Notes

Short posts, photoblogging, and interesting things from around the web—it's like Twitter meets Instagram, but I own all my posts!

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Photoblog—Grimes Glen & Canandaigua Lake

Today we went hiking in Grimes Glen in Naples, NY and stopped by Carolabarb Park, a small scenic outlook over Canandaigua Lake.

A misty lakeshore taken through a pair of binoculars. The image is inset as a small circle in the middle of a black background

At the overlook on Canandaigua Lake, I took this through a pair of binoculars that were permanently mounted there.

A small waterfall in a creek, with a field recorder on a fence in the foreground

I made some field recordings of the creek at Grimes Glen. There were several waterfalls like this throughout the creek. This time I brought my nice field recorder instead of using my phone.

My partner has been very into mushrooms and other fungi lately, so we looked for them in the woods at Grimes Glen. They tell me that viewing will be much better in the summer, but we still saw some interesting ones — primarily polypore or shelf fungi.

A cream-colored polypore fungus with brown rings and dark tubular pores on a log

An unidentified polypore fungus.

A rippled polypore fungus with alternating light tan and orange-brown rings on a log

A polypore fungus — likely a turkey tail.
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Blogrolls as a Social Network

I was pointed toward a fascinating article via a post by Shellsharks (thanks for the mention, btw!). In this post, Robert Alexander proposes using blogrolls/OPML files as part of a federated social network. This could work by having a feed reader be able to pull in the blogroll from a site you follow and discover new sites right in the reader — I love this idea!

In a similar vein, James created a link graph extension that works with his very nice Artemis web reader. The extension shows any pages from blogs you follow that link to the current page opened in your browser.

These ideas are still in the early stage, but this all inspired me to add an OPML version of my blogroll — you can import it into your RSS reader if you want to follow these blogs! I also added the following to my page headers, as suggested in Robert Alexander's post above: <link rel="blogroll" type="text/xml" href="https://reillyspitzfaden.com/blogroll.opml">. I'll be experimenting with the proposed <source:blogroll> element too as I read more about this.

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Photoblog—Mendon Ponds Park

My partner and I went to Mendon Ponds Park on Sunday. One of the cool things there is the “Devil's Bathtub,” [1] a kettle that (like the rest of the area's geography) appears to be left by a retreating glacier. It's a meromictic body of water — unlike the more common holomictic lakes, the layers of water in a meromictic lake do not mix, creating an oxygen-poor region at the bottom with unusual biology. [2]

A large still pond at the bottom of a basin in the middle of the woods. The trees are bare and brown.
The “Devil's Bathtub” viewed from a small deck on the side
The reverb on the pond was interesting — a few clear, loud taps followed by a quick decay. It's kind of like the “nonlinear” or “gated” reverbs of the 80s, although my phone appears to have applied a noise gate to recordings, exaggerating the effect here.
A close-up of a bog with moss, small trees, and logs.
A closer view of the water in the “Devil's Bathtub”
A landscape with a forest ringing a large pond. The grass is mowed in the foreground.
Kame hills across Deep Pond
We heard a chorus of short, quick, high rising calls at Deep Pond. We thought they were birds in the moment, but now I'm remembering that spring peepers sound like this.

  1. The name immediately made me think of Beck's “Devil's Haircut,” and I had ”got a devil's bathtub in my mind” playing in my head the whole walk. ↩︎

  2. ”Very few organisms can live in such an oxygen-poor environment. One exception is purple sulfur bacteria. These bacteria, commonly found at the top of the monimolimnion in such lakes, use sulfur compounds such as sulfides in photosynthesis. These compounds are produced by decomposition of organic sediments in oxygen-poor environments. The monimolimnion is often rich in phosphorus and nitrogen. These factors combine to create an ideal environment for bacterial growth.” (Wikipedia) ↩︎

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Photoblog—Watkins Glen & Seneca Lake State Parks

I went with my partner to the Watkins Glen and Seneca Lake state parks, both on Seneca Lake in the Finger Lakes. I've started taking more pictures lately (nice new camera phone, and better organization for my photo gallery have both encouraged me to do so), so here's a photo blog of our day.

