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Work: despite a good overall response rate from hosts listed on our WTMG map, it sometimes happens that an often-contacted host is not responding anymore. The annoying experience of being ignored is on top of the list of the feedback we receive from travellers. This month, we want to set up sustainable procedures to soft-unlist abandoned accounts.
Until now, we’ve unlisted abandoned accounts once per year, with a crude admin script. This time, we’re defining nuanced conditions for these accounts, based on their recent response rate, response time, and more. To implement these, I’m writing the largest SQL queries I’ve ever written, CTE-galore 😄. Using them, we will be able to do a meaningful, semi-automated cleanup more regularly.
This is also the first application of the Postgres replica of our Firestore, which I might write more about later.
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WWII: it was hard to miss that this year marks the 80th birthday of many significant events of World War II. To learn more about its causes and effects, I’ve been listening to D-Day: The Tide Turns, Adolf Hitler: Rise and Downfall, two excellent podcasts from the Noiser network. I can strongly recommend both so far! They’re both engrossing and informative, exploring background factors, as well as driving the narrative of major events with apt sound effects. I also started reading Anne Frank’s diary (the original publication in Dutch), and I picked up Battlefield V during a sale. That last one is more for entertainment than for learning, but it is inspired on some lesser-known events of WWII, including the sabotage of Vemork heavy water plant, which I’ve learned, after reading the previous Wikipedia article, was a grim and eventually impressive series of daring operations.
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Readup: I’m still dreaming about Readup’s potential, particularly about how it might relate to the fediverse. I recently read the Webmention spec (I think it’s the first W3C spec I read from start to finish!). It would be cool to send out webmentions with Readup, but I’m wondering how many sites support it. I also started working on some glue code to put my most recent Readup posts on my site here.