Adrian back in the weeknotes squad rotation this week.

Last week Neil and I spent some time planning out a new look for the front page of this website, which rippled through into some enhancements and re-jigging of some of the other pages too. There’s nothing to show for it yet, but I did make a start on the work for it.

The catalogue entries have a “type” (client work; open source; internal; etc.) and we’re going to add additional index pages to let you see, for example, all the open-source work we’ve done. When doing that I also revisited some of the earlier styling ideas that I never made it as far as implementing.

I was quite pleased to get this duotone effect working. It’s all in pure HTML and CSS (with a smidge of inline SVG), and the effect is only applied if the system has a pointer that can hover over an item; so on mobile you’ll get the same full colour images everywhere, like you do now.

Annoyingly, when I showed it to Neil and Chris, they each (separately) said that it looked like someone had highlighted the whole page by accident. Which it does. So that work has ended up being just something I get to share with you for the weeknotes.

With the British Library getting ready for their new exhibition Unearthed, their partner libraries have been updating their Museums in Boxes to add the new collection. That’s resulted in a few support queries as folk battle with byzantine institutional WiFi, so we’ve been answering email questions and jumping on the odd phone call to help people get things sorted.

If you’re in the UK you can see where and when the partner libraries are showing it.

Alongside the support work, Chris has been working on new features to show the progress of the audio downloads. That’s one of the pain points causing some of the support calls; and while it all works, the Box could do a better job of communicating what it’s up to.

Here at MCQN we’re big fans of Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse and a couple of times this week we’ve been able to poke at it a bit more than the usual social media interactions.

If you’re wondering what this Fediverse thing is, this short video that was launched this week does a good job of explaining it:

So what have we been doing on the Fediverse?

We sponsor the long-dormant IoT Liverpool meetup, which is an expensive habit given meetup.com’s ever increasing fees and decreasing utility. I’m circling in on restarting some sort of in-person meetup and wondering what to migrate to from meetup.com. So I’ve spun up a test instance of Mobilizon and we’ve been kicking the tyres.

Given that any user on the instance (and attendees would end up being users) can create events, I don’t think it works for it to be a MCQN Ltd instance; but it might still make sense for the DoES Liverpool community. If anyone has recommendations for other open-source, ideally federated, event platforms, I’d be interested in hearing about them.

Finally, we’ve been exploring the Mastodon API and, naturally, thinking about how to connect that to the Internet of Things. Made some good progress this week and got to the point where boosting (or favouriting) a post on the MCQN Ltd mastodon account lights up an LED!