Spammers say the sweetest things:

Jeremy cherfas is the well known writer of this century. He is famous for the suppleness that are still like by many of the people. We should also read the blogs about him to gain knowledge for our own self.

New podcast episode out now, tasting the delights of Nürnberger lebkuchen, at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/lebkuchen/

Meetup location:
* 41.802416°, 12.617251° or
* N41°48.145', E12°37.035' or
* N41°48'8.7", E12°37'2.1"
DJIA adjusted for location east
of the 30W longitude

For the first time since I started checking, today's geohash location is actually somewhere I could easily have reached.

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.