July, 2018 | Chris Aldrich

The Pepper Drive Parade

Our local neighborhood gets together at 10am on the 4th of July for a neighborhood parade. There are far more people in the parade than watching it, so it’s more like a gathering at the top of the street in preparation followed by a procession to the bottom of the street where there’s another gathering with snacks and drinks. Those who are along the parade route seem to eventually join the parade and walk to the end for the party.

There were some truly creative little costumes and decorations, but I think my favorite part of the parade today was a bewildered coyote that was coming up the street in the opposite direction of the parade who was shocked to see a mob of people with horses and a firetruck coming down the street. He managed to run off down a side street and escape.

Potato the dog watching from the sidelines

The first wave of bike riders goes by

The walking portion of the parade starts to go by

Here comes the firetruck

Lots of kids in wagons parading today

There were lots of dogs with hats.

I didn’t get a photo of the coyote, but he went that way!

Here come the horses

Kids hanging out at the end of the parade

Treats for all ages

People giving out popscicles

The cupcakes were popular

Didn’t get to ride on the firetruck? Come check it out after-the-fact.

Now’s all that’s left is the clean up. The End.

👓 When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday | The Atlantic

Read When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday by Ethan J. Kytle (The Atlantic)

After the Civil War, African Americans in the South transformed Independence Day into a celebration of their newly won freedom.

Reply to a post by Ton Zijlstra

Replied to a post by

Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)

Hey Brad, discovery is why I started publishing the feeds I read as opml for others to explore, and some I read do so too. In 2005 I used to have photos of blog authors I read. Do you publish your feed list somewhere? Tom Critchlow also shows all the content of the feeds he follows on his site. Works well as a discovery mechanism too I found. Maybe I’ll start doing that as well from my TinyTinyRSS instance I installed earlier this week.

Yes, discovery can be an issue, but if one is providing various feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON, or h-feed) of various post types, then it becomes easier to slice and dice the content coming out of particular websites. I’ve got my website set up so that nearly every post format, post kind, category, and tag has its own feed. Ideally, you should be able to extract almost anything you’d want from my site via a custom feed if necessary.

As an example if you want to follow what I’m reading, there’s a feed for that. Or you can listen to the things I’m listening to by subscribing to my fauxcast.

Separately, I maintain a following page which, similar to a blogroll, is a list of sites I’m following along with OPML of the full list or subcategories. Thus if you want to subscribe to the IndieWeb OPML list, it’s there for you. (Even more fun if you’re using functionality like OPML subscriptions as they’re done in Inoreader, so that when I update my list, yours automatically does too.)

If you’re interested in recreating portions of some of this I’ve tried to document a lot of it (for WordPress at least) at https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.