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A Little Learning ...
In yesterday’s monthly post I teased about not being able to talk about “the thing that hijacked this update” because it happened in the current month. Here’s the story.
Hyberbolical Crochet
Some weeks ago I developed the notion to take up crochet. I’m honestly not too sure why. I knitted once, long ago, a very long scarf a while before Tom Baker made them fashionable, but knitting seemed a bit too much of a statement and two long needles too much to carry around casually. So, crochet. I did nothing about this notion until three weeks ago, when I mentioned it to a friend with whom I regularly drink coffee.
She said “I’ve been thinking the exact same thing”.
So we agreed to start and, to hold one another to it, to meet the following week chrochet in hand.
Improved Accessibility
I have a little newsletter on Buttondown. It is free to anyone, although I can receive voluntary payments. To that end, I sometimes insert what is called an interstitial in messages to people who are not paying subscribers asking them to upgrade. And to make it stand out just a little I give it a pale yellow background. Whether it works to “convert” people I don’t know, but I do know that in one important respect, it didn’t work.
The year in log files
For a little more than four years now I have kept half an eye on visitors to my various sites using Jason McIntosh’s Bise. I like the hand-rolled ritual each Sunday morning of renaming the log files, running my duct-taped scripts, the brief shot of elation (or despair), and then putting the log files away, never to be looked at again. Except, I do look at them again occasionally, and this is one of those occasions.
Listen to What
This is a bit embarassing. For I think the first time, I gave this post the same title as a previous post, which I realised only because that post had received webmentions that displayed on this place. The only solution is to retitle this post and reshare it. And ensure I test first ...
I very much enjoyed Tracy Durnell's long post about , part of a series on wanting, or perhaps needing, less. It mirrors, at least partially, my own experiences of music in the past few years; having first reduced friction I now find that, in order to be more intentional, I need to reduce friction all over again
Force Fed
One of the primary reasons to design a new ClassicPress theme from the ground up was so that I would understand how it worked. That, in theory, would make it easier for me tinker and so, by and large, it proved. The last thing I knew I had to do1 after it went live about 10 days ago was to add t...
Tag Overload
The chat at indieweb.org has been quite busy lately with people brainstorming about taxonomies, specifically about how to classify places that serve coffee. This isn’t something I am interested in, although the broader topic of classifications and taxonomies I do wrestle with from time to time. What triggered this post is the discussion over there that focused on emergent versus deliberately designed taxonomies.
A Dearth of Ritual
Habits I have aplenty, some of them bordering on the obsessive. Do I need to weigh myself every morning if I record my weight only once a week? But rituals, very few. So what’s the difference?
Get Smart
This started a few days ago when JamesG announced the redesign of his website. The design and the thinking behind it are great. There was just one thing about it that grated with me: a “straight” quote, right there in the title.1
Monthly report: April 2024
Around the web, a few people are saying that April went by super quick. Not for me. Nor dragging either. Just felt like an ordinary month in which I did some extraordinary things, most notably spending time with a great friend from grad-student days first in Rome, then by train to Venice, then by train to Vienna. Glorious.
Make it Simpler
Not really FOMO, but it would have been nice to have been able to attend the first meeting of Front End Study Hall yesterday. Still, glancing through the notes, especially in light of having recently pressed Publish on a redesign of one of my other sites, made me once again reassess my priorities.
My site’s new look will be good enough
Quite by coincidence, I discovered yesterday that I wrote a post on the same day ten years ago expressing my frustration at being able only to tinker with the technology underlying my website, rather than actually understanding it. Why coincidence? Because I am once again in the throes of tinkering with my website while not fully understanding it. And something I wrote back then is a fine prompt to get on and write my submission to this month's IndieWeb Carnival.
Monthly report: March 2024
March was ... March. Changeable, erratic, unpredictable. Good things on the bicycle, taking the train somewhere and cycling to a different train station. Movement among the plants on the terrace. Good fun and some entertaining podcasts made.
Riding Under the Radar
Last week, in an effort to keep riding my bicycle for fun outside the city, I put myself in the hands of Komoot. The app allows you to plan your own rides and use (and modify) rides that Komoot itself or other members have created and saved. It also offers a kind of online diary in which you can share photos and add comments about them.
Seven Year Itch
Digital relationships? That's the topic for February's Indieweb Carnival, and for a long time -- 28 days, in fact -- I did not think I had much to say on the topic. Sure, I've made a couple of real-life friends from people I originally met online. But no more than that. And then it occurred to me that I have been fretting lately about ignoring my most important digital relationship. I've been thinking, the other party ought to change while knowing, at the same time, that the only one who can change is me.
I'm talking, of course, about this website.
