In August 2012, I wrote a quick script to stream front-page Hackernews stories to an IRC channel on Freenode (##hackernews in case you're interested) so that I could quickly glance at popular stories there instead of needing to load Hackernews. Since IRC is my feed reader, I've always tried to pipe as much there as possible.
Very smart and reminiscent of some of the stuff Drew McLellan and Jeremy Keith were doing almost a decade before. There is a lot more power in microformats that most web developers give them credit for. Aaron has a great example and use-case.
My favorite part here:
So in 2.5 years of parsing the HTML, I never had any problems. In 2 days of parsing the JSON API, I hit a glitch where all the stories were empty.
Since more people and programs see the HTML than use the API, the HTML ends up being more reliable.
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
This reminds me I should write up something about using Webmention in conjunction with OER.
Patzer is such a great word. I’ve only heard it in context in the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher.
Most of the others I’ve heard as well, though many are rarer. Throttlebottom is a solid one that I wasn’t aware of before, but seems very fitting. I’m half-tempted to change the tagline of my website to Philologaster now.
I’ve been teaching for more than 27 years, but it is just in the last five that I stopped grading traditionally, and so I am what some may call an “un-grader”. But the thing is, if you work in an institution where your job is to assign final grades at the end of the semester like I do, then you are still a grader.
Purchasing power parity is a theory that says prices of goods between countries should equalize over time. Formula, how to use, and examples.
After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency’s pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today’s PPP. ❧
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:29PM
Why We Don’t Live in a PPP World
PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same.
That’s not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.
A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can’t be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.
A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can’t compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers.
A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports. ❧
Here we use PPP-adjusted data on real incomes from the Global Consumption and Income Project to build an interactive visualisation demonstrating the changing shape of global income since 1980.
The internet would be a really interesting place if every article that was shared automatically had a “via link.” Ok, so the internet is already interesting. But what makes the internet such a great place is its connectivity. Everything is linked together. We can easily share a link to an article. So many links all … The discovery metadata field Read More »
I’ve been fascinated with this idea of vias, hat tips, and linking credit (a la the defunct Curator’s Code) just like Jeremy Cherfas. I have a custom field in my site for collecting these details sometimes, but I should get around to automating it and showing it on my pages rather than doing it manually.
Links like these seem like throwaways, but they can have a huge amount of value in aggregate. As an example, if I provided the source of how I found this article, then it’s likely that my friend Matt would then be able to see a potential treasure trove of information about the exact same topic which he’s sure to have a lot of interest in as well.
One of the things I love about webmentions is that these sorts of links to give credit could be used to create bi-directional links between sites as well. I’m half-tempted to start using custom experimental microformats classes on these links so that when the idea takes off that people could potentially display them in their comments sections as such instead of just vanilla “mentions”. This could be useful for sites that serve as inspiration in much the same way that journalistic outlets might display reads (versus bookmarks, likes, or reposts) or podcasts could display listens. Just imagine the power that displaying webmentions on wikis could have for their editors to later update pages or readers might have to delve into further resources that mention and link to those pages, especially when the content on those linked pages extends the ideas?
Tim Berners-Lee’s original proposal for hypertext was rejected because it didn’t bake bi-directional links into the web (c.f. Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web at 13:39 into the video). Webmentions seems to be a simple way of ensconcing them after-the-fact, but in a way that makes them more resilient as well as update-able and even delete-able by either side.
Of course now I come to wonder just how it was that Jeremy Cherfas finds such a deep link on Matt’s site from over a year ago? 😉
When I was first developing Micro.blog, I made a choice that quick replies in the timeline should be stored separately from regular blog posts. I thought that most people wouldn’t want replies mixed in with their blog posts at their own domain name. I also liked that replies were simple, usually s...
Firefighters are battling flames Wednesday at a West Los Angeles high-rise building.
This article is the first time I’ve seen a Waze-based map embedded into a web page. It’s a particularly interesting use case since the fire described is along one of the busiest thoroughfares in West Los Angeles during rush hour, so having real-time traffic surrounding it can be quite useful to telling the real-time story from a local news perspective.
I can imagine that these would also be helpful on event posts or sites like Meetup.com where people are interested in traffic patterns and/or parking surrounding a particular destination.
This year started with a small project I really like: Feeds for Journalists, by Dave Winer. The idea is that RSS is still a valid technology to get an effective and unbiased flow of news.
As he puts it, after reading a tweet by Mathew Ingram:
If you’re a journalist a...
What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise.
I read this a year ago when it first came out and appreciated it then. Fun to revisit it with more experienced eyes.
Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)