Building MutualAidIndia.com with Gatsby, Airtable & Tailwind

In March of 2020 I decided it was time to rebuild my personal website using some new things I had learned. 

I have had a personal website since I finally got a real footing in website building with Jekyll and Foundation, using Markdown pushed to my GitHub repo for posts. My work is more Product than Code, but there's a fair amount in the realm of the actual coding, _building things_ that I can do, and it brings me a lot of joy and makes me more effective in my professional and activist life. And it's fun. I love learning and I love the idea that I can conceive of a thing and _then build it_ and not be held back by all the little parts of the "full stack" that I can't do up to my own standards of excellence.

Since that site was built, I did a lot more work with various large-scale server-side applications (like Rails), and learned a fair amount working in React, mostly on small projects. So I kind of came at this project sideways – my primary goal was actually to learn, to use and build on new  knowledge, and to have fun. 

So I the final product/goal was decided:
* A personal blog, basically
* With the ability to add some custom pages, which I would be fine to / happy to code myself as needed
* A really nice developer experience and the ability to hook into and play around with little interface things that suit my personal interests like content editing UX, accessibility and language and content that's dynamic and responsive to the audience, etc. 

And the initial direction for implementation paths was basically already set based on my recent experience and motivations for the project: A Rails server with a React client. We'd use Rails to define API routes that would return JSON, and the react app would have components that fetch the data and display it to the reader, e.g. `&lt;Post id={id} /&gt;`

## Architecting a Solution: Two Apps or One?

How to mount a React app and a Rails app together turned into the biggest question for how to implement this site. I'm not doing much non-standard with the server, and  for the front-end I would be happy to use Bootstrap SASS and the Rails asset pipeline.

I knew I didn't want to mess with versioning a server and client app in tandem (maintaining this site is not a job for me, it is an incredibly part-time side-project). But how to mount a React app _inside_ a Rails app is actually a big question all across the community with a few different rapidly-evolving solutions. Here was my list of implementation constraints:

1. One repo/project for both Client and Server
1. Hostable on Heroku (the only place I really felt good running a Rails server/DB)
1. I didn't want a really thick layer of coupling between the Rails and React code. I wanted to _feel_ like I was just writing a Rails server and a React client, keeping things fairly vanilla so that the new skills I learned would be portable
1. Both Rails world and React world are fast-changing, with libraries and paradigms and pipelines and dev tools coming in and going out of fashion all the time. And since this is such a part-time thing for me, I had yet another reason to keep things very vanilla, to use very stable dependencies and tools

## Two Common Solutions: react-rails and react_on_rails

Much of the debate I was privy to at the time was about these two methods, using either [react-rails](https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails) or [react_on_rails](https://github.com/shakacode/react_on_rails), which are Rails gems that allow you to write React components directly inside your Rails views, like this:

```
&lt;%= react_component(
    "PostsPage", 
    props: @posts_list, 
    prerender: true
) %&gt;
```

The approach is exciting for a big production app, especially if you have an existing Rails app and you are trying to migrate over parts of the front end from some other solution to React. At work we had a big giant Rails app with jQuery/AJAX to handle forms and transitions, that badly needed an upgrade to a more React-like solution, so I could see the value of this Component-in-ERB approach. 

But for me... I just wanted to learn more about working with Rails and React; I didn't want to learn this middle-layer's special ticks and idiosyncrasies. So I ruled this entire category out and kept looking, not so much for some gem or npm package, but for a really solid example or instructions manual on how to seamlessly place a React app inside a Rails app's natural Javascript asset-building/-serving process.

As my search progressed and the ideal approach started to take shape, I found [an absolutely fantastic tutorial on Digital Ocean's community tutorials site](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-a-ruby-on-rails-project-with-a-react-frontend) that met all my requirements and then some. It's an example site and repo with step by step instructions for how to get started and how each critical piece is added in order. I highly, highly recommend it.

This approach works by placing a pretty standard React app with its own react-router inside the folder `/app/javascript/packs`. The Rails app's router has a namespace for `/api/v1` and very simple controllers to create, edit, destroy, and update posts. Every other url gets sent off to application.erb, which includes a simple tag provided by webpacker, which is our entry into the React app:

```
&lt;%= javascript_pack_tag 'Index' %&gt;
```

At this point, the react-router picks up the work of deciding which components to display, and those components are responsible for knowing how to fetch data from the Rails API. It's nice and clean, a proper Rails app and a proper React app, without much time spent dealing with the layer of glue between them. 

Though the glue layer is thin, using the the Rails view as the entry-point to the React bundle means we can use Rails's built-in CSRF tag seamlessly and pick it up in the React app:

```
# in application.html.erb
&lt;%= csrf_meta_tags %&gt;

// in any React component with a form
token = document.querySelector('meta[name="csrf-token"]').content
```

This was such a nice touch for me! I really feel like, given the requirements and constraints I had at the time, this solution hit the nail on the head. I'm quite pleased with Digital Ocean for cultivating such a great set of tutorials, and to [Chuks Opia](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/users/troy34) for writing this one.

## The Final Product

In the end, the final product for the site was kinda-sorta satisfying. I give it a 6, mostly because I just never went very far beyond what was in the tutorial because ultimately, I still felt pretty much out on a limb. I did build a nice little side-by-side realtime-preview editing interface though, which I am quite happy with!

