In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many individuals are curious about the proper use of medical masks. WHO released updated Advice on the use of masks in the context of COVID-19 on 5 June 2020. Watch this video to learn more about which individuals should consider wearing a medical mask and how to properly put on, take off and dispose of the mask.
I ran across ProseMirror yesterday and my first thought was: I want this for writing and posting to my website! Not having the time or experience to set it up and integrate it myself, I wonder if there’s a public instance of it on the web that has Micropub integration?
That would allow it to publish to to several dozen different CMSes including WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, and Micro.Blog among a growing set of others.
I know that iA Writer recently added Micropub support to allow people to use their tool to publish this way. Sadly they’ve only got it working as Mac/iOS clients and not as a web client, which is something at which ProseMirror might excel.
I think I’ve finally decompressed a bit from IndieWebCamp West 2020 to try to actually absorb pieces of camp that went by for me in a blur. Fortunately all the big pieces were recorded and documented so well I can re-live most of it from start to finish.
Thanks again Jacky for such a great encapsulation of some of where the IndieWeb is, where it might want to go, and, most importantly, why. I particularly love the extending of the eat your own cooking metaphor that’s happening in this talk.
Read - Reading: Notorious by Gordon Korman(Balzer + Bray)
Keenan has lived all over the world but nowhere quite as strange as Centerlight Island, which is split between the United States and Canada. The only thing weirder than Centerlight itself is his neighbor Zarabeth, aka ZeeBee.
ZeeBee is obsessed with the island's history as a Prohibition-era smuggling route. She's also convinced that her beloved dog, Barney, was murdered--something Keenan finds pretty hard to believe.
Just about everyone on Centerlight is a suspect, because everyone hated Barney, a huge dog--part mastiff, part rottweiler--notorious for terrorizing the community. Accompanied by a mild-mannered new dog who is practically Barney's opposite, ZeeBee enlists Keenan's help to solve the mystery.
As Keenan and ZeeBee start to unravel the clues, they uncover a shocking conspiracy that dates back to Centerlight's gangster past. The good news is that Keenan may have found the best friend he's ever had. The bad news is that the stakes are sky-high.
And now someone is after them. . . .
“At the end of each chapter write a few bullet points that summarize what you’ve read and make it personal if you can — that is, apply it to something in your life. Also, note any unanswered questions. When you’re done the book, put it down for a week.”
“Pick up the book again and go through all your notes. Most of these will be garbage but there will be lots you want to remember. Write the good stuff on the inside cover of the book along with a page number.”
“(Optional) Copy out the excerpts by hand or take a picture of them to pop into Evernote. Tag accordingly.”
Some small pieces, loosely joined for owning one’s highlights online.
I ran across a Chrome extension for highlights, annotations, and tagging tonight. It’s called Learning Paths. It works roughly as advertised for creating and saving highlights and annotations online. With a social silo log in process (I didn’t see an email login option), you’ve quickly got an account on the service.
You can then use the extension to highlight, tag, and annotate web pages. One can export their data as a .csv file which is nice. They’ve also got an online dashboard which displays all your data and has the ability to see public data from other users as well.
Screencapture of the Learning Paths UI for their Chrome extension
One of the interesting pieces they support is allowing users to tweet a thread from all their highlights of a piece online. Upon seeing this I thought it might make a useful feature for getting data into one’s personal wiki, website, or digital garden, particularly now that ThreadReaderApp supports posting unrolled Twitter threads to one’s Micropub enabled website.
So the workflow goes something like this (with links to examples of my having tried it along the way):
Use Learning Paths to highlight an article;
Use the sharing interface to share the highlights as a Twitter thread;
Make any modifications to the Twitter thread and then post;
Screencapture example of ThreadReaderApp’s Authored Threads tab interface
While this works relatively well, there are a few drawbacks:
The UI for the annotations is a bit flaky at times and in my experience often disappears before you’ve had a chance to save them.
The workflow misses out on any of the annotations and tags you might add to each of the highlights (unless you manually add them to the thread, and even then you may run out of space/characters).
