Reads

Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Read a post by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (Kicks Condor)
‘Accept that the Web ultimately overwhelms all attempts to order it, as for now it seems we must, and you accept that the delicate thread of a personal point of view is often as not your most reliable guide through the chaos. The brittle logic of the hierarchical index has its indispensable uses, of course, as has the crude brute strength of the search engine. But when their limits are reached (and they always are), only the discriminating force of sensibility will do - and the more richly expressed the sensibility, the better.’ — “Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man” by Julian Dibbell (2000)
Read Taming a River Theme by Tom Woodward (bionicteaching.com)
Origin Story
Matt worked long hours making an incredible theme for Footprints on the James course.1 It’s in WordPress but a large portion of the site ended up being built by hand as complexity increased and time dwindled.2 That means it’s hard-coded HTML/PHP.
Now because the site was so great, w...
Read Digging up the top science blogs of yesteryear by Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)
This bafflingly huge waste of my time (and yours) was prompted by two seemingly unlinked events. (Of course, no two events are truly unlinked, but let that ride.) First, there was a bafflingly stupid "article" from Mother Jones: Let’s Remember Some Blogs – Mother Jones. Why stupid? Because as fa...
Read Memory palaces - I keep going left (Art of Memory Forum)
I am new to this. I’ve learned (mostly) major system images for 00-99, and I feel that I am ready to start stashing real, useful memories in palaces. I’ve been avoiding palaces up until because I wasn’t ready to start using them for real, and I didn’t want to clutter my real-world palaces with practice garbage. But I am a bit confused by the routes. So far, I’ve tried to follow routes in my head without actually placing any images yet. I just wanted to see how it feels to walk around a familia...
Read a post by Jacky AlcinéJacky Alciné (Jacky Alciné)
Finally began working on the new instance of Fortress. The goal is to have the main site attempt to register and acknowledge accounts for sites that expose a h-card. It’ll just show the authorization endpoint found when attempting to resolve the site as well as a normalized [h-card] for the URL in question. Ideally, I should have that much ready for testing for the IndieWeb before this week’s newsletter is out!
Read The blogging infrastructure by Jared Pereira (awarm.space)

The next prompt for Blogging Futures is on Infrastructure.

I had a conversation with Tom yesterday, and one of the things we talked about was why more people don't have websites. The tooling around it is better than ever, so why aren't more people getting their own internet spaces?

Read Infrastructure for Infrastructures by CJ Eller (blog.cjeller.site)

Part of the Blogging Futures course. Feel free to contribute to the conversation!

Infrastructure makes me think of not specific application but of broad application. How can we foster a multiplicity of blogging infrastructures?

Because there seems to be an understanding in this conversation that no single solution will solve our problems. Constant experimentation of writing possibilities is needed. For that to happen, we need places where that kind of activity can happen – where people can join in blogchains, where people can engage in anonymous publication as mentioned in the previous post, where people can get lost in labyrinths, where people can be a part of a new kind of republic of letters.

Read An Infrastructure of Paper by anonymous (telegra.ph)

What if writing on the web could be as easy as writing on paper?

That is the kind of infrastructure I want on the web - a world where I could write anywhere, even if I didn't have a blog or a website or anything like that. I mean, do you need an account to write on a piece of paper?

I guess Telegraph is a good example of that in action. But why make anonymous publishing platforms second-class citizens? What if they were also integrated into blogs and other platforms? Don't know what that would look like but it would be like little slips of paper inside books, y'know, like newspaper clippings and grocery lists inside used books.

More freedom of where I can write and how I can write.

👓 How you can contribute to WordPress (yes, YOU!) | Jeff Paul

Read How you can contribute to WordPress (yes, YOU!) by Jeff Paul (jeffpaul.com)
Me: Do you regularly use WordPress?
You: Yes, I love it, it’s fantastic!
Me: Have you ever thought about helping contribute to WordPress?
You: No, I am not a developer.
Me: Well, good news, you do not have to be!
You: Ok, tell me more…
Whether you have considered it...

👓 The Truth About Pregnancy Over 40 | NYT Parenting

Read The Truth About Pregnancy Over 40 (NYT Parenting)
More than 100,000 Americans give birth in their 40s each year, but what does that mean for the health of their pregnancies and their babies?

How this phenomenon translates into absolute, rather than relative, risk, however, is a bit thorny. A large study published in 2018, for instance, found that among women who had children between 34 and 47, 2.2 percent developed breast cancer within three to seven years after they gave birth (among women who never had children, the rate was 1.9 percent). Over all, according to the American Cancer Society, women between 40 and 49 have a 1.5 percent chance of developing breast cancer.

The rates here are so low as to be nearly negligible on their face. Why bother reporting it?
November 14, 2019 at 06:49PM

Originally bookmarked this article on November 12, 2019 at 06:53PM