![A screenshot showing a browser window where the left-hand side shows a form for items like Title, Excerpt, and post Content, and the right hand side shows a preview of what the blog post will look like.](https://i.imgur.com/gMNoPIa.png)

And the design of the site itself, I'm pretty happy there too! It's quite minimalist, but has some of its own flare. It's a bit more "vanilla bootstrap" than I love, but with my own colors and fonts and enough personality that I'm not worried it looks thoughtless.

![A screenshot of this website's front page showing a big banner image of mountains and a lake, the site's title and blurb, a cartoon drawing of the author, and the first few entries in the list of posts.](https://i.imgur.com/Tf0Rwck.png)

## What I Would Change

There are still some issues from the basic feature set that I just never really got around to dealing with: 

1. A proper login system to administer content securely without having to go into the database itself
2. Some integration with s3 to upload and store images without having to host them on imgur or similar
3. A "draft" post status
4. Moving other aspects of site management – like the metadata, share links, title, blurb – into the database so they can be updated without changing code

And frankly, if I could do it all over again, I would do a few things differently, either because I've learned more and have different skills constraints, or because some of the choices weren't right in the first place.

**I would ditch Bootstrap for TailWind.**

What I liked most about Bootstrap 4 over version 3 was that it had so many new utility classes that you could style most things using utilities alone, rather than using (and constantly fighting against) their built-in component concepts. Well, I've since learned that there are others doing this better, truly utility-first front-end frameworks like [Tailwind CSS](tailwindcss.com). I've used Tailwind for [another project](https://mutualaidindia.com), and I'm pretty much in love. It's just so much easier to use; I write less code, I have fewer abstractions and middle-steps to think about, and the resulting bundle size is a lot smaller. 

My work with Bootstrap required me to essentially learn this other language – Bootstrap's own markup+class combinations – and I would over-rely on SASS to let me create a bunch of my own custom classes and components, which meant I was kind of creating my own design language on the fly, which I then had to learn, remember, debug and QA. (In some cases it will of course be worth the time and care to create your own design language, but then again, Tailwind and PostCSS have tools for that too.) If I were doing this over again, I would try Tailwind for my styles.

**More Framework than just React**

In this case I specifically avoided going down a Server-Side-Rendering rabbit-hole because of the complexity involved, but since the time I initially build this site there have been huge leaps forward in frameworks like Gatsby and NextJS that allow you to "just write react" and _also_ get advanced features like server side rendering, preloading links, lazy loading images, tools to help with your lighthouse scores, and so on. The tools are there; I should catch up; it's not so hard.

I would be keen to try NextJS in the future, and I do plan to try out their blog tutorial to see how I like it. It looks like an interesting mix between "alternative to create-react-app" and "alternative to Gatsby", with a lot of these ecosystem details like Webpack and linting all set up and taken care of, plus some conveniences like their own [file-system-based routing system](https://nextjs.org/docs/routing/dynamic-routes), and a Hook called [useSWR](https://swr.vercel.app/) that wraps the fetch process in some nice defaults and utilities handy for this "SSR + live-and-reactive" world I want to live in.

And I'm interested in [Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) – it almost seems too good to be true, so why not give it a whirl.

The point is I feel like I should be able to use the site as a bit of a playground for different front-end approaches, while keeping the Rails app, the database, and even the branding/styling pretty consistent and stable. This fits with my overall philosophy toward developing stable but innovative software in small teams and medium-sized networks. 

For the networks of activist groups I've spent most of my career working with, their data is the key to their membership and their donor base – so it has to stay stable, and any security breach could tank the organization overnight. But when it comes to providing rich and creative experiences for users, engaging with online content, consuming news and information, sharing on social media and messaging apps, engaging with and creating and remixing and submitting video, photos and audio... we have to be able to be creative with the sites we build! If we don't, we'll lose out to all the other things fighting for people's attention, or to activism businesses like Change dot org and corporate marketing campaigns. But if are able to keep our apps fresh and dynamic, and keep our dev teams limber, so to speak, we can keep innovating and be responsive to great ideas, even when our scale is big and our teams are small.

Under the Hood 2.0: Rails, React

The Blue Dawn is a volunteer collective that connects Bahujan people with
cast-aware mental health therapists, and sometimes with supporters who will
sponsor sessions directly. I recently built them a WordPress site using
Roots's Bedrock and Timber/Twig templating.

This project started because a friend reached out asking if I'd speak with
a friend of a friend who was working on a new nonprofit and needed
a website. I connected with TBD's founder, Divya Kandukuri, and spoke about
their needs. They didn't need much – just a site with a CMS and some forms.
I got the sense that Divya was supremely competent and had picked a really
good intervention point: directly connecting people with resources that can
help them in their time of greatest need, raising awareness about one of 
the most vicious forms of oppression, and helping those affected build 
community resilience among those affected by it. 

How could I not get involved with such a great project! Besides, I was taking
some extra time off work anyway, and I am trying to find more ways to be _directly
useful_ to _smaller organisations_ rather than always (as I do at my day job) 
working with larger scale tech systems for more professionalised organisations.

_[Check out the repository here](https://github.com/michaelsnook/thebluedawn-wp-bedrock)_

We have been using Bedrock at work so I started there. The other WordPress 
site I maintain uses Sage, so I used that to deploy the first
draft of the site at [thebluedawn.org](https://thebluedawn.org). But the
design I wanted wasn't easy to execute even with Sage's relatively simple
(but still very WordPress-y), so I added the Timber plugin and started 
porting the theme into [Twig templates like this one](https://github.com/michaelsnook/thebluedawn-wp-bedrock/blob/master/web/app/themes/thebluedawn/resources/views/home.twig). 