Found (Almost All) My Missing Images
tl;dr The images I lost from my installation of WithKnown are back, thanks to methodical brute force.
Year in Review 2023
Here’s the thing: I honestly can remember only a single bad event during the entire year. It was very bad, and entirely personal, so I’m going to say no more. Even the medical procedures I underwent had happy outcomes, compared to what I was dreading. So, another great year.
Very Positive Memories
There was a time, a long while back, when I was responsible for a good chunk of land, about 2.5 hectares. I wasn’t the only one who worked that land, but I made most of the decisions and thinking about what we did there fills me with happy memories.
Part of it was working with others to achieve a...
I Wrote This
There’s an interesting discussion going on in the IndieWeb chat forums about signalling that your website does not use AI. JamesG, for example, displays a badge on each post (though not on his home page, that reads “written by human not by AI” and that links through to a site that explains why such a badge is a good thing: “make sure humanity continues to advance”.
Biodegradable Blog Post
It's nice of Jim Nielsen to suggest that , but I'm not sure I fully agree that my current failure-to-ship of a rotten banana is worth writing about, except of course that I am now writing about it, tangentially.
An Alternative to Geohashing
I love the idea of having an algorithm decide where I should go on an outing. The problem with geohashing is that “my” graticule is quite large and almost three-quarters water. Neighbouring graticules are often too far away. So despite my best intentions, I have not actually been on very many expeditions. That is why I was very interested when Christof said he was considering building an alternative version that would work on what I think one might call decigraticules and centigraticules or, more simply, what Christof calls walkable and bikeable. The result is a brilliant website that offers you much more accessible options every day.
Today, I put it to use for the first time.
Stop the Linkrot Part II
I was intrigued to see that Remy Sharp had converted his “No More 404” script into a service, and promptly asked if I could use it. Remy obliged, and I just installed it which means, I hope, even fewer broken links on this site.
Community: Still Searching
I have never felt as much a part of a close-knit community as I did in university. On the very first day, three of us (out of five) in what you might I suppose call a dorm discovered an instant friendship. By the cancelled 50th reunion in 2020, one of us was no longer alive to attend. In between, and still now, there was just something very special that started back then.
A first fix for Known checkins
I had a little time yesterday afternoon, so I decided to begin the Step Two promised in the roundup of my exasperating Hack Day a couple of weeks ago, digging my way through the check-in code in WithKnown.
Looking at the code for a single check-in, there seemed to be a mismatch between a script...
Monthly report: October 2023
A fine month, not only for some great October weather but also for a long anticipated trip to Germany for the border:none conference and IndieWeb Camp Nürnberg.
IndieWeb Camp Nürnberg 2023
IndieWeb Camp and border:none in Nürnberg were wonderful. I had a great time seeing old friends, making new ones and just giving myself over to the whole thing. Well worthwhile, including even the two twelve-hour train journeys that took me there and back. No complaints.
But. Because there has to be a but.
Stop the Linkrot
We had a session at IndieWebCamp Nürnberg on linkrot in its many guises. As time goes by, URLs you link to and things that link to your URLs almost inevitably break in different ways. Perhaps a whole domain vanishes or becomes a sleaze-hub. Perhaps someone changes the structure of their website, b...
Self-care Success
It is 6:45 and I am on a high-speed train pulling out of Roma Termini. We have just passed the strange tall chimney with its spiral staircase wrapping around outside, though I can barely see it. The train’s final destination is Bolzano but if all goes well I will transfer in Verona and then again in Munich and I will end up in Nürnberg at about 19:00.
This, for me, is self care, though I don’t call it that. I call it having fun.
Monthly report: September 2023
Delayed by a day because I judged a blog carnival round-up to be of a higher priority. And to be honest, there isn't that much to report, but here goes anyway.
Delightful Weathers
Deciding to host a blog carnival was the easy part. Actually doing the work took me right back to those wonderful merry-go-round rides of yesteryear, complete with steam driven organ, as opposed to all the shiny themed rides of the modern amusement park. But enough reminiscence. To work!
Perfect Weather
The sky is clear celeste, unmarked by clouds. The wind is fresh, but not overly so. The temperature is a delicious 23°C. In other words, a perfect early autumn day. Yesterday was the same, maybe a touch windier, just the job for a very long bike ride.
IndieWeb Blog Carnival Reminder
As the month turns, it seems like a good idea to drum up a little support for the IndieWeb Carnival, which I am hosting this month. The idea is simplicity itself.
- You write something on your own website that somehow addresses this month’s topic: “My Kind of Weather”.
- You let me know that...
My Kind of Weather
Time to bite the bullet I launched at myself a long time ago, and specify a topic for September's Indieweb Carnival: My Kind of Weather.
