The Fediverse! + Nova editor impressions

I’ve been continuously carving out my online presence in ways that is not beholden to any one corporation or organization. I see it as a way to learn real-world software engineering skills as well as contribute to the re-democratization of the internet. Yesterday, I took another big step towards those goals by setting up my own ActivityPub (or “fediverse”) instance running Calckey opens in a new tab . You can find it at fedi.eleboog.com opens in a new tab !

A screenshot of my Calckey instance as it is currently set up. My profile picture is in the top-left corner on top of a side bar containing numerous icons linking to different sections of the app. A "Federation" ticker is on the top of the screen, showcasing the instances that I am actively federating with. The main feed shows a post from zenith containing the text "Gonna be furry trash at my ML presentation today [smiley face]" and a picture of a t-shirt zenith is wearing featuring multiple anthro characters. Another side bar on the right has numerous widgets, including the time, date, notifications, and server stats such as CPU and RAM usage.

Currently, the instance is just for me, but if you really want to join it, shoot me and email and I’ll think about it. Alternatively, you can send me a message on fedi through my new handle @kebokyo@fedi.eleboog.com opens in a new tab .

Sadly, due to the high ram utilization of both Calckey and Discourse, I can’t have both running at the same time. So, the Discourse forums that I had up for about a month has been shut down for now. Calckey has a bunch of cool features like local-only posts and “pages” that could make it a decent replacement (and one that’s definitely more future-proof).

I’ve also been checking out ways to improve my workflow. I’ve been trying out Sublime Merge opens in a new tab to make managing my website’s git repo a bit easier, and I’ve enjoyed it so far! However, I recently also decided to give Nova opens in a new tab a shot… and it blew me away.

A screenshot of my Nova setup for website maintenance. A list of all of my website's project files are on a sidebar to the left. The rest of the editor is divided up into three sections: a main editor view (at the time of capture, showing a shorter journal entry I was writing before Nova crashed as I detail further in this blog post), a preview of my live website, and a terminal view with tabs for both my local machine's terminal and my VPS's terminal accessed through SSH.

The layout of Nova is very flexible, allowing you to add multiple different sections to the screen with different content such as terminals and a web view. It also has a pretty neat source control system that can replace Sublime Merge for simple tasks.

Sadly, it does have some bugs. I tried CTRL+S on a .png file (for some reason) and the app crashed. Whoops. On top of that, it is a paid, closed-source app that costs $99, but it’s a one-time payment! You do have to subscribe for $49/yr if you want updates after the first year, but if you don’t, you still keep the last version you got forever. It’s a much better model than a lot of apps nowadays (where once you stop paying the subscription, you lose access to the app).

Overall, I’m really enjoying my time with Nova, and I will continue to use it until at least my free trial expires.

Finally, I want to briefly shout out something that I added to the site a bit ago that I never made a blog post about: the sharefeed . It’s essentially a place for me to share articles, blog posts, websites, and other links that I find interesting. It also has an Atom feed that you can use in pretty much any RSS/Atom reader to keep up to date with the things I share in it. I don’t update it as much as I would like to, but I plan to keep this around for a long time. If you have any suggestions for things I could add to it, let me know!

See y’all again in… fuck, four months i guess