After a lot of work, I’ve finally have improved the scripts I use to update Zelfpluktuinen. It works much better, but I still have a lot of work - specially determining canonical name for produce and translated terms so that in the site the visitor can switch from NL to EN at any page.

I’ve increased the number of farms in the site dramatically. Initially, I selected only those with a certain number of reviews and rating in google maps. But now I’ve decided to include all farms in the Netherlands, even those with only a few reviews. This will make the site more comprehensive. It’s not my role to filter stuff out. I let visitors decide what they want to see.

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Recentemente descobri o Fizzy, uma ferramenta interessante para gerir as minhas tarefas. É simples, intuitiva e até agora eficaz.

É uma espécie de kanban board, onde posso criar colunas para organizar as tarefas (chamados de cards) e movê-las entre as colunas, conforme o estado das tarefas avança. Muito simples e intuitivo. Finalmente parece que tenho um sistema que funciona - até ver. Cada card tem um título, uma descrição (totalmente formatável), uma lista de check boxes e é possível incrementalmente ir adicionando comentários, o que num sistema partilhado entre várias pessoas é essencial para a colaboração - e o Fizzy foi desenvolvido inicialmente para equipas de programadores. Principal vantagem; é gratuito para os primeiros 1000 cards.

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I’ve regularly listened to the Mostly Technical podcast for almost a year and always enjoyed it. It’s fun, entertaining and very instructive.

In the past few days I got fed up with all the other podcasts in my rotation, which I listen to while walking. So I just decided to go back to their first episode and listen to all of it again.

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A friend mentions a couple of locations missing on Zelfpluktuinen. Man… updating this sucks - it’s a bunch of scripts, tsv files, google docs sheets, etc.

I need to organize this better. Will start working on some proper tooling to expand, update, improve this. And, who knows, create an additional web directory.

So far we have an average of 80 visitors per day. Not bad - since google search still didn’t index all the pages. Kind of a surprise is that a non-insignificant portion of the traffic comes from chatGPT. That was surprising.

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We went for a lazy walk in Amsterdam, enjoying the nice weather. I was for a few days in Portugal before and summer on these two places is quite different - I rather spent August in Amsterdam than in Portugal, to be honest. I guess I’m an eternal spring kind of guy. During the walk I took a few pictures. You can see the entire photostream in Flickr.

Photo 1: Basilica of Saint Nicholas

Take 2. Now without road constructions in front of it. Originally named St. Nicholas inside the Walls—referring to its location within Amsterdam’s historic city walls—the church was designed by archiect Adrianus Bleijs (1842–1912) in a blend of revival styles, mainly Neo-Baroque and Neo-Renaissance. It was completed in 1887. In December 2021, the basilica received a relic of St. Nicholas—a rib fragment kept at Egmond Abbey since 1087.

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Photo 2: Brouwersgracht

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I’ve just released a web directory, called Zelfpluktuinen, multilanguage, i.e. both in dutch and in english with u-pick locations in the Netherlands. Just a nice thing to have for myself, as I do enjoy going to these places (and the concept).

I’ve crawled a lot of these websites, and now I regret some of the decisions I took. But that’s part of what this site is supposed to be; on keep improving stuff.

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Lovely time in Madeira - few days in Fajã dos Padres followed by a couple days in Funchal. Great weather, great food, wonderful sea water temperature. Couldn’t ask for more.

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Went for a one day trip to Brugge. I didn’t go there for quite a while. What a lovely place.

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You got that right.

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Pensamento do dia