A Garden Is a Lovesome Thing
I no longer have a garden. I used to have one, in spades. Almost two hectares of old apple orchard, a large polytunnel, raised beds for veggies, flowers galore, a pond big enough to dip into after a hard day’s work. All gone, for reasons that needn’t detain us now, and that I try hard not to think a...
An Extended Moment of Joy
A lot of people derive great benefit from recording, usually daily, the things that bring them joy or for which they are grateful. That isn’t something I do — at least not publicly — although I will sometimes jot down something along those lines as a reminder to future me. That may be because I am e...
IndieWeb Carnival revisited
The launch of a new blog carnival was so exciting that I wrote my own summary, even though I was not the host. That job was very ably performed by Sara Jakša, who launched the carnival. The point of my roundup was to visit each of the sites and, by way of encouragement, send a webmention to each...
IndieWeb and Cooking: My Roundup
It’s alive! The Carnival of IndieWeb, that is, with the first monthly roundup from Sara Jakša, who started this ball rolling. I looked at them all, because that’s a key point of blog carnivals, to discover things you might not otherwise have found.
Searching for a recipe
We are looking after a friend’s place in the country and perhaps the hardest work is keeping on top of the vegetable garden. Ignore it for a day, and there are five large cucumbers, mocking you. My cucumber repertoire is somewhat limited; raita, quick pickle, sandwiches and, when I remember, Yan-Kit...
$project-report 01
As reported earlier, I seem to have found the motivation to pick up the pieces on a project that I’ve dropped a fair few times over the past 10 years or so. And as promised, I am going to ape Phil Gyford and refer to it as $project until it is ready.
The Story So Far … back in 2008, I got a litt...
Wondering about my Twitter future
I’ve been watching, with some amusement, the goings on at Twitter and wondering what, if anything, I should do. I’m skeptical that the whole thing is going to implode, although I am not nearly as sanguine that it will not become even worse than it currently is. To an extent, I cannot avoid the mayhem, because a social channel that I like and enjoy has an automatic import of any tweet that contains the word “IndieWeb,” as a result of which one of the rooms is swamped with people whispering into the void that people can follow them on Mastodon at something-something@indieweb.social. I skim past them at a rate of knots, just in case there is something of actual interest that I don’t want to miss.
Anticipating a past anniversary
It’s a little like the old time warp, having said which I confess I never really bothered to get my head around those puzzles about meeting yourself in another time. Anyway, a little more than a year ago, and inspired by , I set out to restore my previous online self, one day at a time. That anniversary passed on 18 July, but I couldn’t easily celebrate it with a blog post because in a sense it hasn’t passed yet.
Spring it on
Robin Sloan is always good to read (although I have not, yet, had enough downtime to read Sourdough). His proposal for is no exception and I decided to give it the “close consideration” he asked for. I’m not sure I have any “generous imagination” to offer.
How to fix a problem with Gregwar/Image
There is an IndieWebCamp going on in Dusseldorf, and during a session on the presentation of photos I thought about sharing my own efforts in that department. Then I discovered, to my horror, that search was completely broken on the website, in production and locally, where I tinker with things. Obv...
Still cooking what I eat
How strange to discover two milestones written about on the same day, several years apart. First there was the post in which I “discovered” podcasts. Eleven years later I was mourning the passing of ADN and extending one of the IndieWeb metaphors — eat what you cook1 — with a little biological...
Weeding Mendel’s Garden and other blog carnivals
Twelve years ago today, I hosted an issue of Mendel’s Garden blog carnival here. Looking at it again today prompted some reflections.
Newsblur could send to Micropub
Still pursuing the idea of sharing from NewsBlur to other places, especially Known and Micro.blog, I went digging around in the code. All of the options are in a section of NewsBlur-master/media/js/newsblur/reader/reader.js starting at line 2560.
In memoriam Google Reader
My former self just reminded me that it is 10 years since Google dumped Reader, “likely,” as I surmised then, “to send us all scurrying to Google Plus”. Which, of course, it dumped a few years later.
Listen with Python
At last, I am once again extracting summary details and artwork for the podcast episodes I have listened to, and I am doing it with Python rather than PHP.
Lost in GIS … Again
Struggling still to understand geographical information and learn how to do things with it, I had high hopes for this tutorial, even though it dates from 2017. Reading through it a couple of times, before trying to do anything, it seemed to contain the sort of information I wanted to be able to use. So I carved out a few hours and started to work through it. There were plenty of errors to begin with of a sort I have become familiar with, that various bits and pieces could not be found. One proved absolutely insoluble, and I reasoned that perhaps I was using too modern a version of Python. So I went back to square one and installed Python 3.6.
