For the last week or two, I have been thinking whether there is a December blogging series I could take on, similar to how Advent of Code publishes a new coding challenge every day throughout Advent. I thought that I would just continue with my regular blogging until yesterday when I came up with an...
Reminiscent of N-day challenges: https://indieweb.org/100_days#December_and_or_24_Days
Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)I'm replying to you from my #IndieWeb site on a domain I own that then publishes to Twitter so I can interact with you, but still owned by me. It's built on open standards (https://spec.indieweb.org) and is a great community around owning your data
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.
Learning the grammar of animacy.
What a sea change of perspective!! English speakers have trouble with other humans’ pronouns, wait until they need to pronoun animals and bodies of water.
I had a Very Bad experience with @Hertz over Thanksgiving. This is what happened & the letter I wrote. We are totally fine, & our Thanksgiving ended up wonderful, but I suspect this is a fraudulent business practice, & I want to give it visibility for those who don't or can't. https://t.co/cr9haMSeXd
— Kate Klonick (@Klonick) Nov 30, 2021
"Hark" is the herald angel's name, actually.
— Ian Bogost (@ibogost) Dec 1, 2021
“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
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.
...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. ❧
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. 😀
[[2021-11-23]] 7:30 PM
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.
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).
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.
