Journal tags: trains

When I went up to London for the State of the Browser conference last month, I shared the train journey with Remy.

I always like getting together with Remy. We usually end up discussing sci-fi books we’re reading, commiserating with one another about conference-organising, discussing the minutiae of browser APIs, or talking about the big-picture vision of the World Wide Web.

On this train ride we ended up talking about the march of time and how death comes for us all …and our websites.

Take The Session, for example. It’s been running for two and a half decades in one form or another. I plan to keep it running for many more decades to come. But I’m the weak link in that plan.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, The Session will keep running. The hosting is paid up for a while. The domain name is registered for as long as possible. But inevitably things will need to be updated. Even if no new features get added to the site, someone’s got to install updates to keep the underlying software safe and secure.

Remy and I discussed the long-term prospects for widening out the admin work to more people. But we also discussed smaller steps I could take in the meantime.

Like, there’s the actual content of the website. Now, I currently share exports from the database every week in JSON, CSV, and SQLite. That’s good. But you need to be tech nerd to do anything useful with that data.

The more I talked about it with Remy, the more I realised that HTML would be the most useful format for the most people.

There’s a cute acronym in the world of digital preservation: LOCKSS. Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe. If there were multiple copies of The Session’s content out there in the world, then I’d have a nice little insurance policy against some future catastrophe befalling the live site.

With the seed of the idea planted in my head, I waited until I had some time to dive in and see if this was doable.

Fortunately I had plenty of opportunity to do just that on some other train rides. When I was in Spain and France recently, I spent hours and hours on trains. For some reason, I find train journeys very conducive to coding, especially if you don’t need an internet connection.

By the time I was back home, the code was done. Here’s the result:

The Session archive: a static copy of the content on thesession.org.

If you want to grab a copy for yourself, go ahead and download this .zip file. Be warned that it’s quite large! The .zip file is over two gigabytes in size and the unzipped collection of web pages is almost ten gigabytes. I plan to update the content every week or so.

I’ve put a copy up on Netlify and I’m serving it from the subdomain archive.thesession.org if you want to check out the results without downloading the whole thing.

Because this is a collection of static files, there’s no search. But you can use your browser’s “Find in Page” feature to search within the (very long) index pages of each section of the site.

You don’t need to a web server to click around between the pages: they should all work straight from your file system. Double-clicking any HTML file should give a starting point.

I wanted to reduce the dependencies on each page to as close to zero as I could. All the CSS is embedded in the the page. Likewise with most of the JavaScript (you’ll still need an internet connection to get audio playback and dynamic maps). This keeps the individual pages nice and self-contained. That means they can be shared around (as an email attachment, for example).

I’ve shared this project with the community on The Session and people are into it. If nothing else, it could be handy to have an offline copy of the site’s content on your hard drive for those situations when you can’t access the site itself.

It’s been a busy two weeks of travelling and speaking. Last week I spoke at Finch Conf in Edinburgh, Code Motion in Madrid, and Generate CSS in London. This week I was at Indie Web Camp, View Source, and Fronteers, all in Amsterdam.

The Edinburgh-Madrid-London whirlwind wasn’t ideal. I gave the opening talk at Finch Conf, then immediately jumped in a taxi to get to the airport to fly to Madrid, so I missed all the excellent talks. I had FOMO for a conference I actually spoke at.

I did get to spend some time at Code Motion in Madrid, but that was a waste of time. It was one of those multi-track events where the trade show floor is prioritised over the talks (and the speakers don’t get paid). I gave my talk to a mostly empty room—the classic multi-track experience. On the plus side, I had a wonderful time with Jessica exploring Madrid’s many tapas delights. The food and drink made up for the sub-par conference.

I flew back from Madrid to the UK, and immediately went straight to London to deliver the closing talk of Generate CSS. So once again, I didn’t get to see any of the other talks. That’s a real shame—it sounds like they were all excellent.

The day after Generate though, I took the Eurostar to Amsterdam. That’s where I’ve been ever since. There were just as many events as in the previous week, but because they were all in Amsterdam, I could savour them properly, instead of spending half my time travelling.

Indie Web Camp Amsterdam was excellent, although I missed out on the afternoon discussions on the first day because I popped over to the Mozilla Tech Speakers event happening at the same time. I was there to offer feedback on lightning talks. I really, really enjoyed it.

I’d really like to do more of this kind of thing. There aren’t many activities I feel qualified to give advice on, but public speaking is an exception. I’ve got plenty of experience that I’m eager to share with up-and-coming speakers. Also, I got to see some really great lightning talks!

Then it was time for View Source. There was a mix of talks, panels, and breakout conversation corners. I saw some fantastic talks by people I hadn’t seen speak before: Melanie Richards, Ali Spittal, Sharell Bryant, and Tejas Kumar. I gave the closing keynote, which was warmly received—that’s always very gratifying.

After one day of rest, it was time for Fronteers. This was where myself and Remy gave the joint talk we’ve been working on:

Neither of us is under any illusions about the nature of a joint talk. It’s not half as much work; it’s more like twice the work. We’ve both seen enough uneven joint presentations to know what we want to avoid.