![A screenshot of TheBlueDawn.org's top section showing the site's title and a brief description with two buttons to get started, overlaid over an image of Bahujan leaders](https://snook.pub/static/images/thebluedawn-jumbotron.png)
![A screenshot of The Blue Dawn's google form to join the counselors network](https://snook.pub/static/images/thebluedawn-counselors.png)
![A screenshot of TheBlueDawn.org's section titled 'What We Do' showing three cards with brief explanations for matching people with good counselors, building the network of caste-aware counselors, and sponsoring counseling sessions for others](https://snook.pub/static/images/thebluedawn-whatwedo.png)

The styles are BootStrap 4 with very little customisation. The WordPress
server is my own Digital Ocean box where I host another WP site. And Cloudflare
manages the DNS and provides its free Universal SSL. Since I already had the
server, the site is basically free to run for the foreseeable future (which
is important for a volunteer collective that doesn't have funding). 

Left to do:

* Replace the remaining Blade templates with Twig templates
* Different index pages for different post types, like Media/Press
* WP Admin control over the content on the Home page or in the Banner. Right now it's just an index of recent posts, with a lot of hard-coded content before it, which means it's only a good solution as long as I remain actively involved and available to make updates.
* Figure out how to better control plugins and mu-plugins.
* Establish some proper seed data to make the site easier for others to develop on.


Volunteer Project: The Blue Dawn Website

It's an app, like Google Reader morphs into the morning news hour on the Radio.
Take RSS feeds, your Medium follows, and any podcasts you like. Run text-to-speech on the
stories (or on platforms like Medium where
sometimes there's an audio accompaniment built in, just grab that). And play the morning news
in audio format, using your favorite sources, but in a comfortable audio format so you can
listen while getting ready for the day or getting on the subway.

Does this exist? An RSS-feed-TTS-morning-news-app? If we were coming up with one today...
I would call it... Radiyr.


Radiyr: If an RSS Reader Had a Baby with the Radio


It was National Coming Out Day yesterday, so I'm coming out... again. And here's why.

I used to call myself "queer" because I thought bisexual implied a binary, but after studying my history a bit more I've come to feel that the spectrum of bisexuality has always been diverse, with people identifying that way who love men, women, nonbinary and intersex people, drag queens and crossdressers, gender-questioning and fluid, and agender people alike.
Many of the gender-fluid/enby people I know identify in some way with the term bisexual, so clearly they're not all worried it's forcing a binary, hm?

In this light I came to feel that, for me, using a more vague term like "queer", or a newer term like "pansexual" or "polysexual" would kind of be a cop-out, a bit like caving to my own internalized homophobia/biphobia, and would contribute to the bi erasure that makes LGBTQ spaces feel less welcoming for bi people like me.
(If you have your own personal reasons for identifying with terms like these, that's cool; I'm just talking about my own journey.)

I think ultimately, I just didn't want someone else's label applied to me, with baggage and connotations I hadn't entirely signed up for and wasn't ready to embrace. But -- what a privilege! To just _decide_ (or pretend) to live outside the system of oppression and control, rather than join in with my comrades, enjoy their companionship and yes feel a bit of the burden they carry.
Isn't that what family and community are about? You don't always get to _choose_ whose struggles become your struggles. They just turn up at your doorstep sometimes, and you invite them in.

This is not my natural way of thinking. For one, I was raised in a highly individualistic society, and for two, as a cis white dude I was basically never forced to accept or live with the consequences of anyone else's labels. I hate to be "pigeon-holed", having lived a life where in almost every respect I was permitted to define my own identity and reject externally imposed boundaries.
To this day, I still really hate it and get really agitated if you mislabel one of my flaws -- I will fight you over the difference between "sometimes has _trouble focusing_" and "sometimes _focuses on the wrong things_" ... (and then feel really silly about it later).

But this year, I just kind of... shook it off. I guess I had a few experiences that really made me feel at home in an LGBTQ space. I realized that in the process of rejecting the "label" I was rejecting my place in the _community_. This year I shed that fear and apprehension and started identifying as bisexual,
and let me tell you: it has been _really nice_. I've been able to relax and feel at home more in LGBTQ spaces and at LGBTQ events, I don't feel like an imposter or an interloper, I'm less worried someone's going to come along and ask to see my "queer card" -- not simply because I'm embracing the term bisexual, but because I just know that life is too damn short to keep myself at arms length from people, from communities, where I can understand and feel understood, where I can learn to be comfortable in my own skin and reconcile this crazy fascist world we live in with the need to be really truly free.

So here I am. Happy National Coming Out Day everyone, I'm bi.

![Bisexual Pride Flag](//snook.pub/static/images/bisexual-flag.png)


Coming Out Again: Bisexual Edition

I loved how the new Star Wars defied old tropes, weaved new themes about the Jedi and the Force, and had important character arcs that weren't the sort of typical (white dude, with a couple tokens) cast that most movies present to us. My problem was that I just didn't think it was a very good movie in terms of telling a well-constructed story that moved us along, made sense, and created character interactions and character development that track to the developments in the plot.

When you look back at the movie, you find that major chunks of the action could have been cut out entirely without affecting the plotline, which kind of cheapened whatever character development happened during those parts. Much like my issue with _Rogue One_, a lot of the drama was about uncertainty between protagonists – which can be great if done well, and if it heightens the tension as you lead up to some climactic moment – but seemed too often to lead to some kind of anticlimax. When two opposing forces bring us to edge-of-your-seat suspense and the real fear about what might happen if something goes wrong, that's drama! When two opposing forces just kind of cancel each other out and negate whatever has been happening for the last few minutes (or last hour), that's not good filmmaking.

