Following last week’s post about WordPress security, in this post, I’ll start with advice I see commonly in other places that I don’t see much point in doing. Most of this advice is nearly harmless to slightly beneficial if it’s done. But the reason I don’t recommend it is that its benefit...
Reads
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
👓 Basic Things You Need to Know to Become a WordPress Developer | Caldera Forms
There are a lot of reasons to love WordPress, but one of the reasons I keep WordPressing is the supportive community. While I have no formal training as a web developer, I don’t like describing myself as “self-taught.” I didn’t figure this out on my own, I was taught by a supportive communit...
👓 For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain | Smithsonian Magazine
A beloved Robert Frost poem is among the many creations that are (finally) losing their protections in 2019
👓 The perils of mixing open source and money | DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson (dhh.dk)Fundraising for open source has become trivial through venues like Kickstarter, so it's natural more projects are asking for money. "Imagine all the good I could do if I was able to work on this full time for the benefit of the community". Yes, let's imagine indeed.
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You’re solving the problems for you and your mates, likely in the simplest way you could, so you can get back to whatever you originally intended to do before starting to shave the yak.
But once there is money involved, work will expand to fill the amount raised (to paraphrase Parkinson’s law).
External, expected rewards diminish the intrinsic motivation of the fundraising open-source contributor. It risks transporting a community of peers into a transactional terminal. And that buyer-seller frame detracts from the magic that is peer-collaborators.
Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that?
👓 National Poetry Writing Month #NaPoWriMo: 3 Days In! | Silence and Voice
Jeffrey Keefer (Silence and Voice)I have been successful with writing poems for the first two days of National Poetry Writing Month, the annual celebration of poetry writing that coincides with National Poetry Month each April. Since I have been writing poetry as one of my 2018 goals (the goal is specifically to publish a poem this year), I thought this was a wonderful opportunity to generate some first drafts of poems in a communal setting as others who are engaging in the same process are sharing their progress via the #NaPoWriMo tag .
I’ve been considering that I ought to write more poetry. Perhaps NaPoWriMo would be the way to go?
👓 How to Delete Facebook | The New York Times
Lost faith in Facebook after data leakages, breaches and too much noise? Here’s a guide to breaking up with the social network and its photo-sharing app for good.
You know things are bad for Facebook when the New York Times is publishing tutorial how-to’s about how to delete Facebook.
👓 Facebook’s Privacy Message Undermined by the Times—Again | WIRED
Facebook has spent much of 2018 apologizing to people. A recent New York Times investigation calls all those apologies into question.
Facebook has said “I’m sorry” and leaked data so many times now that I’m honestly not able to keep up with all the major instances. I keep having to look at date/timestamps in articles to see if it’s a new instance or they’re talking about one of the dozens of prior instances. Facebook really needs to redefine it’s business if they’re going to survive.
👓 Become A Facebook-Free Business | Signal v. Noise
DHH (Signal v. Noise)If Facebook’s endless privacy scandals have shown one thing, it’s that the company has far too much data on its users, and that they can’t be trusted not to sell, barter, or abuse that data whether for profit, growth, or negligence.
While individuals have long been rallying around #DeleteFacebook, there hasn’t been a comparable campaign for business. Enter: The Facebook-Free Business.
Just like when companies began putting Facebook and Twitter bugs on their websites and in advertising, you know it’s getting serious in the other direction when businesses are talking about leaving Facebook.
I wish BandCamp a lot of luck in also leaving Medium to get rid of that last Facebook like bug.
There is a lot to like about companies behaving ethically like this. I’m much more likely to trust a company (especially those talking about my data and privacy) if they can behave this way.
👓 Facebook Stock (FB) Plunges After DC Sues Over Privacy Breach | Bloomberg
Facebook Inc. tumbled on Wednesday, with shares extending their decline throughout the session after the social-media company was sued by the District of Columbia over a privacy breach.
👓 We Should Replace Facebook With Personal Websites | Motherboard
Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.
There’s a lot of talk about leaving Facebook again in the last day or two, but very little on where to go other than a few people talking about Twitter or other toxic social media that will just end up starting the same cycle of pain and frustration again. This is at least a start, but it could lean more towards a full IndieWeb approach.
👓 An Interview with John O’Brien | Dalkey Archive Press
The following interview was conducted in-house at two different times, in 2000 and 2004. The purpose of the interview was to provide a very readable documentation of Dalkey Archive Press’s mission and history. It was amended in 2004, and likely will be amended again in the future, to reflect changes in the culture that have an impact on the work we do.
