Status – Page 95 – Chris Aldrich

One of the major new features I have in this rewrite is WebMention support. WebMentions allow compatible websites to "mention" my articles or other pages on my main domains by sending a specially formatted HTTP request to mi. I am still in the early stages of integrating mi into my site code, but eventually I hope to have a list of places that articles are mentioned in each post. The WebMention endpoint for my site is https://mi.within.website/api/webmention/accept. I have added WebMention metadata into the HTML source of the blog pages as well as in the Link header as the W3 spec demands. If you encounter any issues with this feature, please let me know so I can get it fixed as soon as possible.

Congratulations on getting Webmentions working! (I love your site btw!)

There are a bunch of us out here that can send and receive them, you just have to poke around a bit to find the (ever-growing) community. Services like micro.blog and those involved in the IndieWeb will (often, though not always) have support for it. Here’s a short Twitter list of people whose personal sites likely have the ability to send and receive webmentions as well.

So far the only site that is sending me webmentions is @lobsters 🙁

— Cadey A. Ratio (@theprincessxena) December 1, 2020

One of the largest senders is Brid.gy which sends Webmentions on behalf of services like Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, etc. If you set your site up to syndicate content to those sources and register with Brid.gy, it will send likes, replies, comments, etc. to your site as webmentions. Ideally this is meant to aggregate all the conversation around your posts to your own site.

Are you displaying them on your site as well?

As a visual indicator on posts, I took an extra step to add a Webmention button/badge and a URL field to my posts with a note about webmentions so that people could send them manually even if their platform/CMS isn’t capable of doing it automatically yet. (I don’t have a lot of direct evidence yet that these things help except for edge cases, or when I want to force mentions of my website from my referral logs.)

Replied to a tweet by

Stephanie Stimac Web Witch (Twitter)

But really, what if we moved back to MySpace...
— Stephanie Stimac Web Witch (@seaotta) December 1, 2020

Coincidentally I ran across SpaceHey earlier today, and I had the very same thought…

For SpaceHey I’m using plain PHP, HTML and a lot of custom CSS. No frameworks whatsoever this time (except for jQuery which is needed to convert all time/date formats) 🙂

— An (@AnTheMaker) November 27, 2020

I prefer living in the slightly older blogosphere though. Maybe with some improved infrastructure over what we’ve lost?

I’ve randomly noticed an odd dip in the use of patriarchy, patriarchal, and feminism as words in Google’s nGram Viewer starting around a peak in 1999-2000 and continuing until 2008-2009. I’m curious what may have caused this? One could also add the word “gender” which shows a similar dip, but it tends to drown out the signal of the other three, so I’ve removed it here.

Watched Ella (2016) from Amazon Prime

Directed by Douglas Watkin. With Stephen Page, David McAllister, Ella Havelka, Suzanne Duffy. In October 2012, Ella Havelka became the first Indigenous dancer to be invited into The Australian Ballet in its 50 year history. It was an announcement that made news headlines nationwide. A descendant of the Wiradjuri people, we follow Ella's inspirational journey from the regional town of Dubbo and onto the world stage of The Australian Ballet. Featuring intimate interviews, dynamic dance sequences, and a stunning array of archival material, this moving documentary follows Ella as she explores her cultural identity and gives us a rare glimpse into life as an elite ballet dancer within the largest company in the southern hemisphere.

Started watching for the ballet, stayed with hope for mnemotechny. I was generally disappointed on the second count.

Either Ms. Havelka didn’t want to personally, didn’t have permission to speak of it via elders, or she didn’t know about some of the deeper uses of dance within her culture. It just wasn’t covered here at all. I’ve been fascinated by Lynne Kelly’s research programme and in particular I’m reading my way through her most recent text Songlines with Margo Neale about the uses of song, dance, and arts within indigenous cultures in Australia. I’m curious how much time she spent in country to learn what she did. Was it just a few weeks for some exposure, or was there a deeper learning experience? Is she passing that experience along to her students? Was some of it filmed, but lost in editing?

Presuming they’re not already acquainted, I suspect that Ella Havelka, Lynne Kelly, and Margo Neale might enjoy meeting and discussing dance, culture, arts, and teaching.

Ella Havelka did speak about the significance of her feather tattoo within her culture, so there was at least some representation of associative memory here. The comment was simply a passing one (and sadly focused on covering it up with makeup to hide it for ballet). The discussion of the feather just didn’t connect with the greater body of knowledge I’m sure is hiding just behind it.

I was a bit proud that my 9 year old ballet enthusiast wasn’t able to discern what made Ella different despite that being a large part of the story arc. Still she enjoyed the dancing and journey anyway.

Note: This film was renamed Ballerina for airing via Amazon Prime.

Rating: ★★★½

Watched The Booksellers (2019) from Amazon Prime

Directed by D.W. Young. With Parker Posey, Fran Lebowitz, Gay Talese, Susan Benne. A behind-the-scenes look at the New York rare book world.

Rating: ★★★½

My sort of catnip. How do they not ask about whether or not these sellers use the internet that is killing them?