The plot moves somewhat slowly and the action is mostly what one would expect from a 5 or 6 year old–except that it’s a bear–but the charming language and the way in which is told makes all the difference.
Bacon in a suitcase–indeed!
but…
Invariably the blog’s author has a generic avatar (blech!) instead of a nice, warm and humanizing photo of their lovely face.
Or, perhaps, as a user, you’ve always wondered how some people qualified to have their photo included with their comment while you were left as an anonymous looking “mystery person” or a randomized identicon, monster, or even an 8-bit pixelated blob? The secret the others know will be revealed momentarily.
Somehow, knowing how to replace that dreadful randomized block with an actual photo is too hard or too complicated. Why? In part, it’s because WordPress separated out this functionality as a decentralized service called Gravatar, which stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. In some sense this is an awesome idea because then people everywhere (and not just on WordPress) can use the Gravatar service to change their photo across thousands of websites at once. Unfortunately it’s not always clear that one needs to add their name, email address, and photo to Gravatar in order for the avatars to be populated properly on WordPress related sites.
(Suggestion for WordPress: Maybe the UI within the user account section could include a line about Gravatars?)
So instead of trying to write out the details for the third time this week, I thought I’d write it once here with a bit more detail and then point people to it for the future.
Can you guess which user is the blog’s author in the screencapture?
The correct answer is Anand Sarwate, the second commenter in the list. While Anand’s avatar seems almost custom made for a blog on randomness and information theory, it would be more inviting if he used a photo instead.
Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
Need some additional motivation? Watch this short video:
[wpvideo HNyK67JS]
If you’ve already got a WordPress.com account, this step is easy. Because the same corporate parent built both WordPress and Gravatar, if you have an account on one, you automattically have an account on the other which uses the same login information. You just need to log into Gravatar.com with your WordPress username and password.
If you don’t have a WordPress.com account or even a blog, but just want your photo to show up when you comment on WordPress and other Gravatar enabled blogs, then just sign up for an account at Gravatar.com. When you comment on a blog, it’ll ask for your email address and it will use that to pull in the photo to which it’s linked.
Log into your Gravatar account. Choose an email address you want to modify: you’ll have at least the default you signed up with or you can add additional email addresses.
Upload as many photos as you’d like into the account. Then for each of the email addresses you’ve got, associate each one with at least one of your photos.
Example: In the commenters’ avatars shown above, Anand was almost there. He already had a Gravatar account, he just hadn’t added any photos.
Optionally you can additional social details like a short bio, your other social media presences, and even one or more websites or blogs that you own.
You can add as many emails and photos as you’d like. By linking different photos to different email addresses, you’ll be able to change your photo identity based on the email “key” you plug into sites later.
If you get tired of one photo, just upload another and make it the default photo for the email addresses you want it to change for. All sites using Gravatar will update your avatar for use in the future.
Now, go back to the user profile section on your blog, which is usually located at http://www.YOURSITE.com/wp-admin/users.php.
In the field for the email, input (one of) the email(s) you used in Gravatar that’s linked to a photo.
Don’t worry, the system won’t show your email and it will remain private–WordPress and Gravatar simply use it as a common “key” to serve up the right photo and metadata from Gravatar to the WordPress site.
Once you’ve clicked save, your new avatar should show up in the list of users. More importantly it’ll now show up in all of the WordPress elements (like most author bio blocks and in comments) that appear on your site.
WordPress themes need to be Gravatar enabled to be able to use this functionality, but in practice, most of them do, particularly for comments sections. If yours isn’t, then you can usually add it with some simple code.
In the WordPress admin interface one can go to Settings>>Discussion and enable View people's profiles when you mouse over their Gravatars under the heading “Gravatar Hovercards” to enable people to see more information about you and the commenters on your blog (presuming the comment section of your theme is Gravatar enabled.)