Geohash within walking distance
I bagged another geohash yesterday. All it took was rescheduling and redirecting my normal walk, because the target location was just over 5 km from my home. How often does that happen? I wrote it up on the wiki, to the best of my ability, but adhering to IndieWeb principles I’m hosting my own suitably edited version here.
Planet history
In my as yet completely unsuccessful attempt to revive an internet meme, I was somewhat sketchy on the idea of planets, mostly because they were not something I ever used. I suggested that they were automatic accretions, without detailed curation. I was wrong, as Fluffy pointed out when a group of...
Displaying On This Day
Having decided to take a daily approach to filling in the missing posts on this incarnation of my website, I started to think about displaying what I had written on this day in years past. There are all sorts of reasons to do this, many captured by the IndieWeb wiki page on the topic.1 For me, it is partly simply to remind myself of things past. Undoubtedly there will be some negative things in there, but they’re mine, and I own them.
Beginning to understand javascript, a bit
Blimey, what a great end-of-year gift I have received. Professor Von Explaino heard and gave me almost exactly what I was hoping for in his post .
My independent drop box
I don’t really need to write much here; just enough to make sure that there is something to receive when I go out and try to logon from outside.
And bang, there it is. I couldn’t be happier. Not least because I feel I have dodged several bullets.
PESOS from InstaGram to WithKnown
Six days ago, I learned about Bibliogram. It offers a neat and fast view of public Instagram profiles, and some instances also offer a RSS feed. That . Could it be a way to automatically post photos from InstaGram to my stream?
I’m here to tell you: it could.
A tool to make knowledge gardening easier
It’s so nice when things just happen to come together and move me forward. A teeny thing, but mine, and I hope worth sharing.
A week back I wrote about tending my zettelkasten garden, and trying to become more of a curator and less of a hoarder. Two days later someone mentioned readwise.io, which I had a quick look at. That same day, a cyberchum posted something “from this morning’s Readwise email”. So I was well primed.
A garden with a water feature
People have written some interesting things following on from the pop-up IndieWebCamp that Chris Aldrich organised a couple of weeks ago. The Garden and the Stream set out to compare and contrast wikis and weblogs and how the two might be used. It was a terrific success, and I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be there. The topic interests me and is something I’ve thought about on and off for a long time. This morning, I treated myself to thinking about it some more.
Bise workflow
It has been three weeks now since I first ran Bise on my logfiles to see who and what had been popping in here to take a look. It’s a bit of a faff, for a whole variety of reasons, which start with my host keeping only a couple of days worth of logs. That means I have to download the logs daily. And my host’s naming convention is different from the one Bise expects. Rather than play with Bise, it is easier to rename the files. And then there's a whole lot of to-ing and fro-ing.
They’re not dead!
Very strange, but for two days straight my log files have not shown anyone coming here for a post that couldn't be found. Is this a sign of success, or of increasing irrelevance?
Anyway, I did eventually find something that couldn't be found, and brought it in. And it triggered all sorts of nost...
Statisfaction
It is 160 days since I first noted that I would like to make use of Bise, Jason McIntosh's blog-readership reporter, 118 since I automated downloading the access logs. With half an eye on the project day at IndieWebCamp Austin, time to make good on my promise.
Bise expects its log files to be named a certain way, which is not the way mine were named, but that proved relatively easy to overcome with the wonderfully powerful A Better Finder Rename. The latest version has filters that make it possible to rename 1-9 and 10-... , which require slightly different handling, in the same batch, and that makes life super easy.
Can you depend on Twitter?
One of the reasons I love RSS (and other) feeds is that they effortlessly alert me when someone I follow posts something. So it was this morning, when James Morley published . I've known James a long time, and admired his approach to gathering and visualising data, and this was his first post in almost two years.
It's about automatically harvesting Tweets using a tool called TAGS – Twitter Archiving Google Sheet, and he shows in detail how useful it can be. I might even find a use for it myself. But here's the thing. James recognises some "potential issues," among them this:
Make it easy to be followed
Chris Aldrich has a long and throught-provoking piece asking . It drew an interesting comment from Alexandra Samuel, putting the case that publishers who have paid for a piece have no interest in an author building her own audience...
🎧 Microcast #081 – Anarchy, Federation, and the IndieWeb | Doug Belshaw’s Thought Shrapnel
Episode summary:
Spam almost vanquished
I really wanted to post this 3 days ago, on January 10th. That would have been one year since I started recording the amount of spam I was getting over on my micro-site. I first noticed the problem in November 2018, and in January 2019 started keeping track.
This graph shows all the data from...
IndieWeb Challenge Day 11
A very, very small fix today.1
-
The formatting of footnotes had been driving me nuts, but not nuts enough to do anything about it. Until today. The marker is now where it ought to be, and the font size a smidgen smaller. ↩
IndieWeb Challenge Day 10
I've wanted for ages to be able to do visual representations of some of the data I collect, and as I had a bit more time than usual yesterday I finally made the effort to understand chartist.js and put it to work.
