I hadn’t noticed until now because of a head cold that’s taken me out of commission this weekend, but because of the passing of Leonard Cohen at the end of last week and possibly the cold open of Saturday Night Live, a growing number of people are following/using a Spotify Playlist I had made earlier this year in January.
If you need almost five hours of all the extant Hallelujah covers on Spotify to soothe your soul (for any reason), please feel free to save yourself the time of building it and enjoy my playlist. If you’re aware of any missing covers (that exist on Spotify), please let me know and I’m happy to add them to the collection.
Keep your chin up!
Now I’ve heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don’t really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Not a day goes by that I don’t run across a fantastic blog built or hosted on WordPress that looks gorgeous–they do an excellent job of making this pretty easy to accomplish.
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.
Which would you prefer?
Identicon: A face only the internet could loveChris: a face only a mother could loveAn example of a fantastic blog covering the publishing space, yet after 11,476 articles, the author can’t get his photo to show up.
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.
Another quick example
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.
How to fix the default avatar problem
What is Gravatar?
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]
Step 1: Get a Gravatar Account
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.
Step 2: Add an email address
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.
Step 3: Add a photo to go with that email address
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.
Step 4: Fill out the rest of your social profile
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.
Step 5: Repeat
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.
Step 6: Use your email address on your WordPress account
WordPress screenshot of admin panel for user information.
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.
Administrator Caveats
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.
One account doesn’t have a Gravatar with a linked email and photo.
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’.”
TL;DR
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.
While attending the upcoming conference Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News later this week, I’ll make an attempt to live Tweet as much as possible. (If you’re following me on Twitter on Thursday and Friday and find me too noisy, try using QuietTime.xyz to mute me on Twitter temporarily.) I’ll be using Kevin Marks‘ excellent Noter Live web app to both send out the tweets as well as to store and archive them here on this site thereafter (kind of like my own version of Storify.)
In getting ramped up to live Tweet it, it helps significantly to have a pre-existing list of attendees (and remote participants) talking about #DtMH2016 on Twitter, so I started creating a Twitter list by hand. I realized that it would be nice to have a little bot to catch others as the week progresses. Ever lazy, I turned to IFTTT.com to see if something already existed, and sure enough there’s a Twitter search with a trigger that will allow one to add people who mention a particular hashtag to a Twitter list automatically.
Feel free to follow or subscribe to the list as necessary. Hopefully this will make attending the conference more fruitful for those there live as well as remote.
Not on the list? Just tweet a (non-private) message with the conference hashtag: #DTMH2016 and you should be added to the list shortly.
Lazy like me? Click the bird to tweet: “I’m attending #DtMH2016 @rji | Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News http://ctt.ec/5RKt2+”
IFTTT Recipe for Creating Twitter Lists of Conference Attendees
For those interested in creating their own Twitter lists for future conferences (and honestly the hosts of all conferences should do this as they set up their conference hashtag and announce the conference), below is a link to the ifttt.com recipe I created for this, but which can be modified for use by others.
Naturally, it would also be nice if, as people registered for conferences, they were asked for their Twitter handles and websites so that the information could be used to create such online lists to help create longer lasting relationships both during the event and afterwards as well. (Naturally providing these details should be optional so that people who wish to maintain their privacy could do so.)
Directed by Joseph Sargent. With Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Martin Balsam, Hector Elizondo. In New York, armed men hijack a subway car and demand a ransom for the passengers. Even if it's paid, how could they get away?
A great classic film starring Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Hector Elizondo, and Jerry Stiller. The plot and story (as well as some great 70’s cinematography) holds up incredibly well and far better than most of its contemporaries. The score of the film does have the definite tone of the 70’s, but isn’t so overbearingly stereotypical as movies which came later in the decade.
While headed by Walter Matthau, this film is far more serious in tone and there are few, if any, bits of humor stemming from his Lt. Garber character (or they just don’t play as well now). The final freeze frame of Matthau’s which closes the film (in an early American studio feature nod to the French New Wave) does have a fantastic feel of sardonic comedy though. Matthau’s function in the film reminded me more of his turn in Charade (1963) than his extensive body of comedic work.
