-Year Quest to Digitize 45 Videotapes.” You can use this workflow for any kind of video file that contains lots of subclips that you’d like to chop out and share.

For the last eight years, I’ve carried around this box of videotapes through four different apartments and one house. They’re family home videos from my childhood.

After 600+ hours of work, I finally digitized and organized them well enough to throw away the original tapes. Here’s what the footage looks like now:

Nonviolent Communication describes a communication style centered around sharing vulnerability and offering empathy. One of its biggest strengths is in how it highlights common patterns of lazy communication that exclude personal feelings or critical thinking. I also found its discussion of empathy illuminating, as it made me realize ways that I could improve my skills at listening empathetically.