IndieWeb Challenge Day 9
Updated one of the more useful Grav plugins, TwigFeeds. This had been rewritten to take advantage of a better feed-reading service, and so I needed to change one or two things to make it work properly. The excellent instructions made that extremely easy, which is nice.
IndieWeb Challenge Day 8
Eventually, perhaps, I'll learn to think things through properly, but for now it seem that trial and error just leads me to more errors and more trials. My improved logic for detecting whether a post was a Review or a Listen failed to detect that it was neither of those things. As a result, those...
IndieWeb Challenge Day 7
For ages, I have wanted the navigation menu at the top of the page to remain visible even after you have scrolled down past the bottom of the screen, which pushes the menu up off the top of the screen. In principle, that's supposed to be much easier now that you can use CSS to position an element as <sticky>. But it proved trickier than I expected
IndieWeb Challenge Day 6
If one is sufficiently slapdash, fixing something on this site each day is more than doable. A couple of days ago I did some work to tidy up the display of Reviews. Deeply fancy logic (not) to check the name of an image file seemed to do what I wanted. I had forgotten, however, that while the name I gave the image file was constant, it respected the file format of the original image file. My logic was testing for only one file format.
IndieWeb Challenge Day 5
A brief flurry of webmentions to a recent post reminded me that I needed to look again at how those things are presented. In building the new theme, I had discovered the <detail> and <summary> elements and used them to hide interactions as the default. I hope most people know that clicking on the triangle will expose something hidden. Ideally I would like to offer different visual presentation depending on whether either webmentions or comments exist. That is not going to happen for a while.
What happened to tagging? We did
I very much enjoyed reading What Happened to Tagging, by Alexandra Samuel, so thanks to .
I do think, however, that she is being entirely too negative about the state of play today. Aaron singled out one wistful quote, about the web we could have. I noted that the aut...
IndieWeb Challenge Day 4
Not much to see today, unless you go spelunking into old posts. If you do, however, you will notice that some of the older Reviews now are not quite as messy as they were.
IndieWeb Challenge Day 3
One of the worthwhile things about a commitment like this is that fixing even the smallest thing becomes worthwhile. Today, it was an oddity I noticed in the JSON feed for the site. I noticed it because it seemed that micro.blog had not picked up the two most recent posts. In fact it had, but it had given them a timestamp of midnight on the day in question. And I had also switched from the RSS feed, which was throwing errors, to the JSON feed, which wasn't.
IndieWeb Challenge Day 2
Over the past few months I have developed a new theme for the presentation of this site. A combination of plagiarism and invention, it almost certainly would not suit anyone else who wants an IndieWeb theme for the Grav CMS, expect possibly as a model to plagiarise and improve.1 I have a long list of things I need to improve myself, the first of which is to straighten up the display of Reviews.
Why I am not taking part in the 2019 IndieWeb Challenge
People who align with IndieWeb ideas have a brief history of undertaking a challenge during the month of December. The idea “is to collectively ship something IndieWeb-related that benefits the community, people in addition to yourself”. I sort of know that nothing I might do would benefit the community or people, but I didn't quite understand that there were other ways I could take part in the more general idea of a challenge.
Monthly report: October 2019
Got a lot more done than I expected, considering how late I was with last month's report. That is, as long as I focus on what I completed, rather than what I didn't. Which is exactly as it should be.
Not enough people want Webmentions
A little while ago (on 19 October, to be precise) someone mentioned , an open source commenting system for websites. It looked interesting, so I tried to leave a comment on . Despite a few problems with login, I managed it, and asked whether Commento could play nicely with webmentions. No reply there, but I also took the matter up with support at Commento.
Today I got a reply. It didn't really address the login point, but did speak to Webmentions:
IndieWebCamp Brighton Hack Day
"More tomorrow," I said in part 1 and, as usual, life got in the way.
IndieWebCamp Brighton
If you notice that this site looks a little different, that's because I'm just back from a terrific IndieWebCamp in Brighton this past weekend, and I had set myself the goal of setting this theme free on the hack day. Success, although there are still lots and lots of things to do, mostly quite minor, that I am adding to my snagging list. Like, I just discovered that I neglected to offer a search option on the home page. I should probably fix that, though the challenge may be more than minor.
A little challenge
As I work on my new theme for this site, I noticed again that the old theme's way of dealing with the webmentions I send is not 100 per cent functional. Specifically, quite a few sites seem not to like the h-card here, which is present on every post as a <div> that contains pure <data> elements.
