(This mess will be cleaned up before long.)

DaDas

Each thing has its word, but the word has become a thing by itself. Why shouldn't I find it? Why can't a tree be called Pluplusch, and Pluplubasch when it has been raining? The word, the word, the word outside your domain, your stuffiness, this laughable impotence, your stupendous smugness, outside all the parrotry of your self-evident limitedness. The word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the first importance. (Hugo Ball, Dada Manifesto)

TaDas

Working draft of Html & JavaScript for a tilde.town tilde-ring.

At this moment, it consists in an Html div and an external JavaScript file which, together, provide three links:

1. One to a randomly selected member of the tilde.town web ring. A members is anyone who has the tilde.town ring html in their index.html.
2. One to a randomly selected tilde.town user, excluding any who haven't yet edited their pages.
3. One to a randomly generated tilde.box.

I'm inclined towards removing 2 and 3, replacing them with a "join" link, and trying to move 2 and 3 to the front page of tilde.town instead. I'm referring to it as a tilde-ring because, the tildeverse is something different than the web, even if this only generates links to web sites (at the moment).

The code is still in a somewhat rough state. However, you can see it at work on my home page. I can't decide how I should format it or display it. At the moment, it is left unstyled and without images so you can customize it to suit your preferences. The code is available on github (and in my public_html directory):

• the html
• the javascript

If you want this on your page, it should suffice to drop the html wherever you'd like it. Forks and pulls are welcome, as is any manner of criticism on the code or approach. The thing relies on data generated by ~dan and ~pfhawkins. ~datagrock, ~dan, vilmibm and others on irc were a tremendous help.

At present, my bit of code generates 3 links link to a tilde.town user and a random link to another tilde box. It is a flawed implementation and very bare-bones. Here is a list of its shortcomings:

• It consists of three text links: no graphics no nothing.
• We need a "join" page
• This could eventually be developed into a universal html widget that could be dropped into a ~users page on any known box in the tildeverse, and it will generate links to their neighbors and to other boxes. It doesn't do this yet. ~dan and I have been talking.

~nick also has an implementation of a random link generator for tilde.town users.

Generated a (flawed) list of the programming language packages available on the tilde.town box

I broke this, but I'll probably fix it at some point...

~ford posed the following challenge on his tilde.club blog:

If you are young and new to Linux and looking for an assignment … go find every programming language on this system and learn about each one of them. … Maybe write a one-line description of each language. … For extra credit, don’t write anything—but use the system’s own information to write it for you. (~ford, October 24, 2014).

I am a bit too old to be young, but I am new to linux, and I gave it a go. I accomplished the task with some Prolog code that pipes in the output of dpkg -l and compares and filters that against a file with a list of 256 programming languages copy-pasted from here.

The code generates several false positives, from languages like Icon, Magic, and Processing.

ToDos

1. Figure out a way to manage my site.
2. Lamentations section
3. Implement site structure:
   • Decentered, tightly linked, essays and aphorisms, bound by tags, and relations of terms.
   • Key terms (called "concepts") given canonical definitions, which are visible on mouse hovering over term (or, better, in a specified area of the page, more suitable for mouse navigation.)
   • to "bring grateful release from the constraint of linear exposition. Cross-references abound, but they refer forward and backward indiscriminately" (Quine, Quiddities, Preface).
4. Linkify tilde names: a utility that monitors ‘~*’ patterns, and links to the ~user within the relevant collective. (Just like the twitter ‘@’ and Reddit ‘/u/’).
   • Is this a bad idea? Being a little utility, users’ could choose to run the script or not.
   • Would mimicking this feature of social networks mean capitulating to the pressure to become on?
5. Tilde report: scrape pages on tilde servers, extract sentences with ‘~’ or ‘tilde’, post to a stream of updates linking to the source.
   • Is this just the stream of data scrolling into oblivion, eloquently described by (~datagrok)?
   • @tilde_fortune is doing approximately this, but with apparently any sentences, posted to twitter. (Also, tilde_fortune appears to post text taken from any time, even after the page might have changed.)
6. Recommended cultural capital: (books, music, art, etc)
7. Recommended techno capital
8. "tilde.town connsonance": scan user pages for sentences containing n words in common, or in a row: juxtapose (probably a Prolog project)
9. "tilde.town dissonance": scan user pages for x and is not x or other negation of x: juxtapose.