Month: September 2018

Reply to Now even more IndieWebified | Paul Jacobson

Replied to Now even more IndieWebified by Paul JacobsonPaul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)
I just watched Chris Aldrich’s tutorial on how to configure a WordPress site for IndieWeb use. In other words, how to setup your WordPress site as pretty dynamic hub on the Web using a variet…
I’m glad the video helped out.

I’ve been a big fan of the Post Kinds Plugin as well. Honestly I wished that WordPress had gone the extra mile and adopted something more like it when it was working on the Post Formats concept a few years back. I’ve written a bit about the Post Kinds Plugin in the past and perhaps you’ll appreciate some of those pieces, particularly the bookmarklet portions for desktop and details about mobile posting.

Because Post Kinds and Post Formats are not one-to-one or onto functions, doing the mapping  in both directions is difficult, but when posting using a Post Kinds first method, you should be able to set the Post Formats you prefer. There are some useful defaults within the plugin, but they can be manually changed in the code available in the class-kind-taxonomy file in a relatively obvious way. In my case, while the mapping of “notes” to “asides” is a useful one, I prefer them to map to “status” for my current theme, so I just manually change that one word in the code to reflect my particular preference.

There’s a lot hiding under the hood if you want to tinker in the code. If you have issues or feature requests, I know that the developer David Shanske is very receptive to feedback towards improving the set up. (And similarly for almost all of the IndieWeb-related plugins which can be found on GitHub.)

📺 Legally Blonde (2001) | MGM

Watched Legally Blonde (2001) from MGM
Directed by Robert Luketic. With Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Matthew Davis. Elle Woods, a fashionable sorority queen is dumped by her boyfriend. She decides to follow him to law school, while she is there she figures out that there is more to her than just looks.

👓 New World NetNewsWire | inessential

Read New World NetNewsWire (inessential.com)
So much has changed since I last worked on NetNewsWire, and my thinking about it has changed too. The big things remain the same — NetNewsWire is at the intersection of my passions: reading and writing, the open web, and Mac apps. I want to make NetNewsWire a great app with lots of users. No change there. But so much else has changed. In 2002, when I started NetNewsWire, there was no Facebook and no Twitter, no iPhones, and most people hadn’t heard of RSS. People got their news by visiting a few sites a few times a day. People subscribed to email newsletters. That was about it.

👓 An open letter | Social.Coop

Read An open letter by Michele Kipiel (loomio.org)
Dear fellow members, the events that unfolded over the past few days have put our cooperative to the test, and we failed miserably. Many voices calling for change were silenced in the past, be it by negligence or by sheer lack of commitment by those, whose position of privilege allowed to disregard such calls. By failing to listen, we became the people MLK warned us about: the white moderates who are more devoted to order than to justice. We wasted precious time and energy in endless debates about trivial details, calling for the creation of ever new committees and processes, and we eventually lost sight of the only true reason our cooperative came to existence: to wrestle control of our social media out of the hands of the rich, white, capitalist elite.
Nice to hear that this Mastodon instance seems to be doing the right thing, but the idea of temporarily shutting down an instance makes me glad I didn’t join and that I have my own personal website instead. It’s nice not to be beholden to outsiders in cases like this or other corporate interests.

👓 Sapiens | Adactio

Replied to Sapiens by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith (adactio.com)
I finally got around to reading Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. It’s one of those books that I kept hearing about from smart people whose opinions I respect. But I have to say, my reaction to the book reminded me of when I read Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist: It was an exasperating read.
I’ve had this book and his others on my list for quite a while, but I’ve been worried that they may fall short like this. I’ve started his most recent one in the past few weeks prior to it’s release this weekend. Jeremy’s review makes me even more reticent.

Perhaps it’s better to stick with the better sourced materials within the topic of “big history” by David Christian and others?

📺 “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” Black 22 | Amazon Prime

Watched "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" Black 22 from Amazon Prime
Directed by Patricia Riggen. With John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce, Abbie Cornish, Ali Suliman. Drone pilot Victor struggles with the immense responsibility attached to his job. Jack and Greer join French Intelligence officers on a mission to track down Suleiman's brother. Hanin is forced to make a dangerous decision for the sake of their children.
A bizarre episode to be sure. The significance of the numbered dollar bills was a great gut-punch reveal at the end. While the series is ostensibly about Jack Ryan, this episode was almost entirely about the peripheral characters which were well fleshed out.