Robert Shaw in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (United Artists, 1974)
The film does fit well into the crime/drama/thriller progression of the modern blockbuster which includes its classic predecessors: Bonnie and Clyde (Warner Bros., 1967), Bullitt (Warner Bros., 1968), The Italian Job (Paramount, 1969), The French Connection (20th Century Fox, 1971), Shaft (MGM, 1971), Dirty Harry (Warner Bros., 1971), and Magnum Force (Warner Bros., 1973).
The movie is set in a time period after the prison riot at Attica which is mentioned in passing by the mayor’s staff, but before the film Dog Day Afternoon (Warner Bros., 1975). It’s also obviously set in a time period when people expect airplane hijacks, but think it’s laughable that anyone would consider a subway hijack. (This likely played into the high-concept idea of the studio consider making it originally). However, none of the train passengers takes the hijacking very seriously or seems very scared by the four rough looking characters carrying high powered and automatic weapons. This may be because the terrorism of the late 70’s, early 80’s, or even early 2000s had not yet happened; it was also set prior to John Frankenheimer’s Black Sunday (Paramount, 1979). I find it interesting that the hijackers in the piece actually verbally explain the capacity and killing power of their weapons as if none of the everyday people on the train would understand their automatic capabilities. (This assuredly wouldn’t happen in a modern-day version.) I have to imagine that more modern actor portrayals would have been much more fearful early on. Here no one seems very upset until Mr. Blue shoots the subway car driver in the back. Until then they just seem like they’re a bit “put out”. As an aside, the perpetrators’ going by the names Blue, Green, Grey, and Brown was most assuredly the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s use of similar names for the characters in Resevoir Dogs (Miramax, 1992) which also included the quote “let’s do it by the books”.
The film includes a fantastic (though possibly stereotypical) portrayal of 70’s culture through the characters of multiple ethnicities and cultural types. These are borne out in the credit sequence with character “names” which actually include: The Maid, The Mother, The Homosexual, The Secretary, The Delivery Boy, The Salesman, The Hooker, The Old Man, The Older Son, The Spanish Woman, The Alcoholic, The Pimp, Coed #1, The Younger Son, Coed #2, The Hippie, and The W.A.S.P. One of my favorite stereotypes (which the film may have first immortalized) was the hippie woman calmly chanting “Om” and then later “Om stop” on the runaway subway hoping it wouldn’t crash.
As an indicator of racial change, there’s an odd exchange (that may have been funny at the time), but to a more modern viewer is now just awkward:
Lt. Garber: [looking for the inspector] Inspector Daniels? Inspector Daniels: [identifying himself] Daniels. Lt. Garber: [realizing DCI Daniels is African-American] Oh, I, uh, thought you were, uh, like a shorter guy or – I don’t know what I thought.
There’s also a nice indicator of the growth of stature in women in society as the lead character posits (several times) that a plain clothes police officer might in fact be a woman, a fact that one of Garber’s colleagues failed to contemplate. This is offset by a zany statement by an old, gruff (and somewhat marginalized) subway supervisor (following a prior litany of profanity, by almost everyone in the room):
Oh, come on. If I’ve got to watch my language just because they let a few broads in, I’m going to quit. How the hell can you run a goddamn railroad without swearing?
I’ll have to go back and rewatch the remake again to further compare the portrayal of the two time periods. I will note that the mayor’s deputy comes in at one point in this incarnation and says to him, “Pull your pants up Al, we’re going downtown.” I can’t help but sadly imagine that in a remake, the mayor wouldn’t be laying sick in bed getting a shot in the ass, but would more likely be sitting behind his desk with a woman in a compromising position to get the cheap laugh.
The film also includes some great, but short character actor turns by Tony Roberts as the Mayor’s assistant, Doris Roberts (almost unrecognizable to modern day Everybody Loves Raymond fans) as the mayor’s wife, Kenneth McMillan, and a middle-aged Joe Seneca.
I also noticed an obscure, early production office coordinator credit for Barbara DaFina, better known as Barbara De Fina, much later a well-known and prolific producer and production manager, known for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995) and Hugo (2011). She was married to Martin Scorsese from 1985 – 1991, though she had a nice body of work even prior to that.
Another quote that I can’t help but mention not only for its sheer joy but because it’s also one of the first lines of spoken dialogue of the film:
What’s wrong dude? Ain’t you never seen a sunset before?
The Pimp played by George Lee Miles, referring to his clothing, confidence, and swagger on the dark, dank subway platform
in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (United Artists, 1974)
In the pantheon of first lines of poetry, this captures the tone of its time incredibly well.
