I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
I’ve been slowly making some improvements to my Yarns Indie Reader for WordPress, and also seeing very impressive development of other IndieWeb readers such as Together, Indigenous, and Monocle. These three readers all rely on Microsub, which splits the work of building a reader into two parts: ...
Just the fact that someone is contemplating building a microsub server for WordPress warms the cockles of my heart. This is definitely going to be the year of some fantastic new technology on the feed reader scene!
Having just run into Jan Cavan Boulas at WordCamp Orange County and talking with her about her relatively recent redesign of WordPress.com’s reader, I’d be curious to see what she and others might be able to do for a WordPress reader built on top of a solid microsub server.
After updating to the most recent version 3.8.0 of Semantic Linkbacks I’m getting the following error in the Comments sections of both posts and pages:
Warning: in_array() expects parameter 2 to be array, string given in htdocs/blog/wp-content/plugins/semantic-linkbacks/includes/class-linkbacks-walker-comment.php on line 25
It seems to be throwing the error the same number of times that there are comments on the post. Additionally the comments section is showing both the raw mentions and facepiled versions. I’ll have to test some additional posts, but it also seems to have changed some mentions that were previously moderated out to now be showing.
In what way are avatars a privacy risk? To display an avatar image, you publish an encrypted version (MD5) of the e-mail address in the gravatar’s image URL. Gravatar.com then decides if there is an avatar image to deliver, otherwise the default image is delivered. The default image’s address is also part of the overall gravatar …
ReadAvatar Privacy by Peter Putzer, Johannes Freudendahl (WordPress.org)
Avatars from Gravatar.com are great, but they come with certain privacy implications. You as site admin may already know this, but your visitors and users probably don’t. Avatar Privacy can help to improve the privacy situation by making some subtle changes to the way avatars are displayed on your site.
The plugin works without changing your theme files if you use a modern theme, and it does support (simple) multisite installations. It requires at least PHP 5.6 and WordPress 4.9. For the plugin to do anything for you, you need to visit the discussion settings page in the WordPress admin area and save the new settings. Please note that the plugin does not provide an options page of its own, it rather adds to the existing discussion settings page.
@c I was thinking of writing a “wish” blog post, and saw from the indieweb wiki that you’ve done it on your blog using the post kind WP plugin.
Could you walk me through how you did that?
I should probably add, do you manually add the pictures of the items on your wish post, or did the plugin do it for you?
@vishae Wishes are already built into the core version of Post Kinds, so it shouldn’t take much work, but you’ll need to make a few changes. I’ve written before about the generalization of how to do this. You’ll need to dip into the codehere to change the show value from false to true. (Hint: on your admin dashboard visit: /wp-admin/plugin-editor.php?file=indieweb-post-kinds%2Fincludes%2Fclass-kind-taxonomy.php&plugin=indieweb-post-kinds%2Findieweb-post-kinds.php). Then save the file. There’s already a reasonable template built into the plugin, so you shouldn’t need to make your own.
The plugin will generally import a “featured image” if one is available on the page you’re bookmarking, but it doesn’t yet have functionality for showing it yet. I often I add one manually myself by cutting and pasting the URL for the photo the plugin returns and put it into the External URL featured image plugin. (Eventually when Post Kinds handles featured images, I should be able to turn the plugin off so it doesn’t duplicate the data.)
Directed by Alik Sakharov. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. The beginning of discovery unearths a startling new piece of evidence that threatens to unravel Billy's entire theory of the case.
Hurt plays a terrifically creepy dude here and he’s perfect for the role, but holy crap, what a bizarre an unexpected end of the episode.
Directed by Bill D'Elia. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. The judge gives Billy only a day to make a compelling offer of proof before he dismisses the lawsuit.
Watching the credits a bit, I can see the experience and power behind the show and why it’s so solid. Bill D’Elia is great with this kind of material.
I still feel a bit left out about Billy’s major backstory, but suspect it’ll come along any time. Whatever it is, it almost can’t live up to what his prior self was compared to who he is now.
Directed by Alik Sakharov. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. Billy scrambles to get his wrongful death lawsuit into court by any means necessary.
Okay, I think I’m hooked. There’s a nice driving force behind the plotline here combined with some great characters.
What a gut punch at the end of the episode though. I won’t give things away, but I would have guessed that the actor was too big in stature to have gone that way. Wow!
Directed by Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady. With Etty, Chani Getter, Ari Hershkowitz, Luzer Twersky. Penetrating the insular world of New York's Hasidic community, focusing on three individuals driven to break away despite threats of retaliation.
A painful documentary to watch. It’s fine for communities like this to exist and even flourish, but they should not be so insular so as to force people to live within them and deal with tremendous abuse and lack of choice.