I’m happy to say that it went off without a hitch. Remy definitely had the tougher task—he did a live demo. Needless to say, he did it flawlessly. It’s been a real treat working with Remy on this. Don’t tell him I said this, but he’s kind of a web hero of mine, so this was a real honour and a privilege for me.

I’ve got some more speaking engagements ahead of me. Most of them are in Europe so I’m going to do my utmost to travel to them by train. Flying is usually more convenient but it’s terrible for my carbon footprint. I’m feeling pretty guilty about that Madrid trip; I need to make ammends.

I’ll be travelling to France next week for Paris Web. Taking the Eurostar is a no-brainer for that one. Straight after that Jessica and I will be going to Frankfurt for the book fair. Taking the train from Paris to Frankfurt will be nice and straightforward.

I’ll be back in Brighton for Indie Web Camp on the weekend of October 19th and 20th—you should come!—and then I’ll be heading off to Antwerp for Full Stack Fest. Anywhere in Belgium is easily reachable by train so that’ll be another Eurostar journey.

After that, it gets a little trickier. I’ll be going to Berlin for Beyond Tellerrand but I’m not sure I can make it work by train. Same goes for Web Clerks in Vienna. Cities that far east are tough to get to by train in a reasonable amount of time (although I realise that, compared to many others, I have the luxury of spending time travelling by train).

Then there are the places that I can only get to by plane. There’s the United States. I’ll be speaking at An Event Apart in San Francisco in December. A flight is unavoidable. Last time we went to the States, Jessica and I travelled by ocean liner. But that isn’t any better for the environment, given the low-grade fuel burned by ships.

And then there’s Ireland. I make trips back there to see my mother, but there’s no alternative to flying or taking a ferry—neither are ideal for the environment. At least I can offset the carbon from my flights; the travel equivalent to putting coins in the swear jar.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not moaning about the amount of travel involved in going to conferences and workshops. It’s fantastic that I get to go to new and interesting places. That’s something I hope I never take for granted. But I can’t ignore the environmental damage I’m doing. I’ll be making more of an effort to travel by train to Europe’s many excellent web events. While I’m at it, I can ask Paul for his trainspotter expertise.

Today was the first day of UX London. I was planning to attend. I decided I’d skip the first couple of talks—because that would entail rising at the crack of dawn—but I was aiming to get to the venue by the time the first break rolled around.

No plan survives contact with the enemy and today the enemy was the rail infrastructure between Brighton and London. Due to “unforeseen engineering works”, there were scenes of mild-mannered chaos when I arrived at the station.

I decided—wisely, in retrospect—to abandon my plan. Here’s hoping it’s better by tomorrow.

While I had Matthew in my clutches, I made him show me around the API for They Work For You. Who knew that so much could fun be derived from data about MPs?

First off, there’s Matthew’s game of MP Top Trumps, ‘though he had to call it MP Fab Farts to avoid getting a cease and desist letter.

Then there’s a text adventure built on the API. This is so good! Enter your postcode and you find yourself playing the part of your parliamentary representative with zero experience points and one hundred hit points. You must work your way across the country, doing battle with rival MPs, as you make your way towards Sedgefield, the lair of Blair.

You can play a Web version but for some real old-school fun, try the telnet version. This reminded me of how much I used to love text adventures back in the days of 8-bit computers. I even remember trying to write my own in BASIC.

For what it’s worth, Celia Barlow, MP for Hove, has excellent pesteredness points. I made it all the way up to Sedgefield and defeated Tony Blair in battle. My prize was the source code of the adventure game in Python.

Ah, what larks!

There’s another project that Matthew works on that I find extremely useful. He has created accessible UK train timetables using the data from the National Rail site, a scrAPI if you will. This is where I go whenever I need to plan a train journey.

The latest feature is something that warms the cockles of my heart: beautiful, hackable URLs. If I want a list of trains going from Brighton to London, I can just type:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london

It handles spaces (or pluses or underscores) too:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria

The URL can also be extended with a departure time:

http://traintimes.org.uk/brighton/london victoria/14:00

My address bar is my command line. This is the kind of design that makes URL fetishists like Tom very happy.

The second day of BarCamp London is going great — I’m amazed a the energy and enthusiasm after a night of very little sleep for everyone. The lack of sleep can be attributed to Simon and his damn Werewolf game.

I’ve just seen the most wonderful presentation from the excellent Matthew Somerville. He works on They Work For You… and I just found out that he’s the guy who did the renegade accessible Odeon site!

He’s built a fantastic mashup of maps and train times. Maybe I shouldn’t be drawing attention to it because he’s getting the data by screen-scraping — because there is no National Rail API — but damn, this is sweet! You can find out when they’re due to arrive at a station. You can see the trains moving along the map. Click the checkbox to speed up the movement by ten.

See how Brighton is in the drop-down list of stations? Matthew added that in the middle of the presentation in response to my request. After all, I need to get back down to Brighton later today.