So interesting to see some of the changes that are happening at Flickr. I'd more or less given up on it as a place to share some of my images, and now I'm beginning to think it is becoming more attractive again. I've been a paying user for a long, long time, without really thinking about it. I'm not too bothered about the "silo" aspects of the site, as I have copies of the images themselves. I suppose I ought to look into grabbing comments, likes and so on, but not with all that much urgency. It's the images that count.

The thing I find most interesting about this most recent blog post is this:

Lastly, we looked at our members and found a clear line between Free and Pro accounts: the overwhelming majority of Pros have more than 1,000 photos on Flickr, and the vast majority of Free members have fewer than 1,000. We believe we’ve landed on a fair and generous place to draw the line.

I'd love to see the raw histogram of number of images and videos per user.

So, that's what an Overton window is. Thanks to Alice Bartlett for prompting me to find out.

Having a diagram doesn't make it clearer, making it clearer makes it clearer.

Words to live by from a how-to-do-slides post that didn't contain a lot new for me. Except for the bit about showing websites.

In the latest Daskeyboard metahacks, there's a certain irony to the juxtaposition of item 5 -- “The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.” – Mark Twain -- and item 2 -- "Giant container ships are just as responsible for pollution as cars". How hard would it have been to check? For example, BBC Radio 4's More or Less.

One of the developers of Sunlit, a photo-sharing app that is part of the Micro.blog ecosystem, contacted me to say that “the images on your site have a MIME type of application/data”. I’d like to say I understood immediately what the problem was and what it meant, but I had to do some learning first. It wasn’t as simple as the extension, the bit after the filename that indicates whether it is a JPEG or PNG kind of image. Rather, it was about what my server tells your browser about the image.

To backtrack, Known stores all files as blobs that contain the actual file data, the 1s and 0s. Your browser, when it receives a post from my server, can often sniff out what kind of thing (image, audio, text etc) that blob of data represents and do a good job of showing it to you. Normally, you wouldn’t even notice. One clue is that if you right-click on an image, and ask to open it in a new tab, it actually gets downloaded instead, I suppose because the new tab doesn’t know what else to do with it.

Anyway, I confirmed that the source file for most images did not have an extension (which would have told the browser directly how to deal with it). Most, but not all. Files I had uploaded to my site directly did have an extension and the correct MIME type. The “bad” files had come from OwnYourGram or Quill, both of which are part of the joyful #IndieWeb. They use a standard called Micropub to send things to a suitably equipped website.

It seemed unlikely that both Quill and OYG would fail to send the requisite information to identify a photo, so I went digging into the code that Known uses to decide what to do with a post sent by Micropub. I made a bit of progress but although I could see more or less what was happening, I couldn’t see how to make it right.

Fortunately Aaron Parecki, who built Quill and OwnYourGram (and so much else), was around and gave me the clue I needed to investigate: curl -I example.com/file.

One beautiful feature of Quill is that if it is sending a photo and if the receiving site has a media endpoint for receiving files (which Known does) it uploads the file, shows you a preview and tells you the location of the file. With that, the curl command shows that the temporary file has the correct description of Content-Type: image/jpeg. Once Known has processed the whole post from Quill, though, the file that contains the image shows as Content-Type: application/data.

Somewhere between receiving the temporary file from Quill and storing it permanently, Known fails to give it the proper MIME type.

I wish I knew enough to discover where the problem lies. Most likely Marcus Povey – who keeps the wheels spinning at Known – will be able to do the needful, now that I have submitted an issue. And Sunlit will be able to share my photos far and wide.

It's all about power. Where the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium leads, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking and the Agricultural History Society follow.

@phoneboy kindly shared a screenshot of the "webmention" spam he said he had received.

As I suspected, it looks to me like common or garden spam, hence the scare quotes. Of course, I can't be absolutely certain without digging further into the actual URLs, which I'm not about to do, but everything about these comments screams pingbacks or trackbacks. And the solution is obviously Akismet which, to be honest, I am suprised Phoneboy has not already installed and activated.

The day may come when webmention spam is a thing, and #indieweb people have been thinking about a protocol called Vouch for that eventuality.

A couple of days ago, @phoneboy mentioned the fun he had deleting the spam webmentions he had received on WordPress.

