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Reads, Listens, Watches
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
👓 Creating An Exit Page on a Website | Brad Enslen
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)Today I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before. A ...
👓 The End of the Blog | Kicks Condor
Inspired by Brad Enslen’s ‘exit page’ concept, I’ve added a ‘the end’ post to this blog. (I also have to say that many of my upcoming changes are inspired by h0p3’s wiki—moving away from just a blog of recent posts, to a kind of modern home page with updates and Indieweb intertwingliness.) ‘The end’ can be seen right now on /page3, if you scroll to the very bottom. Small, needless things—lovely.
As I am semi-regularly importing more content to my site, I wonder about where to put the “end”. What happens when I post something and something gets imported at a timestamp before it? I’ll have to think about how to architect it so as not to need to move it around so much in the future.
👓 Can We Ever Reset the Field? | Smokey Ardisson
Smokey Ardisson (ardisson.org)The rise of the massive corporate-run social networks—silos, where everything was stored inside and nothing left—changed distributed online social relationships. The silos replaced distributed with centralized; all of your social connections were now in one place, making it faster and “easier” to keep up with everyone. Easier in some ways, yes, but now everyone could see every aspect of you, even if you didn’t want them to. Worse, your constant software talk annoyed your bowling-league friends, and your one uncle could not stand the fact you supported the Democratic Party. All of that didn’t happen at once; it took time for these corporate social networks to consume all of your communities, to seize ownership of all of your connections and relationships, transforming something very human into mere pieces of computer data, eventually hollowing out your communities and your humanness in the process. But once it had happened, and once you realized those downsides (and others, such as abuse, Nazis, and anti-democratic propaganda), how could you escape? Was there even anywhere to escape to?
To a large extent, some of the questions and observations in this article are the things that drive me to have my own domain and have my own website. I and many others in the IndieWeb are still working on the infrastructure to support the web we’d like to have instead of the web we’re given. We’re still not there yet, and it may never be the utopia we’re hoping for, but we’ll never get there if we don’t try.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Just like in real life, where your bar trivia team doesn’t really overlap with your work softball team or your church bowling league, all of your online communities gathered in their own places, ones best suited to them, and you didn’t have to act as all facets of yourself simultaneously when trying to only interact with one. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:19PM
our brains have been trained to believe that we want, that we need, a single place where all of “our people” can gather, where it is “easy” to keep up with all of them: a massive network service, just without all the “bad stuff” of the existing ones. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:21PM
You find them in a place that you curate yourself, not one “curated” for you by a massive corporate social network intent on forcing you to be every part of yourself to everyone, all at once. You should control how, when, and where to interact with your people. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:23PM
web we lost ❧
https://indieweb.org/lost_infrastructure
August 21, 2018 at 01:24PM
we can’t just recreate the same thing we’re trying to escape, and we can’t expect the solution to be precisely as easy on us as the problem was. ❧
August 21, 2018 at 01:25PM
👓 I am completely baffled why some people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog | Bruce Godin
It is completely baffling to me that a lot of people seem to be choosing Mastodon over Micro.blog as an alternative to Twitter lately. At least among tech geeks on Twitter anyway. I admittedly do not know a lot about Mastodon but it seems confusing AF to set up by all accounts and may be just yet an...
Micro.blog can be so many things to so many different people. We need to help them clarify to others exactly what it is that the service is doing and how to help people begin to use it. It’s not simply just a Twitter replacement as some might pitch it.
We should consider: How would Marshall McLuhan pitch it?
👓 Diversity on Micro.Blog | Kicks Condor
One question I wonder: while I think the self-made entrepreneur has got to be synonymous with imperialist America—couldn’t the independent autodidact, operating apart from corporate interests, be a modern type of vanguard for the dispossessed? I feel like the Instagram influencer is more a direct descendant of The American Dream; the bespoke blog a piece of the underground press—particularly in 2018, when they have become ancient machinery.