Traditional network television programming has always followed the same script: executives approve a pilot, order a trial number of episodes, and broadcast them, expecting viewers to watch a given show on their television sets at the same time every week. But then came Netflix's House of Cards. Netflix gauged the show's potential from data it had gathered about subscribers' preferences, ordered two seasons without seeing a pilot, and uploaded the first thirteen episodes all at once for viewers to watch whenever they wanted on the devices of their choice. In this book, Michael Smith and Rahul Telang, experts on entertainment analytics, show how the success of House of Cards upended the film and TV industries -- and how companies like Amazon and Apple are changing the rules in other entertainment industries, notably publishing and music.
We're living through a period of unprecedented technological disruption in the entertainment industries. Just about everything is affected: pricing, production, distribution, piracy. Smith and Telang discuss niche products and the long tail, product differentiation, price discrimination, and incentives for users not to steal content. To survive and succeed, businesses have to adapt rapidly and creatively. Smith and Telang explain how. How can companies discover who their customers are, what they want, and how much they are willing to pay for it? Data. The entertainment industries, must learn to play a little "moneyball." The bottom line: follow the data.
I had lunch today with author Henry James Korn who revealed big chunks of the plot of his upcoming novel Zionista to me. I should be getting a copy of the first draft to read over the weekend, and I can’t wait. It sounds like it continues the genius of his political satire in Amerikan Krazy.
There is a multi-lingual low-budget movie shooting across the street from me in which Trump is terrorizing some Spanish speaking gardeners!
It doesn’t appear to be a comedy and Trump is grumbling as if he’s a Zombie!
There were some more-than-steamy scenes (shot behind the neighbors’ bushes) which are NSFW, so they won’t appear here.
I won’t spoil the ending, but the last shot I saw involved the cinematographer lying on the ground shooting up at a gardner with a shovel standing over him menacingly.
We met at Charlie’s Coffee House, 266 Monterey Road, South Pasadena, CA, where we stayed until closing at 8:00. Deciding that we hadn’t had enough, we moved the party (South Pasadena rolls up their sidewalks early) over to the local Starbucks, 454 Fair Oaks Ave, South Pasadena, CA where we stayed until they closed at 11:00pm.
Quiet Writing Hour
Angelo manned the fort alone with aplomb while building intently. If I’m not mistaken, he did use my h-card to track down my phone number to see what was holding me up, so as they say in IRC: h-card++!
Needing no introductions this week, Angelo launched us off with a relatively thorough demo of his Canopy platform which he’s built from the ground up in python! Starting from an empty folder on a host with a domain name, he downloaded and installed his code directly from Github and spun up a completely new version of his site in under 2 minutes. In under 20 minutes of some simple additional downloads and configuration of a few files, he also had locations, events, people and about modules up and running. Despite the currently facile appearance of his website, there’s really a lot of untapped power in what he’s built so far. It’s all available on Github for those interested in playing around; I’m sure he’d appreciate pull requests.
Along the way, I briefly demoed some of the functionality of Kevin Marks’ deceptively powerful Noterlive web app for not only live tweeting, but also owning those tweets on one’s own site in a simple way after the fact (while also automatically including proper markup and microformats)! I also ran through some of the overall functionality of my Known install with a large number of additional plugins to compare and contrast UX/UI with respect to Canopy.
We also discussed a bit of Angelo’s recent Indieweb Graph network crawling project, and I took the opportunity to fix a bit of the representative h-card on my site. (Angelo, does a new crawl appear properly on lahacker.net now?)
Before leaving Charlie’s we did manage to remember to take a group photo this time around. Not having spent enough time chatting over the past few weeks, we decamped to a local Starbucks and continued our conversation along with some addition brief demos and discussion of other itches for future building.
We also spent a few minutes discussing the upcoming IndieWebCamp LA logistics for November as well as outreach to the broader Los Angeles area dev communities. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP. If you’d like to volunteer or help sponsor the camp, please don’t hesitate to contact either of us. I’m personally hoping to attend DrupalCamp LA this weekend while wearing a stylish IndieWebCamp t-shirt that’s already on its way to me.
IndieWebCamp T-shirt
Next Meeting
In keeping with the schedule of the broader Homebrew movement, so we’re already committed to our next meeting on September 7. It’s tentatively at the same location unless a more suitable one comes along prior to then. Details will be posted to the wiki in the next few days.