Some of the characters and character developments came across this way too – you have conflicted or contradictory characters, not because the person is an "antihero," or a "bad person with a heart of gold," or they committed a crime to feed their family, or due to past traumas they are now visiting traumas on others to achieve safety, or because they're overzealous in pursuit of the good, or  they're the scoundrel who saves the day anyway... but just because we weren't sure if we should like them a lot. Or maybe for a moment we liked them and then later changed our minds, or vice versa. Simply creating characters that aren't all good or bad isn't particularly dramatic – you have to create conflict and allow that conflict to play out in the plot of the story! Here are a couple of examples from previous _Star Wars_ movies:

1. Vader is bad, but he loves his son, so he doesn't kill him and eventually betrays his master to save him. This character conflict leads to conflict in the plot and results in moments where the plot arc changes dramatically because of a change in the character's resolve or his loyalty. The conflict in Vader is not just indecision but _acting_ in one direction and then _acting_ in another.
2. Lando Calrissian is an old friend of Han's, but he has lost his sense of loyalty; under duress he betrays our heroes, but when he realizes there's no point trying to placate the Empire he decides to save them. Lando's conflict is also _very important_ for driving the plot forward. And the discovery that Lando has betrayed them isn't just a change in course, but actually rewrites our understanding of what had been happening during the current story line. As a result, we the audience also feel betrayed and lied to because we thought our heroes had found a sort of safe harbor.

But the character conflicts in _The Last Jedi_ often take the form of "the audience isn't 100% sure how we feel about someone", rather than these reversals that truly drive the plot forward – or if they do, we're not emotionally invested in the relationships and the values that are being betrayed so much as watching the plot take a left turn.

There were a few times I really felt the Star Wars tingles running down my spine. But to be honest, some of the jokes and the attempts at humor really broke it for me. Some moments that should have been sacred were interrupted with what seemed like an attempt at Guardians Of The Galaxy-type lightheartedness. Just when I thought I was getting into it... nope. The Jedi are a religious order 1,000 generations old, but this movie didn't really seem to care, and I really never got close to feeling the sense of wonder I experienced as a boy watching Luke channel the force for the first time. So there was no Jar-Jar and barely a peep from C3PO; great. What we got instead is the Last Jedi in the galaxy cracking jokes during Jedi training (which, I might remind you, doubles as induction into an ancient religious order). Is this any better than Jar-Jar and C3PO? I honestly can't tell.

All in all, I finished the the movie pretty bored. I'm happy that we have some story lines where Black and Asian characters – and plenty of women – have their own worth, their own authority, their own meaning. But I'm left feeling like... what a low standard we have set for ourselves, that in 2017 I have so few sci-fi and fantasy movies to choose from that we have to choose between well-crafted storytelling and characters more representative of the world we live in.

*Update:* Here's [an excellent article about one of the interesting trope-defying character arcs](https://www.tor.com/2017/12/21/star-wars-vice-admiral-holdo-and-our-expectations-for-female-military-power/) of _The Last Jedi_. (Lots of spoilers in that article.) It presents a good counterweight to one of my concerns about "characters we're just not sure about." I present it here for a few reasons:

1. It's a great illustration of this idea that diversity and representation in casting and storytelling isn't _just_ about some kind of quest for political correctness. In this case, we get to see an _interesting character_ who is not quite what we expect, and not quite what one of our heroes expects either, contributing to their character development arc. "Diversity" is really just good storytelling.
2. The piece of the story here actually kind of speaks to one of the concerns I have with the film: I like the thematic thing, but I thought the _craft_ was off. I didn't love the acting; I didn't think the relationships this character apparently had with other characters in the film were shown or explained in a way that was compelling on an emotional level, and so the way this person's story worked out didn't hit home for me as much as I wish it had.
3. One critique on the film that has been nagging at me more and more since I first wrote this piece is on display here: There actually _is_ a deep, emotional story to be told, but they didn't _tell it_. The story was great but the screenplay left a lot on the table. The way this article describes friendships and emotions and the characteristics of the different players in the film is far more compelling than what actually played out of the silver screen.


My mixed feelings about Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Before Obamacare, lack of health insurance killed 44,000 Americans per year.

I know some people feel personally aggrieved by the Affordable Care Act; they feel that their situation, or that of their loved ones, got worse because of Obamacare. They have a right to be hurt and upset about that. And it is impossible for me to look any one of them in the eye and say, "The struggle your family went through was necessary to save those other people," however much I wish I could make them believe it.

![A chart showing the rate of Americans without health insurance declining sharply after the Affordable Care Act took effect](//snook.pub/static/images/gallup-uninsured.png)

But before Obamacare came into effect, roughly a half a million Americans lost their lives, just since the year 2000, because they didn't have health coverage and couldn't afford to see a doctor. Half a million people. A small town, every year. A football stadium, all dead. Year after year. Not from fire and twisted metal, but from preventable and treatable diseases, for going without regular checkups and the healing touch of a trained nurse or physician.

Think about the great lengths we have gone to since the War On Terror began, the enormous sums of money we have devoted to this cause. And then think about a problem 100 times as deadly whose solution cost half as much – a solution found in healing not killing, in solidarity and support for our American family.

If we treated health as an integral part of security and allocated resources to match the enormity of the threat, we would have enough money for Obamacare, and a lot more. We could even lower the premiums and the copays – to zero, actually, which is what the fight should have been about from the start.


On Obamacare, and Priorities

It is making my stomach turn to have to say this, but: 

&gt; I absolutely cannot support the idea of using the terrorist watch list as our way of regulating access to guns. 

