Read | Chris Aldrich

👓 The Woodard projection | Jon Udell

Jon Udell (Jon Udell)

In a memorable episode of The West Wing, visitors from the Cartographers for Social Justice upend CJ’s and Josh’s worldviews.

Cartographer: “The Peters projection.”

CJ: “What the hell is that?”

Cartographer: “It’s where you’ve been living this whole time.”

I’m having the same reaction to Colin Woodard’s 2011 book American Nations. He sees North America as three federations of nations. The federation we call the United States comprises nations he calls Yankeedom, New Netherland, The Midlands, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, The Deep South, El Norte, The Far West, and The Left Coast.

Here’s his definition of a nation:

A nation is a group of people who share — or believe they share — a common culture, ethnic origin, language, historical experience, artifacts, and symbols.”

I love the concept of this thesis! Ordering a copy of the book for myself.

I’ve lived in Greater Appalachia, The Deep South, Yankeedom, The Midlands, and the Left Coast and I’ve always unconsciously known many of these borders within culture. It’s often been difficult to describe the subtle cultural shifts and divides between many of these places to others. I can’t wait to read a book that delves into all of it depth.

Replied to Testing Out IndieWeb With Poetry (The Daily Connector)

For this Connected Writing Activity — which is taking place rather randomly as a test of something new, so pardon the odd nature of the post — we are testing out Greg’s idea for IndieWeb syndication across blogs. He has a “sub” set up for poetry at IndieWeb, so let’s try that.

You’ve gotten soooo close, but missed by just a hair.

You’ve described the process properly, but in the link at the top of your site, you’ve written:

<a href="https://indieweb.xyz/en/indiewebpoetry” class=">/en/indiewebpoetry</a>

instead of

<a href="https://indieweb.xyz/en/indiewebpoetry” class="u-syndication">/en/indiewebpoetry</a>.

I think the other small portion you’re missing is that Indieweb.xyz works using the Webmention protocol. It doesn’t appear to me that your site is using the Webmention or the Semantic Linkbacks plugins to make that portion work. If you install and activate them, that will get you a bit further and your site will properly ping Indieweb.xyz when you publish your posts to it.

An alternate route, without those plugins, is to manually ping Indieweb.xyz directly. You can use this manual submission link which has instructions and the fields you’ll need to fill out to force a manual webmention.

Looking forward to seeing your poetry on /en/indiewebpoetry!

P.S.: I’m also seeing <pre><a rel="webmention" href="https://brid.gy/webmention/wordpress">-</a></pre> appearing in a widget in your right hand sidebar. I take this to mean that you’re trying to accept webmentions and that you’re using WordPress.com to host your site. I suspect you may not be getting the results you’re looking for on that account because the code is wrapped in <pre></pre>. If you remove that pre tag, you’ll be closer to getting that piece working. If it’s done properly you should only see the dash “-” in that widget. If you prefer to not have a random dash in your sidebar and since that link is only used/read by Brid.gy’s code parser, you can also hide it on your site by using the following code instead <link rel="webmention" href="https://brid.gy/webmention/wordpress">.

👓 Thursday, June 20, 2019 | Scripting News

Read Thursday, June 20, 2019 (Scripting News)

When you buy something online that there is no Consumer Reports or Wirecutter review of, how do you decide what to get? There are a lot of what appear to be review sites on the web, but I guess they're all ads for what they recommend. I don't think the search engines have gotten around to this yet. Here's a search for "best bike cover." Which if any of them are serious criticism by people who know the area.