Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
I wrote in the morning again with one or two small snippets later in the evening. I focused mostly on the topic of rel=”me” for profile equivalence and identity-consolidation with about 1,882 words.

I added a couple of new chapter ideas that will need to be fleshed out as well–I’m surprised I’m still coming up with outline pieces.

Today: 3,115 words
Total: 6,532 words

At the end of NaNoWriMo day 1, I’ve added 2,859 words, most of them written in the early morning. A chunk is in the introduction, but the biggest part includes a relatively solid 1,800 words on the topic of microformats.

The power company decided to turn the power off at the home office today, so I had to migrate over to the local Starbucks for an impromptu write-in.

It’s probably going to take me a few weeks of heaving editing when the whole thing is said and done, but overall it felt like a terrifically productive first day. I am managing to get a bit of light editing done as I go through, particularly to try and make sure I don’t miss anything too significant. I’m going to need to spend a few days on screen captures when this is all said and done.

The best part is that even with a short section of code, the whole \LaTeX file compiled on the second run! And this was without putting any real effort into it as I was writing.

Hopefully in the coming week, based on output versus the scope of the outline I’ve set, I’ll have a better idea about how much of the book I’ll be able to finish within the month. I’m presently a tad concerned that it’ll take a few additional weeks to properly cover all the introductory topics I want to touch upon.

I keep having to remind myself of the likely technical level of the audience, but I feel like I’m keeping it simple enough to be clear while hopefully encouraging people to want to learn more about eventually learning to write some code themselves when they’re done reading and working through the book.

I’m happy that it feels like it’s almost writing itself, but the couple of dozen sites I’ve built in the past few years and a relatively solid outline are helping a lot.

Today: 2,859 words
Total: 3,417 words

📖 Read pages 90-171 of Origin by Dan Brown

📖 Read pages 90-171 of Origin: A Novel by Dan Brown

I was just shy of that first “punch” when I quit reading the other day. It came  and we’re now off to the races. This somehow feels a bit “fluffier” than the typical Langdon novel though. It feels like there’s a lot of discussion for those who don’t understand the religion, science, and technology, but at least he does it in a way that doesn’t feel too on-the-nose. I still feel a bit disconnected from the characters here compared to his prior efforts.

Today I was reminded while thinking about Disqus that I had an Intense Debate account from April 23, 2009. Apparently it’s still functioning all these years later–possibly as a result of their purchase by Automattic in 2008. Not that there was much there, but I took a few minutes and exported out all my data and now own it here on my site.

One of the interesting parts was that it featured a comment about Twitter pulling the rug out from underneath developers–an event that foreshadowed even more of the same in the coming years as well as a conversation about the gamification of follower accounts, something which has gotten us into a sad state of affairs today nearly a decade later. Apparently while they tried to cap follower accounts, their early efforts just didn’t go far enough to help the civility of the platform.

Testing out some integrations for WordPress and Mastodon

There are a bunch of ways for using WordPress with Mastodon, so tonight I thought I’d start experimenting with some.

Straightforward syndication/POSSE plugins (requires an account on a Mastodon instance):

More advanced plugins (shouldn’t require an account as they make your site behave like a standalone instance of Mastodon):

  • Ryan Barrett‘s Fed.Brid.gy – allows one to let their own website federate directly into Mastodon and other networks in various ways. I’ve tinkered with it a bit but haven’t gotten all the pieces working yet. This was just recently released, but Ryan has gotten some interesting pieces working well based on tests I’ve seen.
  • Matthias Pfefferle‘s OStatus – supports a variety of post kinds on Mastodon; it includes a handful of sub-plugins (Webfinger, Salmon, Activity Streams, etc.) to get everything working. I hope to get around to testing this out shortly too, but has many more moving parts.

Do you know of any other interesting methods for using these two systems in combination with each other in a straightforward manner? I’d love to hear about them.