It's not just a little off, it's downright wrong. It legitimizes 
the existence of this list, which has no transparency or due process, no judicial oversight, and whose existence the ACLU opposes. 
And worse, it's a cowardly attempt to "get something done" that _still_ relies on the use of [brown] terrorists as 
the political and rhetorical boogey-man.

I love, love, love, that someone in Congress is finally standing up and disrupting business as usual to make something happen on gun regulation. I welled up when I first saw the headlines. I was so proud of having helped Chris Murphy (in my own small way) get elected to the Senate in 2012. 

But that feeling quickly wore off when I read what was actually happening. Even on this issue, which should be a slam dunk for Democrats right now, it happens that the party that's ostensibly on my side is doing things I find to be not just imperfect but harmful and counter-productive. **Taking shortcuts with civil liberties and racial animus should never be acceptable strategies for getting a bill across the finish line.** Shame on the Senate Democrats for their opportunism, for this moral and political cowardice. And now we're going to have a facebook feed full of liberals and progressives vehemently defending this approach in terms of both the policy and the politics.

I'm not against compromise, but compromise means you put up a bill to ban *a lot of guns* and eventually say yes to a deal that just bans *some guns* plus high-capacity mags. It doesn't mean that you pick an approach that appeals in one part to your base and in another part to the worst instincts that feed and strengthen your opponents over the long-term. 

This seems to be the Democratic way of doing things – validate the bad worldview to get the good result. (And it's seen as a virtue! a sign that one knows how to Get Things Done™.) But it's a recipe for a generational backslide like the one we've been experiencing all my life, and it does nothing to build the kind of political culture and meaningful narratives that will help us when the next Iraq War comes up for a vote, or the next Welfare Reform, or the next Crime Bill. The GOP is a huge and active driver of culture in their own way; on the left, social media and hollywood and pride parades and #BlackLivesMatter drive culture – and Democrats just keep sucking.


How Democrats Managed to Fuck Up the Gun Control Filibuster

_roof shingles  
not mine  
but Someone's  
home and comfort  
not here  
but Somewhere  
there's peace and quiet  
not for all  
but For me  
foreign streets still welcome  
not loving  
but Relenting  
to power and force  
and Will to dominate  
these parks and harbours and proud others  
not strategic allies  
but Sisters and brothers We see  
when we look believe  
when they speak give up our  
day Off to fix the leaky roof  
or Give up our distance and our  
exclusion and our comfort  
so They may know the  
peace We covet because life is short and memory is long--  
or life is long and memory is short--  
who can remember?  
we give up our comfortable beds to  
another or for the stepping out we have  
chosen not to take, chosen not  
to See the textures, the wrinkled  
faces and cracked shingles of  
brothers and sisters We forgot_

Unnamed Poem Written Far From Home

This is a repost of Pramila Jayapal's statement on the Black Lives Matter protest at Bernie Sanders's campaign event yesterday in Seattle. [You can read, like or share the original here](https://www.facebook.com/pramila.jayapal/posts/10153194606313621).