The appearance of the thread on your site is simply what you get.
While the idea works roughly in practice, it isn’t as optimal as the workflow or data fidelity I’ve found in using more robust tooling like that found in Hypothes.is for which I’ve also built a better UI on my website.
Still others, might appreciate the idea, so have at it! I’d love to see others’ ideas about owning their highlights, annotations, and related data in a place they control.
And God spoke:
“I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens above, on the earth beneath, or in the waters below.
–Exodus 20:1-4
I have a hypothesis that the admonition in the ten commandments to have no other gods nor to worship idols was the result of a power struggle among early peoples on the border of nomadic lives and settling down into agricultural lifeways. These peoples may likely have been associating their memories not only to standing stones, portable items (the Ark of the Covenant as an example which was historically said to be carried into war), or small idols and graven images.
By removing peoples’ valuable cultural and societal memories over several generations, a ruling priestly class, particularly in a society with not evenly distributed writing and literacy, would have been more easily able to aggregate power within the culture to itself. From a cultural perspective it would also have put an extreme emphasis on writing, literacy, and learning with them. Is this part of an explanation for why Jewish culture still has such an emphasis on these tools thousands of years later?
This obviously needs to be thought out further with supporting evidence from the historical and archaeological record, but on first blush, I feel like the evidence for this hypothesis generally exists.
If I’m right, then these few sentences have had a far more dramatic influence on Western and even human culture than we have previously thought.
Featured Image: The Crusader Bible, MS M.638, fol. 39v, Paris, France, ca. 1244–1254, 390 x 300 mm, via the Morgan Library & Museum, Purchased by J.P. Morgan (1867–1943) in 1916
David’s Greatest Triumph, The Ark Enshrined in Jerusalem, David Blesses Israel
Old Testament Miniatures with Latin, Persian, and Judeo-Persian inscriptions
David retrieves the Ark of the Covenant from Obed-Edom’s house, and a jubilant celebration ensues as the triumphant king, playing upon his harp, leads it into Jerusalem. Once the Ark has come six paces into the city, a sacrifice is made of an ox and a ram. No one is more overjoyed than the king himself, who dances and leaps before the procession. David’s wild behavior embarrasses Michal, who points accusingly at him from her window. But the king is unconcerned, wishing only to give thanks and humble himself before God. (2 Kings 6:12–16)
I’m a graphic designer doing environmental outreach in the public sector, and a fiction writer and photographer in my personal time. I live in the Seattle area, having moved to Washington state in 2008. I use this blog to explore different productivity techniques, consider my philosophy about creative work, search for balance between my creative work and the rest of my life, serve as an accountability tool and record of what work I do, and give back to the creative community.
I've been dipping my toe into #indieweb stuff over on my blog but the part I'm bad about is POSSE - publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere. I deleted analytics from my blog last year but pretty confident I'm shouting into the void So I'm back on Twitter (for now )
Yesterday I had created an event post for an upcoming DoOO Meetup I’m hosting and syndicated a copy to Meetable. The sad, but predictable, result was a webmention being displayed on Meetable that duplicated all of the details including all of the invitations. This felt annoying to me, and I simultaneously thought that as the host, I also ought to officially RSVP for the event itself so that it didn’t appear like no one was going. Rather than go to the trouble of creating a stand-alone RSVP reply post, I thought, why not create a two-for-one bargain? So I naïvely added a class="u-in-reply-to" to the Meetable URL in my event and threw on a data tag to the front of the post like so:
<data class="p-rsvp" value="yes">I'll be hosting</data>
And of course, wouldn’t you know: it worked! The duplication of all the data on the syndicated copy disappeared, and in its place a smiling photo of me indicating that I’m attending.
Sadly, I’ve noticed that the WordPress Webmention plugin doesn’t seem to allow me to self-RSVP to my own original post within the same post. I thought I might try forcing it manually only to discover that Telegraph won’t allow the source and target to be the same URL. I also tried mention-tech which will apparently send it and report a success, but my site doesn’t seem to actually receive and display it. I will say this may be the only case I’ve run across in 5 years that I’d want to self-mention the same post and actually display the result.
