Working with the latest student data
November 23, 2021 at 11:00AM - 12:00PM
Month: November 2021
Galileo: Directed by Alex Graves. The President and NASA plan a TV event for a probe's landing on Mars; satellite photographs show a suspicious-looking fire in Russia; Leo asks Toby and Josh to decide on the next postage stamp; Sam and C.J. have personal reasons for not wanting to accompany the President to a concert.
Noël: Directed by Thomas Schlamme. Josh speaks to a psychiatrist about the events of the last three weeks: Toby hired musicians for the foyer, an Air Force pilot disobeyed orders, Yo-Yo Ma performed at the White House, and Josh managed to cut his hand quite badly.
The Leadership Breakfast: Directed by Scott Winant. Toby wants to use a bipartisan breakfast to discuss real issues instead of making it a staged event; Sam floats the idea of moving the press room across the street; Leo wants Josh to apologize to a columnist on his behalf; Leo and Toby realize they need to start thinking about reelection.
✒ Inked TWSBI Diamond 580ALR, Prussian blue (EF) with Diamine Earl Grey
Pen and paper publishing to your website? PaperWebsite is on to something.
Handwriting to Website #FTW
While browsing today I ran across an awesome concept called PaperWebsite.com. It allows you to write on paper, take a photo, and then upload it to a website. Your handwritten words published to your website. A tactile writer’s dream.
My immediate thought—I need to have this now!
Articles written by hand in my journal to my website? Short notes that I write on index cards published as microblog updates. How cool would that be? I was also talking to someone this morning about voice-to-text as a note taking concept. What about that too?
Of course, as you may know, I’ve already got a website. Do I need another one like this for $10/month? Probably not.
Value Proposition
But this has got me wondering “what the value proposition is for Paper Website as a company?” What are they really selling? Domain names? Hosting? Notebooks? They certainly seem to be selling all of the above, but the core product they’re really selling is an easy-to-use interface for transferring paper ideas to digital publishing. And this is exactly what I want!
The problem now is to buy this sub-service without all the other moving pieces like a domain name, hosting, etc., which I don’t need. Taking just the core service and abstracting it to the wider universe of websites could be a major technical hurdle (and nightmare).
IndieWeb and Micropub
Perhaps I could try find an OCR solution and wire it all together myself? I’d rather see the original developer run away with the idea though. So instead I’ll quietly suggest that they could take their current infrastructure and add a small piece.
Since PaperWebsite’s already got the front end up and running, why not add on Micropub support to the back end? Maybe Ben Stokes could take the OCR output and create a new Micropub client that could authenticate to any website with Micropub support? I have to imagine that he could probably program it in a couple of days (borrowing from any of the pre-existing open source clients or libraries out there) and suddenly it’s a product that could work with WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Craft, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, Blot, and a variety of other platforms that support the W3C spec recommendation or have plugins for it.
The service could publish in “draft” form and allow editing after-the-fact. There’s also infrastructure for cross-syndicating to other social services with Micropub clents, so note cards to my website and automatically syndicated to Twitter, Mastodon, or micro.blog? Yes, please.
And maybe it could be done as a service for a dollar a month or a few dollars a year?
I made a short mention of the idea in the IndieWeb chat, and it’s already a-buzz with implementation ideas… If you’re around Ben, I’m sure folks there would lend a hand if you’re interested.
The website, commonplace book, note taking, stationery, and fountain pen nerd in me is really excited about where this could go from a user interface perspective.
How Moleskine, Leuchtturm, LiveScribe or the other stationery giants haven’t done this already is beyond me. I could also see serious writing apps like iA Writer or Ulysses doing something like this too.
Since I can post to my website by pen and paper with OCR’d photos, I realize I should use a similar workflow to post handwritten zettels to my [[Obsidian]]-based [[zettelkasten]]/[[commonplace book]] too!
[[2021-11-23]] 7:30 PM
@flancian since @an_agora has this sort of functionality, I’m curious what you call this pattern? https://indieweb.org/tag_aggregation
People treat corporations like people so that corporations can treat people like robots.
IndieWeb Committment for New Year’s Eve 2021
The annual page for IndieWeb New Year’s Commitments is up. I always have trouble with coming up with something new and interesting to work on. (There are really so many things, to be honest, and so many that I ought to do, but which seem so droll… What might be fun!?!)
I was recently enamored of the idea behind Paper Websites, so I quickly wired up something as a minimal example. It works, but I’d like to commit to rounding off some of the rough edges, exploring other potential methods, maybe slipping in the ability to write HTML into it as well, and writing up some of the details of how I’ve done it.
As a stretch goal, I’m also considering publishing a physical paper notebook/journal to have as a companion to the project—a true “Paper Blog”. To be honest, this sounds like some quirky, creative fun, so maybe I’ll do it first. 😀
...when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web. ❧
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer as been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
Read “Skywoman Falling”
It’s interesting to compare and contrast the origin stories of Skywoman and Eve (of Adam & Eve). Also interesting to see the cultural differences which arise from these philosophies.
“Livability is my true north. I don’t want you to worry about constantly fluffing your pillows. I gravitate toward things that look better with time, pieces that feel like they have stories of their own.”
— Bushra Farooqui (@startuployalist) Dec 1, 2021
"Hark" is the herald angel's name, actually.
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) Dec 1, 2021