I've always fond RSS indispensable. As for tools creating better ways to surface stuff, Newsblur does allow you to train it, which to me seems more useful than using an algorithm to train me.

Absolutely we need more and better tools, but the basics are definitely there for the major CMSs and even more so for people who are comfortable developing their own sites.

Just wondering why @adactio's sparklines contain only 131 points on the x-axis. Maybe because a day on which nothing is posted is not recorded? Getting ready to publish my own first sparkline and want to do the right thing.

Thanks Aaron. I haven't given up yet. In fact, getting another proposal together is high on this week's agenda.

Chris Aldrich's clever solution for not drawing attention to visible but "hidden" links doesn't quite work as advertised, at least not for me in Firefox on OSX.

This post opened a whole can of worms relating to Grav's public comments plugin. Despite being authored by "Team Grav" it hasn't been touched for going on two years and just doesn't work. It sends the notification email correctly, but does not acknowledge the comment and does not save the data.

I've taken a first look at the code, and it seems like I might just be able to wrap my head around it, but I will need hours free to do that. Hours that I do not currently have.

I could disable public comments again, and just accept Webmentions (which this post is intended to test). But although Comments are rare, some are worthwhile beyond mere affirmation, so I am loathe to do that.

P.s. It also raises again the need to fix Known's HTML-escaping problem, and makes me wonder why the comment is truncated when it gets to jeremycherfas.net -- which means looking at the templates there in more detail.

Ton's post about his first edit of Open Street Map is just the nudge I need to start doing more of this myself.

A feed reader that offers control over deletion of old posts is good, I agree. A combination of age of post and number of posts per poster would be great. Like "delete all except the previous five posts per feed". Wouldn't work in MB, of course ...

Because it is an inescapable law of journalism that a simple yes/no question in a headline almost always requires a "No". And in this particular case, I do not believe blogging waned in 2018. QED.

Not a crazy idea at all. And it reminds me that I failed to link to a very impressive presentation by the very impressive David Runciman. https://www.talkingpoliticspodcast.com/blog/2018/129-democracy-for-young-people He would give 6-year olds the vote.

Malformed link to the example slideshow. Other than that, really interesting post.

@cn Re: OwnYourGram I'm all set up for watching logs in real time now, but not seeing a way to either resend or nudge OwnYourGram. Can you tell me what I’m looking for?

I don't follow Dave Winer religiously, so I don't know whether he revisited his predictions for what Twitter was or would become. I do know that @brentsimmons stopped narrating his work there less than a year after he started. YMMV.

Updated to latest HEAD of WithKnown and hoping that might solve the multiple-photo problem. Better create a multiple photo post on Instagram, then.

Another interesting microcast about stuffed animals. I have never seen twins who looked so different.

Great story, Ben. My dog used to eat stuffed animals too. And that's a wrap here.

Tiny bit peeved that for the first time this morning trails.io refused to record my activity. Coincidentally, or not, a popup informed me that my Pro subscription would end soonish. I confess I didn't hear the start countdown beeps, so I should have checked.

In a word, yes. Or no, if you think that maybe the userbase is not the people who supply the content, but the people who supply the advertisements.

Liquid | Author looks like an interesting wordification program, but those line lengths look way too long for my taste.

Maybe you'll soon be able to tackle the lack of displayed avatars in the Likes and Reposts. Good luck. I'll be following along.

Kudos to @rosenblawg and Bryce Stucki for prompting the first ever retraction and correction by CDC http://retractionwatch.com/2018/11/15/in-a-first-u-s-cdc-retracts-replaces-study-about-suicide-risk-...

I always enjoy a touch of schadenfreude -- who doesn't -- and this story makes me feel for the 37 Signals crew. My normal suspicion would be that the big publisher made all their advance back on the first printing, after which they don't actually have much further interest. 10,000 copies of a $27 book and a mid six-figure advance? Yes, that could be it.

I really like @sebsel's idea of push without notifications, as described by @adactio, but I think I would like it even more if there were some way I could _ask_ if there was anything new rather than have to visit the site. Notify myself, if you like.

Once again, thanks to @cn for alerting me to a bug that hits every time I upgrade Grav. I applied the same fix again, so with luck all will be well again.

#photo

Not very detailed is exactly what we need.

##indieweb

Terrific 99pi on the role of art and illustration in the dinosaur revolution https://overcast.fm/+DC83Lgo

Trying to remember that weird illustrated book about future evolution.

Quick thank-you to @fiona for posting the link to Mike Hapgood’s The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

So much to read and think about. And to compare with the Zettelkasten approach to tending one's garden.

