Reading List

The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.

Hold Off on Litestream 0.5.0

mtlynch.io

Litestream is an open-source tool that backs up SQLite databases to cloud storage in real time. I love it and use it in all of my projects.

Litestream is owned by Fly.io, and they paused development on Litestream for almost two years in favor of an alternative project called LiteFS. Two weeks ago, Ben Johnson, Litestream’s creator and lead developer, announced that they were shifting focus back to Litestream and had just published a new release, 0.5.0.

Read My Blog With Javascript

mtlynch.io

You can now read my blog with client-side JavaScript. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you can.

Maybe you want to add a blogroll to your site with a list of recent posts from your favorite blogs, but you don’t want to fetch them server side. If you wanted to use JavaScript to show my five most recent post titles, you’d write some code like this:

fetch("https://mtlynch.io/index.xml")
 .then((response) => response.text())
 .then((str) => new DOMParser().parseFromString(str, "application/xml"))
 .then((data) => {
 const articles = [...data.querySelectorAll("item")].map((item) => ({
 title: item.querySelector("title").textContent,
 date: new Date(item.querySelector("pubDate").textContent),
 }));

 // Sort articles by date, newest to oldest.
 articles.sort((a, b) => b.date - a.date);

 // Print the titles of the 5 most recent articles.
 articles.slice(0, 5).forEach((article) => console.log(article.title));
 });

The above code produces this output:

Refactoring English: Month 10

mtlynch.io

New here?

Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and founder of small, indie tech businesses. I’m currently working on a book called Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers.

Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my book and my professional life overall.

Highlights

  • I’m experimenting with low-investment, low-payoff-style blog posts.
  • I’m adjusting my strategy for freelance editing to work specifically with people who have read my book.
  • My intuition was way off about the odds of reaching the front page of Hacker News.

Goal grades

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

List of 2x-resolution xkcd Cartoons

mtlynch.io

This is a list of all the xkcd cartoons that are available in 2x resolution, as of today’s date.

See the accompanying post, “Get xkcd Cartoons at 2x Resolution,” for an explanation.

Get xkcd Cartoons at 2x Resolution

mtlynch.io

I recently learned a neat trick from Marcus Buffett: xkcd has an undocumented way to get images of the cartoons at double their normal resolution.

The _2x trick

For example, xkcd #2582 “Data Trap” lists this URL as the direct link:

That leads to this 275x275px image, quite small by today’s standards:

But there’s a trick! Add a _2x to the filename in the URL:

That gives you a version that’s 2x the original resolution, at 550x550px: