In a spirit of exploration, and because he mentioned it again in a recent 20-year roundup I decided to see what I could do with Tim Bray’s Topfew. Not the actual Topfew, because that’s beyond me, but the original incantation:

awk '{print $1}' access_log | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -12

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One of the first things the professor told us to do when I began to formally learn a bit of Python was to install Anaconda, which I dutifully did. Looking back, all we ever used there was Spyder. Only later did I discover the joys of Jupyter, but the joy was short-lived. Once I got the point of using virtual environments, I discovered that my entire setup was just too big a tangle for me to understand. So I uninstalled Anaconda, not for the first time. And after a couple of missteps, Jupyter seemeed to work just fine without it. Then I upgraded my os to Ventura, and many, many things stopped working, including Jupyter.

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RSS is not dead, never has been, but in recognition of renewed interest, I decided to have a go at cleaning up my feeds. Not getting rid of them, because there is absolutely no cost to keeping a feed hanging around just in case it miraculously springs back to life. But tidying up.

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Jubilation! I now have a Python program that accepts a date in the form YYY-MM-DD, gets all the Overland data for that day from Compass, and builds a static map of my wanderings for that day. And it works. Here is today, so far.

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Truly, the life of the amateur, cargo-cult coder, can be a vale of tears.

There’s a little program I use to keep a vague eye on how many people are looking at my websites. It is called Bise and is actually rather lovely because it gives a bird’s eye view without going into useless detail and without tracking anything. The big drawback is that it is written in Perl, a language I know little about. Still, by assiduous use of magic incantations, I have had it working nicely for a couple of years. Occasionally, however, something somewhere gets updated and error messages appear.

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