> Many people have been emailing and asking me for how I am thinking about what happened yesterday at the event on social security and medicare, when some protestors identifying as Black Lives Matter got up on stage to challenge Bernie Sanders on race and racism, and ended up shutting down the event so Bernie could not speak. I'm struggling but in the spirit of community, here's what comes to mind. First, I want to give a huge shout out to the amazing leaders who worked for months and months to organize the event: Robby Stern and PSARA, Social Security Works Washington, Washington CAN, Burke Stansbury, and so many more. This was a huge event to put together, and their determination is what ultimately got Senator Bernie Sanders to Seattle in the first place. The rally was also packed--maybe around 5,000 people--and people stood in the hot sun for a couple of hours, engaging actively and cheering on the incredibly wide range of speakers the coalition had put together. I was proud to be the speaker just before Bernie was supposed to speak. Watching what unfolded made me heartbroken. I have so many somewhat jumbled thoughts--here are just a few.
>
> 1) This is one small result of centuries of racism. As a country, we still have not recognized or acknowledged what we have wrought and continue to inflict on black people. The bigger results are how black kids as young as 2 are being disciplined differently in their daycares and pre-k classes. That black people are routinely denied jobs that white people get with the same set of experiences and skills. That black people--women and men--continue to die at the hands of police, in domestic violence, on the streets. That black mothers must tell their children as young as 7 or 8 that they have to be careful about what pants or hoodies they wear or to not assert their rights if stopped. That this country supports an institutionalized form of racism called the criminal justice system that makes profit --hard, cold cash--on jailing black and brown people. I could go on and on. But the continued lack of calling out that indelible stain of racism everywhere we go, of refusing to see that racism exists and implicit bias exists in all of us, of refusing to give reparations for slavery, of refusing to have our version of a truth and reconciliation process--that is what pushes everything underneath and makes it seem like the fault is of black people not of the country, institutions and people that wrought the violence. That is the anger and rage that we saw erupt yesterday on stage. But it's not the problem, it's a symptom of the disease of unacknowledged and un-acted upon racism.
>
> 2) When the disruption first happened, the crowd (mostly white) turned ugly. It's hard to say what is the chicken or the egg. Some of it may have stemmed from the protestors calling the whole crowd racist. Some of it was from annoyance at the disruption. Some was probably from deep disagreement about tactics in a movement to get attention to an issue. Some was from deep disappointment because people had stood in the hot sun for hours to hear Bernie. Whatever it was, the conversations that ensued--the name calling of white and black people against each other, including some people calling blacks who didn't agree with what was happening racist--were so painful. I was in the speakers tent and Pam Keeley alerted me to two young black girls (Gina Owens grandchildren) who were weeping, they were so scared, so I went over to comfort them. We stood with our arms around each other, and in some small way, that gave me the greatest sense of doing something tangible--to be with people I love, assuring them they would be safe, and that none of us would ever let harm come to them. After the protests, several people came up and wanted to talk. Many were furious--some white people said they no longer support BLM. Others said they do support but this erodes their support. Some said outrageous things from anger. Others seemed befuddled. Some understood. People will have to work this out for themselves, but as we all do, I hope that we can open our hearts to all of the pain and suffering in the world and be as compassionate and kind as possible to each other so that we can also heal as we learn and listen.
>
> 3) I don't have any answer on what is "right." Bernie Sanders was a guest in our city--invited by a multiracial coalition to speak on some very important issues. Enormous amounts of work went into yesterday's event and it was so important to talk about preserving and expanding Social Security and Medicare. None of the papers today are covering those issues, because they were eclipsed by what happened. That's not necessarily "wrong"--it just is what it is. But here's what I would have loved to have happen: after the protestors were able to get the mic and say their piece and have the 4.5 minutes of silence for all the black people who have been killed, I would have loved for Bernie Sanders to take the mic and respond. And also to speak about Social Security and Medicare too. Here's what I would love even more: for the Sanders campaign and BLM nationally to sit down and talk about an agenda on racial justice that he can use his presidential platform to help move. Imagine rolling out that agenda and inviting black people to talk about it on stage with him. Now that excites me.
> 
> 4) I had not yet endorsed Bernie Sanders (and still have not), although I was incredibly excited about his candidacy. One of the primary reasons is because I wanted to know more about his stands on race and racism. I asked the campaign for some time to discuss this with him, and he did very graciously make some time for me to have a short conversation with him. What I got from the conversation is that he knows he comes from a very white state and he's a 70+ year old white guy. He knows that running for President, he must now speak to voters who are very different from those in his state. He IS deeply committed to equality on all counts but his primary lens for all of his work--and a HUGELY necessary and not-often-enough-acknowledged lens--is economic. He is a truth-teller on economic issues in a way that no other candidate is. he gets the connection between large corporations, elections, and income inequality. He does understand the problems of the criminal justice system and I fully believe he will work to change that if elected. But the deeper comfort with talking about race and racism is harder. As Mayor of Burlington, early on, he endorsed Jesse Jackson for President and Jackson went on to win the state. He was active in the civil rights movement. But more than that, he is someone who has fought for so many of the threads that connect our movements. He has to learn to talk about racism in that way, to connect his ideas on education, economics, incarceration, and race. As I said when I had the honor of introducing him at his evening rally, he is in a unique position to do so. And we are in a unique moment where we crave that leadership in a Presidential campaign. I told him in my conversation with him that he needed to talk head on about institutional racism--he said he agreed and he would do it in the evening. And he did--to an enormous, cheering crowd of 15,000 people. That's a huge platform for our messages. There's more to do and learn for sure, but is any one of us perfect? The most we can ask for is for someone who listens and cares deeply, who is trustworthy, and who will do what he says. I know I learned a lot in my campaign and I will continue to grow from listening to people's voices. I believe Bernie Sanders is growing too--and I hope (and yes, believe) that we'll look back on this and see his emergence as a leader who brings our movements for economic, racial and social justice together in a powerful way.
>
> 5) Here's what I am trying to deeply think about: How do we call people in even as we call them out? As a brown woman, the only woman of color in the state senate, often the only person of color in many rooms, I am constantly thinking about this. To build a movement, we have to be smarter than those who are trying to divide us. We have to take our anger and rage and channel it into building, growing, loving, holding each other up. We need our outlets too, our places of safety where we can say what we think without worrying about how it's going to land, where we can call out even our white loved ones, friends, allies for what they are not doing. But in the end, if we want to win for ALL of us on racial, economic and social justice issues, we need multiple sets of tactics, working together. Some are disruptive tactics. Some are loving tactics. Some are truth-telling tactics. Some can only be taken on by white people. Some can only be taken on by people of color. Sometimes we need someone from the other strand to step in and hold us up. Other times, we have to step out and hold them up. Each of us has a different role to play but we all have to hold the collective space for movement building together. That's what I hope we all keep in mind and work on together. It's the only way we move forward.


Pramila Jayapal on Seattle's BLM protest at Bernie Sanders Campaign Event

![](https://snook.pub/static/images/spelunking.jpg)

Want to go exploring?

Spelunking

Today I finally got around to trying out a new technique I heard about a couple
weeks ago -- and wow, I wish I had known about this earlier. By placing a simple
link on your website, you can give your mobile and tablet visitors the ability to instantly share your page with friends using the popular WhatsApp messaging service.

**If you're on a WhatsApp-enabled mobile or tablet device, [click this link to try it out](whatsapp://send?text=Wow%20this%20WhatsApp%20thing%20is%20amazing%21).** It's that simple. No Javascript, no OAuth, no wrangling of permissions.

Here's how it's done:

&gt; 1. Add this code to your page:
&gt;     `&lt;a href="whatsapp://send?text=[[ URL encoded
&gt;     message goes here ]]"&gt;click this link&lt;/a&gt;`
&gt; 1. Celebrate.

Aside from the incredibly easy setup, one of my favorite things about this is the seamless user experience: the link opens up my WhatsApp conversations list, showing the friends I talk with the most and am the most likely to want to talk to about the action I'm sharing.

