In the latest , 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
The lack of threading at micro.blog saves me a lot of time in the morning. Time that I then spend going to my site to write this because posting on iOS is broken for me and the error message offers not even the slightest clue.
Next stop, Edinburgh 🛫🎧
I wonder how easy it is to count the corpses of yeast and lactobacillus cells in a baked loaf?
https://www.sourdough.co.uk/can-real-sourdough-identified/
Is there any way to get more helpful diagnostic information out of iOS app when it fails to post? Error Sending Post doesn't help much.
Also, why don’t @mentions from the OSX app give clickable links?
I was going to recommend @lioncourt for Micro Monday, but I’m making a last minute switch to @belle for her open explanation of an accident that could have happened to any of us.
Well, not me, because I'm not a developer, but, you know.
Listened to the first episode of Bundyville, because it was on 99PI. Instant subscribe. Very fine narrative podcast about an important subject.
Twitter weirdness. Ability to follow links seems to have changed. In Safari, with mu-block, I can click on a link shared directly by someone, but not on a link in a retweet. Is this a change in behaviour, or something I simply never noticed before? Or both.
#indieweb
Far and away the weirdest nagware I've ever seen. A website distributing PDFs of academic papers requires me to wait 120 seconds until I can download, but the clock ticks only while I am on that site. I can't go and do anything else. Of course, I can also "donate".
Terrific. FB Just banned a friend's link to my latest podcast episode (Brown v. White; Our Daily Bread 23). Twice, for reasons unspoken that I can only imagine. They did not ban my link to the same post.
Managed to find some time to join [virtual Homebrew Website Club](https://indieweb.org/events/2018-08-22-homebrew-website-club) today. If you're interested in #indieweb and have a moment, come and join us.
After enjoying a lovely day off yesterday, I've been paying for it today. Haven’t been away from the desk for more than about half an hour at a time. Mind you, most of that was to make a bread, and now that I’m done, I think I’ll go for a walk while the microbes do their thing.
How I wish Prince had written a song called Purple Grain.
Episode 01 of my contribution to Dog Days of Podcasting is up. [The Abundance of Nature](https://www.eatthispodcast.com/our-daily-bread-01/)
I'm going to be exploring the history of wheat and bread every day in August.
Lots of people learning the lessons of the 2008 financial crash ten years on. It cannot be said too often, but Garrett Hardin foresaw the appeal of "privatise the profits, commonise the costs" many, many years ago.
The resurrection of blogrolls and webrings continues apace. I wonder whether this post will get me included.
Yes, it can be boring to read things in grey and white with a little bit of blue, but if all you're looking for is something worth investigating in more detail (which I am) then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. And in some RSS readers (like Newsblur, the one I use now) I do have the option of seeing the story as the author intended, more or less.
TFW when you realise it has been way too long since you did the human cron job thing.
It says here https://indieweb.org that "The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the 'corporate web'", but that's just a start and of course there is more to it than that. More a state of mind than a thing, I'd say.
Finished reading: Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, ISBN: 9780571204687
Quick reminder that a 3-hour [virtual Homebrew Website Club](https://indieweb.org/events/2018-06-13-homebrew-website-club) will be starting in about 22 minutes. We use [Mumble](https://indieweb.org/Mumble) to chat about anything and everything #IndieWeb. See you there.
Great explanation and interesting change, though I personally don't like such a dark background. One thing I noticed, the blue of the date-as-permalink in comments is really intense, to the point of distraction. For me.
A little problem with Known's Micropub endpoint
3 min read
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.
2018-06-11
1 min read
It's all about power. Where the Dublin Gastronomy Symposium leads, the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking and the Agricultural History Society follow.
Very happy to report that exist.io now includes browsing past calendar months.
Excellent news; thanks. Now to find all those hard-coded class names ...
I feed @WithKnown into micro.blog and POSSE to Twitter just fine. Known also makes it easy to feed micro.blog only certain kinds of post because the RSS is easy to adapt.
Oh rats. I thought I could use Omnibear to post a photo, but it doesn't seem to do that.
So many fascinating bits of data in Apple's Podcast Analytics beta, but no easy way to extract it for further processing, as far as I can tell.
Anyone using OwnYourGram with the latest master of @WithKnown? Since updating, my photos no longer come back to my site. Everything else is improved, but no actual image. I have no idea why this is happening, and would welcome clues.
2018-05-27
1 min read
@phoneboy kindly shared a 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.
Quick reminder. Virtual Homebrew Website Club to talk about anything IndieWeb-related will start in about 40 minutes, using Mumble. Details at https://indieweb.org/events/2018-05-23-homebrew-website-club
People of Europe's timezones!
There will be a [virtual Homebrew Website Club meeting](https://indieweb.org/events/2018-05-23-homebrew-website-club) this evening.
Feel free to drop in and discuss anything IndieWeb.
TFW you realise your human-powered cron job hasn't been human powered for too long.
2018-05-21
1 min read
A couple of days ago, @phoneboy mentioned the fun he had
I
Now Phoneboy
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?
Test post from Omnibear in Firefox.
2018-05-17-02
1 min read
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 . They do a tip-top job of explaining for people less knowledgeable than they are, and the audio quality is very acceptable.
2018-05-17
1 min read
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.
2018-05-07
1 min read
I think I just need to remind myself and others of the natural progresion of things.
- Everything not forbidden is permitted.
- Everything not permitted is forbidden.
- Everything not forbidden is compulsory
That is all. #indieweb
Data Peddling Scum is the name of my new Grunge tribute band.
We're live now on Virtual HWC https://indieweb.org/events/2018-05-02-homebrew-website-club#Virtual_European_Time - Why not join us?
If you would like to know more about the IndieWeb beyond micro.blog and WP, why not join us for the [virtual Homebrew WebsiteClub](https://indieweb.org/events/2018-05-02-homebrew-website-club#Virtual_European_Time) this evening at 17:30 CEST?
Huge congratulations to @nprDanCharles, @mgodoyh and everyone else at The Salt for their well-deserved #jbfa
2018-04-27
1 min read
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?
I really do not understand the nofilter tag on Instagram. Is it really that meaningful to point out that you just snapped a shot and didn't mess with it later?
Me neither! Came up yesterday in a MOOC I am studying. It's the little things ...
You could do worse than look at @WithKnown for a reasonably simple solution. It isn't quite as easy to use, but it isn't that difficult either.