Stefan Hayden

TLDR: do your live blogging here.

The Problem

I have had the the same problem since the dawn of micro blogging. If I am watching a live event like an awards show, I often want to have a series of posts all properly tagged with the right hashtags. I want to quickly see what other are saying and boost and interact with those people. And I want all other posts not about the event to fade in to the background.

But normal UI for micro blogging makes you re-type hash tags on every post. You can reconfigure some UIs to show a column of posts about a topic but you have to do the work to reconfigure the UI.

The Solution

No more. Liveblog is a tool 100% focused on quickly posting during live events. Hashtags persist for every post. Content Warnings persist for every post for perfect spoiler warning protection. Optionally you can toggle thread mode and auto reply to your last post for perfect thread creation. Below you can do a search to see what others are saying and it will auto refresh to always show fresh content to reply to, boost or favorite.

Security

Liveblog is deployed on vercel. It auths against your mastodon instance with minial permisions. All credidentials are stored in encrypted, httpOnly cookies. This means they are never stored on my servers. It also means if you login from different browsers or clear cookies it will register a new app on your account.

I am excited to annouce a new project, Tvmarks, a personal website to track your tv shows. It is inspired by and shares much of the same code as Postmarks. Through the power of the tvmaze database Tvmarks lets you a build a selfhosted version of what you are watching, what you have watched, and what you plan to watch. Tvmarks is also fediverse enabled with shows added and episodes watched shared with your comments to activitypub.

How I Got Here

Postmarks launched in 2023 but I didn’t discover it till 2025. That still seems wild to think about since I am, or try to be, very pluged in to the fediverse. But one thing it taught me that I never really thought of is how an sqlite can juist be a file that node can access. I love web aplications but have never loved needing to care about servers and databses. Glicth with sqlite really solves so many problems that are needed but I rather not care about. With those obticals trivialized I was excited with the idea of owning my tv watching data.

A cousin of Postmarks

Is it clear I love Postmarks?! I forked it in Febuary and got to work. Most changes were pretty strightforward to support shows and episodes in the database. Tvmaze has great apis to source data from to host in your own database so you are never dependant of another website to host your data.

RIP Glicth

Though Tvmarks was built to run on glitch.com I have also been able to run it on a VPS and on Render.com.

Install it and let me know

If you try it link me to your instance -> @stefan@gardenstate.social

These are the video essays I thought were worth sharing this year in a rough order of how much I liked it. I’m not able to give them legit order or cut any but a few out. So here they!

• The 20 Best Train Movies Of All Time
• The Entire History of RPGs
• Robert Altman: America’s Rebel Director
• An in-depth look at Romance in video games
• Building Civilization - A Sid Meier Retrospective
• How The OC saved indie rock
• Know No Shame: Black Sails
• The Harry Potter for Grown-Ups Industrial Complex
• The Unhingery of Unsolved Mysteries (1987-2002)
• Sabrina the Teenage Cashcow - A Video Essay
• How Reality Cop Shows make us LESS SAFE
• TaleSpin (1990-1991) Retrospective/Review
• The Lore of FTL: A Deep Dive
• In Praise of Subtle Performance
• All the RAGE: A Franchise Retrospective by Noah Caldwell-Gervais
• Theme Hospital - Making of Documentary
• How Many Clicks Does It Take To Get to the Center of Diablo? A Franchise Retrospective
• What’s the deal with Seinfeld? - Renegade Cut
• The Past, Present & Future of Soul Reaver - Noclip Documentary
• Plagiarism: A Measured Response
• The Goblin Hypothesis by Curious Archive
• Star Trek Voyager… The Documentary You’ve Been Waiting For!
• A critical look at how we watch video essays
• The 1970s science fiction classic that actually needs a reboot
• Games that Don’t Fake the Space
• You’re Standing on My Neck - A Brief Retrospective of Daria

Great list of active forums from Aftermath. I’ve been looking for a search engine that just searches smaller sites lke these and I don’t think it exists!

A tweet on mastodon is called a “Post”.

Before Nov 14, 2022 they were called Toots. This was fun but mostly was due to a misunder standing of the english meaning.

this is in responce to this youtube video that arguest that all text posts on social networks should be called tweets which to me makes no sense. The idea that a post on twitter with an image and a image on instagram with text should have a different name because of some fundimental valuye of how it is displayed is wild. The only reason these things ever have different names is for corperate branding purposes.

In a federated world a text post with an image can be displayed differently on different platforms so the way a post is made has no bearing on how it is displayed.