I asked him to document them.

Now Phoneboy replies:

Once I figure out the right settings, I’ll let you know.

And I’m not sure what that means. What right settings? Doesn’t WordPress keep a copy of all comments it receives? It would be really useful to see the contents of those “spam webmentions,” where they came from, what they contained, who sent them, simply because, as I said before, so few of these imagined evils have so far been spotted in the open. Not sure what settings that requires.

Also, the irony of this question has not escaped me:

Also, where did you post this comment? Didn’t see it in micro.blog.

I posted it here. Where else would I post it?

#indieweb

If you're looking for a really good introduction to the #IndieWeb and insights into how it all works, you could do a lot worse than listen to Jeena's podcast with Martijn. They do a tip-top job of explaining for people less knowledgeable than they are, and the audio quality is very acceptable.

Strangely, perhaps, given my love of tinkering with shiny, I've never been tempted by Ghost. But reading the latest birthday review surfaced this bit of wisdom.

Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.

But

Centralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on power and flexibility. In the long run, nothing beats owning your technology and controlling your destiny.

I think I just need to remind myself and others of the natural progresion of things.

1. Everything not forbidden is permitted.
2. Everything not permitted is forbidden.
3. Everything not forbidden is compulsory

That is all. #indieweb

Like Tom MacWright, I too have almost no need for Google these days, with one exception: Chat. I have a couple of friends with whom I enjoy messaging, and they aren't about to go anywhere else. I already use YakYak. Is there any way I could message their GTalk without having a Google account myself?

Digging into how withknown creates RSS feeds, I can see two things.

One is that for a status post, which has no title, `<title>` is a truncated version of the post content, although the level of truncation seems to vary. Not sure why.

The other is that even status posts, with a truncated `<title>`, have a full `<description>` that includes `p-name` and `e-content` and even `entry-content`.

But micro.blog does not seem to read `<description>` at least not when it is coming from my withknown RSS feed.

Puzzling.

I managed to fix a long-standing niggle with my #indieweb practice this afternoon, thanks to some great help from cweiske and others. For the longest time Quill, a micropub client that I can use to publish here, wasn't showing me an option to syndicate directly to Twitter. That meant that I tended reply to tweets and stuff right there in the silo and not bring them back here. Fair enough, especially when a reply without context is like an egg without salt. But we figured it out, in part by that old standby of "switch it off and then switch it back on again". That got things working, and was enough of an impetus to upgrade WithKnown to the latest build. And so far, everything looks good.

#indieweb

Two savvy treats on one day. Jeremy Keith takes a general look at the power of internet companies in his post on Ends and means. Tim Bray focuses specifically on the utility that is Google Maps in his post Reviewing Ethics.

Jeremy: Going back to the opening examples of online blackouts, was it morally wrong for companies to use their power to influence politics? Or would it have been morally wrong for them not to have used their influence?

Tim: Call me crazy, but I’d pass leg­is­la­tion to keep Google from do­ing what they’re do­ing. They should be able to sell space on the map­s, and they should be able to pro­vide qual­i­ty fil­ter­s, and col­lect feed­back on re­views and down­grade or up­grade them ac­cord­ing­ly. But no damn way should they own the map and the crowd­sourced value-adds on the map.

No collusion, I'm sure, just two smart people addressing their concerns about good behaviour by those who make and use the web.

One of the good things about WordPress is how flexible it seems on the surface, able to perform all sorts of wizardry. One of the bad things about WordPress is how that very flexibility often makes it extremely difficult to achieve any sort of wizardry. That seems particularly true of anything to do with the #indieweb.

So I was surprised to learn that Aaron Davis was having difficulty implementing a ZenPress child theme

Surprised because I run fornacalia.com with a ZenPress child theme and cannot recall any difficulties in setting that up. I think there may have been some issues with capitalisation of various names, but beyond that, I'm at a loss. I'd love to help -- but not sure how best to do that.

Maybe I should just share my child theme.

Webmentions are the glue that sticks all the bits in all the sites together.

