Month: December 2019

Liked Syndication Links 4.2.1 and Simple Location 4.0.2 Released by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Released some minor bugfix editions today.

Simple Location

  • Rounds all numbers to a maximum of two decimal points, as I introduced a bug in the last version that would fail to fill in numbers in the post editor due form validation requirements.
  • Extracts additional location information from Compass…mostly the information I store when I’m on a plane, to generate a better description of the location. It also passes this info to WordPress more effectively so it could do more in future.
  • I also introduced a new location provider. If set, if you enter a 3 letter airport code in the location name box, it will replace it with the location and name of that airport, as well as the weather. In future, I may add a similar reverse address lookup for people.
  • Misc bug fixes

Syndication Links

  • Some bug fixes introduced in 4.2.0
  • Due to the request to allow syndication provider checkboxes to be checked by default, I introduced two new filters: syndication_link_checked and syndication_link_disabled. The first parameter of each is a boolean that if true, will set either checked or disabled on that Syndication Provider. The second and third parameter is the uid of the provider and the post_id of the post.
Hooray!
Liked a tweet by AmandaAmanda (Twitter)
What a fantastic vote of confidence! I’ll take it.

Cleaning up feeds, easier social following, and feed readers

I’ve been doing a bit of clean up in my feed reader(s)–cleaning out dead feeds, fixing broken ones, etc. I thought I’d take a quick peek at some of the feeds I’m pushing out as well. I remember doing some serious updates on the feeds my site advertises three years ago this week, but it’s been a while since I’ve revisited it. While every post kind/type, category, and tag on my site has a feed (often found by simply adding /feed/ to the end of those URLs), I’ve made a few custom feeds for aggregated content.

However, knowing that some feeds are broadly available from my site isn’t always either obvious or the same as being able to use them easily–one might think of it as a(n) (technical) accessibility problem. I thought I’d make a few tweaks to smooth out that user interface and hopefully provide a better user experience–especially since I’m publishing everything from my website first rather than in 30 different places online (which is a whole other UI problem for those wishing to follow me and my content). Since most pages on my site have a “Follow Me” button (courtesy of SubToMe), I just needed to have a list of generally useful feeds to provide it. While SubToMe has some instructions for suggesting lists of feeds, I’ve never gotten it to work the way I expected (or feed readers didn’t respect it, I’m not sure which?) But since most feed readers have feed discovery built in as a feature, I thought I’d leverage that aspect. Thus I threw into the <head> of my website a dozen or so links from some of the most typical feeds people may be most interested in from my site. Now you can click on the follow button, choose your favorite feed reader, and then your reader should provide you with a large list of feeds which you might want to subscribe. These now broadly include the full feed, a comments feed, feeds for all the individual kinds (bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, listens, etc.) but potentially more useful: a “microblog feed” of all my status-related updates and a “linkblog feed” for all my link-related updates (generally favorites, likes, reads, and bookmarks).

Some of these sub-feeds may be useful in some feed readers which don’t yet have the ability for you to choose within the reader what you’d like to see. I suspect that in the future social readers will allow you to subscribe to my primary firehose or comments feeds, which are putting out about 85 and 125 posts a week right now, and you’ll be able to subscribe to those, but then within their interface be able to choose individual types by means of filters to more quickly see what I’ve been bookmarking, reading, listening to or watching. Then if you want to curl up with some longer reads, filter by articles; or if you just want some quick hits, filter by notes. And of course naturally you’ll be able to do this sort of filtering across your network too. I also suspect some of them will build in velocity filters and friend-proximity filters so that you’ll be able to see material from people who don’t post as often highlighted or to see people’s content based on your personal rankings or categories (math friends, knitting circle, family, reading group, IndieWeb community, book club, etc.). I’ve recently been enjoying Kicks Condor’s FraidyCat reader which touches on some of this work though it’s not what most people would consider a full-featured feed reader but might think of as a filter/reader dashboard sort of product.

Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll write a bit of code so that each individual page on my site that you visit will provide feeds in the header for all the particular categories, tags, and post kinds that appear on that page?That might make a clever, and simple little plugin, though honestly that’s the sort of code I would expect CMSes like WordPress to provide out of the box. Of course, perhaps broader adoption of microformats and clever readers will obviate the need for all these bits?