Some WordPress users often have several user accounts that they use to administer their site. One might have a secure administrator account they only use for updates and upgrades, another personal account (author/editor admin level account which uses their name) for authoring posts, and another (author/editor admin level) account for making admin notice posts or commenting as a generic moderator. In these cases, you need to make sure that each of these accounts has an email address with an an associated Gravatar account with the same email and the desired photo linked to it. (One Gravatar account with multiple emails/photos will usually suffice, though they could be different.)
Example: In Nate’s case above, we showed that his photo didn’t show in the author bio box, and it doesn’t show up in some comments, but it does show up in other comments on his blog. This is because he uses at least two different user accounts: one for authoring posts and another for commenting. The user account he uses for some commenting has a linked Gravatar account with email and photo and the other does not.
Want more information on how you can better own and manage your online identity? Visit IndieWeb.org: “A people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’.
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To help beautify your web presence a bit, if you notice that your photo doesn’t show up in the author block or comments in your theme, you can (create and) use your WordPress.com username/password in an account on their sister site Gravatar.com. Uploading your preferred photo on Gravatar and linking it to an email will help to automatically populate your photo in both your site and other WordPress sites (in comments) across the web. To make it work on your site, just go to your user profile in your WordPress install and use the same email address in your user profile as your Gravatar account and the decentralized system will port your picture across automatically. If necessary, you can use multiple photos and multiple linked email addresses in your Gravatar account to vary your photos.
Instagram filter used: Dogpatch
Photo taken at: Downtown Montrose
Love that he starts out with the goal of demystifying a person who has been more heavily shaped by myth and retold history than by direct fact.
“contains significant amounts of material not well-explained elsewhere.”He expects to finish up the diagrams and publish it next year some time, potentially through Springer.
I finally have finished a draft version of the book that I’ve been working on for the past four years or so. This version will remain freely available on my website here. The plan is to get professional illustrations done and have the book published by Springer, presumably appearing in print sometime next year. By now it’s too late for any significant changes, but comments, especially corrections and typos, are welcome.
At this point I’m very happy with how the book has turned out, since I think it provides a valuable point of view on the relation between quantum mechanics and mathematics, and contains significant amounts of material not well-explained elsewhere.
Instagram filter used: Ludwig
Photo taken at: UCLA Meyer & Renee Luskin Conference Center
H/T to Sawyer Hollenshead.
This may also be of interest to those who’ve attended Dodging the Digital Memory Hole related events as well as those in the IndieWeb who may be concerned about their data living beyond them.
by Donald T. Hawkins
Over the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting with some fiction to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of a workflow for status updates around reading books, writing book reviews, and then extracting and depositing notes, highlights, and marginalia online. I’ve now got a relatively quick and painless workflow for exporting the book related data from my Amazon Kindle and importing it into the site with some modest markup and CSS for display. I’m sure the workflow will continue to evolve (and further automate) somewhat over the coming months, but I’m reasonably happy with where things stand.
The fact that the Amazon Kindle allows for relatively easy highlighting and annotation in e-books is excellent, but having the ability to sync to a laptop and do a one click export of all of that data, is incredibly helpful. Adding some simple CSS to the pre-formatted output gives me a reasonable base upon which to build for future writing/thinking about the material. In experimenting, I’m also coming to realize that simply owning the data isn’t enough, but now I’m driven to help make that data more directly useful to me and potentially to others.
As part of my experimenting, I’ve just uploaded some notes, highlights, and annotations for David Christian’s excellent text Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History[2] which I read back in 2011/12. While I’ve read several of the references which I marked up in that text, I’ll have to continue evolving a workflow for doing all the related follow up (and further thinking and writing) on the reading I’ve done in the past.
I’m still reminded me of Rick Kurtzman’s sage advice to me when I was a young pisher at CAA in 1999: “If you read a script and don’t tell anyone about it, you shouldn’t have wasted the time having read it in the first place.”
His point was that if you don’t try to pass along the knowledge you found by reading, you may as well give up. Even if the thing was terrible, at least say that as a minimum. In a digitally connected era, we no longer need to rely on nearly illegible scrawl in the margins to pollinate the world at a snail’s pace.[4] Take those notes, marginalia, highlights, and meta data and release it into the world. The fact that this dovetails perfectly with Cesar Hidalgo’s thesis in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,[3] furthers my belief in having a better process for what I’m attempting here.
Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll be able to add similar data to several other books I’ve read and reviewed here on the site.
If anyone has any thoughts, tips, tricks for creating/automating this type of workflow/presentation, I’d love to hear them in the comments!
I enjoyed his treatment of inversion, but it seems like there’s a better way of laying the idea out, particularly for applications. Straightforward coverage of nested intervals and rectangles, limit points, convergent sequences, Cauchy convergence criterion. Given the level, I would have preferred some additional review of basic analysis and topology; he seems to do the bare minimum here.
There is a relatively new candidate recommendation from the W3C for a game changing social web specification called Webmention which essentially makes it possible to do Twitter-like @mentions (or Medium-style) across the internet from site to site (as opposed to simply within a siloed site/walled garden like Twitter).
Webmentions would allow me to write a comment to someone else’s post on my own Tumblr site, for example, and then with a URL of the site I’m replying to in my post which serves as the @mention, the other site (which could be on WordPress, Drupal, Tumblr, or anything really) which also supports Webmentions could receive my comment and display it in their comment section.
Given the tremendous number of sites (and multi-platform sites) on which Disqus operates, it would be an excellent candidate to support the Webmention spec to allow a huge amount of inter-site activity on the internet. First it could include the snippet of code for allowing the site on which a comment is originally written to send Webmentions and secondly, it could allow for the snippet of code which allows for receiving Webmentions. The current Disqus infrastructure could also serve to reduce spam and display those comments in a pretty way. Naturally Disqus could continue to serve the same social functionality it has in the past.
Making things even more useful, there’s currently a third party free service called Brid.gy which uses open APIs of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Flickr to bootstrap them to send these Webmentions or inter-site @mentions. What does this mean? After signing up at Bridgy, it means I could potentially create a post on my Disqus-enabled Tumblr (WordPress, or other powered site), share that post with its URL to Facebook, and any comments or likes made on the Facebook post will be sent as Webmentions to the comments section on my Tumblr site as if they’d been made there natively. (Disqus could add the metadata to indicate the permalink and location of where the comment originated.) This means I can receive comments on my blog/site from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, G+, etc. without a huge amount of overhead, and even better, instead of being spread out in multiple different places, the conversation around my original piece of content could be conglomerated with the original!
Comments could be displayed inline naturally, and likes could be implemented as UI facepile either above or below the typical comment section. By enabling the sending/receiving of Webmentions, Disqus could further corner the market on comments. Even easier for Disqus, a lot of the code has already been written and is open source .
Web 3.0?
I believe that Webmention, when implemented, is going to cause a major sea-change in the way people use the web. Dare I say Web3.0?!
Instagram filter used: Gingham
Photo taken at: Little Free Library #8424
A simple preface followed by an anecdote about the beginning of a deal relating to telecom. The style is quick moving and history, details, and philosophy are liberally injected into the story as it moves along. This seems both interesting as well as instructive.
“There are some who believe that an immutable law of history holds that conflict is inevitable when a rising power begins to bump up against an established one. But no law is immutable. Choices matter. Lessons can be learned.”
—page XIV
“Prescriptions, after all, are easier to make than predictions.”
—page XIV
“Note taking allows Party and government officials to get quick reads on what went on at meetings they didn’t attend. […] Private meetings with senior government officials without recoring devices or note takers are rare and highly sought after.”
—page 10
“…the so-called iron rice bowl, the cradle-to-grave care and support guaranteed by the government through the big companies people worked for.”
—page 11
“The Party had made a simple bargain with the people: economic growth in return for political stability. That in turn meant Party control. Prosperity was the source of Party legitimacy.”
—page 11
“Messages in China are sent in ways that aren’t always direct; you have to read the signs.”
—page 14
“It was the nature of dealing with China: nothing was done until it was done.”
—page 14
Picked up a copy at Little Free Library #21797 at 8:29 am
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0421-3 First Edition Hardcover