A year after the killing of Freddie Gray, a teenager in Baltimore was fatally shot by the police. This is the story of his life and death, and of a grieving family looking for answers.
As soon as I heard Davetta Parker’s voice, I knew I had to meet her. Her grandson Lavar Montray Douglas, known as Nook, was among seven young people from one high school in Baltimore who were killed in the spasm of violence that shook the city after the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of a severe spinal cord injury while in police custody.
I cold-called her. She was sitting at her desk in a Baltimore public library. She said, “I think God sent you to me.” She said that she had so many questions about the death of her grandson, who had been shot by a police officer, and that she needed someone to help investigate, because the police never did. She said that she had written letters to news channels and newspapers, but that no one had written back. And there I was on the phone.
My colleague Lynsea Garrison and I spent four months examining Nook’s case. It took us on a journey from a quiet back room in the central library, where we first met Ms. Parker and her daughter Lashanda Douglas, known as Toby, into the streets of Baltimore, to drug corners, living rooms and grand homes in the county.
We wanted to tell his story for the simple reason that events like these are rarely told, even though they have become ordinary. Nook and his friends — many of whom have also been killed — were typical for homicide victims in Baltimore. They all had records with serious crimes. But they were boys. Most hadn’t even turned 18. And the deeper question in our minds was: How did things get like this for them?
You’ll meet Ms. Parker and Ms. Douglas in Part 1. Every day this week, we’ll bring you a new chapter in the life of Nook and his family’s search for answers about his death.
There was an unexpected note on page 66 that indicated that J.R.R. Tolkien may have been fascinated by a cursed ring described on a lead tablet in Lydney and a very similar (the same?) gold ring found at the Roman city of Silchester in Hampshire. The text posits that perhaps the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings were potentially inspired by these archaeological finds from Irish myth.
Directed by Lawrence Trilling. With Billy Bob Thornton, William Hurt, Maria Bello, Olivia Thirlby. A burned-out attorney gets a second chance for redemption when he agrees to pursue a wrongful death lawsuit against the biggest client of his former law firm.
University of Florida mathematician Kevin Knudson and I are excited to announce our new math podcast: My Favorite Theorem. In each episode, logically enough, we invite a mathematician on to tell us about their favorite theorem. Because the best things in life are better together, we also ask our guests to pair their theorem with, well, anything: wine, beer, coffee, tea, ice cream flavors, cheese, favorite pieces of music, you name it. We hope you’ll enjoy learning the perfect pairings for some beautiful pieces of math.
We’re very excited about the podcast and hope you will listen here, on the site’s page, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be published approximately every three weeks. We have a great lineup of guests so far and think you’ll enjoy hearing from mathematicians from different mathematical areas, geographic locations, and mathematical careers.
It’s been a while since I’ve actively read Om Malik‘s blog, but I noticed that he’s using graphical indicators that add some semantic detail about what each post is. It’s a design element I’ve only seen lately out of the IndieWeb community with plugins like the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress or done manually with emoji in post titles the way Aaron Davis has done relatively religiously, particularly on his “Collect” site.
Om Malik is using some graphical indicators to give quick additional semantic meaning to what he’s posting.
I highly suspect that he’s using the Post Formats functionality from WordPress core to do some of this using a custom theme. Sadly it’s generally fallen out of fashion and one doesn’t see it very often any more. I suspect that it’s because WordPress didn’t take the functionality to its logical conclusion in the same way that the Post Kinds Plugin does.
The way Aaron Davis uses emoji in his posts helps to provide additional context about what is being written about to indicate what is going on in a link before it’s clicked.
I think some of my first experience with its resurgence was as helpful UI I saw suggested by Tantek Çelik on the Read page of the IndieWeb wiki. I’ve been doing it a lot myself, primarily for posts that I syndicate out to micro.blog, where it’s become a discovery function using so-called tagmoji (see books, for example), or Twitter (reads, bookmarks, watches, listens, likes). In those places, they particularly allow me to add a lot more semantic meaning to short notes/microblog posts than others do.
I do wish that having emoji for read posts was more common in Twitter to indicate that people actually bothered to read those articles they’re sharing to Twitter, the extra context would be incredibly useful. I generally suspect that article links people are sharing have more of a bookmark sentiment based on their click-bait headlines. Perhaps this is why I like Reading.am so much for finding content — it’s material people have actually bothered to read before they shared it out. Twitter adding some additional semantic tidbits like these would make it much more valuable in my mind.
It doesn’t appear that Om has taken this functionality that far himself though (at least on Twitter). Perhaps if WordPress made it easier to syndicate out content to Twitter with this sort of data attached it would help things take off?
Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)
Serena
Devon Zuegel