That’s my one-liner about one of the core ideas about the #IndieWeb, but it doesn’t actually tell you very much if you want to know how the glue works. I’ve kind of absorbed a moderately high-level abstraction over the past little while of playing with webmentions, but a friend asked for more:

Do you know of any diagrams that explain how this stuff works without all the … words that web communities seem to enjoy creating? I keep coming back to this topic every so often, and every time I return things just appear more complicated and broken than before …

I don’t think that last opinion is merited, but then I would say that. And right now I don’t have the time to write up my understanding. I’m pretty sure I saw something clear and to the point a little while back, but I’m blowed if I can find it now. So here are four pieces I have found.

• Implementing Webmentions, which contains a good verbal description of the flow.
• Adactio: Journal—Parsing webmentions, which explains some the technology too.
• So long Disqus, hello Webmention has a go at why webmentions are a good idea and some of the nuts and bolts of implementation.
• Webmentions · Rudiger Meyer is another good verbal description of the how, along with the why and the what.

These may not answer the question fully, but they are a start. And they might inspire me to write my own version, especially if I could have a synchronous discussion about it with my interlocuter.

I have only seen one side of Nick Snelgar's dispute with his local planning authority but I have no reason to doubt what I've seen there. To me it seems indisputable that, no matter what politicians like Michael Gove may say, there is no real desire to allow small farmers to reform the farming and food landscape in England.

Over at Scripting News, Dave Winer says:

Every blog should have a Subscribe button. In an open ecosystem this is a problem, a problem that silos don't have. Which is the advantage Twitter (a silo) has over the open web.

I guess I'm not smart enough to see what that problem might be.

Some of the people rediscovering independent publishing on their own domains are agonising over self-censorship, guilt and the like. I'm slowly continuing to bring old posts over into my main site. That goes for the ones that hurt a bit to read.

The only ones I'm not bringing are link posts that include dead links. A few are just too topical to bother with. The others are coming over, albeit not very quickly, even if I have to go searching for archived pages to link to.

Along the way, Salmon has this to say:

the world’s billionaires – the richest 2,000 people on the planet – saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.

Hang on a minute. Wouldn't the billionnaires need to make that awesome sacrifice every year? Or does the fact the people would slide back into extreme poverty next year not matter?

Catching up on reviewing my Christmas reading: Unbelievably dystopian

Latest episode of Eat This Podcast is up now. Bread as it ought to be.

It is always interesting to read of someone else deciding to give the IndieWeb a try. I like what Michael Singletary has to say, especially this

Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.

What really struck me, though, was the line in his bio: “Blogging since 2002, taking control of my content since 2018.”

I lost some of my pre–2002 posts, not through the actions of any evil silo (were there any, then?), but through my own idiocy in misplacing a crucial backup. And I never really got on board the silo first band-wagon, so in a sense I have always owned the content I care about owning. Most of my friends do consider it kind of weird that I didn’t see the photo they posted only to FB, but they’re only too happy to show them to me one on one. So yes, for now few people visit this island, and that’s OK. I enjoy the ones who do.

I'm using the IndieWeb in an attempt to make it easier for everyone to visit, and that works too.

My friend Jason was recently musing on the possibility of legislating firms to employ a certain number of people, based on revenue, in order to slow the pace of automation and the joblessness it leads to. I get that there's a problem,because no matter how good state provision for joblessness might be, firms contribute only a small part (if any) to the costs of supporting the workers they fire. Jason's idea is essentially an additional tax on firms to offset the costs of joblessness by creating unnecessary jobs. In my view there's a far better way; tax firms more, and spend some of the proceeds on a universal basic income.

One million webmentions. Very pleased to have played my own tiny part in this.

@cn suggested I use the date as the title of a Post in Known, to ensure that the contents of the post gets through to micro.blog intact, and, as so often, he is correct.

All I have to do now is remember to salute him next #micromonday

For all the joy of the #indieweb, and the pleasure of civil discourse, I am becoming incredibly confused by aspects of micro.blog. There’s the question of titleless posts, of which is this is one as an experiment, versus status updates. There are posts that appear to be contributions to an interesting conversation but aren’t because they have been cross-posted automatically from elsewhere. And there is the lack of a scroll back, which means that as I follow more people and choose not to check in the middle of my night, stuff vanishes irretrievably from my timeline. 

There are also issues with Known that are nothing to do with micro.blog.

