Developer Diary, International Romani Day

Today marks International Romani Day, a day to celebrate Romani culture and raise awareness of the issues facing Romani people. Given the evidence from language and DNA, the Romani seem to have originated in India, probably among the Doma. They appear to have left India around fifteen centuries ago, and managed to make it to the Balkans, and spread from there into Europe.

You probably already know about their historical plight in Europe, from slavery in the east, blamed for Ottoman expansion in the west, forced to assimilate, and subject to genocide during World War II. People still associate their subculture with crime, one of the reasons that you don’t find me using the more common term for the group, with overt discrimination, forced sterilization, and ethnic cleansing occurring far more recently and in far more reputable countries than you probably want to think about.

Anyway, on to the week’s projects.

Entropy Arbitrage

GitHub - jcolag/entropy-arbitrage-code

Primarily, probably to nobody’s surprise, I added styles for any inbound reply Webmentions. Despite having an example reply to look at, the styles for them apparently never rolled out. Along the way, I updated the h-cards, since I noticed that everything jammed up into the a link, even though a span wraps it.

However, I also added the jekyll-compose plugin on the development side. This gives me a consistent process for creating and managing draft posts, in particular. For the last few years, I’ve created drafts through a combination of writing them in my notes and manually exporting them and creating them as posts and hoping that I finish the post before the artificial deadline that I dropped in the front-matter.

Oh, and I updated a few more emoji names for clarity. Most required my adding a multi-word name instead of one with underscores, such as thumbs-up 👍 and the like, but I also noticed that the star ⭐ and radio 📻 emoji don’t have unique names at all, so I now refer to them in posts as “pentacle” and “boombox,” for lack of a cleaner-and-unused term on either.

Earburn

GitHub - jcolag/earburn

You might remember that I mentioned the changes to my h-card representations, a couple of paragraphs back. This came up because Earburn now shows the first h-card on the current webpage, when you click the icon, so I finally got a good look at how mine looks.

I have not pushed these changes out to Mozilla, yet.

Next

I don’t know if I’ll get to it, but I want to start at least looking into how to “upgrade” Earburn to the Manifest version 3 API, or however they try to phrase that.

As mentioned last week, library updates and changes to Notoboto have also built up, and I’ll need to start dribbling them out at some point.

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Credits: The header image is Flag of the Romani people by AdiJapan, based on the design (allegedly) by Gheorghe A. Lăzăreanu-Lăzurică, and released into the public domain.