Posted Sep 06, 2023

Learning Log, Aug 2023

Welllllp. I finally caught Covid this month. My husband and I have been able to dodge it for just over 3 1/2 years—having been on the more cautious end of the behavioral bell curve—but this summer surge came for us. This pandemic is awful but very thankfully we’re feeling better now, minus the odd coughing fit.

🌱 Digital Gardening

I disallowed Open AI’s GPTBot from crawling any of my sites’ content. Hidde’s blog post pretty much says it all.

What to Draw generator

This idea generator fetches a random photo for Unsplash following the user’s filters for a photo topic and orientation. Very recently, the Unsplash API started returning an error for requests containing orientation=any, instead of silently ignoring this (not-accepted) value as it did previously. I fixed the user filters so that if “Any” is selected for the topic or orientation, that parameter is not sent along in the request to the API. “Any” is the default value for both these filters, so fixing this meant un-borking the entire app. 👍🏼
I removed the “Architecture” topic from the filters list, as it seems to have been deprecated. Requests using that topic weren’t returning relevant results.

Seasons

The notification triggers API experiment was at some point deprecated. I was using these to send web notifications any time a seasonal holiday popped up throughout the year. I finally got around to replacing web notifications with a Google calendar.