None of this is insurmountable. For me, though, it does add friction. 

During the virtual IWC tonight, we were discussing third-party clients for publishing to websites, essentially Micropub clients and MarsEdit. And it occurred to us more or less simultaneously, that I do not use Micropub for the site that supports it out of the box, whereas I do use a client for the site that does not support Micropub out of the box. And that is because the post-creation UI is nice and simple for Known, and a right mess for WordPress.

So, just to be difficult, I'm using Quill for the first time in a long while to create a Post in Known.

#IndieWeb

A cup of coffee here, a cup of coffee there, pretty soon you're talking about a bottle of wine. Nevertheless, I thought it worth dropping 2.5 coffees to check out fsnotes, which bills itself as a "lightweight notational velocity reinvention".

I depend totally on nvALT as my general place for keeping scraps, vital information, inchoate thoughts and more besides, and the one thing that has always bugged me has been the inability to have more than one folder. Mainly, I envisage using an additional folder as an archive; notes that I truly believe I have finished with but that I really do not want to throw away because there might be something in them I need later. NvALT's blazing search speed would be fabulous for that kind of treasure hunt, but I honestly don't want currently dead notes cluttering up my view of all that stuff.

I asked about multiple folders 21 days ago and a couple of days ago the developer, Oleksandr Glushchenko, delivered just that. Definitely deserving of my support.

First impressions are that fsnotes is every bit as fast as nvALT. I haven't been able to give multiple folders a good workout yet, because I only have one big folder of notes. My minor niggle is that the display of links is different from nvALT's. A well-formed Markdown link is clickable in the preview mode, but not in "native" mode. I suppose I could fix that easily enough in my existing notes, and it need not be a problem going forward, but it is an annoyance right now that might stop me switching completely over to fsnotes.

Maybe I'll raise an issue on github for that.

Rather happy to have scratched a long-standing itch into submission. I use the semantic-linkbacks plugin to display webmentions on one of my WordPress sites. It has an option for displaying webmentions as facepiles, which keeps things neat. But my WordPress theme also displays webmentions as comments, which is mostly redundant. Not entirely, though, because a few webmentions contain actual content, which is not visible in the facepile. I could completely void display of the webmentions, but that loses the little bit of content there.

Fortunately, the latest master of the plugin has settings to display the facepile for  each kind of webmention, so I could stop it making facepiles for actual mentions. Then all I needed to do was hide the theme's display of any webmentions that are just likes or reposts. And that is easily done by adding

.p-like {
	display: none;
}

.p-repost {
	display: none;
}

to styles.css.

I'll probably have to revisit that if I ever get any other kinds of webmention, but for now I am content.

#indieweb #webmention

As suggestedby @mrhenko, a test post containing a photo but no title.

Just an old snap.

Ah, the old chestnut about audio quality of podcasts. So I'll give my standard answer. If what you're saying is interesting, audio quality is less important. Asymcar is my goto example for that. And if what you say is not interesting, no level of production value will make me listen longer.

In between is a grey area. So, specifically addressing Henrik's question, that microcast was perfectly OK, except that once we had dealt with the weather and the question, I had had enough. On all outdoor recording wind noise, handling noise and bumps are the most distressing to me because they are always a shock to my ears. But if I know it is going to be over in three minutes, I can survive.

I've recorded outdoors and walking along myself, almost always with either the built-in microphone on the earbuds or else with an external Zoom iQ-6. The Zoom is actually worse, because it is so much more sensitive to wind and handling. A few times, when I was doing Dog Days of Podcasting, I cheated and recorded while walking along only to shadow myself with a decent mic when I got home. That's fun because you get the spontaneity of unscripted speech with much better sound quality.

More good help from Manton, cleverdevil and others, but alas no nearer (although I may have eliminated some possibilities).

1. I was allowing both HTTP and HTTPS. There could have been some kind of mismatch, I suppose, but after editing .htaccess to force SSL, it made no difference to micro.blog's OS X app.
2. Then thought that possibly a different endpoint would help (despite the fact that I know all the same details are on the home page). 
3. Pointed micro.blog first at /profile and then at /profile/jeremy; still no good.

At this stage, given that Manton managed to get everything working from a clean install of Known out of the box, I think I need to try the same. If that works, well, if nothing else, it works.