Thanks for coming everyone! We’ll see you next time.
Live Tweets Archive
Though not as great as the notes that Kevin Marks manages to put together, we did manage to make good use of noterlive for a few supplementary thoughts:
This morning while breezing through my Woodwind feed reader, I ran across a post by Rick Mendes with the hashtags #readlater and #readinglist which put me down a temporary rabbit hole of thought about reading-related post types on the internet.
I’m obviously a huge fan of reading and have accounts on GoodReads, Amazon, Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and literally dozens of other services that support or assist the reading endeavor. (My affliction got so bad I started my own publishing company last year.)
READ LATER is an indication on (or relating to) a website that one wants to save the URL to come back and read the content at a future time.
I started a page on the IndieWeb wiki to define read later where I began writing some philosophical thoughts. I decided it would be better to post them on my own site instead and simply link back to them. As a member of the Indieweb my general goal over time is to preferentially quit using these web silos (many of which are listed on the referenced page) and, instead, post my reading related work and progress here on my own site. Naturally, the question becomes, how does one do this in a simple and usable manner with pretty and reasonable UX/UI for both myself and others?
Current Use
Currently I primarily use a Pocket bookmarklet to save things (mostly newspaper articles, magazine pieces, blog posts) for reading later and/or the like/favorite functionality in Twitter in combination with an IFTTT recipe to save the URL in the tweet to my Pocket account. I then regularly visit Pocket to speed read though articles. While Pocket allows downloading of (some) of one’s data in this regard, I’m exploring options to bring in the ownership of this workflow into my own site.
For more academic leaning content (read journal articles), I tend to rely on an alternate Mendeley-based workflow which also starts with an easy-to-use bookmarklet.
I’ve also experimented with bookmarking a journal article and using hypothes.is to import my highlights from that article, though that workflow has a way to go to meet my personal needs in a robust way while still allowing me to own all of my own data. The benefit is that fixing it can help more than just myself while still fitting into a larger personal workflow.
Brainstorming
A Broader Reading (Parent) Post-type
Philosophically a read later post-type could be considered similar to a (possibly) unshared or private bookmark with potential possible additional meta-data like: progress, date read, notes, and annotations to be added after the fact, which then technically makes it a read post type.
A potential workflow viewed over time might be: read later >> bookmark >> notes/annotations/marginalia >> read >> review. This kind of continuum of workflow might be able to support a slightly more complex overall UI for a more simplified reading post-type in which these others are all sub-types. One could then make a single UI for a reading post type with fields and details for all of the sub-cases. Being updatable, the single post could carry all the details of one’s progress.
Indieweb encourages simplicity (DRY) and having the fewest post-types possible, which I generally agree with, but perhaps there’s a better way of thinking of these several types. Concatenating them into one reading type with various data fields (and the ability of them to be public/private) could allow all of the subcategories to be included or not on one larger and more comprehensive post-type.
Examples
Not including one subsection (or making it private), would simply prevent it from showing, thus one could have a traditional bookmark post by leaving off the read later, read, and review sub-types and/or data.
As another example, I could include the data for read later, bookmark, and read, but leave off data about what I highlighted and/or sub-sections of notes I prefer to remain private.
A Primary Post with Webmention Updates
Alternately, one could create a primary post (potentially a bookmark) for the thing one is reading, and then use further additional posts with webmentions on each (to the original) thereby adding details to the original post about the ongoing progress. In some sense, this isn’t too far from the functionality provided by GoodReads with individual updates on progress with brief notes and their page that lists the overall view of progress. Each individual post could be made public/private to allow different viewerships, though private webmentions may be a hairier issue. I know some are also experimenting with pushing updates to posts via micropub and other methods, which could be appealing as well.
This may be cumbersome over time, but could potentially be made to look something like the GoodReads UI below, which seems very intuitive. (Note that it’s missing any review text as I’m currently writing it, and it’s not public yet.)
Overview of reading progress
Other Thoughts
Ideally, better distinguishing between something that has been bookmarked and read/unread with dates for both the bookmarking and reading, as well as potentially adding notes and highlights relating to the article is desired. Something potentially akin to Devon Zuegel‘s “Notes” tab (built on a custom script for Evernote and Tumblr) seems somewhat promising in a cross between a simple reading list (or linkblog) and a commonplace book for academic work, but doesn’t necessarily leave room for longer book reviews.