📺 20 crazy bikes that you have to see to believe | YouTube
These crazy bikes are built all kinds of strange ways. Here is our list of 20 crazy bikes you have to see to believe.
Featured Crazy Bikes ⭐
#20 The Ice Wheeled Bike http://www.colinfurze.com/ https://www.youtube.com/user/colinfurze/featured
#19 The Zenga Tall Tall Bike
#18 The STOOPIDTALLER created by Richie Trimble
#17 the Longest Bicycle in the world created by Mijil Van Mares Werkploeg
#16 the Monster Bike created by Wouter van den Bosch
#15 The Forkless Cruiser Phantom Bike by Olli Erkkila
#14 the Backwards Tandem Bike created by Huang Hong-sen
#13 Sideways bike by Michael Killian
#12 The Backwards bike by Destin Sandlin
#11 the Running shoe bike from Continental Tire
#10 Nisttarkya the 1st Indian Electric concept bike Developed By Santhosh
#9 The Rowbike Four Wheeled Rowing Cycle https://www.rowbike.com/product-page/rowbike-4-0
#8 The Bendable Bike created by Adam Frucci
#7 The B.O.N.D Bike by Yannick Read
#6 The Lopifit bike https://www.lopifitus.com/
#5 The Halbrad Half Bike designer Felix Kruschardt http://halbrad.de/
#4 The Bionic Runner Bike https://amzn.to/2JnOxEZ
#3 The Lunartic a hubless urban bike - designed by Luke Douglas
#2 Strandbeest The Spider Bike Created by Theo Jansen http://carv.co/
#1 the Cyclotron Bike https://www.cyclotronbike.com/
👓 Getting started | Blogmesh
Blogmesh is in the early stages of development, but we do have a version that sort-of works and can be used for demos and testing. Feeling adventurous? Comfortable with setting up WordPress and installing plugins? Here’s what you’ll need
👓 A quick introduction to Blogmesh | Blogmesh
Blogmesh aims to make blogging more social, and in doing so create an alternative for existing social networks. The main idea is to connect existing blogs in a way that resembles other social networks, like Twitter. Simply follow your friends and see a timeline of their updates.
Because blogs are usually self-hosted, this means Blogmesh has the potential to become a decentralized network that belongs to its users, and where every user owns their own content.
Blogmesh uses existing, well-established standards like RSS. This means that many existing sites are already Blogmesh-ready.
I ran across a reference to Blogmesh this morning via the Twitter hashtag for #IndieWeb. (hat tip to @Bjorn_W)
Hi @simonw remember blogmesh? my friend @roytanck behind blogmesh made this https://t.co/wMPe5tQpVC to show how to re-blog. This proof-of-concept uses WordPress. It’s super easy to re-create the social aspects of walled garden social media with RSS & #WordPress #Openweb #indieweb
— Bjorn W (@Bjorn_W) August 21, 2018
Blogmesh looks like an intriguing concept, and on its face it sounds like it’s in a tangential space to Alex Kirk‘s Friends plugin, which allows private connections to friends via WordPress, or even to PressForward, which is a very full featured RSS plugin for WordPress. It almost sounds like a version of Jack Jamieson‘s original Yarns reader which integrates a feed reader with micropub capabilities into one’s WordPress site, but perhaps may not be as powerful as Jamieson’s pending rewrite of Yarns as a Microsub server.
Clicking a post from a friend will take you to their blog, where you can read the full post and leave comments.
While this may be an interesting concept, it isn’t adding much to the broader IndieWeb stack of technologies which are already in place for WordPress. I don’t imagine greater power with this compared to the Micropub spec which might allow me to write a reply within the reader portion of the plugin, publish it to my website and then send a Webmention to the other site the way the coming wave of Microsub servers and reader interfaces will allow. 1
While Blogmesh seems like a relatively solid solution and may fix a few UI issues for some, it doesn’t seem like as robust or decentralized a solution as Microsub, which I think has more promise and which almost any website (WordPress or otherwise) could support. This being said, I also suspect that Roy likely has a much broader vision for the plugin’s functionality that hasn’t yet been stated. It always impresses me the ingenuity and work that people are putting in to fix the problems that exist with current social media and this case is certainly squarely in that category.
