Month: January 2020

Chickened Extraordinary Chickens by Stephen Green-Armytage (Harry N. Abrams)

More than 160 photographs, most in full-color, accompanied by detailed commentary, capture the unusual world of exotic ornamental chickens, documenting breeds of all sizes, shapes, and colors that range from the Bearded Silkie and crested Polish to the Phoenix, whose tail feathers can exceed ten feet in length.

Bookcover of Extraordinary Chickens

It’s been almost a year and a half since I’ve done much with Instagram. As a result, in part, I take fewer photographs and mean to fix that. I still need a new set up to pull content back to my site, but I spent some time to port my backlog of photos from Instagram back to my website, so now I’m back in sync at least.
Checked into Jamba Juice Innovation Bar
Large Orange C-Booster

I’m kind of surprised at the lack of merchandising effort in this massive and potentially gorgeous Jamba Juice. I’m not sure if it’s that they’re so old or just dirty, but the windows here are in just terrible shape too. I’m wondering how long they’ll be open.

exterior of the Jamba Juice Innovation Bar
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After several years of giving back no data, apparently YouTube has changed at least some of the markup and metadata on their site so that parsers are returning richer data now. I’m thrilled to see that as of this morning putting in traditional YouTube permalinks now allows the parser in David Shanske‘s awesome IndieWeb Post Kinds plugin to properly return the title, summary, site name, tags, and featured images from YouTube videos! If only they’d include an h-card to give back the author name, URL, and avatar…

Making watch posts for YouTube just got a whole lot easier!

Read What to Watch for in WordPress in 2020: Community Hot Takes (Impress.org)
The great thing about WordPress and the WordPress community is that we build it together. The features and code, the opinions, aspirations, goals, and hard work of each member of the community pushes it forward.  Following up on our first “What to Watch for in WordPress in 2020” piece, we wante...
Read The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy (Boston Review)
Seeking to discredit those who wish to explain the persistence of racism, critics of the New York Times’s 1619 Project insist the facts don’t support its proslavery reading of the American Revolution. But they obscure a longstanding debate within the field of U.S. history over that very issue—distorting the full case that can be made for it.
Incidentally when I read this article, I saw a pop up of a book by the paper that is an anthology of essays presumably published by the site. Is this becoming a common thing now to help create ancillary streams of revenue for newspapers and magazines? I saw one the other day for a series by Colin Woodard as the first.

Originally bookmarked at January 24, 2020 at 02:48PM

Replied to a tweet by Tim PrebbleTim Prebble (Twitter)
I had posted about watching Tim’s experiment and a fellow academic replied to me via Mastodon that about a reverse experiment from 1715 that may be of interest:

@chrisaldrich Everything old ( from 1715) is new again The Bird Fancyer’s Delight (Walsh, John) – IMSLP: Free Sheet Music PDF Download

Although strictly speaking, the goal here was to get birds to imitate the written recorder tunes rather than vice versa.

—Jason Green, January 24, 2020 at 12:27 pm

Bookmarked WordPress by Jan Bozzez (janboddez.tech)
Through the years, I’ve created a few (child) themes and plugins for WordPress. Some of them are described below, and more will surely follow.
Jan has some awesome IndieWeb-esqe plugins for WordPress, how have I not seen these before?! If David Shanske hasn’t seen them yet, he definitely should be aware of them.

We should definitely add some of these to the IndieWeb wiki as necessary.

Jan if you’d like to join a group of us helping to improve the web standards and IndieWeb-friendliness of WordPress, do reach out.