Chris Aldrich | Chris Aldrich

👓 Hypothes.is Collector | John Stewart

Bookmarked Hypothes.is Collector by John Stewart (John Stewart)

In order to make it easier to track activity in Hypothes.is, I created a program called Hypothes.is Collector. The idea is that you can type in user name, a URL, a tag, or a group ID and click the button to see all of the related annotations. The program will create a new sheet with an archive of up to 200 annotations based on the search terms. It will then create a third sheet that will count how many of these annotations were made on each URL in the set by each user.

This seems like it could be an interesting tool for annotations in a classroom setting and is related to some of the broader Hypothes.is API tools.

cc: Greg McVerry, W. Ian O’Bryne

🔖 Write, Right? Write! – TRU Writer

Bookmarked Tru Writer by Alan Levine (https://splot.ca/writer/write)

Welcome to a new experiment in simple but elegant web publishing. This site let’s you quickly publish full formatted and media rich articles, essays, papers — without requiring any logins or tracking of personal information. Don’t take our word for it, explore one piece published here, chosen at random.

A published work includes a header image which you can upload to the TRU Writer. Choose how you wish to credit yourself as an author, or choose to by anonymous.

You should be able to copy the contents of anything you have written in a Word Processor, or already published on a web page, paste it into the TRU Writer editor. Most standard formatting (headers, bold, italic, underline, lists, blockquotes, hypertext links) will be preserved.

You can then edit/augment your work using a rich text editor, including embedding content from social media sites, and you can upload new images to be included within the text of your writing.

So find an essay or article and see what you can do with it by publishing online with the TRU Writer.

Give it a try now!

This is implemented as a WordPress theme, so it can be created for many different sites. Learn more about TRU Writer and where to find the theme.

👓 Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 | John A. Stewart

Replied to Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 by

John Stewart (John Stewart)

This is the first post in a three part series on using Google Sheets as the database for a blogging CMS. In this post, I’ll explain the motivations for building the system. In the second post, I’ll walk you through the Google Sheet itself and the Google scripts (their version of js) that drive it. In the third post, I’ll share the website that displays the blog, and the code behind it. My guess is that interest in the three pieces will vary for different audiences, so I wanted to encapsulate the descriptions.

I generally like where John is taking this idea and the fact that he’s actively experimenting and documenting what he’s coming up with as potential solutions. While I do like some of the low-tech angle that he’s taking, I’m not sure, based on what he’s written, how some of it will come out within the broader spectrum of DoOO or IndieWeb-related technologies.

For example:

How easy/hard will it be for students to own/export their data after the class?
How might they interact if they’re already within the DoOO cohort or already self-hosting their own space?
What are the implications for students of maintaining multiple spaces with a variety of technologies and therefor overhead?
I’ve never had a lot of luck with Disqus, which I find to be heavy and often has problems with auto-marking all of my content as spam. I’ve definitely found it to be an issue with using for POSSE workflows. Worse, with the introduction of specifications like Webmention to the DoOO space, students could be writing their responses to classmates and teachers on their own sites and thereby owning all of that content too, but with Disqus, this just isn’t possible.

I’ll reserve judgement for once I’ve seen some of the code and further ideas in parts II and III as I suspect he’s likely taken some of these issues into account.

We’ve played with this concept of front-end blogging for a while now. Alan Levine has built an open sourced tool called TRU Writer that even provides this type of front end interface on a WordPress site. ❧

I’m curious if John, Alan Levine, or others have yet come across the concept of Micropub? It generalizes the idea of a posting client and interface so that it could work with almost any CMS-related back end. I could see people building custom micropub clients for the education space, or even using some of the pre-existing ones like Quill, InkStone, or Micropublish.net. Many of them also use JSON or form encoded data that they could also be using with platforms like the one John describes here. The other nice part about them is that they’re flexible and relatively open in more ways than one, so they don’t necessarily need to be rebuilt from scratch for each new CMS out there.

👓 Trump’s Strange Tweet About Joseph McCarthy | Politico

Read Trump’s Strange Tweet About Joseph McCarthy (POLITICO Magazine)

People who have actually studied the disgraced Wisconsin senator describe a man who bears similarities to some of the president’s most notable attributes.

I had previous read about Trump’s reliance on Roy Cohn, but somehow had never drawn the historical line from Cohn to Joseph McCarthy. This piece not only draws the parallel very clearly, but indicates a lot of similarities between Trump and McCarthy.

Sadly, we’re all being doomed to repeat history here.

👓 Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be | Bloomberg

Read Amazon Isn’t Paying Its Electric Bills. You Might Be (Bloomberg)

The company’s rate discounts have pushed up utility costs for everyone else.

I’ve been thinking a while about government-related corporate handouts like the one described in this article. It’s sad that mega-corporations can use their power, money, and influence to squeeze out large marginal gains for themselves at the cost of the everyday person. Amazon should not only get preferential treatment like this, but should potentially be paying in more. If they’re really as great as they say, their marginal savings and sales to such a broad customer base should pay for these benefits on the front sales side instead of hidden within their back end.

Just as people are woefully inept at mentally handling probability theory in their daily lives, they’re also apparently horrifically terrible at handling marginal costs for things and where the flows of those streams end up. Governments shouldn’t be forced to compete against themselves to benefit the Amazons of the world.

In cases like this, the marginal cost to power consumers gets passed along by state governments which don’t have much if any transparency. The average consumer sees a small rise in their bill over time and doesn’t think too much of it while potentially millions or hundreds of millions are siphoned off of society and are lining the pockets of the already ultra-rich.

I’m reminded of the scheme proposed by Richard Pryor’s character in the movie Superman III or by the group of programmers in Mike Judge’s Office Space. In small bank transactions, just round off fractions of a penny in one way or another to benefit yourself and dump it into a side account. It’s all so small, no one will notice. Except that in aggregate, it is noticeable–eventually. Our representative government shouldn’t be involved in these sorts of transactions, or if they are they should be working in the opposite direction.

It’s one thing if we decide as a government that there should be universal health care and the tax base for it is spread out equally and equitably. And by this I don’t mean allowing loopholes and tax dodges like the recent one mentioned in which Betsy DeVos registers her mega-yacht overseas as a means of dodging not only taxes, but also in paying her crew less, which is yet another form of this type of scheme in which small perks are created for the already privileged.

Another example of this type of issue is the recent Trump tax cuts. The complexity of the system makes it very near to opaque and the long term effects aren’t realized soon enough to catch the cheat. It’s now been long enough since they were enacted that the effect on the overall economy has been generally gauged as minimal and the general populace hasn’t benefited much in comparison to the ultra-rich which have benefitted incredibly handsomely.

I’m curious if there’s a word or phrase that is generally used to describe this sort of system to cheat the broader populace while benefiting a privileged class? If not, I’m going to suggest marginal theft.