Replied to 10 Books That Have Influenced Me by Cathie LeBlancCathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)
I was challenged on Facebook to post 10 books in 10 days that have had an influence on me. Not surprisingly, it was really challenging to narrow this down to just 10. But it was also kind of fun to…
I’ve got a good bit of overlap here, but also some new ones I should add to my list or even reread. My copy of Piercy’s He, She and It is pretty beat up, but I’ve not read Gone to Soldiers before. Thanks for sharing!
Watched The Orchestra in My Mouth by Tom Thumb from TEDxSydney

In a highly entertaining performance, beatboxer Tom Thum slings beats, comedy and a mouthful of instrumental impersonations into 11 minutes of creativity and fun that will make you smile.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxSydney, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Pretty cool to see a internal view of a beatboxer with a laryngoscope through the nose.
Watched The Help (2011) from Netflix
Directed by Tate Taylor. With Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard. An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.

Review: ★★★½
Watched The Help (2011) from Netflix
Directed by Tate Taylor. With Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard. An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African American maids' point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.
I can’t help but think that it would be interesting to have a white person’s commentary (in the vein of a traditional director’s commentary, but highlighting different cultural points) to underline some of the unspoken privilege hiding in many of the scenes here. Some of the small and really painful injustices are thrown away in small pieces and then the big emotional moments in the film are left to the end for the white people instead of where they belong.

 

Read Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters (National Museum of Australia | nma.gov.au)

Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters was an Aboriginal-led exhibition that took visitors on a journey along the epic Seven Sisters Dreaming tracks, through art, Indigenous voices and innovative multimedia and other immersive displays.

Previously on show at the National Museum of Australia, 15 September 2017 to 28 February 2018

I would liked to have seen this exhibition. Hopefully it will travel.
Read Songlines: the power and promise by Lynne Kelly (Lynne Kelly)
The last 5 months have been flat-chat working on a new book at the invitation of Margo Neale who is the Head of Centre for Indigenous Knowledges and Senior Indigenous Curator & Advisor to the D…
Can’t wait to read this. Created a stub version of it on Goodreads.com to remind me when it comes out.

IndieWebCamp 2020 West is Officially On

IndieWebCamp West Coast is an online IndieWebCamp being held on
 

Tickets / RSVP

What is it?

Two days meeting up online to share ideas, create & improve personal websites, and build upon each other’s creations. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve their presence on the web, there is something for you here. All skill and experience levels welcome.
If you’ve never attended an IndieWebCamp, we’ve got an article to describe what to expect.

I’m definitely attending, and I hope you’ll join us!

Replied to a tweet by Sara SoueidanSara Soueidan (Twitter)
RSS is such a great topic. I can’t wait to see what your perspective is on it.

One of my favorite resources is the IndieWeb wiki page for RSS as it’s got some good pros/cons, alternate methods for feeds that don’t require side files, conversion tools, and miscellanea.

I’ve always loved the way that platforms like WordPress provide RSS feeds for so many moving parts including authors, comments, dates, tags, categories and various combinations of these. This is a bit reminiscent of Huffduffer, a bookmarking site for audio and podcasts, that provides RSS feeds for almost every portion of its website.

XSL for creating human-readable OPML & RSS feeds is an interesting quirk I’ve seen a few times in the wild with interesting results and design opportunities.

Of course you can’t get away with writing an article without referencing http://isrssdead.com/. The favicon on the site, which ironically doesn’t have an RSS feed, leads me to believe that it’s owned by Dave Winer, the creator of RSS. It seems like it is giving a nod to http://isabevigodadead.com/, but given the site owner, I don’t think it will ever indicate “yes”.

One of my favorite RSS tangential topics is OPML and OPML subscription. There’s nothing more fun that auto-updating subscriptions of bundled RSS feeds.

An interesting, underreported, and discussed phenomena I’ve noticed over the last few years for many websites that do have RSS is that they’ll change CMSes and redirect all their URLs properly for SEO purposes, but they completely neglect to redirect their RSS/Atom/other feeds and thereby lose all their subscribers or force them to manually fix broken feeds. It’s the sad equivalent of creating a new Twitter account and then trying to regain all of one’s followers one at a time–and a simple thing to fix.

Not sure how much interest it is overall, but I’ve got an RSS feed of RSS related tags on my site which has at least a few interesting tidbits, as well as off-label and non-standard use cases.

I’m watching your RSS feed for your take.

RSVPed Attending WordPress Custom Post Types and Taxonomies with Marco Berrocal

June 20, 2020 at 11:00AM- June 20, 2020 at 01:00PM

There are times when a WordPress installation may come up short in relation to what is required by your client. You need content of another type that isn’t a page or a post, and you need to label it differently. Enter Custom Post Types and Taxonomies.

During this Meetup, Marco will discuss what they are, show you how to create them, what his recommendations are when it comes to creating them, and how you can see WordPress as more than just a blogging or a simple site platform.

BIO: Marco Berrocal, Partner Relations at GreenGeeks
Marco is a talented WordPress developer who has worked for more than a decade making custom themes and plugins. He absolutely loves working with WordPress and with his local community (Costa Rica) as a WordCamp Organizer. When he is not in WordPress mode, he's all about my kids, travel, and food.

As always, we'll get the latest news and information going on in WordPress and answer your questions in a mini-version of a Happiness Bar.

Read New York Times staffers revolt over publication of Tom Cotton op-ed (CNN)
Staffers at The New York Times expressed dismay Wednesday over the newspaper's decision to publish an op-ed written by Republican Sen. Tom Cotton that called for the U.S. military to be deployed in cities across the country to help restore order.

Forget about blackout poetry, Google enables highlight poetry in your browser!

Kevin Marks literally and figuratively highlighted a bit of interesting found poetry on Google’s Ten things we know to be true article. (Click the link to see the highlight poetry on Google’s page for yourself.)

A screenshot appears below:

Screenshot of a Google Page with the words "Doing evil is a business. take advantage of all our users" disaggregated, but highlighted so as to reveal a message.
Found poetry:
“Doing evil
is a business
take advantage of
all our users”

Here’s a shortened URL for it that you can share with others: bit.ly/D-ntB-Evil

It’s a creative inverse of blackout poetry where instead of blacking out extraneous words, one can just highlight them instead. This comes courtesy of some new browser based functionality that Google announced earlier this week relating to some of their search and page snippets functionality.

You can find some code and descriptions for how to accomplish this in the WISC Scroll to Text Github repository.

What kind of poetry will you find online this week?