bookmark | Chris Aldrich

🔖 The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse

Bookmarked The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse by Brianna Privett (WordCamp US 2017)

The Personal Web of the 1990s/early 2000s was the first wave of online diarists and bloggers who use the web as a platform to chronicle and share their our daily lives. WordPress came out of this movement, and is now in its second decade. 2017 marks 20 years that I’ve been using the web to create and archive memories, and 12 years that I’ve been doing it with WordPress. I’ve learned a few things about creating a real and permanent record of a lifetime on the ephemeral digital landscape, and together we’ll discuss how to use WordPress to create your own home on the web. We’ll cover topics such as how to maintain your (and your family’s) privacy, using WordPress to build a keepsake repository your friends and family can contribute to, and how to ensure that these digital spaces are available as a legacy for lifetimes to come.

I can’t wait until WordPress.TV (presumably) posts this up in a few weeks. This sounds a lot like Brianna’s talking about a web-enabled commonplace book, a topic which intrigues me greatly and the purpose for which I’m most often using my own site.

In looking briefly at her personal site, I don’t see lots of evidence of her use of the idea, so I’m guessing that she’s either keeping it privately on her back end, password protected, or on another site altogether like I do for some of my content. Her talk mentions this, so I’m excited to see how she executes on it.

I’m also curious, after having recently remotely attended the Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 conference, how she’s archiving and backing it up for future generations, particularly if she’s keeping large chunks privately.

I’m keeping my eyes open to see if she posts slides from her presentation.

Update December 10, 2017:

Here are links to the slides (Google Docs version).

The video has also been posted today on WordPress.tv:
Brianna Privett: The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse

📺 Jeremy Keith – Building Blocks of the Indie Web

Bookmarked Building Blocks of the Indie Web by Jeremy Keith (View Source London)

In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that's how!

Based solely on what I know from just the title of the talk, this wasn’t quite at all what I was expecting. It was far more interesting and philosophical than I expected, but I suppose that’s the extra magical bit that you get for a something presented by Jeremy.

Approaching the subject from a more architectural standpoint was quite refreshing and a great way to frame the subject for this audience. I found myself wishing he’d had twice the amount of time to expand on his ideas. Often when I’m explaining IndieWeb building blocks, I’ll touch on webmention prior to micropub, but I like the way he turned my usual thinking on it’s head by putting micropub first in his presentation.

Thanks, Jeremy (and Mozilla for the conference). This was great fun! 🎉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvYK-K0jWng

🔖 Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

Bookmarked Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism (Penguin Press)

“A delightful tour through the businesses and industries that turned America into the biggest economy in the world. . . . An excellent book.”—The Economist From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a four-hundred-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things -- the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the twenty-first century. The result is a thrilling alternative history of modern America that reframes events, trends, and people we thought we knew through the prism of the value that, for better or for worse, this nation holds dearest: capitalism. In a winning, accessible style, Bhu Srinivasan boldly takes on four centuries of American enterprise, revealing the unexpected connections that link them. We learn how Andrew Carnegie's early job as a telegraph messenger boy paved the way for his leadership of the steel empire that would make him one of the nation's richest men; how the gunmaker Remington reinvented itself in the postwar years to sell typewriters; how the inner workings of the Mafia mirrored the trend of consolidation and regulation in more traditional business; and how a 1950s infrastructure bill triggered a series of events that produced one of America's most enduring brands: KFC. Reliving the heady early days of Silicon Valley, we are reminded that the start-up is an idea as old as America itself.

Jeff Jarvis made this book sound interesting on the latest episode of This Week in Google. The referenced snippet starts at 1:51:30 into the show.

I suspect it’s similar in flavor to American Amnesia which I’ve been reading and enjoying lately–and need to get around to finishing.

IndieWeb on WordPress by Khürt Williams

Bookmarked IndieWeb on WordPress (Island in the Net)

I have had a web presence since about 2001. Initially, I set up a blog using Radio Userland but quickly abandoned that when Google launched Blogger. I then jumped to Tumblr then back to Blogger. But it wasn’t until 2005 that I finally registered a domain, islandinthenet.com, and started hosting my online presence, my “house”, on WordPress.

One of my favorite IndieWeb quotes thus far, and certainly a sentiment I’ve had many times:

I visited the IndieWeb wiki and went down a rabbit hole of information. As I read, I kept nodding my head, “Yes, we need this. I have to do this.”

Khürt also highlights another good reason for IndieWeb:

Each time Instagram changed their terms of service to something with which I disagreed, I would delete my account. I am on my third Instagram account. I have a lot of image posts with missing content.