I’ll also need to consider the publishing workflow, in some sense as it relates to the reverse chronological posting of updates on typical blogs. Perhaps a hybrid approach of the two methods mentioned would work best?
Kindle Notes and Highlights are now shoing up as a beta feature in GoodReads
Comments
I’ll keep thinking about the architecture for what I’d ultimately like to have, but I’m always open to hearing what other (heavy) readers have to say about the subject and the usability of such a UI.
Please feel free to comment below, or write something on your own site (which includes the URL of this post) and submit your URL in the field provided below to create a webmention in which your post will appear as a comment.
Last night we continued the blossoming group of indiewebbers meeting up on the East side of the Los Angeles Area, leading up to IndieWeb Camp Los Angeles in November.
The quiet writing hour started off quiet with Angelo holding down the fort while others were stuck in interminable traffic, but if the IRC channel is any indication, he got some productive work done.
Following introductions, I did a demo of the browser-based push notifications I enabled on this site about a week ago and discussed some pathways to help others explore options for doing so on theirs. Coincidentally, WordPress.com just unveiled some functionality like this yesterday that is more site-owner oriented than user oriented, so I’ll be looking into that functionality shortly.
Angelo showed off some impressive python code which he’s preparing to opensource, but just before the meeting had managed to completely bork his site, so everyone got a stunning example of a “502 Bad Gateway” notice.
At the break, we were so engaged we all completely forgot to either take a break or do the usual group photo. My 1 minute sketch gives a reasonable facsimile of what a photo would have looked like.
Peer-to-Peer Building and Help
With a new group, we spent some time discussing some general Indieweb principles, outlining ideas, and example projects.
Since Michael was very new to the group, we helped him install the WordPress IndieWeb plugin and configure a few of the sub-plugins to get him started. We discussed some basic next steps and pointers to the WordPress documentation to provide him some direction for building until we meet again.
We spent a few minutes discussing the upcoming IndieWebCamp logistics as well as outreach to the broader Los Angeles area community.
Next Meeting
For a new group, there’s enough enthusiasm to do at least two meetings a month, in keeping with the broader Homebrew movement, so we’re already committed to our next meeting on August 24. It’s tentatively at the same location unless a more suitable one comes along prior to then.
Thanks for coming everyone! We’ll see you next time.
I have become increasingly frustrated by the fact that many of the publications I used to like are turning into churnicle factories, creating platforms for anybody and everybody to post whatever dr…
A push notification (AKA client notification) is a notification that shows up on one or more of your client devices without you having to explicitly request it — it’s “pushed” to you, instead of you having to poll for it. –Source: IndieWeb.org
Pushpad
Today I came across a beta web service called Pushpad that provides easy-to-install push notifications. As a result, for people who spend a lot of time in front of their screens, they can now subscribe to updates on the site here via web browser push notifications. Subscribers will get a small toaster-like pop up notification in real time on their screen to indicate that new content was published.
My first push notification
Set up
The service was quick and simple to set up with lots of documentation. While geared at large corporations looking for a simple turnkey implementation for push notifications on most major web browsers, it’s also easily usable by smaller sites. Even better it’s free for providing less than 10,000 notifications a month, which covers most small sites.
They provide an “Express” version that requires no serious technical skills and sets up in just a few minutes and a separate “Pro” version which provides a lot of additional customization (including a white labeled version) for those with the development skills to implement it.
For those on WordPress, they also have an easy to use plugin.
Pushpad supports the Push API for Chrome and Firefox and APNs for Safari.
Automation
Pushpad also supports integration with Zapier (currently in beta), which means that any of the hundreds of applications that are integrated with Zapier can be used to create push notifications on the desktop. Hopefully they include IFTTT.com soon too. I’m already using Pushbullet with IFTTT for integration between my Android phone and my desktop, but additional integrations for personalized notifications could be cool.
Roll Your Own
But maybe you’re hard core? If you prefer not relying on outside services, you can always build your own push notifications! In particular, IndieWeb.org provides some thoughts and tips about how to implement these for yourself based on open web standards.
Push Notifications for BoffoSocko.com
Now that we’ve been talking about them, would you like to try receiving them in the future? You can subscribe to push notifications for my blog by simply clicking on the icon below and then authenticating your subscription:
Not into push notifications? Maybe this isn’t your favorite way to find out about my content? If not, I offer a number of other ways to subscribe and consume my content.
