And this is some text

Just need to test a non webmention webmention

And Wired doesn't want me to bookmark its page. Hey ho.

What is different about this iteration of white nationalism is how the movement is framing its ideas, and the place those ideas occupy in U.S. politics. One of the chants white nationalists repeatedly turned to as they marched in Charlottesville on Friday night and Saturday was “white lives matter” — a direct response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police in August 2014 and the resulting protests.

So depressing, and salutary to read this minutes after finishing listening to the latest episode of the astonishingly good series Seeing White, from Scene on Radio.

A link to a paper by Rich Borschelt, describing his frustration at the failed model of science communication. As Hawks notes:

The sad thing is that such workshops and conferences are funded again and again by organizations on the logic that they are going to do something about science literacy.

Amen.

Really super, fully comprehensive explanation that should make life easier for anyone wanting to make more use of WordPress in the IndieWeb.

Well, yes. And increasingly, as I read pieces like this one, I find myself thinking that although it isn't hard to take the necessary steps to reclaim the social interactions we want, it needs to be done. That makes it a positive step, which gives it extra weight. I've already set up Instagram so I see what I want as I want it. And some of Twitter. FB I really don't care about that much.

[T]he invisible hand is usually just giving you the finger if you care about what you make

This downbeat summary does seem to be on the mark, at least for good software. I didn't upgrade to Day One Premium, because Classic does all I need. Does that make me part of the problem? I don't believe it does, any more than darning my socks (which I don't do) or patching my trousers (which I do) makes me a bad consumer. Definitely, the people who make beautiful software need a better way to sell their creations, and no, I don't know what that might be.

No idea what happened to the million. But the page is an interesting artefact that, in its current state is, I venture, a more accurate keep[sake of the internet than it would be had it all stayed up and running.

The article suggests that:

Given the existence of powerful and widely accessible tools such as the Wayback machine, this kind of restorative curation may well be within reach.

To which I would be fairly vehemently opposed

Truly, I did not know this.

I just know I'm going to regret this. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life.

Thought just occurred: would I be willing to pay a subscription to have the recommender tuned to remove revenue maximisation and site-addiction maximisation? Would anyone?

I've made plenty of "remove ads" in-app purchases on my phone. This isn't too different. And it might actually result in a truly useful experience.

Yes please!

Really good debriefing on two years of progress in the #indieweb. I found this rather familiar:

While learning all of the requisite skills was challenging, the real struggle in joining the indieweb was piecing all the components together to hold a mental image in my head of what an indiewebsite should be. I spent a great deal of time trawling through the wiki and absorbing all of the ideas on disparate pages. At the time, there were many pages which would all have slightly different variations of the similar information.

There's still a ways to go, mind. When I did this reply to automatically, the title of the entry came though as "kongaloosh". I added the correct title by hand myself. The entry title is there, as `p-name` and I cannot tell whether the issue is at my end (WithKnown) or at Alex's end.

link

[T]oday’s highbrow signifier is tomorrow’s Beanie Baby.

And vice versa, of course.

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:

For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.

Not that anyone who needs to is listening.

I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.

George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep. 

Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.

Scrabblers of the world, unite!

Peter Molnar's excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That's the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.

> As is often the case, Dave is focused on RSS rather than the web per se.

> BEIJING, June 20 (Reuters) - China will spend almost twice
as much this year on subsidies to encourage farmers in the
northeast to reduce corn plantings as it intensifies its push to
rebalance grain stocks.

> The country will issue 2.56 billion yuan ($374.95 million)
in funds to pay farmers subsidies to rotate their corn plantings
with other crops every other year as well as to leave some land
fallow, the Ministry of Finance said on Tuesday.

> The funds are 78 percent higher than last year, and the
acreage targeted by the subsidies is double last year's area at
around 800,000 hectares.

> It seems that everyone is surprised to learn that there are two Americas. More surprising is the fact that rural life—idealized for its calming sensitivities and neighborly good-will—is a place of anger, local political conflict, and wide-spread alienation. Many rural residents are mad at each other, and they are mad at those who live in the throbbing metropolitan core of American capitalism. Actually, it is a surprise that everyone is surprised.

Marion Nestle links to Dole's declarations as it prepares to go public. As ever, though, while the company may have to settle lawsuits and what have you, it does not contribute to the costs borne by those who succumb to food poisonning.

In among the firehose of suggestions to someone wanting to know "why #indieweb" was this gem from Matthew Butterick, who sets out, at great but appropriate length, precisely what is wrong with Medium.

I've used his advice on Practical Typography before, on one of my sites; seeing it again, I think I need to spend some time making some more deliberate choices on the site I am currently gussying up.

I did a silly little thing in WordPress that made me inordinately happy and advanced my #indieweb progress.

> There’s probably a piece to be written someday that digs deep into the way liberal podcasts tends to pair well with the open podcast ecosystem and the way conservative podcasts pairs with over-the-top premium subscription models (see also: Glenn Beck and his activities with The Blaze), but this is not that day.

> We tested Lydon against a bunch of other people, and he came out top among Britain's housewives because they felt he was so uncompromising, he'd never just do an ad for the money - he'd only do it if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

> In other words, he was the best person to do what we were paying him to do, because he would never do what we were paying him to do, so if he did that, it's OK.

> So Mastodon is what we don’t need. What do we need right now?

> Decentralized protocols — true distributed social platforms — are very possible. There’s already a chat protocol, called Tox, that leverages a distributed hash table to store information globally across all instances, without permitting anyone to access information they don’t have the key for. It has many different clients, no centralized API with absurd limitations, and no one specially privileged official client. It’s not for persistent messaging and posts, of course, but it’s not terribly difficult to imagine a protocol that could archive content locally, that operates without any central servers or control. If we’re going to allow ourselves to be driven off Twitter, let’s not be lazy about it. Let’s work together and build something no corporation can control, and no one accident — or calculated act of malice — can wipe out.