Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes

I like the idea of the microformats web extension. I suspect it could do with an update to microformats v2 though. The idea of being able to parse a page and add contact information or events directly to my address books or calendars is pretty awesome.

I could also appreciate it parsing a page and allowing me to use an h-card to quickly create a follow post and automatically add a page’s feed to my feed reader.

My theme doesn’t provide any differentiation when I’m logged in between public posts and private posts so I’ve gone into the CSS and added the following snippet which then adds a simple light gray background to my private posts. It’s a simple visual way to indicate which posts are private or not.

.status-private{
        background-color: #​e7e7e7;
}

Yesterday started off with a small family emergency. As a result Thanksgiving was postponed until today. I’ve been hard at work cleaning up, making an apple pie, a turkey, and green beans. Hopefully dinner this evening will be more memorable than last.

In a turn of good luck, the rain also seems to have finally passed and the sun has emerged!

📗 Started reading The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth Lerer

cover of The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer

I’d gone through the first edition several years back and thought I’d do a quick review, particularly in relation to some history of memory I’ve been working on and thinking about.

Throughout the day and commuting in the car to class, I’ve listened through lecture 4.

📖 14% done with The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition by Seth Lerer

cover of The History of the English Language by Seth Lerer

Listened to Lecture 5 and the first several minutes of 6 today while cooking in the kitchen.

There’s some interesting history about the ideas of law, ligatures, and links. He also has an interesting history of the words ‘apocalypse’ and ‘revelation’ which ultimately mean the same thing. Apocalypse essentially means to ‘take away the cover’. He doesn’t go into it, but this word also has historical relation to the removal of the curtain within the holy of holies, or in the New Testament the rending of said curtain at the death of Jesus. Subsequently there has obviously been a lot of semantic shift to create our modern day meaning of apocalypse.

I’ve been going through a number of broken links on my website and slowly, but surely, bringing many of them back to life. Thanks Broken Link Checker! Apparently there were 429 broken links, but I’m able to quickly fix many of them because as I made my posts, I backed up the original links automatically using Post Archival in the Internet Archive. (Somehow this plugin has violated one of WordPress’ guidelines and can’t be downloaded, though I haven’t seen any details about why or been notified about it.)

I’ve only come across one or two which archive.org didn’t crawl or didn’t have. Many of the broken links I’m able to link directly to archive copies on the same day I made them and my archive snapshots were the only ones ever made.

A chat about algorithms and colorectal cancer

Friend: I spent all day researching marketing for colorectal cancer for work. Now my social media feeds are overflowing with healthcare ads for cancer screenings and treatment.
Me: Social silo algorithms will get you every time with surveillance capitalism.
Friend: …
Me: …
Friend: THEY ARE LITERALLY ‘UP MY BUTT’!!!

I slept my way through most of IndieWebCamp Berlin2 this weekend (mostly due to the time zone differential), but in the spirit of the event, I did want to work on a few small hack projects.

I started some research and work into creating a plugin to effectuate making “vias” and “hat-tips” easier to create on my site since I often use them to credit some of my sources. I was a bit surprised not to see any prior art in the WordPress repository. Sadly, there’s nothing concrete to show off just yet. I think I’ve got a clear concept of how I want it to look and what will go into the first simple iteration. It will be my first “real” WordPress plugin, so there’s some interesting learning curve along the way. 

On a more concrete front, I made a handful of CSS tweaks and fixes to the site, and particularly to some of my annotation/highlighting related posts, that I’ve been meaning to take care of for a while.  Now on read posts where I’ve aggregated some annotations/highlights, the highlighted portions should appear in yellow to better differentiate them in portions of text and represent them as highlights. This prevents me from creating a read post for the content and one or dozens of related, but completely separate, follow-up annotation posts. Now they’re combined, and I think they provide a bit more contextualization for the original, but still include the timestamps for the annotations. I’m sure there’s some more I can do to tweak these, but I like the result a bit better than before. Today’s post about a research paper I read on food is a good example of to highlight (pun intended) some of the changes. Ideas for further improvements are most welcome.

I also slightly tweaked and then further experimented with some of the CSS for my reply contexts. I’ve been considering reformatting them a tad to try to highlight the fact that the content within them is context for my responses. In some sense I’m looking at making the context look more card-like or perhaps oEmbed-esque. I still haven’t gotten it the way I’d ultimately like it, but perhaps one day soon? I played around with changing the size of the context with respect to my content as well as adding some outlines and shadows to make the context look more like cards, but I haven’t gotten things just right. Perhaps some more research looking at others’ sites will help? Which sites do you think do reply contexts incredibly well?

I’m glad there’s a holiday coming up so I can spend a bit of time catching up on some of the sessionsand  notes and hopefully see some of the demos from the camp.