I had been fretting about losing data, but if I install into a new sub-domain and it works there, I can always edit the config.ini to point back at the old database. It will be a good opportunity to see how good the instructions are to install at Dreamhost. Last time I managed without any instructions, and I also didn't write up my experiences. This could be an opportunity to pay back.

#indieweb

I have never yet been able to post from my micro.blog to this stream, although the feed from here is reliably picked up there, and brid.gy reliably pulls replies from there to here. @manton suggested we move my complaints to help@micro.blog, but I can see no way of actually engaging with that account. So this afternoon, I decided to attempt to go back to the beginning.

It was a miserable failure.

Here's how it went:

1. Revoke all current authorisations for micro.blog
2. There were four of them, two from yesterday when I last tried.
3. Launch OS X app
4. OK!
5. “If you’re using WordPress or another server, first open the preferences window and enter your web site URL to set it up for posting within the app.”
6. Roger that. But the old website was still there. Is that going to be a problem?
7. Start a new post; the old website is there at the bottom. This is going to be a problem.
8. Same old Same old; Error sending post.
9. Post does not arrive at micro.blog
10. Post does not arrive at WithKnown
11. WithKnown Error log is empty.
12. Access log shows no sign of anything from recent attempt to post from micro.blog
13. Check to make sure I have up to date micro.blog app
14. “Micro.blog can’t be updated when it’s running from a read-only volume like a disk image or an optical drive.” Move Micro.blog to Applications folder using Finder, relaunch it from there, and try again.
15. Strange. Check path to micro.blog.
16. Path is “/Applications/Micro.blog.app”.
17. Check the App Store; disappointed but also content that there is not an update.
18. Delete web site URL from preferences; quit micro.blog, mostly for superstitious reasons; launch micro.blog.
19. Very strange; web site URL is still there. Or back? Maybe the app pulls it from micro.blog?
20. Repeat; same outcome. Superstition justified. Go to my account at micro.blog.
21. See I have three App tokens. The one for MarsEdit is definitely pointless, as I am not hosted at micro.blog. Remove it.
22. Throw caution to the winds; remove the tokens for IOS and OS X
23. OK, IOS now says “Internal Server Error” on attempting to connect. I think I ought to sign out now and then sign back in.
24. Phew. All is good. And I have a new app token.
25. On iOS, try to write a new post; insert my Known site; authorise micro.blog; write a test post. Post it.
26. “Error sending post”. Tear hair out, as now I do not seem to be able to post to micro.blog from iOS app.
27. Go back to 22; remove iOS app token and authorisation token at WithKnown.
28. Log back in. Can no longer post without adding WithKnown, and posting gives an error, as at 26.
29. Try again from OS X; same error as at 8.
30. Post to WithKnown; feed is picked up.

Any and all suggestions gratefully received.

#indieweb

I dunno. I see this Add a "tweetstorm" UI for chaining status updates with chained POSSE tweets and I think of something I wrote a while back: Or you could write a blog post. Does the #IndieWeb really need to make indie copies of everything the silos offer? Even the workarounds?

Maybe I misunderstand, and a feature like this is what weans people off the silo pap. All I know is, I don't think it would work for me.

Finished the first phase of moving two WordPress driven sites from one hosting service to another this morning. I was a bit wary, having read all the things that can go wrong, and I took a few wrong turns into dead ends. But I managed to back out and didn't screw up too badly on the first one. The screwing up I did accomplish was mainly the result of my impatience, doing things in quick succession when I should have given them time to settle down in between. But I learned my lessons, and this morning's transfer went much more smoothly. Scarily so, in fact.

There's plenty left to do, moving various ancillary things, all part of an ongoing effort to tidy up in general, but I don't foresee any more difficulties, touch wood.

And in case anyone cares, I couldn't have done it nearly as easily without the Duplicator plugin for WordPress, which truly is a life saver.

Funny, as I continue slowly to bring old posts in, to see what I wrote about my tools, in 2007 and then again in 2013.

The conclusion remains as it ever was; although the tools change, the jobs they need to do remain more or less the same. Find things and write about them.

