It’s been a tough week and a half, but I’m glad to report that the Christmas tree is up and smells lovely. I do so love a good Frasier fir.
Notes
Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
Is there an available Hypothes.is logo/icon in .svg format? Something along the lines of this .png? I’d like to have an “official” one to make it embedable in an application.
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
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.
📖 On page 67 of 320 of Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world by Lynne Kelly
📖 14% done with The History of the English Language, 2nd Edition 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.
Out for a walk and saw these massive turkeys just roaming around the neighborhood with impunity.
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’!!!
📖 On page 24 of 320 of Memory Craft: Improve your memory using the most powerful methods from around the world by Lynne Kelly
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.
📖 28% done reading The Unteachables by Gordon Korman
Another school-centric story. And again with alternating chapters from the different perspectives of the characters. It’s certainly a good way to breed empathy for the characters and also not a bad way to get the readers to identify with one or more of them along the way.