Monthly report: September 2019
The balance I try to maintain, between doing things and writing about doing things, has swung too far in the doing direction. Sure, there are good reasons, like wanting to get the new theme for this site up and running before Friday, but I've got so many little notes scribbled that really wouldn't take much more than half an hour if I put my mind to it in the moment. Onward
I don't know what I don't need
Most of my "free" time for the past six weeks or so has been devoted to how this site works, on screen and behind the scenes, rather than what it contains. I've enjoyed it a lot, but now that I am almost ready to roll out the new look, which will be very like the old look, I have an odd problem. What don't I need?
Even more simpler
Three weeks on, I'm still too stuck in reverse engineering mode to have made much progress coming up with a new theme for Grav.
No more reverse engineering
For quite a while now I have been wrestling with the new default theme for Grav, which runs this site, in order to benefit from all the wonderful possibilities going forward. Unfortunately, I am belatedly coming to the realisation that reverse engineering a theme is just more trouble than it is worth, at least for me. In trying to be all things for all people, a lot of themes are just very, very complicated. I don't need all the possibilities on offer. I just need the kind of layout I like, which would essentially mirror the layout you see right now, especially if you are not looking at it on a phone.
Monthly report: June & July 2019
Not at all unhappy that this report covers two months. June and July we enjoyed a lot of travelling, some of it the very time when I might have been writing a monthly report, so. Travels to Ischia, Wales and Puglia, each of them wonderful in its own way.
One definite discovery, which I sort of knew but hadn't really thought much about. When I'm away on holiday, I sometimes have to do a bit of work. If I set aside a couple of quiet hours early in the morning, I can get as much done then as I can in almost a day at home. Knowing that in a couple of hours I will have to be ready to go to the beach, or sightseeing, or shopping for that day's dinner, prevents me from prevaricating like nothing else.
A little automation ...
Quite apart from the fact that I have barely written a thing here for almost a month, I thought it would be worthwhile to pick a low-hanging fruit. So I followed the very simple instructions at Automate your outgoing webmentions and now my hope is that I have removed one more piece of grit from wh...
🎧 Episode 24: What is the IndieWeb?
Episode summary: A live interview on xray.fm in Portland where I talked about the IndieWeb
Monthly report: May 2019
I began this monthly report on the first of the month, full of good intentions and excuses. That it took another five days is proof the excuses are real.
"Excuse" always seems to carry such a freight of negativity. They're not reasons for failing to accomplish what you set out to do. They just excuse you, and that's just beating yourself up. Myself. So, no more excuses. Reasons!
Onwards.
IndieWebCamp Utrecht
Another absolutely brilliant IndieWebCamp, this time in Utrecht. By now I feel like a bit of an old hand, and it was nice to see old friends and make new ones. The first day, as usual, was devoted to group-organised sessions on different topics.
Automating listen posts
Getting my podcast listening history out of Overcast and into this site has been going swimmingly since I started a couple of months ago. I had to do everything manually, but that was OK as it gave me the chance to check that it was indeed all going swimmingly. While my friends have been sharing all their great ideas for the hack day at this weekend's IndieWebCamp in Düsseldorf, earlier this week I decided that the time was right to start automating my listen s posts. This was prompted by the podcast Automators #22: Text Expansion, co-hosted by one of those friends.
Monthly report: April 2019
I suppose that if the previous month gets done more than halfway through, then the subsequent month is going to come on fast like an express train. So here we are.
RIP The Curator's Code
Folksonomy is all very well, but my own set of tags leaves a lot to be desired. I'm forever giving things a tag and thinking I'll remember it and then discovering that not only do I not remember the tag, but also that the tag applies only to a single item, neither of which is very helpful. So I reso...
Digging up old posts
Later in the summer I'll be offering some bread-making courses, and as part of that I've been excavating part of my personal baking history. Today, that was the story of how I came by one of my sourdough starters, the 100-year old Tuscan pasta madre. I snapped this portrait this morning.
A...
Sucking up the podcasts I've listened to
Finally, I have succeeded in importing all the podcasts I have listened to with the Overcast app, at least as far back as May 2018.
Sparklines improved
Sparklines are a Tufte invention to display data almost as a word. I like them, and built them laboriously by hand in the past, for example to track changes in how Board members rated aspects of my workplace's activities. Anyway, having suddenly become aware of an avalance of spam to WithKnown (which had been going on for a while) I decided to track it and, as an exercise, to display the data as a sparkline.
Tracking spam
As I mentioned a while ago, I had been living in cloud cuckoo land with respect to spammers. I naïvely thought that my little microblog was of no interest to spammers. The truth was, I just wasn't being notified of the incoming dross. As a result, I'm afraid I might have got onto some lists as a v...