👓 Statement from Stephen J. Adler, President and Editor-in-Chief,… | Reuters

Read Statement from Stephen J. Adler, President and Editor-in-Chief,... (Reuters)
Reuters President and Editor-in-Chief, Stephen J. Adler, issued the following statement...

Reply to Robin DeRosa about citation management

Replied to a tweet by Robin DeRosaRobin DeRosa (Twitter)
I’ve been (slowly) pecking away at trying to own all of this type of data on my own website. It sounds like what you’re hoping for is a cross between Derek Sifford’s Academic Blogger’s Toolkit which has a pretty slick WordPress interface for looking up and importing references and David Shanske’s Post Kinds Plugin which allows one to create specific post types like bookmarks, reads, notes, highlights, annotations, etc.

I think if Academic Blogger’s Toolkit could create an internal database within WordPress and an interface to allow you to easily import/export it as well as use it within your own instance, that might be the simplest solution to have ownership over all of one’s reference data. The Post Kinds plugin would give you the rest including the ability to hide your posts as private just to you or others granted access on your site.

Like Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, Aaron Davis, and others I use my own site like a commonplace book and store bookmarks of things I’d like to read as well as things that I have read, usually along with notes, highlights, annotations, and other marginalia that I think would be of use.

Perhaps by adding one or two extensions, WordPress could be the perfect platform for doing this type of work without reliance on external sites?

Academic Blogger's Toolkit

https://wordpress.org/plugins/indieweb-post-kinds/

📖 Read through page 13 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

📖 Read through page 13 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

So far a very facile opening. Somewhat surprised to see a reference to Jesus and Paul here, but interestingly apropos.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Introduction

…the high barriers to becoming a Christian had to be abolished. Circumcision and the strict food laws had to be relaxed.

Highlight (yellow) – 1. Introduction > page 4

Naturally, if you make it easier to be a Christian, then it will be easier to create links and grow the network

👓 Twitter’s UX and ‘bullying’ | natdudley.com

Read Twitter's UX and 'bullying' (natdudley.com)
The longer you've been on Twitter, the more likely it is that you've seen, been part of, or been on the receiving end of what I would politely term a Twitter Clusterfuck. Someone, somewhere has said something controversial. It might be something mean. It might be something offensive. It might be something stupid or funny or smart. Whatever it is, it draws the attention of a larger proportion of the Twitter network than would normally interact with that single person’s tweet on a daily basis.

👓 It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back | The Atlantic

Read It’s Time for the Press to Stop Complaining—And to Start Fighting Back (The Atlantic)
A nearly 50-year campaign of vilification, inspired by Fox News's Roger Ailes, has left many Americans distrustful of media outlets. Now, journalists need to speak up for their work.

📖 Read pages 13-79 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

📖 Read pages 13-79 of 288 of Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

It’s an interesting overview of the subject of network science and complexity. Potentially good if you know nothing of the area at all, or if you’re about to delve heavily into the topic. I’m breezing through it quickly with an eye toward reading his more technical level networks textbook that came out two years ago as well as some of his papers in the area.

Some of the pieces so far are relatively overwritten given that it’s now more than 15 years later… but the general audience then probably needed the extra back story. The only math so far is at the level of simple logarithms and the few equations are buried in the footnotes.

There are some useful rules of thumb he’s introduced for the generalists and engineers in the crowd like the idea of things that fall into an 80/20 Pareto rule are very likely power law models.

He’s repeated some common stories about Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi. I hadn’t heard the story about Erdős saying there were too many plus signs on the Notre Dame campus–that was kind of cute. I did enjoy that he’d dug at least an additional layer deeper to pull up Frigyes Karinthy’s short story “Chains” to introduce the original(?) conceptualization of the idea of Six Degrees of Separation.

I’ll circle back later for additional highlights and annotations.