Tried to Like this post, but neither Quill nor Omnibear seem able to do so. I wonder whether that is because there is a hashtag in the title? This post may help me find out.

Leaving Trieste on a glorious day; blue skies and clear. Pity it wasn’t like this the past couple of days, but all in all it was better than expected and the city is beautiful. People said Why are you going? Because it is there. And I’m glad we did.

I'd be up for an IWC in Italy.

Successfully updated WithKnown to latest master with no (apparent) ill effects. Now to see whether it permits things that it previously did not.

Managed to get my demo for IWC done with about 10 minutes to spare. Not unhappy. More quantified nonsense.

Great session on Indie Strategy has come to a close. Much to digest.

Getting ready for two days of IndieWeb in beautiful Nürnberg.

Well, this is exciting, and a little bit scary. Proposal for the book of Our Daily Bread is on its way to publisher. Now to wait. Fortunately, baking with natural leavens teaches patience.

I wish I agreed that a code of conduct shouldn't be necessary, that the law and common sense should be enough to ensure good behaviour. Alas, I think the very point that common sense is uncommon, and that there's no argument against "I thought I was behaving decently" make some kind of fallback necessary. A code of conduct is not, of course, a legal agreement or contract, but the same reasoning applies: Hope for the best, but plan for the worst.

I'll be sorry not to see Christian at Nürnberg.

@cn @lioncourt @vasta Should be fixed now, although the update and the fix exposed a couple of other “issues”.

The release of gitsync 2.0 for Grav can't come soon enough for me.

Nice post, but alas, when I liked it on my stream all it picked up was your author name as Title and the automated summary. I know it is all about the plumbing, but this is one of my chief niggles about automated syndication (by me) -- that there is so much variability in what is sent and received that it kind of makes a mockery of the process.

So I'm doing the manual thing now, to make sure this finds its way back to you, in case the other one doesn't.

#IndieWeb

Gérard Rubaud has died. A great pioneer baker. Sad news.

http://www.farine-mc.com/2018/10/r-i-p-gerard-rubaud-1941-2018.html

The value of charts -- podcast or otherwise -- as a measure of worth, as opposed to merely popularity, is deeply suspect. In all kinds of rankings, people like what other people like, so popular stuff becomes more popular. Which is why I am highly ambivalent any time I so much as glance at podcast charts. Either people like what I'm doing, or they don't, but asking whether they like my output more or less than someone else's is pointless. Mostly.

An unrelated mystery: why would someone who has their own domain in their own name not want that domain to be more popular by, you know, publishing on it?

Thanks for the link; I would not have seen it otherwise. I hope you saw David Runciman's review of *Fear* in the LRB.

So hard to decide on someone for micro.monday -- so with no further justification, I suggest @grayareas

Anyone using micro.blog through Launch Center Pro? I can generate a post. Wondering how to just open the app, if possible.

I really need to automate my little script that fetches things I've saved to reading.am, because when I do it by hand it just shoves a giant indigestible bolus into the timeline. That might mean automating MAMP too.

Thanks Aaron for your mention of my wheat and bread podcasts. You raise an interesting question about aboriginal bread in Australia. I've listened to a podcast with Bruce Pascoe and read a general piece that was awfully muddled, but I have not read his book. I have no reason not to take his claims at face value, although I also think that the freight he is adding to those claims owes as much to the general status and recent past history of aboriginal people in Australia as it does to archaeology. I will certainly be including something in the book I am working on.

Chris Aldrich's discussion of the rewarding discovery that a friend has read something that you are reading, before you see it in their feed, is spot on. It is fun. And it reminds me of two things. The most important is that I really need to get to grips with my tags, both in Zettelkasten and, perhaps even more importantly, in Pinboard.

The whole business of bookmarking, storing copies, highlighting and annotating remains a source of confusion for me. There are just too many moving parts. I quite like Chris' suggestion of making it a topic at a future IndieWeb Camp. I've got two projects on the go, either of which could be my thing in Nürnberg in a couple of weeks.

I've been a fan of Phil Gyford's since he made his own redesign of the Guardian's site. The Directory would probably be a good starting point for a good estimation of linkrot over a decade or more.

I could extract quote after quote from Colin Tudge's latest essay on agriculture, at http://www.campaignforrealfarming.org/2018/10/why-wont-the-powers-that-be-take-agriculture-seriously... but it would undermine the whole, just as a steak undermines a whole cow or an organic loaf of bread undermines the fertility-building beans needed to produce it. Just go read.

It's a great story. He told me how the UK started a trade war with France, which promptly shipped the good wines through Ireland. The Irish helped create the great wines of France. https://www.eatthispodcast.com/how-the-irish-created-the-great-wines-of-bordeaux-and-elsewhere/