It all begins with a tweet (pay not attention to the fact I'm no longer on Twitter)@ReclaimHosting Is NewsBlur something that would install on a Reclaim server? Looks like perhaps too many moving parts. (Looking for an alternative to TinyRSS) https://t.co/UoWItuDBkW— Mark Sample (@samplereality) July
Month: July 2018
👓 American democracy’s built-in bias towards rural Republicans | The Economist
Its elections no longer convert the popular will into control of government
👓 A Family Of Woodchucks Ate Paul Ryan’s Car | NPR
Miles Parks (NPR)Winter in Wisconsin is tough. So tough, in fact, that living creatures might go searching for shelter in unlikely places. House Speaker Paul Ryan explained Thursday that a family of woodchucks moved into his Chevy Suburban recently, eating the wiring and rendering the car useless. "My car was eaten by animals," Ryan said, to laughs from an audience at an event hosted by The Economic Club of Washington D.C. "It's just dead."
👓 How to Teach Google What a Story Is | The Atlantic
Deep inside Google, a small team has been trying to solve a problem that's easy for any schmuck around the watercooler but frighteningly difficult for the world's most data-rich company: telling a story.
👓 Mathematician-M.D. introduces a new methodology suggesting a solution to one of the greatest open problems in the history of mathematics | USC
A completely new approach suggests the validity of the 110-year-old Lindelöf hypothesis, opening up the possibilities of new discoveries in quantum computing, number theory and cybersecurity
Athanassios Fokas, a mathematician from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of the University of Cambridge and visiting professor in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has announced a novel method suggesting a solution to one of the long-standing problems in the history of mathematics, the Lindelöf Hypothesis.
👓 How to get science research covered in the press | Northeastern
One of the most persistent challenges in science today is how to get the mainstream press—and by extension, the general public—to pay attention to the…
👓 White supremacists committed most extremist killings in 2017, ADL says | NBC News
White supremacists and other far-right groups committed the majority of extremist-related murders in the United States last year, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League.
👓 Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and other lies of physics | Aeon
After spending billions trying (and failing) to support beautiful ideas in physics, is it time to let evidence lead the way?
👓 Oldest extract of Homer’s Odyssey found | BBC
Found near an Ancient Greek temple in Olympia, the tablet has been dated to Roman times.
👓 This Snail Goes Through Metamorphosis. Then It Never Has to Eat Again. | New York Times
The transformation of a deep sea mollusk is comparable to an average person growing as much as 60 feet tall with a giant sac of bacteria filling its guts.
👓 Michiko Kakutani on Her Essential New Book 'The Death of Truth' | Rolling Stone
With a series of brilliant essays, the legendary book critic has crafted the first great piece of literature on the Trump administration
👓 How Online Hobbyists Can Reaffirm Your Faith in the Internet | New York Times
Much of the internet feels terrible. But using the web to learn an offline hobby can give you a glimpse of a healthier relationship with your digital devices.
I see a lot of what I love about the IndieWeb community being discussed tangentially in this article. Interestingly, with respect to this article’s headline there’s a double-entendre with regard to who they are and what they actually happen to be doing as an online community.
📺 Wanted (2008) | Universal Pictures
Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. With Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy, Morgan Freeman, Terence Stamp. A frustrated office worker learns that he is the son of a professional assassin and that he shares his father's superhuman killing abilities.
Reply to Brad Enslen about Blogrolls in WordPress
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)Feh. Apparently there are no good blogroll plugins for WordPress. I did look extensively through the WP plugins directory but didn’t find anything interesting. Most plugins were way out of date for my version of WP.
Might be an opportunity there for the Indieweb movement to aid discovery.
Apologies Brad. I just saw your follow up post and had meant to reply to your earlier one when I saw it last week, I just didn’t have the time to write a quick response. I had hoped you might have found something even better than what I’ve put together previously or perhaps started building a newer and shinier edifice.
There is actually an excellent and solid “plugin” for creating a blogroll, but it’s actually been hiding in WordPress core for ages: the original Link Manager. Use of it declined so much it was programatically “removed”, but all the code is still in core, it still works wonderfully, and it only requires a single line of code (or the simplest plugin ever written) to re-enable it.
It was very solid and didn’t need much iteration, so it should work fine with current versions of WordPress–it certainly does on mine.
I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
Even if you just want a plug and play plugin, there are details for that in the post as well, you’ll just be stuck with putting the blogroll into a traditional sidebar position. (With conditional statements in the sidebar widget, you could restrict the blogroll widget to only displaying on a “Following” page, for example.)
I do think there is still a more IndieWeb way of doing this, potentially by making follow posts with mark up that could be parsed by microsub readers perhaps? Certainly dovetailing something with microsub seems to be a laudable goal. I would like to eventually dive into the Link Manager code and add some additional microformats as well as update the OPML to v2, but there’s enough back compatibility that the older version is fine for most use cases I’ve run across. I know David Shanske has some ideas about some changes he’d like to see in the future as well. You could always also go super low tech the way Greg did and have a blogroll post that you update over time, though perhaps a page is a better way to go? Updating things to be more automated is certainly a reasonable goal though.
Give it a spin and see what you think. Here’s my Following page (aka blogroll) with details at the very bottom for subcategories of OPML subscription. I’ll try to update the IndieWeb blogroll page with some of these details to make them more imminently findable as well.