Playing Lyle Lovett singing Texas River Song, even though I know it's a stretch, to celebrate having eaten a giant bowl of my own dogfood.

A couple of weeks ago I followed Chris Aldrich to reading.am, which is a neat little spot for just putting down a marker for something that you're reading. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to save links to the things I marked. And now, a little over two weeks later, I've done it.

I have a PHP file that fetches the RSS feeds of things I've marked in reading.am, looks for any that are new since the last time the program ran, and then POSTS the results to Known's micropub endpoint. #IndieWeb PESOS for my bookmarks!

There is no way I could have done it without amazing help from people on the IndieWeb IRC, and it isn't perfect by any means. There's more work to be done, for sure, before I even think about sharing the code.

But hey, it works.

And, as my main helper said, "Launch early and iterate often".

I'll be doing that.

We had a virtual meeting of the Homebrew Website Club yesterday evening, and as usual it was interesting and informative. We all forgot to take notes, but sketchess was prompted to do a brain dump, which I have added to and tightened up slightly to capture the main points.

• There was a lot of discussion of the confusion among people new to #IndieWeb caused by having so many different ways to achieve the same thing. Some people thought it would be good if there were, maybe, a recommended approach for specific circumstances. However, that does require the user to be clear what they are trying to achieve.
• sketchess suggested that directed tutorials to achieve a specific outcome would be helpful. There was some support for this but, as ever, the issue of time can be a constraint.
• We talked about the potential usefulness of different levels of wiki pages, or a special section, or something completely independent of the wiki.
• aaronpk reminded us that the difficulty with independent offerings is that there can be difficulties in maintaining momentum. The wiki, as a collective effort, is more likely to be managed by individuals.
• We noted that sometimes developers simply do not remember what it was like to start some activity, and also that a “getting started” for an experienced developer would be completely different from a “getting started” for someone who perhaps only knows silos. A beginner's guide written by recent beginners, with expert input from more experienced people, might be useful.
• We talked about self-dogfooding, and that this may be inhibiting Generation 2 and up. They are not necessarily interested in building things themselves, although they want to make use of IndieWeb principles and practices.
• Several people seem to be exploring the IndieWeb without making use of IRC or the wiki. Their efforts sometimes show up in IRC thanks to Loqi. Would it be useful to reach out directly and suggest they join and use the wiki?

Comments and edits welcome.

@nicolakidsbooks it is probably part of the same phenomenon that made my bubba's chicken soup such effective medicine. That is, the exact same food can become very positive or very negative depending on when in the sickness cycle you experience it. Eat a novel food just before you feel ghastly, and you may well be put off it for life. Eat it as you're on the mend -- and the return of appetite is always a good sign -- and you'll probably ascribe magical properties to it, and turn to it whenever you're feelibng a bit better after feeling awful. Constraints on learning and all that.

In the past couple of days, prompted by Marty McGuire's write-up, I raved about the potential of Audiogram to help promote the podcast by making it easier to share audio clips to social media -- by turning them into video clips. This afternoon, having managed to get tomorrow's episode edited early, and having had to chop quite a few interesting digressions, I thought I would have a serious play.

Tl;dr: It worked. I'd show you here, but I haven't found an easy way to upload video to Known yet. If you want to see the result, you can go to Patreon right now.

Installing Audiogram was not entirely plain sailing. Marty used Docker, and so despite warnings from other IndieWeb friends, I tried the same. All went well out of the gate, but then fell at the first. Something to do with virtualbox. So I switched to Homebrew and that did the needfull. Even then, though, Audiogram wouldn't start, but the error message made it clear that I needed to update node.js and npm. That done, it still wouldn't start.

Turned out I already had a local server running, via MAMP, and that was getting in the way. Switching off that server, and all was good.

That was two days ago. Today, I tried to use it for serious, and although there were plenty of hiccups along the way, I got there.

The instructions for modifying the theme are very straightforward, and with a bit of trial and error I was able to create a background for any future clips.

Uploading the audio, inserting the caption, all that was dead simple thanks to Audiogram's editor. Actually generating the videos, though, generated error after error, and some of them scrolled through several screens. But I kept my nerve, turned to search engines and StackOverflow and eventually got there.