I will say that it appears that Roy’s user interface is very solid–I wish there were more WordPress IndieWeb contributors with these kinds of design chops.
The repost functionality which Bjorn W highlights is very cool looking and quite intuitive. It has a simple, but intuitive user interface. However, it isn’t very different from David Shanske‘s solution for reposting content to one’s website using the Post Kinds Plugin. In this case, Post Kinds is even more powerful because it also includes a lot more social post types and can also be easily dovetailed with Webmention and Micropub for broader decentralized social interaction.
I’ve bookmarked the Github repository for Blogmesh and look forward to seeing what develops. I’ve also helped to stub some of Blogmesh on the IndieWeb wiki. I’d love to hear what others think of it if they try it out. I’m blocking some time for the weekend to add it to a WordPress instance I’ve already spun up to test it out.
References
1.
Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 12, 2018. Accessed August 22, 2018.
🎧 Red Fife | Eat This Podcast
For more than 40 years, one wheat variety dominated the Canadian prairies. Red Fife — the red-seeded wheat grown by David Fife, a Scottish immigrant — gave the highest yields of the best quality. It almost didn’t happen, if you believe the stories. And then, having set the standard, Red Fife was eclipsed by its own offspring and slowly slid into oblivion. Until, in 1986, Sharon Rempel set about rescuing it.
Thanks to Kara Gray and Richard Gray for their help.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:33 — 5.3MB)
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🎧 Nikolay Ivanovich Vavilov | Eat This Podcast
This short episode fails to do justice to the man who, more than anyone, first grasped the importance of knowing where and how wheat arose. It does, however, explain why Vavilov wanted to collect the building material of future food security, for wheat and many other crops. In more than 60 countries, Vavilov and his colleagues gathered diversity from farmers’ fields; they died protecting their collections.
Thanks to Luigi Guarino for the photograph of Vavilov’s desk with his route across Ethiopia, and much else besides.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:18 — 5.9MB)
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One day I’d like to get a solid biography of Vavilov’s to read, but until then, this short, but excellent story will have to suffice.
🎧 Bake like an Egyptian | Eat This Podcast
Kamut® is a modern wheat — registered and trademarked in 1990 — with an ancient lineage. The word is ancient Egyptian, and the hieroglyphics may literally mean “Soul of the Earth”. More prosaically, “bread”. The story of its discovery and growing popularity says a lot about our hunger for stories. It is also quite capable of leading hard-nosed molecular biologists astray.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:13 — 5.1MB)
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🎧 Hulled wheats | Eat This Podcast
Ancient grains used to be rare and hard to find not because they contained some magical secret for a long and fulfilled life, but because they take a lot more work than modern wheats. Instead of the wheat berry popping free after a gentle rubbing, they need to be bashed and pounded. Now, of course, we have machines to do that kind of thing, but our ancestors were mostly only too happy to abandon hulled wheats, unless they had no option.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 6:19 — 5.2MB)
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👓 Keep Track of Your Conversations in One Place | WordPress
Jan Cavan Boulas (The WordPress.com Blog)You can now stay on top of the discussions you care about, right from your Reader.
👓 Trump’s Strange Tweet About Joseph McCarthy | Politico
People who have actually studied the disgraced Wisconsin senator describe a man who bears similarities to some of the president’s most notable attributes.
I had previous read about Trump’s reliance on Roy Cohn, but somehow had never drawn the historical line from Cohn to Joseph McCarthy. This piece not only draws the parallel very clearly, but indicates a lot of similarities between Trump and McCarthy.
Sadly, we’re all being doomed to repeat history here.