Last night I had dinner at a local restaurant that happened to have a playlist on of great songs from my high school years.
Category: Read
👓 Wavelength for Micro.blog | Manton.org
We have something really big to announce today. Micro.blog now supports hosting short-form podcasts, also known as microcasts, with a companion iPhone app called Wavelength for recording, editing, and publishing episodes.
Micro.blog is about making short-form content you own as simple to post as a tweet because we believe blogging should be easier. Podcasting should be easier too.
Wavelength looks like a cool new app in the podcasting space. While meant for growing category of microcasts, it portends some interesting things. I suspect this is just the start for something that will likely continue getting better over time.
Congrats Manton!
👓 Export your Facebook posts to WordPress | Chris Finke
I’m a big proponent of owning the data that you create. I use WordPress (of course) wherever I blog, and I use the Keyring Social Importers plugin to make backup copies of my Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins. And as of today, I am also syncing my Facebook updates back to a private WordPress blog using Keyring Social Importers. Not familiar with Keyring Social Importers? That’s too bad, it’s amazing. Install it, and within minutes, you can be importing data from any one of a dozen sites to your blog. Remember all of that data you put into Myspace/Jaiku/Bebo/Pownce and how it disappeared when the site shut down? Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to save a copy of all of that? That’s what Keyring Social Importers makes possible.
I was kind of hoping for something slightly different when I searched for something and found this, but it is interesting for those who don’t know about Keyring Social Importers and it had an interesting comments section.
I was looking for something in the range of a bulk Facebook Importer to exit Facebook altogether whereas this solution keeps you addicted to it. I would classify it more of a PESOS solution than a POSSE solution.
👓 Internships at The Spectator for summer 2018; no CVs, please | Spectator
Since we abolished CVs for The Spectator’s internship scheme, it has acquired quite a reputation. There are fewer than two dozen journalists here in 22 Old Queen St and we recruit people rarely – but when we do, we seek to recruit from our interns. We’re not the only ones. Our two best interns from last year (the ones asked back for Christmas) have both just been offered jobs by national publications. The best interns we’ve had recently have included a PPE graduate, former teacher and a mum-of-three whose kids are old enough for her to roll the dice and try a new career. In journalism, all that matters is flair, enthusiasm and capacity for hard work. We don’t care where, when or even whether you went to university. That’s why we recruit our interns from aptitude tests alone.
An interesting method for recruitment.
👓 Site Building with WordPress and Elementor | Throw Out The Manual
One of the biggest challenges for folks new to building a website with WordPress is that it feels very much like writing/blogging software out of the box. Yes, you can create pages, but as soon as you want to structure information in columns or do anything more complex than images and text you will quickly find you need to find a theme or a handful of plugins to get the job done (and if you don't know what you don't know, that's a huge hurdle). "Site Builder" plugins are becoming more and more popular and you even see more themes integrating them into their frameworks these days. Some are pretty good, some suck really badly. One I really like and wanted to demonstrate as a way to quickly get up and running with a WordPress site is Elementor which is both free (there's a Pro version that has more features I'll discuss in a bit) and incredibly user-friendly with a lot of great options.
While I know more than the average WordPress bear, I’ve never really seen the value of any of these site builders myself.
I am curious how some of these site builders will do with the upcoming release of Gutenberg, however.
👓 Someone Photoshopped Mark Zuckerberg as Data from ‘Star Trek’ and it’s incredible | Mashable
Wow.
This photo is just too awesome for words. It almost makes up for the pitiful excuse for what these hearings actually represented. I’m hoping that they’re more politics than actual substance at the end of the day. The hearings are another great example of how completely disconnected our representation is to the actual world in which we live. The saddest part is that Mr. Data actually has some pre-programmed in morality while it seems that Zuckerberg doesn’t even have a shred.
👓 Fed up with Facebook, activists find new ways to defend their movements | Tech Crunch
Malkia Cyril Contributor Share on Twitter Malkia Cyril is founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network. More posts by this contributor The benefits of police body cams are a myth In the wake of revelations that the person…
👓 Jared Kushner’s $1.2 billion miracle | Think Progress
Someone is doing Jared Kushner a huge favor. But we don't know who.
👓 All my Instagrams are MINE | Spitot Design
There was a time in the early days of social media that I signed up for every service that came out. The username @spigot is mine across most services you can find. By the time Instagram started, I’d started to grow weary and standoffish to new services. I’m sure you know what I mean. So I held ...
👓 What’s a Sysadmin to Do? — Avoiding Digital Detritus on a Blogging Platform Older than All of My Kids | DTLT
We have a lot of blogs.
I don’t just mean those of us in DTLT — we do have a lot of blogs. I mean the University of Mary Washington. UMW currently has over 2500 active domains in our Domain of One’s Own program (and almost 3500 domains all-time), and that’s to say nothing about how many blogs and websites are on those domains and their subdomains.
But before there was Domain of One’s Own there was (and still is) UMW Blogs. After three years of DTLT staff and a few UMW faculty experimenting with blogs in and out of class, UMW Blogs launched in 2007 — a WordPress installation that allowed any student, faculty, or staff member to get their own subdomain (like mygreatblog.umwblogs.org) and WordPress site, administered by DTLT. Since then, the 600 blogs of 2007 grew to over 11,000 blogs and 13,000 users in 2018!
Some interesting thoughts on maintaining a large Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) installation.
👓 April 2018: Newsroom job | Richard MacManus
This week I started a cool new job at Newsroom, one of New Zealand’s premier independent media companies. I’ll be their Chief Product Officer for a few days a week, and also writing my weekly technology column for the site. As I noted in my LinkedIn profile, I’ll be responsible for building the Newsroom technology platform and further developing Newsroom Pro – the company’s subscription service.
Congratulations ricmac!
👓 Six ‘X-Rated’ Math Terms That Only Sound Dirty | Huffington Post
Cox-Zucker machine. What sounds like a high-tech device for oral sex is actually an algorithm used in the study of certain curves, including those that arise in cryptography. The story goes that David A. Cox co-authored a paper with fellow mathematician Steven Zucker, just so that the dirty-sounding term would enter the lexicon.
I always thought he was cool before (many of his students didn’t “get” him), but I’m now even more proud to have had Steven Zucker as my first math professor in college.
👓 Congrats, Jeff Goldberg. You Just Martyred Kevin Williamson | POLITICO
The <i>Atlantic</i> climbed out on a limb by adding Williamson to its staff. Then they proceeded to saw off the branch.
I noted the hire of Williamson with curiosity when it happened, but I expected it might last a tad longer than this. At least he managed longer than Quinn Norton did at the New York Times, but both seemingly gone for relatively similar reasons.
👓 Apps of a Feather
Third-party Twitter apps are going to break on June 19th, 2018.
After June 19th, 2018, “streaming services” at Twitter will be removed. This means two things for third-party apps:If you use an app like Talon, Tweetbot, Tweetings, or Twitterrific, there is no way for its developer to fix these issues.
- Push notifications will no longer arrive
- Timelines won’t refresh automatically
We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.
Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.
If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropub spec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.
If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.
👓 Facebook deleted Mark Zuckerberg’s Messenger texts without telling anyone | The Verge
Facebook has been secretly deleting messages sent on Messenger by founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook claims it did nothing wrong, but it demonstrates a double-standard with regard to how the company see privacy.
It’s very telling that they have certain privacy policies for themselves and different ones for everyone else.