Some of the fixes seemed to be pure voodoo. There's an invisible file that one of the Audiogram developers suggested deleting. The first time I tried that, it worked beautifully. The second time, not so much. Nor the third. But then, it worked again, at which point I called a halt, for now; a wise decision in my opinion.

I'm looking forward to seeing whether clips will attract listeners to the podcasts in their entirety. I put the first one on Patreon because the episode is not yet public, although Patreons have received it. I'll probably use clips there as bait and see how it goes. Once episodes are public I'll send clips to Twitter and, maybe, Facebook which will, I think make it relatively easy to trace any impact. And if the whole process isn't too hard (getting to the first video uploaded took almost three hours today) then I can imagine it might be useful to promote older epsiodes too, when there is a news peg.

So, grateful thanks to Marty McGuire and WNYC.

Struggling to understand how different bits of the #IndieWeb work in WordPress, I received some very sound advice from lots of people, including this little exhortation from @chrisaldrich:

I'll admit I had to read it about 3 times before I grokked it myself, but it also was a great general and practical intro to the inherent value of microformats.

If that were what it took to grok Facebook or Twitter, would anyone beyond a small, self-selecting cadre of geeks be using them?

I thought not.

On what planet does Techcrunch live? Their report on Anchor's bid to lure podcasters from SoundCloud says n0thing about whether audio hosted there will be sharable via, say, Huffduffer, which to me was the biggest single problem with SoundCloud as a podcast host.

I would also argue that a promise by Anchor "to cut podcasters in when it starts to earn money" isn't much to go on.

But what do I know?

Blast. Just when I was reaching around to pat myself on the back for making webmentions work on the Mothership, I notice some big problems.

First, the home page is all messed up with duplicates of many things. Doesn't seem to happen on the local version, which means it is going to be tricky as all get out to solve.

Secondly, the markup on the Mothership leaves a lot to be desired. That one will be a lot easier.

There are probably others too.

#IndieWeb

Language Log -- a useful site I really enjoy -- recently wrote again about the big debate on whether language shapes, constrains or otherwise has any effect on thought. But that's not why I'm noting it here. Instead, there's the reason why they're talking about it again.

In 2010 The Econonomist hosted a big debate on Language and Thought. It used a very spiffy web-enabled platform to host the debate, and a language academic thought it would make a dandy introduction to some readings she is poutting together on the topic. Alas ...

[T]he Economist's intro page on this debate leads only to an debate archive site that doesn't include this one; and the links in old LLOG posts are now redirected to the same unhelpful location.

A source at the magazine explained:

We vastly over-designed the debate platform (and over-thought it generally, in various ways), and when we stopped running the debates that way, we stopped running that bit of the website. The old debates are now unavailable online.

Fortunately for all concerned Language Log was able to find copies in the Internet Archive. 

But if it hadn't ...

#indieweb

Marion Nestle summarises the status of gluten-free hosts and usefully links to the Vatican's circular on the matter. I actually went to look, wondering whether, maybe, there's some reason why the host cannot be gluten free. And there is, up to a point.

The bread used in the celebration of the Most Holy Eucharistic Sacrifice must be unleavened, purely of wheat ...

But that's not really a reason, is it. It's just a historical tradition. Obey, or else.

My father was devoted to cryptic crossword puzzles. He was good, too, but every now and then a clue would stump him. If I was around, he would read the clue aloud to me and, more often than not, before I'd even had time to think about it, he had solved it.

There's something about the act of saying it aloud that makes a different kind of thinking possible.

So it was last night, during the Homebrew Web Club virtual meeting in Europe. There was only me and Zegnat, much of the time, and first we explored further his comment, during the recent Indieweb Summit talk about Events, that "most of the things discussed are already available and possible with the current IndieWeb building blocks". So I fired up WithKnown and created an event for the virtual HWC and he replied and the reply was received and published. Just like that. Of course there are some things that could be improved, but it does Just Work.

Thinking more about improving things, I shamelessly took advantage by asking a lot of ill-informed questions about how to move further in the indiewebification of my presence on the web. Martijn was so helpful and patient with me, and I learned a lot. But the truth is also that just by asking the questions out loud, and having to think clearly about how to do so, I was able to see more clearly how things might work.

It's still pretty cryptic, but I'm getting there.