 

Read grandfather clause (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Grandfather clause, statutory or constitutional device enacted by seven Southern states between 1895 and 1910 to deny suffrage to African Americans. It provided that those who had enjoyed the right to vote prior to 1866 or 1867, and their lineal descendants, would be exempt from recently enacted educational, property, or tax requirements for voting. Because the former slaves had not been granted the franchise until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, those clauses worked effectively to exclude black people from the vote but assured the franchise to many impoverished and illiterate whites.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court declared in 1915 that the grandfather clause was unconstitutional because it violated equal voting rights guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment, it was not until Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that Congress was able to put an end to the discriminatory practice. The act abolished voter prerequisites and also allowed for federal supervision of voter registration. With the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Fifteenth Amendment was finally enforceable.

I hadn’t known about the racist related background of this phrase. I’ll have to work to remove it from personal use.
Listened to PURPLE EPISODE 1: “Is Democracy up for grabs? from On the Media | WNYC Studios

What happens when Americans lose faith in the democracy?

As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, (a strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort that a number of other large news organizations have also contributed to) we are featuring a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy -- and what to do about it. Bob is one of the Purple Project organizers.

Democracy is in trouble. Not necessarily because of our current political mayhem, or even because of the accumulated sins and failures of American society, but because vast swaths of the public are giving up on the system that has governed us for 243 years.

Here are some alarming data points: One, in 2018 only 33% of the general population expressed trust for government. Two, among 1400 adults asked about the importance of democracy, only 39% of younger participants said “absolutely important.” Three, in a 2018 Democracy Fund survey of 5000 Americans, 24% of respondents expressed support for “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress or elections,” and either a “strong leader” and 18% for “army rule.

The more complicated question is what as a society we are to do about it? In this mini-series we’ll be talking that over, but we’ll begin with the actual state of public sentiment and public participation. Eric Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Citizen University and Co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship. He and Bob discuss potential solutions for taking on widespread disaffection.

Listened to PURPLE EPISODE 2: “Low Information, High Misinformation Voters" from On the Media | WNYC Studios

How do we repair our institutions in the age of Pizzagate and flat Earth conspiracy theories?

As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, (a strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort that a number of other large news organizations have also contributed to) we are featuring a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy –– and what to do about it. Bob is one of the Purple Project organizers.

The Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, the flat Earthers...and on and on. Absolute nonsense peddled by the cynical and the naive, and eagerly lapped up by the gullible. Misinformation is a problem that Brendan Nyhan, professor of government at Dartmouth College, has studied for years. In this interview, Brendan and Bob discuss new research on how Americans form their political beliefs and how civic institutions may begin to win back their trust.

Replied to a tweet by Paul JacobsonPaul Jacobson (Twitter)
There’s a few quick ways depending on your needs:

  • If you’re using the Webmention plugin, it will happen automatically on publish. (If you’re also using it to receive, then I highly recommend using Semantic Linkbacks as well.)
  • For quick “manual” webmentions you can use Aaron Parecki’s Telegraph or Kevin Marks’ Mention Tech. Just input your source URL that has a link to a target URL and the services will send the Webmention on your behalf.
  • Some sites that receive them will have boxes you can put your URL response in them and click a send button. (See mine below.)

I also maintain a collection for most of my WordPress IndieWeb-based research, which may answer additional questions or go into more depth. Hopefully the above three can get you started quickly though.

Read about CROWDLAAERS (crowdlaaers.org)
Welcome to the “Crowd Layers” dashboard, a public service for ​Capturing and Reporting Open Web Data for Learning Analytics, Annotation, and Education Researchers ​(CROWDLAAERS). This real-time dashboard visualizes group – or ​crowd​ – discourse ​layers​ added via Hypothesis open web annotation to online documents. Developed by researchers at the University of Colorado Denver, CROWDLAAERS visualizes social learning analytics associated with open and collaborative web annotation. The dashboard has been iteratively designed in partnership with educators and researchers to support the social life of reading and the social life of documents across the open and annotated web.