remember VS Internet-Places-Database

Racket is my favorite language. It's fast, practical, has solid foundations and an extremely nice concurrency story (based on concepts borrowed and extended from Concurrent ML). It has an excellent documentation system, with an integrated package ecosystem, which means that most packages have high quality documentation with cross-references. It has a great backwards-compatibility story -- a lot better than Python's, for example, which I use in my current dayjob. So, my impression of the commenters saying it's too academic or not practical is that they probably never dove deeply enough, or they are students who were only exposed to the teaching languages in the past. It's definitely not perfect: the community is small, the runtime has a high memory baseline, parallelism requires spinning up a Racket VM per system thread, among others, but these are things that will improve over time.

In the past several years, I've:

* built & run an e-commerce site written in Racket[1]

* built a native macOS and iOS reminders app, available on the App Store [2, 3, 4]

* built a cross-platform desktop client for Apache Kafka [5, 6, 7]

* built a `#lang` for Lua [8]

Among[9] other[10] things[11]. I think that's all pretty practical stuff!

[1]: https://defn.io/2019/08/20/racket-ecommerce/

[2]: https://defn.io/2020/01/02/ann-remember/

[3]: https://defn.io/2024/04/09/ann-remember-for-ios/

[4]: https://github.com/bogdanp/remember

[5]: https://defn.io/2022/11/20/ann-franz/

[6]: https://defn.io/2023/10/15/ann-franz-for-windows/

[7]: https://defn.io/2023/08/10/ann-franz-source-available/

[8]: https://defn.io/2022/11/12/ann-racket-lua/

[9]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/http-easy/index.html

[10]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/deta/index.html

[11]: https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui-easy/index.html

A really simple keyboard driven reminder tool for macOS:

https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember

My goal for this year is to continue building (mainly Mac and iOS) apps (like Remember[1] and Franz[2]) using Racket and to help improve the language and ecosystem in any way I can.

[1]: https://remember.defn.io

PS this is a macOS app with the GUI made with swift https://github.com/Bogdanp/remember/tree/master/cocoa/remember/remember but the backend is Racket.

I started gathering domains to see for myself the state of the Internet

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I have many observations.

One is that I cannot see aby useful amiga links. I had to manually search them for some time. Some parts of the old internet exist, but are buried.

Second is that spam sites are everywhere. Not only AI generator.

Next is that personal sites exist, but they are often boring. Also 'CV sites' are a waste of time for me. I wonder how many of them are fake.

Many sites have poorly set up HTML meta fields, title, description. How anybody is supposed to find them?

I prefer going to passionate personal site about programming tips that reading content farms. It is difficult to find such sites.

You can find many RSS feeds, links in my repository

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database/tree/ma...

It contains also domain lists, that include tag indicating, if it is personal, or not.

I am running my personal web crawler since September of 2022. I gather internet domains and assign them meta information. There are various sources of my data. I assign "personal" tag to any personal website. I assign "self-host" tag to any self-host program I find.

I have less than 30k of personal websites.

Data are in the repository.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

I still rely on google for many things, or kagi. It is interesting to me, what my crawler finds next. It is always a surprise to see new blog, or forgotten forum of sorts.

This is how I discover real new content on the Internet. Certainly not by google which can find only BBC, or techcrunch.

Google will not be interested in fixing search. It also may not be possibile because of ai spam. They would like to invest in deep mind/bard/gemini than to fix technology that will be obsolete in a few years.

I have started scanning domains to see how many different places there are in the internet. Spoiler: Not many.

We could try to create curated open databases for links, forums, places, and links, but in ai era it will always be a niche.

Having said that I think that it is a good thing. If it is a niche it will not be spoiled by normal users expecting simple behavior, or corporations trying to control the output.

Start your blog

Start your curated lists of links.

Control your data. Share your data.

Link https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

There are already many project about search:

- https://www.marginalia.nu/

- https://searchmysite.net/

- https://lucene.apache.org/

- elastic search

- https://presearch.com/

- https://stract.com/

- https://wiby.me/

I think that all project are fun. I would like to see one succeeding at reaching mainstream level of attention.

I have also been gathering links meta data for some time. Maybe I will use them to feed any eventual self hosted search engine, or language model, if I decide to experiment with that.

- domains for seed https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

- bookmarks seed https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

- links for year https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2024

I have myself dabbled a little bit in that subject. Some of my notes:

- some RSS feeds are protected by cloudflare. It is true however that it is not necessary for majority of blogs. If you would like to do more then selenium would be a way to solve "cloudflare" protected links

- sometimes even selenium headless is not enough and full blown browser in selenium is necessary to fool it's protection

- sometimes even that is not enough

- then I started to wonder, why some RSS feeds are so well protected by cloudflare, but who am I to judge?

- sometimes it is beneficial to cover user agent. I feel bad for setting my user agent to chrome, but again, why RSS feeds are so well protected?

- you cannot parse, read entire Internet, therefore you always need to think about compromises. For example I have narrowed area of my searches in one of my projects to domains only. Now I can find most of the common domains, and I sort them by their "importance"

- RSS links do change. There need to be automated means to disable some feeds automatically to prevent checking inactive domains

- I do not see any configurable timeout for reading a page, but I am not familiar with aiohttp. Some pages might waste your time

- I hate that some RSS feeds are not configured properly. Some sites do not provide a valid meta "link" with "application/rss+xml". Some RSS feeds have naive titles like "Home", or no title at all. Such a waste of opportunity

My RSS feed parser, link archiver, web crawler: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive. Especially interesting could be file rsshistory/webtools.py. It is not advanced programming craft, but it got the job done.

Additionally, in other project I have collected around 2378 of personal sites. I collect domains in https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database/tree/ma... . These files are JSONs. All personal sites have tag "personal".

Most of the things are collected from:

https://nownownow.com/

https://searchmysite.net/

I wanted also to process domains from https://downloads.marginalia.nu/, but haven't got time to read structure of the files

On the other hand it is not 1995. Time has moved on. I wrote a Simple RSS feed, that also serves as search engine for bookmarks.

I am able to run it in attick on raspberry pi. We do not have to rely so heavily on google.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

It is true that it does not serve me as google, or kagi replacement. It is a very nice addition though.

With a little bit off determination I do not have to be so dependent on google.

Here is also a dump of known domains. Some are personal.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

...and my bookmarks

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

Some more years, and google can go to hell.

[4] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

These are exported then to github repositories:

[5] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - bookmarks

[6] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - 2023 year news headlines

[7] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - all known to me domains, and RSS feeds

My own repositories:

- bookmarked entries https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

- mostly domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

- all 'news' from 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023

I am using my own Django program to capture and manage links https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive.