Category: Read

Read The Kairos Mechanism (Arcana #1) by Kate Milford (Kickstarter)
A self-published (print and digital) novella companion to my second book, THE BROKEN LANDS. Both will be released in September.
Looking back at older Kickstarters makes me wonder why they don’t have an “ongoing” functionality which allows those who could continue building and distributing Kickstarted products even after the initial fundraising has finished. 
 
Presumably the user would have a separate site set up to do this so they save the fees, but why wouldn’t Kickstarter offer functionality like this? 
Read Get a story and do some good. Buy The Kairos Mechanism PDF and I’ll donate the full amount to BINC. by Kate Milford (ClockworkFoundry)
Observant folks have noticed that one of my books is much harder to find than others. The Kairos Mechanism was my first self-published book, meant as a sort of semi-sequel to The Boneshaker that would connect it to the events of The Broken Lands. It’s also a sort of sequel to Bluecrowne, if you were to follow Trigemine’s adventures rather than Lucy’s and Liao’s. I funded it on Kickstarter and used a startup e-book platform (which has since gone defunct) as well as McNally Jackson’s Espresso Book Machine (which has since been discontinued at that location). So Kairos has been basically out of print since, oh, 2018ish. I get emails almost daily from readers asking where they can find it, to which I always have to answer, with mixed feelings, “Unfortunately it’s basically out of print. The good news is, there’s an illustrated PDF available.” Mixed feelings because I don’t like that Kairos basically doesn’t exist in real-world form, so that makes me sad; however, the illustrated PDF is a very cool thing that includes art from some amazing young illustrators, so that makes me happy.
Interesting to see that her book disappeared ostensibly because the web platform that she had it stored in shut down. 

I funded it [The Kairos Mechanism] on Kickstarter and used a startup e-book platform (which has since gone defunct) as well as McNally Jackson’s Espresso Book Machine (which has since been discontinued at that location). So Kairos has been basically out of print since, oh, 2018ish.
—Kate Milford

Read Your Local Bookstore Wants You to Know That It’s Struggling (nytimes.com)
Independent booksellers are desperate for customers to return, and not just for an online reading.
Bookmarked on: Oct 15, 2020 at 20:19

Avid Bookshop in Athens, Ga., sends personalized URLs to customers with a list of handpicked recommendations. ❧

Perhaps if they went the step further to set up domains for their customers, they could ostensibly use them not only as book blogs, but also to replace their social media habits?

An IndieWeb friendly platform run by your local bookseller might be out of their wheelhouse, but it could potentially help solve their proximal problem while also solving one of society’s problems all while helping to build community.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:51PM

Take Vroman’s Bookstore, a 126-year-old institution in Pasadena, Calif. It has more than 200 employees, 20,000 square feet of space and the rent to go along with it. In a normal year, it hosts anywhere from 300 to 400 events, bringing in authors for readings and signings, along with customers who buy books and maybe a glass of wine from the bar. But none of that is happening this year. ❧

Coincidentally I bought two books at Vroman’s yesterday and it looked reasonably busy for mid-day. (Maybe because of this article?)

It’s a bit disingenuous to mention wine at their bar as their wine bar was only finally open for a minute before the pandemic shut everything down.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:54PM

Like many other stores, Vroman’s is hosting online events to promote new books, which can attract attendees from all over the country but generally bring in almost no money. ❧

Maybe they need a book paywall for admission into those events? Buy a book to get the zoom code to get into the event?

David Dylan Thomas essentially did this for his recent book launch.
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:55PM

In the best of times, the margins at a bookstore are paper thin — traditionally, a successful shop hopes to make 2 percent in profits — but operating during a pandemic is even more expensive. ❧

Yes—they said paper thin…
Annotated on October 16, 2020 at 12:57PM

Read A Long Time Coming by Daniel Jalkut (Red Sweater Blog)
When I founded Red Sweater Software in 1999, I picked the name “Red Sweater” because I happened to be wearing a red sweater (jumper, to you Brits) as I was thinking of a name for the company. I liked the way the words rolled off my tongue, and I knew it would lend itself to […]
I’m always watching a few domain names myself, ever hopeful. It’s nice to hear stories like this where the patience eventually pays off.
Read Reflections on HAX Camp (Throw Out The Manual)
I spent the last 2 days in a whirlwind trip driving down to Durham, North Carolina to meet up with a motley crew of web developers and talk all things web components at HAX Camp [https://hax.camp]. I came away with my mind reeling and trying to stay above water on all the interesting stuff I was seeing and hearing in hopes of taking something tangible away. But let me back up for a second and explain why I would end up at an event like that, much less why Reclaim Hosting would be interested in s
I still need to spend some time digging into HAX. 
Read Understanding .htaccess by Lauren Brumfield (labrumfield.com)
All Reclaim Hosting servers run Apache Web Server Software. So when an account is provisioned the server creates a directive telling Apache what a user’s domain is and where the files for that domain are located on the server. A single server is able to host multiple sites this way because Apache...
Some great basic information and resources here for understanding and working with .htaccess.
Read More than 280 characters by Gary Pendergast (Gary Pendergast)
It’s hard to be nuanced in 280 characters. The Twitter character limit is a major factor of what can make it so much fun to use: you can read, publish, and interact, in extremely short, digestible chunks. But, it doesn’t fit every topic, ever time. Sometimes you want to talk about complex topics...
Nice mention of the influence of IndieWeb ideas of POSSE and Tweetstorm here.
Read Merriam-Webster changes its definition of 'sexual preference' as Barrett gets called out for using term (Fox News)
Merriam-Webster dictionary changed its definition of “sexual preference” to include the word “offensive” as Democrats slammed Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett for using the term during Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearings.
Interesting to see historical linguistics playing out in real time in the news apparently.
Read Update SimplePie to Latest Version and possibly include PHP-MF2 (core.trac.wordpress.org)
It is the first release in 3 years and has a large number of bug fixes. It also is the first version that includes support for new types of feeds as described by the IndieWebCamp community. These feeds are made up of h-feed and h-entry microformats, which allows the feed to be parsed from the html rather than a separate xml file. SimplePie will now detect when it finds such a feed and parse them when it finds the php-mf2 parser available.
Wow! Look at the movement on this finally! Way to stick with it David Shanske!
Read Death Jump: Farmer Survives Airborne Combine Accident by Chris Bennett
A rag doll in freefall. Matt Griggs was seconds from death, at the whim of a combine beyond his control, pinballing against the interior of the cab. The massive machine, a 35,000 lb. behemoth, was roughly 4’ in the air, at the peak of a bizarre aerial jump that could never qualify for even the most outrageous Dukes of Hazzard script. Dropping back to the ground, the front tires touched down on a narrow, rural Tennessee backroad, catapulting Griggs from the box in an explosion of glass and depositing him in a skidding heap on the blacktop.
Some interesting framing here of community and faith in a bizarre (and potentially avoidable) accident. Nice closing with some safety, but I doubt many read past the opening graphs.

the hand of God ❧

read “statistical mechanics”
Annotated on October 15, 2020 at 08:05AM

Read Een sociaal netwerk via je nieuwsbrief en eigen site. by Frank Meeuwsen (Digging the Digital)
Ik bedacht me zojuist dat er nóg een fijne bijkomstigheid is nu ik mijn OPEN nieuwsbrief op mijn eigen site publiceer en verstuur als nieuwsbrief. Ik gebruik webmentions op mijn site, een gratis plugin voor WordPress en open protocol wat weinig stuk maakt. Elke keer als ik een nieuwsbrief verstuur,...
Read A Skeptical Farmer’s Monster Message on Profitability by Chris BennettChris Bennett (AG Web)
Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, several years prior to the roller coaster rise and fall of commodity prices, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming. Roughly 10 years later, his operation is transformed, and the 41-year-old grower doesn’t mince words: It was all about the money.
Interesting to read this after hearing the experimental anthropologist Scott Lacy talk about farming technologies in Africa earlier this morning in Anthropology and the Study of Humanity. The African farmers described sounded much more in touch with their needs and their land than the majority of American farmers apparently are. Based on this, it almost sounds like Big AG has been doing to the industry what ride sharing tech companies are trying to do elsewhere, they’re just doing it with different tactics.
 
Somehow AG Web seems like the sort of journal I ought to check in on occasionally. 
Read Automatically sending Webmentions from a static website by James Mead (jamesmead.org)
Using Actionsflow to automate the sending of Webmentions using webmention.app
This is an interesting way for static sites to automatically send webmentions using RSS.

Perhaps it’s something I might use in conjunction with my work with TiddlyWiki, MediaWiki, or my Obsidian.md notebook projects.