Category: Entertainment Industry

Replied to a tweet by Martha BurtisMartha Burtis (Twitter)
I want it all too! If you’d like to join us at IndieWebCamp this weekend (free online), let’s have a session there to brainstorm how we can have our cakes and eat them too.

I think some of the POSSE (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) model may work to smooth some of this over. For example, I can write my response to everyone on my own WordPress site and fairly easily syndicate it to Twitter to have the best of both worlds.

If this weekend isn’t convenient, let’s host a pop-up session or mini-conference in a bit to discuss it and see what we can hack together.

 

Replied to a post by Katherine M. MossKatherine M. Moss (cambridgeport90.micro.blog)
I wonder how on earth one finds the ISBN of a Kindle-only book? I’m wondering whether or not the IndieWeb book resources should begin going by ASIN instead of ISBN … seems that the ASIN is easy to find if on GoodReads.
Each publisher should be assigning individual International Standard Book Numbers to each format for each different edition, but in practice they don’t always. Often they’ll assign a single ISBN number to all e-book versions (regardless of file format) and sometimes they’ll incorrectly use the same number as the paperback or hardback editions.

Things can be worse for more independent or self-published works where the author doesn’t know how these things work. These may often have no ISBN at all regardless of the format.

The least “indie” thing one could do would be to use the Amazon Standard Identification Number which is a number assigned by Amazon. ASINs are easy to find on Goodreads solely because they’re owned by Amazon. In many cases, there are far more editions on Goodreads than actually exist because of the lack of use of ISBNs and de-duplication of editions which they import from a variety of data sources, including Amazon itself.

To my knowledge, the only true way to find the “correct” ISBN is to copy it directly from the book/source itself.

Read Longtime WME Agent George Freeman Let Go Over Objectionable E-Mail He Accidentally Sent To Colleagues by Mike Fleming (Deadline)
EXCLUSIVE: Veteran WME agent George Freeman has been let go by the agency today because of an e-mail he meant to send to an individual but mistakenly dispersed to a large number of colleagues. The …
Read Disney Developing Original Movie Musical ‘All Night Long’ From Lionel Richie Song Catalog by Matt Donnelly (Variety)
Walt Disney Studios is developing an original movie musical based on the songs of American treasure Lionel Richie, Variety has learned exclusively. Tentatively titled “All Night Long,” …
Bookmarked a tweet (Twitter)
It’s starting to feel too late on the West coast of the US to start something right now, but my mind is buzzing. I’ll see if I can come up with something IndieWebby/Domain of One’s Owny overnight to post tomorrow. 

In the meanwhile, I’m curious what Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and others might whip up while I’m sleeping?

Thoughts on Wikity for WordPress

I spun up a new instance of Wikity today at http://wikity.chrisaldrich.net/ to test it out for potential use as a personal online wiki. My goal was also to test out how it may or may not work with IndieWeb-based WordPress pieces too.

Below are my initial thoughts and problems.

The /home/ page has a lot of errors and warnings. (Never a good sign.)

It took me a few minutes to figure out where the Wik-it! bookmarklet button was hiding. Ideally it would have been in the start card that described how the bookmarklet would work (in addition to its original spot).

The Wikity theme seems to have some issues when using for http vs. https.

  • Less seems to work out of the box with https
  • The main card for entering “Name of Concept or Data” didn’t work at all under https. It only showed the title and wouldn’t save. Switching to http seemed to fix it and show the editor bar.

I’ve tried copying over from Aaron Davis‘ Wikity instance, but the cardbox seems to fail on my end.

  • Nothing seemed to work at all when I had my site as https. In fact, it redirected to a URL that seemed like it wanted to run update.php for some bizarre reason.
  • On http I at least get a card saying that the process failed.
    • Not sure what may be causing this.
    • Doesn’t seem to matter how many cards it is.
    • Perhaps it’s the fact that Aaron’s site is https? I notice that his checkbox export functionality duplicates his entire URL including the https:// within the export box which seems to automatically prepend http://
    • Copying to my own wiki seems to vaguely work using http, but failed on https.

Multiple * in the markdown editor functionality within WordPress doesn’t seem to format the way I’d expect.

Sadly, the original Wikity.cc site is down, but the theme still includes a link to it front and center on my website.

The home screen quick new card has some wonky CSS that off centers it.

Toggling full screen editing mode in new cards from the home screen makes them too big and obscures the UI making things unusable.

The primary multi-card home display doesn’t work well with markup the way the individual posts do.

The custom theme seems to be hiding some of the IndieWeb pieces. It may also be hampering the issuance of webmention as I tried sending one to myself and it only showed up as a pingback. It didn’t feel worth the effort to give the system a full IndieWeb test drive beyond this.

Doing this set up as a theme and leveraging posts seems like a very odd choice. From my reading, Mike Caulfield was relatively new to WordPress development when he made this. Even if he was an intermediate developer, he should be proud of his effort, including his attention to some minute bits of UI that others wouldn’t have considered. To make this a more ubiquitous solution, it may have been a better choice to create it as a plugin, do a custom post type for wiki cards and create a separate section of the database for them instead of trying to leverage posts. This way it could have been installed on any pre-existing WordPress install and the user could choose their own favorite theme and still have a wiki built into it. In this incarnation it’s really only meant to be installed on a fresh stand-alone site.

I only used the Classic Editor and didn’t even open up the Gutenberg box of worms in any of my tests.

Summary

The Wikity theme hasn’t been maintained in four years and it looks like it’s going to take quite a bit of work (or a complete refactoring) to make it operate the way I’d want it to. Given the general conceptualization it may make much more sense to try to find a better maintained solution for a wiki.

The overarching idea of what he was trying to accomplish, particularly within the education space and the OER space, was awesome. I would love nothing more than to have wiki-like functionality built into my personal WordPress website, particularly if I could have different presentations for the two sides but still maintain public/private versions of pieces and still have site-wide tagging and search. Having the ability to port data from site to site is a particularly awesome idea.

Is anyone actively still using it? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about problems/issues they’ve seen. Is it still working for you as expected? Is it worth upgrading the broken bits? Is it worth refactoring into a standalone plugin?

Replied to a thread by Andy MatuschakAndy Matuschak (Twitter)
This thread makes me wonder when the Hypothes.is team will be allowed to build a layer onto e-reader platforms? Another great idea might be for e-readers and note taking tools to have built-in micropub clients so I can use them to publish to my website or other platforms.
Watched Joel Dueck: Pollen, Textpattern, and Websites as books by Jared Pereira from YouTube

Joel walks us through his 20+ year strong personal website, and digs into his frustrations with past versions, and how he's building the latest edition to generate both a website and a book.

  • 0:00 — History/existing Textpattern site
  • 35:00 — Tour of new site
  • 58:00 — Use of Racket / Pollen to wield godlike powers
  • 1:15:00 — Dual web/printed-book publishing: Pollen, LaTeX, Quad, etc.
Read Fox Says Discovery About 'Simpsons' Composer Culminated in Firing (The Hollywood Reporter)
In new court papers, 'Simpsons' producers say they were surprised and disturbed to learn that Alf Clausen was having his son and others create music for the animated comedy. Fox demands an end to an age bias suit as an impingement of its First Amendment-protected decision-making about the show's music.
Watched The Reason Paul Schneider Left Parks And Rec After Season 2 from YouTube

The Reason Paul Schneider Left Parks And Rec After Season 2
We all remember Parks and Recreation season 2: Leslie was trying to fix the pit. Andy and April began their triumphant weirdo love story. Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt joined the merry band of civil servants. But do you remember Mark Brendanawicz?

Paul Schneider played Mark, the Pawnee, Indiana city planner who was a relatively central character on Parks and Recreation's first season and who had a scrapped romance subplot with Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope. In the second season, Mark's purpose began to flounder despite a second, and ultimately crumbled, romance with Rashida Jones' Ann Perkins. During the Parks and Rec season 2 finale, Mark announced he was leaving city government for a job with a private-sector construction company...

...which earned him a new nickname from Leslie, "Mark Brendanaquits”, and he was never heard from again. Chris and Ben's entrance into Parks and Recreation as guest characters on season 2 proved to be the perfect gift in disguise to slip Mark's departure past everyone with few questions asked.

Looking back, there are some mysteries left unsolved. Why have Mark leave at all, and why did Paul Schneider exit Parks and Recreation and never return?

In short, Paul Schneider left Parks and Recreation because he felt sidelined. Several years after the fact, the actor opened up about his Parks departure in an interview with Screen Crush, revealing that he felt he'd been at a creative crossroads with the series' writers after Mark's character was altered from the first season. The early episodes of Parks and Rec are rougher and feature more tension and disdain between the characters, just like its predecessor, The Office. Mark Brendanawicz's character is a relic of that previous style, and he was reportedly an even less likable character in earlier versions of Parks and Recreation. A shift in emotional perspective came about as the series continued on, and while it worked out well for many principal characters, it didn't for Mark. Keep watching the video to see the reason Paul Schneider left Parks and Rec after season 2.

I vaguely remember him from the beginning, but mostly I remember Leslie continually badmouthing Mark Brendanawicz in later seasons. It seemed relatively obvious to me that he would leave given his minimal interaction on the show from the beginning of the series to the end of the first season. These sorts of situations are never fun for the agents/managers, particularly if the writing staff and producers aren’t sure what they’re doing or where the show is going.
THIRTEEN

Imagine webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.

Read Playwright Terrence McNally Dies Of Complications Due To Coronavirus by Greg Evans (Deadline)
Acclaimed playwright Terrence McNally has died of complications due to coronavirus. The author of Master Class, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune and Love! Valour! Compassion!, among many oth…