Year in Review 2018
Monthly reports have been going more than a year now, even if I have missed a few, including last December. What to add for an annual report? I think this has to be a different kind of beast, more like a GTD high-level view. But there's still room for some low-level stuff, down at the bottom, thanks to .
Dancing Queen
I haven't seen that video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing her ass off, and nor will I, but kudos to for using it as a peg on which to hang a good story about copyright, mash-ups, fair use and the like.
A pox on spammers
I've been living in cloud cuckoo land for way too long. I thought that my stream of microposts was somehow of no importance to spammers (or anyone else, for that matter) because there were generally very few comments when I looked. However, it seems that old posts were being targetted with a vengean...
Monthly report: October 2018
Should I be beating myself up because we're more than halfway to the end of November? I don't think so. October was a good month, but not standout good. Maybe if it had been I would have written it up more rapidly. The high spot was definitely , and I did write that up reasonably quickly. No need to repeat here.
IndieWebCamp Nürnberg 2018
Almost two weeks have gone by since the IndieWebCamp in Nürnberg, and as everyone is gearing up for IWC Berlin it is about time I wrote up what a good time I had and what I did.
The good time is simple. It is so energising to meet, in the flesh, with people who have very similar sorts of ideas and who are in addition so much more knowledgeable than I am. Just sitting in on discussions and absorbing what I can makes me feel that much closer to understanding. Being occasionally able to make a useful contribution is also rewarding. Even a couple of days is very worthwhile, and this being my second IWC I felt much more relaxed about knowing the ropes and some of the people.
🎧 My Url Is rosemaryorchard.com (Episode 2)
Episode summary: In this episode Eddie interviews Rosemary Orchard, a new member of the community. We talk about how she found the IndieWeb, attending IndieWebCamps remotely, wiki editing challenges and Micropub’s potential with syndication and destination targets. Podcast: Mac Power Users #417: Workflows with Manton Reece IndieWeb compatible service: Micro.blog Videos: IndieWebCamp NYC 2018 Event: IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2018 IndieWebRing Video: Building a Micropub Endpoint Shortcut: Post using Micro.blog and Mastodon GitHub Repo: Micropub Endpoint for Jekyll and other flat-file CMSes If you enjoyed this podcast: Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts and recommend it using your favorite podcast player. You can help support the IndieWeb community by sponsoring the IndieWeb; You can help support the development of the show by sponsoring Eddie. Find this episode on the web at https://myurlis.com/episodes/002/.
It's a link thing
This is too good to be true. Yesterday I read of how he graphically a link between two individuals who both liked the same thing on the internet, and how, by doing that, he could alert himself to things he might like.
Today I finally see, in my reader, an earlier post from Kicks Condor, in which he talks about , and how that might help him to discover interesting things to read. That could even be the basis of a self-organising discovery engine.
Clearly, they ought to know about one another. Maybe this post of mine will trigger that.
Spread unintelligibly thin
As someone who mostly dislikes other people who willy-nilly connect everything they put online to everywhere they put things online in a many-to-many idiopathic echo chamber, I ought to do a little less of that myself. Or at least be a little more mindful about what I am doing.
In some ways, this is just a continuation of the soul-searching that found an outlet in Putting my house in order: Phase 1. I achieved some of what I set out to do there, but not enough, and this latest bout of navel gazing was prompted by a silly exchange on micro.blog.
Monthly report: September 2018
Fine time, in part recovering from August and also on its own terms. A brief trip to Edinburgh that included one of the most memorable meals of my life. And on the home front, just enjoying the effect that a reasonably moist summer had on the terrace.
Improving my Grav templates
A couple of back-burner projects are simmering nicely. Mapping I wrote about recently.1 Today I turned back to working on micropub to add posts to this site. I have now worked out how to send two different kinds of post to two different places in the file system. Both are what you might call notes (indeed I call them Notes) but some are little status update notes and others are bookmarks.2 The way Grav works is that each file lives in a folder and Grav uses a specific template to display the contents of the file. I wanted a way to visually distinguish the two kinds of note; I chose different icons in the title.
Finding my way, slowly
Observant readers may notice a new menu item over on the top right: Walks. This is the story of how that came to be. And how much further I have to go.
Write every day? With constraints?
A lot of people seem to be talking about writing; more often, more thoughtfully, more purposefully. Jeremy Keith which, in their several ways, make the point that writing regularly is a habit, that it may help others but mostly helps yourself and that you should write whatever you want. All good and true. None of the people Jeremy singled out says much about setting constraints, except perhaps for Patrick Rhone's plea that anything over 280 characters should be "on a blog that you own". Recently, however, I have seen other people remark on the value of a set constraint, usually a number of words. The morning brain dump folks set a minimum of 750 words, and no maximum. Others like a set number of words, no more, no fewer. And that reminded me that ages ago, when blogging was still new and exciting, I took part in a little challenge.