Perhaps even more promising, this approach has the potential to spark ***real conversations*** between your members and their friends. It's not a broadcast medium like Twitter or Facebook, so you'll probably only get one impression out of it, but it's likely to be orders of magnitude more impactful than any impression from those other networks -- and engaging in real dialogue could do a lot more to galvanize your members than simply getting them to start a thread on Facebook.

For something so easy to deploy, it's worth a test, right?

**[Love this idea? Click here to share it with your WhatsApp friends.](whatsapp://send?text=Check%20out%20this%20fast%20easy%20way%20to%20get%20people%20sharing%20your%20page%20on%20WhatsApp!%20http%3A%2F%2Fsnook.pub%2Fposts%2F2015%2F06%2F05%2FEasy-WhatsApp-Shares.html)**

Easy WhatsApp Shares

App idea: CanvassStarter. Pick the neighborhoods your progressive organization wants to canvass; enter a question or two, and a bid for price per door.

Three or four organizations all want to canvass in the same place? Great – now we can all afford to do it! Not all their target voters are the same? fine by us! We'll use different scripts for those voters, and the increased target density will still make the canvasses cheaper for all involved. This leverages not just economy of scale, but economy of density.

**CanvassStarter is especially geared towards relatively low-budget organizations looking to build a bridge between online and field** (such as by building up a local organizing chapter around a high-energy moment or event), and for organizations who have a loose sense of others they\'d want to partner up with, but **who find it unwieldy to assemble coalition efforts due to the logistics field organizing and the complexity of ad-hoc coalition-building across different target geos and demos.** So in this sense, it's like KickStarter for canvassing a neighborhood. And if you're one of the funders, your question(s) get asked.

We'd want to partner up with proven canvass-managing organizations, and there'd be some work to figure out what options are needed for neighborhood-based and voter-based bid options (like rolling our own Google Adwords bidding system, but not in a competition model, but then sometimes on a script-level basis in a competition-for-placement model). So the technical and logistical challenges are real, but mostly the service would attempt to stay lean and solve a lot of financial, political, and networking problems for highly aligned but distinct progressive advocacy organizations.

CanvassStarter

Snoogle™ is a search engine that indexes all the hypothetical stuff you've ever hypothetical invented and tells you (and your annoying friend who won't believe you) whether you totally came up with that thing first that someone else just brought to market.

Snoogle searches your chat/Facebook/Twitter/email history and notifies you when it detects "inventions" you mention in conversation or in public places. If the invention was only discussed in private, Snoogle prompts you to share your idea in public with a nice official-looking "copyright" symbol so no one can scoop you. Then whenever you're trying to convince people you came up with something first, you'll have sources.

The idea was inspired by [the time I invented Snapcash](https://www.facebook.com/michael.snook/posts/10101701184449536) on Facebook and then Snapchat came out with a very similar product under the *exact* same name about month later. (I'm posting it eight months later because I didn't have Snoogle yet.) As a kid, I also co-invented *Second Life* and *Mike's Hard Iced Tea* -- but alas, no Snoogle. So a couple other companies took those ideas and went and "built them" and "marketed them" and "sold them" and they got all the credit!

I'm not looking for royalties or anything, I just think it'd be nice if other people knew me as the guy who came up with SecondLife and Snapcash. That's all I'm saying. In fact, this is an important rule of Snoogle: Snoogle is only for use in arguments with friends or as a source for stories; if we catch you using it to sue anyone, we'll take your account away and steal all your ideas.

Comment below and I'll let you know when it's ready for beta testing.


Snoogle: For When You Totally Came Up With That First

My feature idea: conditional formatting rules in Google Docs -- not spreadsheets, text documents. Useful for highlighting names of colleagues who are owning certain tasks in a project document, or for highlighting tags like "critical" or "completed".

Right now it's surprisingly difficult to tell the application, "find every line that starts with 'DONE' and format that line as strikethrough", or "Find every time my boss's name is mentioned and highlight it with bright colors." -- I can turn it into "==!!== NAME ==!!==" with Find & Replace, but I can\'t set its font size or background color and I can't enforce consistency of that rule throughout the document, which is a problem if other people are editing it and shouldn't be troubled to follow my crazy formatting whims.

[The original musing about it on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/michael.snook/posts/10102094430057186)

Wanted: Conditional Formatting in Collaborative Text

### Employr: Swipe right on resumes.

With Employr, job seekers and posters get a quick look at what the other has to offer, and match via the time-honored method of swiping right and left. If you both swipe right, you can chat and set up an interview!

Tag yourself or your hiring organization with different interests,
skills possessed or desired, and then swipe left or right at potential matches
for employment. If you both swipe right, message them and set up an interview.
Geographic filters allow for hiring in offices, remotely, or for small community
organizations and local businesses. Resume previews show only a summary of
skills and experiences, so the initial review process is equitable and
un-biased, with no HR overhead.

Local small non-profit owner / my neighbor says:

&gt; I would definitely use Employr to help for hiring. I run a small non-profit   that puts on dance classes for kids in the neighborhood and performs at festivals around Brooklyn. I post online, do a lot of word-of-mouth, and put up flyers when I need to hire for a position or a particular event. I would love to be able to set interests (like "dance, nonprofit, local") and set the range to "5 miles", and find good people committed to the community. Sounds amazing!

Well, it's not amazing _yet_, because it hasn't been built. But I think it's a cool idea at least.


