Month: December 2020
Birds of North America Texts and Field Guides
Spent some time tonight looking at the seven most popular bird books for North America for my memory project. I’m still figuring out how to set up the memory palace for the project though. Lots of data to encode.
While all are generally solid I’m arranging them for data/information, layout, and image purposes. Here’s the rough order of preference I think I’m going to put them in moving forward:
- American Museum of Natural History, Birds of North America (and/or the Western Region) (DK)
- The Stokes Field Guide to the Birds of North America
- National Wildlife Federation Field Guide to Birds of North America,
- Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America
- Sibley Birds West
- Golden Field Guides: Birds of North America
I’ll probably buy the top two as I proceed. It looks like DK just published an update to theirs in the last month! In particular, I like the volume of detail of the DK edition and the layout for potentially making memorization easier.
Now to figure out how to best lay out the various pieces. I’m thinking that Lynne Kelly’s idea of using a Lukasa memory board may be best. But what to fashion it out of and how?
Covid-19 has drawn new attention to indoor air pollution. Science has long considered gas appliances to be key culprits.
Some modification ideas to the Curator’s Code Plugin
I quietly wonder what it would take to modify the zip file for the Curator’s Code Plugin to take advantage of Parse This to input a URL and parse back a small snippet of context for more easily giving credit to posts in the WordPress classic editor?
It looks like it used to be in the repository, but perhaps with the rise of Gutenberg, they opted not to maintain it?
I follow most of the code there, but I’m thinking too much of the actual output is done via JS with tinyMCE, so maybe I’m missing some of the finer portions. It also needs some tweaks to redirect to maybe the Internet Archive since curatorscode.org no longer exists.
I’m thinking an output closer to the following for each type might still be simple, but provide some additional context, (presuming my microformats aren’t too horrific/mis-nested):
<p><small><cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">AuthorTK</span> <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-TK-TK</time>)</cite></small></p>
<p><small><cite class="h-cite ht"><abbr title="hat tip">↬</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">AuthorTK</span> <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-01-29</time>)</cite></small></p>
Hopefully the via and ht classes also give people enough to latch onto for doing some custom styling of the output if necessary.
With more prevalence of crediting like this, I also wonder how parsers might better display received webmentions for these types of notifications beyond the basic “Sue mentioned this”. Maybe a facepile of avatars under the heading “Inspired by this post”? Though the way “via” is used in practice, it might also fit under the category of a repost?
Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit
I’ve been thinking more lately about giving credit on my own website, particularly in cases where the context of things I’m reading has some additional context based on where I originally saw them. I’d also like to give people I follow credit as the source by which my own content is aggregated.
Earlier today I tinkered around with some ideas relating to the old Curator’s Code which I revisit from time to time. I outlined some details, data fields, UI, and some pseudo-code to actually build it into a WordPress plugin. Then I thought I ought to check the repository where I discovered that someone had previously made one. Unfortunately it was withdrawn from the repository. I suspect its that they didn’t want to continue to support it moving into the Gutenberg era. (It still works with the classic editor.)
I don’t give credit on my site often enough in large part because it isn’t an easier thing to do when quickly posting some of the smaller bits of content. They say “manual until it hurts“, and doing this has just hurt too much for too long. Toward that end I thought I’d make a couple of quick bookmarklets for cutting and pasting text into my site. It’s not as good as a better custom UI, but it’ll work and could potentially work well for others.
These bookmarklets aren’t any great shakes and perhaps (hopefully?) someone with more JavaScript chops than I have can greatly improve upon them to add or modify some of the bits and automate things a bit better. In particular, I’m sure there’s a way to find the original publication date on a page and pull that data out, but currently I could only figure out how to find the last modified date using document.lastModified because I couldn’t find the other. I’d also prefer to have a way to automatically find the author(s) as well, but JS isn’t my best friend.
Instructions for use
Create two bookmarks in your browser’s bookmark bar. Give them convenient names like “via” and “hat tip” and add the snippets of code respectively into the URL fields. On a site you want to give credit to, highlight the name of the author of the post and click the bookmarklet. You’ll see a pop up for some text which you can then cut and paste into your post to give the credit. You can obviously edit the text if necessary.
If your site supports sending Webmention notifications, then when the post is published, the cited page will get a notification of your post.