After reading this interview, how could one not want to devote their life to supporting such an institution?
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subversive ❧
maybe also the word uncomfortable?
December 19, 2018 at 05:10PM
uncomfortable ❧
ha!
December 19, 2018 at 05:11PM
There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among-and should be evaluated against-a whole history of other novels. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:14PM
As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed. ❧
In some sense, there is a link between these areas of art/writing and funding and what we see in social media influencers who in some sense are trying to create an “art” for which they get paid. Sadly, most are not making art and worse, most of them are being paid even worse.
December 19, 2018 at 05:18PM
While many people say that such and such a book changed their lives, you can be sure that they could not tell you who published the book. The identification is with the book and its author, not the publisher. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:25PM
My models were New Directions Press and Grove Press. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:32PM
Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:35PM
Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don’t they teach these literatures, they don’t read them. ❧
We certainly could use an Anthony Bourdain of literature to help peel back the curtain on other countries and cultures.
December 19, 2018 at 05:38PM
I think only the philistine mind thinks that art needs a social or moral justification. ❧
Quote of the year.
December 19, 2018 at 05:46PM
A prerequisite for war, as well as bigotry, is that one sees a people or a country as a stereotype, as something sub-human or non-human; this is why politicians spend so much time trying to create stereotypical images for those countries they want to go to war with. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:48PM
Small publishers are oftentimes awful at getting their books out to people, even though of course the marketplace determines many of the limitations. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 05:51PM
👓 the register | Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka
Danny O'Brien (oblomovka.com)It’s about two in the morning on Thursday, I’m scrabbling around for things to put into NTK, and I get an e-mail from the Register’s Andrew Orlowski. He sounds deliriously happy. He’s uncovered an apparently hidden link to a wiki set up for some s00p3r s33krit confab that Tim O’Reilly’s organising. The descriptions and notes fit completely into Orlowski’s view of particular segment of the West Coast tech scene. Mainly, that it looks like some weird Californian cult.
This post has some interesting thoughts about the differences between public, private, and secret and how they’re being carried out online.
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The problem here is one (ironically) of register. In the real world, we have conversations in public, in private, and in secret. All three are quite separate. The public is what we say to a crowd; the private is what we chatter amongst ourselves, when free from the demands of the crowd; and the secret is what we keep from everyone but our confidant. Secrecy implies intrigue, implies you have something to hide. Being private doesn’t. You can have a private gathering, but it isn’t necessarily a secret. All these conversations have different implications, different tones. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:53PM
On the net, you have public, or you have secrets. The private intermediate sphere, with its careful buffering. is shattered. E-mails are forwarded verbatim. IRC transcripts, with throwaway comments, are preserved forever. You talk to your friends online, you talk to the world. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:54PM
hat tip: Kevin Marks in IWC chat
👓 The web finally feels new again. | i.webthings
The web was amazing before Web 2.0 and the advent of so-called social networks. Many people had their own sites and blogs from which they shared ideas and interacted with others in the community at large. It seemed to me like meeting others in their own homes back then and there was a widespread enthusiasm for blogging and personal expression. Then came the big social networks. With time, many personal sites and blogs disappeared from the web as people flocked to the big silos where their content became a heavily monitized commodity. To me, the web had lost much of its soul as people gathered in just a few, huge noise chambers.
👓 The Web Finally Feels New Again | KicksCondor
(Joe’s full article is here.)
Yes, here we are again—I think what you’re saying is that even a single-line annotation of a link, even just a few words of human curation do wonders when you’re out discovering the world. (Perhaps even more than book recommendations—where we know that at leas...
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it made me feel like we were trying to send some kind of concentrated transmission to the author—linking as a greeting, links as an invitation. ❧
I love the idea of this.
December 19, 2018 at 04:14PM
I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. ❧
December 19, 2018 at 04:17PM
I’m really not sure if linking, in general, has changed over the years. I’ve been doing it the same since day one. But that’s just me. ❧
Only in the last hour I’ve had a thought about a subtle change to one of the ways I link. It’s not a drastic thing, but it is a subtle change to common practices. Also as I think about it, it removes some of the obviousness of links on social platforms like Twitter that add the ugly @ to a username in addition to other visual changes when one mentions someone else.
December 19, 2018 at 04:22PM
👓 How to improve Twitter in 2018 | Scripting News
Eliminate the char limit, help news orgs evolve, make an irreversible deal with developers.