First, here are some pictures from Watkins Glen. They have a gorge trail most of the way down the gorge, but because of the season it's currently closed. We hiked on the higher rim trail and could see down into the gorge from it.

A view into the gorge at Watkins Glen. There are steps carved into the side of the gorge.
A view into the gorge at Watkins Glen. The steps in the side are the gorge trail.
There's a suspension bridge between the north and south rim trails, and I took this off the bridge, looking directly into the gorge.
My partner at a railing, smiling back at the camera. They're wearing wire-rimmed glasses, black T-shirt and jeans, a small purple backpack, and a green coat tied around their waist.
Here's my partner looking out over the gorge.
Me standing on a staircase next to a shale cliff. I'm wearing a maroon T-shirt and jeans, carrying a black coat, and using a maroon cane to stand.
My partner asked me to pose for them as we were walking down the terraced staircase from the rim trail at the end of the hike.
My partner lying down on a stone bench with their eyes shut and their tongue hanging out
My partner thought this stone bench looked like something people would get sacrificed on, so they asked me to take a picture that looked like that had happened.
A clear blue sky viewed through some trees, with a jet and contrails in center frame
I really like airplanes/contrails and photos of the sky.

Watkins Glen is at the far end of Seneca Lake from us, and on the way home, we stopped by Seneca Lake State Park on the opposite end (since it's one of the Finger Lakes, it's very long and skinny).

A clear blue lake in the late afternoon, with darker texture in the water near the camera.
Seneca Lake looked beautiful off of Long Pier.
A clear blue lake in the late afternoon, with stones visible near the shore.
Another view of Seneca Lake from the beach at Seneca Lake State Park.
A stand on a roof with a long, horizontal cross-polarized Yagi antenna, a vertical boom, and a box of electronics on the side.
Finally, I always love to collect photos of roof antennas/weather stations at parks, and it amuses my partner greatly. Here's one at Seneca Lake State Park.

In addition to microblogging, I plan to use my notes page and its feed as a replacement for things like Instagram — this way I own all my photo posts. My partner and I are looking for more state parks and cool geography to visit, so I'll be posting more of this kind of thing.

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Jamesg—Which HTML element are you [Quiz]?

James posted a "Which HTML element are you Quiz?" and I got the following results:

You are the <a> element!
Anchors like to connect ideas and people, just as the link helps connect HTML documents.

Your nested element is <blockquote>.
You like to think about ideas from multiple places and connect them.

Did you have fun filling out the quiz? Share the URL with friends!

Want to take the quiz again? Refresh the page.

Resources
<a> on MDN
<blockquote> on MDN

I like doing these kinds of web games — thanks for putting this together, James! If other people want to do this, I think it would be fun to see what you get as well.

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Jan 28, 2025, 6:59 PM

A streetlight with three lamps in a Target parking lot at night. The air is thick with snow, and glowing diffraction lines come from the light at diagonals.

My partner and I were coming home from Target and I liked how the snow looked. It always makes me happy when it's falling so thickly and visible in the air like that.

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Adding multiple RSS feeds

I finally have multiple RSS feeds on my site! I previously used Eleventy to auto-generate the feed, but that method only works to make a single feed, and I wanted to have a separate one for my new notes feed.

I ended up having to make an explicit template for how the feeds should look, and then I can apply that template to each feed that I need to generate. I'd been wanting to do this for a while, but had seriously struggled. Eventually this writeup helped me figure it out, and I borrowed from how Benji imported a template to avoid repeating the same code for each feed. I'm very happy to have this working!

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Setting up a "notes" feed

I'm adding a new page to my site. I want the blog feed to be for longer, more thought-out articles, but I also like the idea of having a "microblog"-style (e.g., Mastodon/Bluesky/etc.) feed that's on my own site. Feels more in line with IndieWeb principles of owning what I post.

I'll be adding an additional RSS feed for my notes, and I think it could be cool to do one for my likes, and maybe even add a photo blog (to serve a similar function to Pixelfed/Instagram).

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