Employr

**Update 2020:** This is how the old version of the site was built. The new one is Rails 6 + React.

----

This site is pretty simple: just HTML and CSS, with help from Github Pages, Jekyll, Foundation, SCSS, and Disqus. This post has a bit about why these tools, and why I think they're a good fit for this project.

![](https://i.imgur.com/tYucYct.png)

## GitHub Pages

My favorite way to start building a new site -- it's free, it's easy, and it's already integrated with my git repo. If you want to start putting HTML, javascript, and CSS up on the web, GitHub Pages is the quickest way to get started. This site is just [a GitHub repository](https://github.com/michaelsnook/snook.pub), which gets served up as static HTML.

The site has no Apache config to worry about, no URLs.py, and no database, with all the hosting burden having been moved onto Github.  It's free and virtually uncrashable. You don't even have to log into a server to deploy changes -- just `git push` and let GitHub Pages do the rest. [If you're not familiar with Github Pages, check it out.](https://pages.github.com/)

## Jekyll

[Jekyll](http://jekyllrb.com/) is a tool for creating static sites, which is integrated into GitHub Pages. It allows you to use [Liquid templates](http://liquidmarkup.org/), which are almost identical to the templates I'm used to in Django and Flask, and the combination of Jekyll and GitHub Pages results in a pretty dreamy workflow: 

1. Serve the site locally with `jekyll serve --watch`. 
1. Work on the site. Refresh browser window to view changes.
1. When I'm ready to publish, commit and `git push`.

The `--watch` flag tells Jekyll to redeploy the site each time it detects that you've saved changes. GitHub pages takes care of the post-commit hook that tells Jekyll to recompile and redeploy the site whenever I push changes. And when a project grows to more than just HTML/CSS scaffolding and requires a real web application behind it, the familiar template format makes that a smooth transition.

## Foundation

I really can't say enough good things about Foundation. I don't love to write CSS, or feel terribly good at it. I don't like worrying about whether my paddings have caused my paragraphs to overrun, or second-guessing the way I've set up my `.panel` style. Foundation, like its big cousin Bootstrap, provides an easy-to-use grid and utility classes, with simple JavaScript-y add-ons like dropdown menus and modals.

My preference for Foundation isn't based on anything terribly scientific; I just find it easier to use. The markup just makes sense to me, and feels less repetitive. It leaves me needing to write less custom CSS, and I rarely if ever find myself writing code to fight against Foundation's defaults or the assumptions that went into the design of their grid. 

## SCSS

Okay, I have to confess: I'm really not writing any less CSS than I was before I was using SCSS. The fact is, I have been meaning to learn SCSS/SASS or LESS for a while, so I finally did it, thanks to [Foundation's incredibly simple instructions](http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/sass.HTML). 

This site's styles are so simple, I may decide to revert back to old-fashioned CSS. The current arrangement just adds a step to my workflow (`grunt build` at the command line every time I update the stylesheet). That said, I'm excited to keep learning SCSS and to try out some of its more advanced features, so I'll probably put up with the extra step for now.

## Disqus

What good is a blog without comments, right? And how are you going to handle comments on a static HTML website with no server or database? Well, that's where Disqus came in. It was really a breeze to install. Sign up for an account; they email you the embed code; paste and go. I think some people object to Disqus (some of them liked it before it was cool), and I'm sure everyone finds it to be generic -- but it works! And it's free! And it took me all of five minutes to install!

If you have a problem with that, I'd like you to read one of my favorite tweets of 2014:

&gt; A cool blog post would be: we used a bunch of boring technology to solve a business problem and got to go home early and play with our kids.

&mdash; [@moonpolysoft April 2, 2014](https://twitter.com/moonpolysoft/statuses/451494961557434368)

## More To Do

This is definitely my favorite stack to build a website on, so far. As I build out the "projects" section, I may end up with project pages that really want to be more like "apps" than "pages", in which case I'll have to re-examine my priorities and the reasons that make this the ideal stack for me, for this site, for now. But for the time being, this is working just fine -- it's fast, it's free, and it's fun!

Under the Hood

A radical socialist libertarian pacifist futurist party, dedicated to the peaceful exploration of space in the name of all humankind.

So far The Space Party mostly exists as:

* Members of [a project](http://coactivate.org/projects/spaceparty/) on CoActivate.org. The coactivate project has about 8 members and a wiki.
* There is some sort of website happening at [TheSpaceParty.org](http://thespaceparty.org).
* The [Facebook page](https://facebook.com/SpacePartyUSA) has over 4,000 people on it!
* And there's a fun but sporadic Twitter feed, [@SpacePartyUSA](https://twitter.com/SpacePartyUSA).

The Space Party

**Update from 2020:** This is a post from the old website, copied over from the archives, but no longer entirely accurate!

---

Hello World! This is a post. This site is getting real, and this post is its introduction.

Welcome to it, by the way, and thank you for coming to see my website. You'll find posts, projects, and, before too long, a contact form to get in touch with me if needed. 

I'm building this site for a few reasons. First is that I am a web developer (sort of) and so I should have my own website. Second is that I find longer-form writing to be a relief and a joy and I want to encourage myself to do it. I have a few hobby projects now and I like to talk about them, or at least I imagine when I finish one of them I will want to talk about it.

It's with that in mind that I've set up my site, with this sidebar on the left here, to show the categories, "Posts" and "Projects". Posts will likely be much more numerous than projects, and some posts will be associated with a project. Right now there are no projects to list, but I suppose I will throw up a page about the Space Party, which is a free-time project of mine, and then I will show you all what I mean.

**Edit:** Now you can see what I mean.

Michael Snook's site

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