Despite some of the problems people have in getting some IndieWeb technology to work the way it could, I’m very heartened by people like Khürt Williams who see the value of it to the extent that they’ll struggle through the UX/UI issues (which are ever improving through the herculean efforts of so many in the community) to make it work for them.

Since Khürt may not be following developments as closely, I’ll briefly mention that the overhead involved for owning your Instagram posts and FourSquare/Swarm posts is coming along with efforts like Aaron Parecki’s OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm. David Shanske has been working diligently on updating some of the workflow for the Post Kinds plugin to work better with checkins and locations for FourSquare/Swarm. For WordPress specific users who want an alternate Instagram option that uses a PESOS syndicaton/ crossposting model, I’ve also found some excellent results with the DsgnWrks Instagram Importer, which provides a bit more WordPress specific data and integrates wonderfully with David Shanske’s Simple Location plugin.

I’m hoping that Michael Bishop’s idea of doing weekly updates on WordPress specific IndieWeb updates will help those who are interested in keeping up with movement in the community without needing to read the chat logs or GitHub updates regularly.

As for the issue of Akismet spam and Webmentions, this is a known problem that Akismet is aware of and hopefully working on. In the meantime, there’s a documented work around that will fix the issue that has (in the practice of several hundred people using it) an exceedingly low rate of allowing spam through.

🔖 Ten Great Ideas about Chance by Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms

Bookmarked Ten Great Ideas about Chance (Princeton University Press)

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gamblers and mathematicians transformed the idea of chance from a mystery into the discipline of probability, setting the stage for a series of breakthroughs that enabled or transformed innumerable fields, from gambling, mathematics, statistics, economics, and finance to physics and computer science. This book tells the story of ten great ideas about chance and the thinkers who developed them, tracing the philosophical implications of these ideas as well as their mathematical impact. Persi Diaconis and Brian Skyrms begin with Gerolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century physician, mathematician, and professional gambler who helped develop the idea that chance actually can be measured. They describe how later thinkers showed how the judgment of chance also can be measured, how frequency is related to chance, and how chance, judgment, and frequency could be unified. Diaconis and Skyrms explain how Thomas Bayes laid the foundation of modern statistics, and they explore David Hume’s problem of induction, Andrey Kolmogorov’s general mathematical framework for probability, the application of computability to chance, and why chance is essential to modern physics. A final idea―that we are psychologically predisposed to error when judging chance―is taken up through the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Complete with a brief probability refresher, Ten Great Ideas about Chance is certain to be a hit with anyone who wants to understand the secrets of probability and how they were discovered.

h/t Michael Mauboussin

Energy and Matter at the Origins of Life by Nick Lane | Santa Fe Institute

Bookmarked Energy and Matter at the Origin of Life by Nick Lane (Santa Fe Institute Community Event (YouTube))

All living things are made of cells, and all cells are powered by electrochemical charges across thin lipid membranes — the ‘proton motive force.’ We know how these electrical charges are generated by protein machines at virtually atomic resolution, but we know very little about how membrane bioenergetics first arose. By tracking back cellular evolution to the last universal common ancestor and beyond, scientist Nick Lane argues that geologically sustained electrochemical charges across semiconducting barriers were central to both energy flow and the formation of new organic matter — growth — at the very origin of life. Dr. Lane is a professor of evolutionary biochemistry in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London. His research focuses on how energy flow constrains evolution from the origin of life to the traits of complex multicellular organisms. He is a co-director of the new Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution (CLOE) at UCL, and author of four celebrated books on life’s origins and evolution. His work has been recognized by the Biochemical Society Award in 2015 and the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize in 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmLLo0WC5xg

h/t Santa Fe Institute

🔖 Adjoint School, ACT 2018 (Applied Category Theory)

Bookmarked Adjoint School, ACT 2018 (Applied Category Theory)

The Workshop on Applied Category Theory 2018 takes place in May 2018. A principal goal of this workshop is to bring early career researchers into the applied category theory community. Towards this goal, we are organising the Adjoint School. The Adjoint School will run from January to April 2018.

There’s still some time left to apply. And if nothing else, this looks like it’s got some interesting resources.

h/t John Carlos Baez

An Edward Tufte-inspired LaTeX class for producing handouts, papers, and books

Bookmarked Tufte-LaTeX (tufte-latex.github.io)

A Tufte-inspired LaTeX class for producing handouts, papers, and books

One of those times that I love to hate: when you’re doing some good writing work, but then get sidetracked when you find an Edward Tufte template in $\LaTeX$ for a book.

Typesetting geekery gets me every time.