Just do it -- by hand
Quite a few people, online friends and unknowns, discovered today that they won't easily be able to syndicate from their WordPress websites to their Facebook profile page, at least not automatically. There is a lot of hurt anger and confusion -- why didn't WP say something earlier? Why is FB doing t...
A long post about a short journey
Continuing my baby steps towards equipping Grav, which runs this, my main website, with a Micropub endpoint, it took me almost half a day to remember where I had got to. And about ten minutes to undo all my good work. Like the proverbial snail, though, I am now a little bit closer than I was, even if I had to drop down a bit to get here. And i (re)learned two important lessons: git; and small steps.
This is my IndieWeb
Mildred Marianne asked and a couple of us weighed in. My own brief answer concluded "More a state of mind than a thing, I'd say" but . His piece is well worth checking out in detail, as it offers a bird's eye view of all the different things the IndieWeb is and could be. I might take issue with singling out the country of America for his metaphor as being a tad parochial, but one could choose any reasonably democratic place instead.
I want to respond to a little thing. In questioning the closed nature of the big silos, Chris asks parenthetically: Would you use your phone to only call friends who use AT&T?
Monthly report: May 2018
It has been a busy month, so busy that this report is the latest it has been in its short life. Many things have stayed on track, which makes me really happy.
Bread baking continues apace, with a new process in place to email people a choice of two different loaves. They reply by Monday, I deliver on Thursday and everyone is happy. I have been seriously eyeing up a Rofco B20 oven to cut total baking time but even though it seems on paper to be very compact I have not been able to identify a suitable space.
Monthly report: April 2018
The PHP course I started has been going really well, giving me the good grounding that I was looking for and that I never had. The secret will be somehow to keep using it. Some pretty big bakes too, handling double my normal quantity in a day. The big downside there is oven time. I can bake only one...
I yam who I yam
One of the key problems online is to prove that you are who you say you are. If you are, then I can allow you to do certain things.
These two things are usually called authentication and authorisation.
An even better h-card
After patting myself on the back for adding an h-card to my page of latest posts, friends pointed out that I could use the <data> element rather than choosing not to display the h-card information. One good reason to do this is that screen readers ignore this information, which must be a bonus for anyone who accesses my stuff that way.
The Partial template now reads:
<div class="h-card">
<data class="u-url" value="https://jeremycherfas.net"></data>
<data class="p-name" value="Jeremy Cherfas"></data>
<data class="u-photo" value ="https://www.jeremycherfas.net/user/plugins/aboutme/assets/avatars/zoot.jpg"></data>
</div>And all the other logic remains exactly the same as before.
Another little tweak: because all my bookmarks from reading.am are now automatically brought back to my stream, I am removing them from the sidebar here.
Improving the h-card in Grav
I spent a little time fixing up the way this site presents my h-card on the summary of blog posts. In case you're wondering, an h-card is a way of presenting information about yourself or your organisation on your website that makes it easy for other websites to identify you with your work, for example in webmentions.
Change for a time
One of the difficulties of trying to be IndieWeb is that because there is no One True Way, only a set of useful building blocks, lovingly assembled, when something isn't working well it can be hard to know which bit is responsible for what. I had that problem recently with micro.blog waiting a long time before a post here appeared there. Then today, a post I published this morning popped up on micro.blog, and I had time to think about fixing things.
It was trivial, but I fixed it. Here's how.
Instagram leaves money on the table
The Main Squeeze had a slightly spooky moment when she opened her Instagram app this morning. Last night, she'd been noodling around looking for a holiday place to stay. Now, near the top of her stream, there was the exact same place she had spent most time looking at, in a "sponsored" post.
We ha...
A user considers
I really enjoyed reading Eli Mellen's post of a couple of days ago: .
It really struck a chord with me because I have so often felt exactly the same frustrations, but my moaning comes from a position of consi...
Spending days to save minutes
There's an XKCD cartoon beloved of geeky nerds and nerdy geeks looking to make things happen automatically. Actually, there are two, Automation and Is It Worth the Time?. Both have exercised me all weekend, and now, after only 13.5 hours, I might be able to save myself literally minutes every da...
Why I cannot post bookmarks to Known automatically
I've said before that I would like to bring a record of the things I mark at reading.am back to my notes website as Bookmarks. In theory, WithKnown makes this very easy, because every type of entry (Posts, Status updates, Bookmarks etc) has its own API, to which you can send correctly formatted POST requests. You can also send POST requests to Known's micropub endpoint. Unfortunately, neither option works for Bookmarks (and probably not for Likes and Reposts, but I haven't played with them).