Bookmarklet code
Below are snippets of code that the bookmarklets are running (for transparency’s sake).
javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","<p><small><cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">"+text+"</span> in <a class="u-url p-name" href=""+location.href+"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" >"+document.title+"</a> (<time class="dt-published">"+document.lastModified+"</time>)</cite></small></p>");})()
javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","<p><small><cite class="h-cite ht"><abbr title="hat tip">↬</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">"+text+"</span> in <a class="u-url p-name" href=""+location.href+"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" >"+document.title+"</a> (<time class="dt-published">"+document.lastModified+"</time>)</cite></small></p>");})()
Example
Here’s an example of what it looks like on my site:
↬ with input from Tina Roth Eisenberg in curator’s ǝpoɔ ()
Who will you credit?
Kona sunrise
If you started a niche blog (and I mean old school geocities/Wordpress/blogger blog, not a newsletter) right now, what would it be about? Don’t overthink it.
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) December 8, 2020
Photos of the custom license plates I collect while driving around.
I know there’s a sub-community around pens and stationery on micro.blog. I don’t see it hiding in discovery. Is there a tagmoji for it (yet)?
Reading about decentralized social media has imagining something like a giant web of independently networked Roam research-like pages where there’s a chat stream where we talk just like Twitter
— Frozen Warmth (@liminal_warmth) December 8, 2020
But also you can post, which links back to a page with longer content
I sort of like the idea of networked thought via digital commonplace books. Being able to carry on longer conversations between notebooks in a sense. It shouldn’t matter how long or short the conversation is.
I attempt to do this with my own website(s) leveraging Webmentions for the back-and-forth portions. Twitter is often just a simple notification mechanism for those who don’t have that support yet.
The real super-power feature missing from Roam Research?
My public Roam Research notebook being able to converse with someone elses’ (or any other page on the internet for that matter). Webmention support might solve this.
Reading about decentralized social media has imagining something like a giant web of independently networked Roam research-like pages where there’s a chat stream where we talk just like Twitter
But also you can post, which links back to a page with longer content
— Frozen Warmth 💙 (@liminal_warmth) December 8, 2020
(See also related conversation at https://boffosocko.com/2020/12/09/55782252/)
But are “labels” and “tags” the same thing?
A long time ago, I read that they're different. The distinction as described was:
- “labels” are when you mark your own content (first party)
- “tags” are when you mark other people's content (third party)
I like the framing you’ve made in the definition of “label” and “tag”. I wish the distinction was respected by a broader range of people and programs as it could be more useful that way.
I’ve mentioned a subtle way of doing this on my site before:
I also find that I have a subtle differentiation using singular versus plural tags which I think I’m generally using to differentiate between the idea of “mine” versus “others”. Thus the (singular) tag for “commonplace book” should be a reference to my particular commonplace book versus the (plural) tag “commonplace books” which I use to reference either the generic idea or the specific commonplace books of others. Sadly I don’t think I apply this “rule” consistently either, but hope to do so in the future.
Now I’m wishing that I had a separate “labels” taxonomy on my site to distinguish between “mine” and “theirs”. In using the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress, I’m passively collecting labels (though it’s called tags) others put on their content (which is currently hidden in my internal metadata) and that is separate from the metadata tags I place on it. Being able to separately search the two could be a powerful feature.
Ideal for the armchair bird enthusiast or dedicated bird watcher, this book includes stunning full-color photographs, revealing each species with unrivaled clarity.
A lavish introduction describes bird characteristics and behavior, while stunning full-color photographs reveal individual species for easy identification.
The 550 most commonly seen birds are pictured in clear, close-up photographs, with images of similar birds provided to make differentiation easy, from game birds and waterfowl to shorebirds and swifts to owls, hummingbirds, finches, and more. Discover which species to expect when and where with up-to-date, color-coded maps highlighting habitation and migratory patterns.
The most commonly seen species are given a whole page in the species catalog, and each full-page profile includes images of plumage variations, subspecies, information on similar birds, and artwork of the bird in flight that reveal their outstretched wings.
Rare birds and vagrants who occasionally stray into North America are also described, making AMNH Birds of North America one of the most comprehensive guides on the market and essential for anyone interested in birding.
Publish Date: November 10, 2020
Pages: 752
8.6 X 11.0 X 1.8 inches | 6.45 pounds
Hardcover
ISBN/EAN/UPC: 9780744020533
After doing some research on various bird books, I’ve picked up this massive textbook as the structure for creating a bird memory palace.
Purchased from Amazon.com for $26.60 on 2020-12-07; arrived today.
Dan Cederholm's logo but now adjusted for the microformat dinners. :D
::dan don't hurt me:: :D
