GitHub | Chris Aldrich

Read Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back (The GitHub Blog)

Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.

Good to seem them taking a positive stance on this.

Replied to @-mention when posting to Twitter · Issue #527 · snarfed/bridgy by

Stephen Paul Weber (GitHub)

Twitter interprets microsyntax whenever you post. There's no way around it. So if you have a post whose plain text says "Blah blah with @singpolyma" there is no way to tell twitter that "@singpolyma" is not the user named "singpolyma" and it will notify said user no matter what. In a silo this works, but when bridging to a federated environment it can cause issues (and especially annoyance of Twitter users).

One way to deal with this is to have my local implementation detect any such cases and not bridge them to Twitter, but this is not ideal. What should brid.gy do if it is asked to post something with the text @singpolyma in it? Here is my proposal:

For the source HTML @singpolyma I would suggest changing it to "@ singpolyma", however I could see an argument to also leave it as-is, since some users might be writing plain-text microsyntax and expecting it is always going to Twitter? Hmm.

For the source HTML @<a href="https://twitter.com/singpolyma">anything</a> put "@singpolyma" into the tweet.

For the source HTML @<a href="https://singpolyma.net">anything</a> put "@ singpolyma.net" into the tweet.

Thoughts?

Not necessarily a permanent solution for all platforms and microsyntaxes depending on the number of syndicated copies, but potentially a clever stopgap for those who may need it.

One can use a zero-width space (using something like in their HTML) between the @ and a twitter user name on the original post and the syndicated copy will not have the traditional @mention link or notification functionality.

Here’s an example

Original post: https://boffosocko.com/2020/09/17/55777062/
Syndicated copy: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1306748549233815553

This reply can also serve as a test for the functionality within Github where I’ll “tag” both @kylewm and @snarfed, but if it works, Ryan shouldn’t be auto-linked or notified.

I just automated my creating stars on Github to syndicate that intent and data (by PESOS) back to my website as bookmarks. Here’s an example on my site.

This is done using a variation of Using IFTTT to syndicate (PESOS) content from social services to WordPress using Micropub.

As part of this I used the feed pattern https://github.com/{{username}}.atom to input a feed which I’m filtering with my username and the word “starred” to pull out the correct items to syndicate.

I couldn’t find a permalink URL for the star itself, so I’m adding a syndication link that points to the page of “stargazers” for the individual repo that I’m bookmarking.

While GitHub calls these stars and I might have mapped them to “likes” on my website, I’ve always thought of my intent as more of a bookmark. In practice I often use my stars as bookmarks for things I want to come back to visit on their site anyway. Since it’s my website and I have the control, I get to choose. Of course I also have the facility to create a star post kind on the site too, but the semantic difference just doesn’t warrant the work.

Now to figure out how I might extract out all of my prior data to backfill old bookmarks like this…

I’ve now got about 20 webhooks set up to pull back data out of silos like this including ones for GoodReads, GitHub, Hypothes.is, Last.fm, Spotify, Untappd, Twitter, Letterboxd, Diigo, Reading.am, Huffduffer, Google Calendar, Meetup.com, YouTube and Pocket.

Replied to a tweet by

curried apotheosis (Twitter)

A frequently recurring product wish I have when interacting with issue trackers: labels that I can add to issues, and only I can see.

They're for my organization and tagging. That's it.

Not going beyond "me" is a *feature*.
— curried apotheosis (@warpfork) January 8, 2020

I do something like this on my own website. Post issues there so I can own the data (and tags) and control the details and notes and syndicate a copy to GitHub. I’ve documented some of it here: Enabling two way communication with WordPress and GitHub for Issues. Others have done it as well: https://indieweb.org/issue. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but it works well for me and just for the reasons you describe.

If others want to see my details, the’re available on my site (when I make them public), but they’re primarily for my benefit and not others. The public copy conforms to the silo’s requirements and can be modified by the repo owners, if necessary.

Bookmarked at 2020/01/10 9:51:41 pm

Read Reclaim Your Domain LA Hackathon Wrap-up by Kin Lane (kinlane.com)

I spent the weekend hacking away with a small group of very smart folks, at the Reclaim Your Domain Hackathon in Los Angeles. Fifteen of us gathered at Pepperdine University in west LA, looking to move forward the discussion around what we call “Reclaim Your Domain”.

An interesting list of people in the DoOO/IndieWeb space in/formerly in the LA area.