Bioinformatics is a broad discipline in which one common denominator is the need to produce and/or use software that can be applied to biological data in different contexts. To enable and ensure the replicability and traceability of scientific claims, it is essential that the scientific publication, the corresponding datasets, and the data analysis are made publicly available [1,2]. All software used for the analysis should be either carefully documented (e.g., for commercial software) or, better yet, openly shared and directly accessible to others [3,4]. The rise of openly available software and source code alongside concomitant collaborative development is facilitated by the existence of several code repository services such as SourceForge, Bitbucket, GitLab, and GitHub, among others. These resources are also essential for collaborative software projects because they enable the organization and sharing of programming tasks between different remote contributors. Here, we introduce the main features of GitHub, a popular web-based platform that offers a free and integrated environment for hosting the source code, documentation, and project-related web content for open-source projects. GitHub also offers paid plans for private repositories (see Box 1) for individuals and businesses as well as free plans including private repositories for research and educational use.
Tonight was the beginning of a new group of indiewebbers meeting up on the East side of the Los Angeles Area, in what we hope to be an ongoing in-person effort, particularly as we get nearer to IndieWeb Camp Los Angeles in November.
We met at Starbucks, 575 South Lake Avenue, Pasadena, CA.
Quiet Writing Hour
The quiet writing hour started off pretty well with three people which quickly grew to 6 at the official start of the meeting including what may be the youngest participants ever (at 6months and 5 1/2 years old).
#indieweb@ChrisAldrich: Quiet writing hours for the first Homebrew Website Club in Pasadena, CA are in full swing. 4 people already here.
Jervey Tervalon, a writer, and his 6 month old daughter
Evie (5 years old, private site)
Following introductions, I did a quick demo of the simple workflow I’ve been slowly perfecting for liking/retweeting posts from Twitter via mobile so that they post on my own site while simultaneously POSSEing to Twitter. Angelo showed a bit of his code and set-up for his custom-built site based on a Python framework and inspired by Aaron Schwartz’s early efforts. (He also has an interesting script for scraping other’s sites searching for microformats data with a mf2 parser that I’d personally like to see more of and hope he’ll open source it. It found a few issues with some redundant/malformed rel=”me” links in the header of my own site that I’ll need to sort out shortly).
Bryan showed some recent work he’s done on his photography blog, which he’s slowly but surely been managing to cobble together from a self-hosted version of WordPress with help from friends and the local WordPress Meetup. (Big kudos to him for his sheer tenacity in building his site up!) Jervey described some of what he’d like to build as it relates to a WordPress based site he’s putting together for a literary journal, while his daughter slept peacefully until someone mentioned a silo named Facebook. 5 year old Evie showed off some coding work she’d done during the quiet writing hour on the Scratch Platform on iOS that she hopes to post to her own blog shortly, so she can share with her grandparents.
At the break, we managed to squeeze everyone in for a group selfie.
Peer-to-Peer Building and Help
Since many in the group were building with WordPress, we did a demo build on Evie’s (private) site by installing the IndieWeb Plugin and activating and configuring a few of the basic sub-plugins. We then built a small social links menu to demonstrate the ease of adding rel-me to an Instagram link as an example. We also showed a quick example of IndieAuth, followed by a quick build for doing PESOS from Instagram with proper microformats2 markup. Bryan had a few questions about his site from the first half of the meeting, so we wrapped up by working our way through a portion of those so he can proceed with some additional work before our next meeting.
Summary & Next Meeting
In all, not a bad showing for what I expected to be a group of 5 less people than what we ultimately got! I can’t wait until the next meetup on either 8/10 or 8/24 (at the very worst) pending some scheduling. I hope to do every two weeks, but we’ll definitely commit to do at least once a month going forward.
Can you guess which user is the blog’s author in the screencapture?
The film includes a fantastic (though possibly stereotypical) portrayal of 70’s culture through the characters of multiple ethnicities and cultural types. These are borne out in the credit sequence with character “names” which actually include: The Maid, The Mother, The Homosexual, The Secretary, The Delivery Boy, The Salesman, The Hooker, The Old Man, The Older Son, The Spanish Woman, The Alcoholic, The Pimp, Coed 
Om Malik
