The Charlottetown Farmers’ Market was open on Wednesday for the first time this season today, and it will be open every Wednesday into the fall.

If you’ve only ever experienced the market in its claustrophobia-inducing Saturday edition, try coming out on a Wednesday: it’s busy, but it’s a nice, gentle, easy busy.

I’ve resolved to try to eat lunch there every Wednesday this summer. Perhaps you’d like to join me?

I ended up there today for almost the entire afternoon, and by the time I was ready to leave, the market vendors were packing up their stalls. I wasn’t content to depart, however, without taking the chance to sketch the market in its relatively lonley state, and so I set myself up on a windy picnic table outside for a few minutes and made this, which I think does it some justice (except for the curvy stairs: drawing curves still frazzles out my brain).

This was my first season with winter tires on my car. I should have done it years ago: winter driving was so much better this year.

I was late getting summer tires back on, and so, in a bid too be super-organized, I made an appointment for November 6 to get winter tires put back on.

I have never felt so organized as I do right now.

Following the questions from Mr. Blunt, we’ll hear from Ms. Candid, Mr. Lax, and Ms. Obtuse.

Here’s the finished version of the map of Charlottetown that I started on this morning. I added Charlottetown at the bottom in 60 pt. Akzidenz Grotesk, and punched a 3/8 inch hole at the top. I’m not entirely sure why the hole, but it works.

In addition to the printing part of this project, it’s been interesting to consider the notion of the least-detailed-but-still-useful version of a map of the city. I see a lot of tourists wandering around Charlottetown with maps in their hands looking confused, and I think part of the reason for this is that they don’t understand the fundamentals: Kent is the head, Great George is the spine, Queen and Prince the arms, and Water the feet.

Once you understand that, everything else is easy:

• “The Confederation Centre is at the corner of Queen and Grafton.”
• “Dave’s Lobster is at the foot of Prince Street, just below Water.”
• “Meet me at my house on Prince Street just south of Grafton.”
• “Ken’s Corner is on Fitzroy (one street up from Kent) and Weymouth (two blocks east of Prince).”

Available for sale in my shop.

Our friend–and Oliver’s former helper–Derrick Biso announced their engagement on Facebook. Oliver responded with his wedding speech:

Derrick (I Met through Lindsay “My Helper Before Derrick”) Jann (I Met Through Derrick “My Helper and LGBTQIA+ Teacher and many other things such as Yoga, Meditation, Mindfulness, Etc.”) Derrick and I went to Cloggeroo (“The Folk Festival in Georgetown”) Together, Hung-Out Together doing Yoga, Meditation, Mindfulness, Etc., and Did Many Other Things Together. We’re The Best of Friends. Jann went along with Derrick to My Grade 9 Graduation, My House Summer Party (German-Themed). They’re so much special human beings and the best of my friends. -Oliver (Friend of Derrick and Jann)

This was a beast to print because the type, 48 pt. Akzidenz Grotesk, is old and worn, and so prints unevenly. But with some judicious masking, and a whole lotta packing, I made it (mostly) work.

I’ve entered the heady “draw on anything that’s not nailed down” phase.

I’m cooking up something new, jumping off from the Let’s Make a Map course that starts today.

I experimented over the weekend with my new watercolour set, and received some helpful advice from Dave and Erin which guided me toward more-water-less-paint. Watercolour seems to be more a matter of suggestion than traditional “colouring in” as I was used to from childhood. I botched the front vestibule, and the driveway angle’s all wrong, but I like the way this developed.

It’s remarkable how little the tools we’ve created for ourselves to write for the web have evolved: when I wrote the first post here in 1999, I didn’t have a CMS, or a WYSIWYG editor, but otherwise it was as it is.

Of late, I’ve been watching the patterns I go through when I write here, and I decided that it would be a good idea to leverage the fact that I can code to build some prosthetic devices for my writing.

First up: an easier workflow for referencing posts from the past.

Here’s the story: I’m writing along, and I want to, say, mention Bird, a restaurant that Oliver and I went to in Osaka.

Heretofore my pattern would be:

1. Open up a new browser tab.
2. Go to https://ruk.ca/
3. Scroll down to the bottom so I can enter a search term.
4. Enter the search term, and click Search.
5. Find the post I’m looking for.
6. Copy the URL of the post to the clipboard.
7. Paste the URL into my new post.

Here’s what I built to replace this.

A Drupal View to Return JSON Search Results

First, I built a Drupal View that returns JSON of up to 10 posts that match the keywords I pass; the search is the same Apache Solr search that the human-facing search uses.

So, for example, this URL returns posts matching keywords truck bird:

https://ruk.ca/search-json?keyword=truck+osaka

Here’s what it returns:

{
  "nodes": [
    {
      "node": {
        "label": "TRUCK and Bird in Osaka",
        "path_alias": "https:\/\/ruk.ca\/content\/truck-and-bird-osaka"
      }
    },
    {
      "node": {
        "label": "\"Getting lost gracefully is a form of art...\"",
        "path_alias": "https:\/\/ruk.ca\/content\/getting-lost-gracefully-form-art"
      }
    }
  ]
}

The View leverages the Apache Solr Search module, the Apache Solr Views integration module, and the Views Datasource module, and it’s really simple (here’s an export of the View if you want to experiment):

An Alfred Workflow

Now that I had a way of getting search results as JSON, I built a workflow for Alfred.app to give me a quick way of getting at them.

The workflow allows me to trigger Alfred (with Control + Space) and then to enter rp followed by my search keywords.

The input script filter looks like this in Alfred’s workflow editor (here’s the PHP):

The workflow’s PHP script simply accepts the keywords it receives from Alfred, passes them to my Drupal View, and passes back the results–titles and paths–to Alfred. In operation, it looks like this:

When I press ENTER on one of those search results (or use the keyboard shortcut that Alfred provides for each), the path gets copied to the clipboard, and I paste it into my post.

Like this:

One of my favourite places to eat is at Bird, an out of the way eatery in Osaka that Oliver and I took a long and winding road to find.

While it took a little bit to stitch together the various parts to make this all work, it’s a productivity-enhancing aid to my writing here, and time well-spent, I think.