Michael Berman – California State University Channel Islands (@amichaelberman)
Chris Mattia – California State University Channel Islands (@cmmattia)
Mikhail Gershovich – Vocat (@mgershovich)
Rolin Moe – Pepperdine (@RMoeJo) ❧

A bit curious that for a reclaim the web event around DoOO that he highlights their Twitter presence rather than their own websites. Potentially for lack of notifications/webmention functionality?
–December 17, 2019 at 08:49AM

Once again I am reminded of the importance of API 101 demos, and how I need to focus more in this area. ❧

I’d love to see a list of API 101 demos. This would be particularly cool if there were a DS106-esque site for content like this. Examples can be powerful things.
–December 17, 2019 at 08:57AM

Lastly, I walked through Github Pages, and how using a separate branch, you can publish HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JSON for projects, turning Github into not just a code and content management platform, but also a publishing endpoint. ❧

More information on how to use GitHub pages to build your website: https://indieweb.org/GitHub_Pages
–December 17, 2019 at 08:59AM

Extension of the Insights » Posting Activity functionality

Filed an Issue Automattic/jetpack (GitHub)

Increase your traffic, view your stats, speed up your site, and protect yourself from hackers with Jetpack.

I’ve been enjoying the idea that JetPack is providing a Github contributions-like functionality at https://wordpress.com/stats/insights/example.com under the heading Posting Activity.

Seeing this naturally provides me some additional motivation to post more often, which is generally a good thing for the platform. It also dovetails in visually with the “you have posted X days in a row” notifications sent by the mobile app.

I’m sure it all may be on the roadmap somewhere, but in case it’s not I thought I’d leave a few ideas about continuing to extend this awesome functionality and related UI features.

It would be nice to be able to display more than one calendar year of activity. Perhaps a tabbed UI could provide access to prior years while still being relatively compact? (This could be similar to “All Time Views” just below it which has button (aka tab) options for “Months and Years” or “Average per Day”.
While hovering over a particular square representing a date provides some useful information like the number of posts on a particular date, it would be awesome if clicking on that date would take one to the correct archive page for that date. This is not too dissimilar to from GitHub’s functionality and the permalinks for each day should already exist in core. Example: https://example.com/2019/04/17 to show all of that day’s posts.
Similar to the functionality for posts, it would be interesting to have a similar set up for comments to allow sorting through those visually as well.
It would be awesome to have all of the above rolled up into a widget that would allow one to post the visual data for several months and/or years visually on a sidebar, footer, or other widgetizeable area. This also provides site readers the ability to quickly jump to a particular date and/or set of posts much like the Archives widget allows, but with a more visual interface.
If there is a widget, while I’m sure that many will love the blue WordPress-based color scheme, many will want to key their colors off of their theme as a customizable widget option.
Given the infrastructure for creating a lot of the above functionality, one could go a half step further and create an “On this Day” feature similar to that of Facebook, Timehop, and many others which allow one to create archive page views for what happened on this same day a year ago, two years ago, three, four, etc. This could be wonderfully useful for a wide variety of sites to look back at birthdays, anniversaries, and red letter dates as well as the average Tuesday. To my knowledge there is only one old plugin that I was able to find after some serious search that has somewhat similar functionality: Room 34 presents On This Day. There is also some similar functionality like this recently built into the Post Kinds Plugin which creates archive views for several date-based permalinks. This would be all the better if there is a better API for such an endpoint so that it could be tied into third party platforms like Timehop which are overly focused on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., but which could include WordPress-based websites.

Also as I post this, and as I’m thinking the functionality is relatively new, I notice that my JetPack enabled .org site only has Posting Activity that goes back to mid-October 2018 (despite the fact that it should go back much further), while my wordpress.com site has data that goes far back beyond that date. Is this a potential bug, or could it be the case that my self-hosted site hasn’t been parsed back far enough to cover more time yet? It may also be related to the fact that I’ve recently (this week) disconnected and reconnected JetPack to do some troubleshooting.

🔖 The influence of collaboration networks on programming language acquisition by Sanjay Guruprasad | MIT

Bookmarked The influence of collaboration networks on programming language acquisition by Sanjay Guruprasad (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Many behaviors spread through social contact. However, different behaviors seem to require different degrees of social reinforcement to spread within a network. Some behaviors spread via simple contagion, where a single contact with an "activated node" is sufficient for transmission, while others require complex contagion, with reinforcement from multiple nodes to adopt the behavior. But why do some behaviors require more social reinforcement to spread than others? Here we hypothesize that learning more difficult behaviors requires more social reinforcement. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the programming language adoption of hundreds of thousands of programmers on the social coding platform Github. We show that adopting more difficult programming languages requires more reinforcement from the collaboration network. This research sheds light on the role of collaboration networks in programming language acquisition.

[Downloadable .pdf]
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 26-28).

Advisor: César Hidalgo.

URI: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/119085

I ran across this paper via the Human Current interview with Cesar Hidalgo. In general they studied GitHub as a learning community and the social support of people’s friends on the platform as they worked on learning new programming languages.

I think there might be some interesting takeaways for people looking at collective learning and online pedagogies as well as for communities like the IndieWeb which are trying to not only build new technologies, but help to get them into others’ hands by teaching and disseminating some generally tough technical knowledge. (In this respect, the referenced Human Current podcast episode may be a worthwhile overview.)