Corporate social media has been dominating the online space so significantly that the newest generation of Internet users now thinks that is what the "web" actually is. Fortunately, with WordPress as your platform, you can not only take back your online identity and presence, but you can use it to have a richer and fuller experience than the locked-down experience you get with the limits of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Chris will explore some open web standards and technologies that open up WordPress to allow site-to-site interactions and easier posting functionality through the magic of a small handful of simple plugins. These are simple enough building blocks that the beginning WordPress user can do some powerful new things with their sites but are also rich enough that senior developers can build and extend them or find uses for them for business sites and even e-commerce.
I suppose since I’m the one speaking that I have to RSVP, right?! I hope everyone will come join me in talking about using WordPress and the IndieWeb.
I’ll be hosting a Domain of One’s Own meetup on Thursday, July 23, 2020 at at 10:30 AM Pacific / 1:30 PM Eastern / 7:30 PM CEST. Everyone who is interested in the topic is welcome to attend. We expect there will be students, teachers, designers, web developers, technologists, and people of all ages and ranges of ability from those just starting out with a domain to those running DoOO programs at colleges or even people running their own hosting companies.
Attendees will be expected to have read and agree to the IndieWeb Code of Conduct which will apply to the meetup.
We will
Have discussions about A Domain of One’s Own and the independent web;
Get to know other colleagues in the space;
Ask colleagues for help/advice on problems or issues you’re having with your domain;
Find potential collaborators for domains-related projects you’re working on;
Explore new and interesting ideas about what one can do or accomplish with a personal domain;
Create or update your domain
Agenda
Welcome
Introductions: short 2 minute introductions of attendees with an optional brief demonstration of something you’ve done on your domain or purpose for which you’re using your domain.
Group photo for those who wish to participate
Main meetup: Ideally everyone should bring a topic, demonstration, question, or problem to discuss with the group. Depending on time and interest, we can try to spend 5-10 minutes discussing and providing feedback on each of these. If questions go over this time limitation, we can extend the conversation in smaller groups as necessary after the meetup.
RSVP
To RSVP to the meetup, please do one of the following:
While the time frame for this inaugural meetup may work best for some in the Americas, everyone with interest is most welcome. If there are others in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, or other locales who are interested, do let us know what dates/times might work for you in the future and we can try to organize a time to maximize some attendance there. I’m happy to help anyone who’d like to take the leadership of other time zones or locales to leverage some of the resources of the IndieWeb community to assist in starting future meetings to cover other areas of the world.
Know someone who would be interested in joining? Please forward this event, or one of the syndicated copies (linked below) to them on your platform or modality of choice.
Before I moved to the United States of America in 1991, I had very mixed feelings about this country that called itself a “Melting Pot.” Perhaps it was because my Jamaican parents had siblings that had emigrated here, just as my parents had emigrated to England post World War II. In actuality, I was curious about the USA because of its history and accomplishments. As a young black British boy, it did not escape me that the racial history of American and England were significantly different. I was both aware of the relationship between England and its former colonies, as well as the unique history in America to slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, and its laws and views on interracial relationships. Just as in the famous work of Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” published in 1835, he also noted the irony of the freedom-loving nation’s mistreatment of Native Americans and its embrace of slavery.
I’ve met David several times at local events including Innovate Pasadena‘s excellent Friday Morning Coffee Meetup. It was great to see his article on the front page of the Pasadena Outlook (though I’d have put it above the fold) this morning. I was saddened not to find it on the Outlook’s website, but was glad to find it living on David’s own website so I could share it. (Hooray for the independent web and David’s owning his own content!)
I share it not only because his experiences are valuable and worth noting, but because I hope that people will take a look at the leadership services he’s offering to the community as well.
Jacky Alciné from IndieWebCamp West 2020 (Internet Archive)
Tracy Durnell (Twitter)
David Samuels (DLS Partners)