I wrote last week about how I started a new site, DailyGame.space, to track daily puzzle plays. I’ve had a little traction with it among a group of friends, and I’d love to extend that to anyone reading this little newsletter: Give it a try, log in with your Atmosphere account (I like that more than calling it a Bluesky account, even though that’s functionally what it is. I also like it more than folks calling it an “Internet Handle” — that feels too broad, and specificity helps a lot with discovery.
I’ve added a slew of features and redesigned the application. There are new social features, social activity, badges, and several new games. My personal new favorite is Kickoff League, which is basically chess-meets-soccer. Fun stuff!
Publishing data with Atproto presents an interesting challenge from other data storage structures. Unlike a database for which you have full control, you need to consider that a published lexicon means that anyone can build an application using your data. Like Dan Abramov said in the article I referenced last week: “The data no longer lives inside the products; the products aggregate over our data.”
That means I have a social responsibility to publish the lexicon for the data I’m writing, which will then help enforce the data I’m publishing matches that schema. It also means that I’m building an app that could be completely ephemeral — if I decide I’m done, anybody could immediately step in. It also means that anybody could build their own app to track their daily puzzles. I love that.
Another interesting facet here is that I could integrate with something like Puzzmo extremely easily, because they publish streak data on a user’s repository. I don’t need an API key, I don’t need to scrape anything: The data is just right there for me to consume. And there are other games built with the Atmosphere, which opens up all sorts of options. Very cool! Open social webs are great, and building something like this in that context is exciting.
It’s been another week without a lot of writing, but I've been continuing my Top 40 ‘90s Albums retrospective. We’re up to #23!
I’ve also been posting photos on an Atmosphere-powered photo site, Grain.social, which has been nice. I’ve actually already integrated photos from the platform on my personal site.
Now, if only Beehiiv would integrate with standard.site. Hmm.