Yesterday was our 23rd wedding anniversary. Wow, 23 years!
Unfortunately, just as we were planning on heading out, our car decided it would be a good time for the accelerator pedal sensors to fail rendering it immobile.
Honesty
Going over old posts from the #write365 project I noticed a thread running through a number of them: honesty.
- Writing for self gives an honesty of thought and opinion.
- Writing tired, when the guard is down, gives a deeper honesty we might normally try to hide.
Liked: Unfollowing Everybody…
“At this point, there’s nothing novel about noticing that social media is often toxic and stressful. But even aside from those concerns, our social networks are not things we generally think of as requiring maintenance or upkeep, even though we routinely do regular updates on all the other aspects of our digital lives.”
I had to come home early from work thanks to a migraine. Nothing terribly unusual about that as I’m a sufferer but I did notice a return to my old/usual aura rather than the colour-draining dizziness of recent months.
So, England are finally out of the World Cup.
Still, I’ve got Croatia in the sweepstake at work and am guaranteed a prize. Takes the edge off a bit.
People first
I’ve said before about liking to get to know the person behind the words and not seeing someone as “social units” in a timeline – well, below is a perfect example.
The team at Betamagic (those behind News Explorer) have replied saying they’ll look at properly supporting title-less posts so I’ve given them mine and Dave Winer’s as examples.
Now that’s service. Thanks guys!
One thing I’ve noticed about News Explorer is that it doesn’t completely support title-less items.
If the item title tag is present but blank it’s handled fine but if the item title tag doesn’t exist – which is perfectly legitimate – it says “No title.”
Liked: Relentlessly Turning Input Knobs To 0 – Feld Thoughts…
“Basically, I’ve turned down the input knobs on almost all real-time social media inputs to 0.”
Having deleted my accounts (with the exception of micro.blog and even that is hardly registering) I appreciate the difference this makes.
I found the issue. Line 80 of \includes\class-linkbacks-notifications.php in the Semantic Linkbacks plugin should be:
if( ! Linkbacks_Handler::get_type)( $comment ) ) {
The :: is missing.
It looks like the Semantic Linkbacks plugin might be at fault. Issues raised.
Over the past couple of days I’ve noticed a problem when posting a comment on the blog.
The comment is submitted but you are not directed back to the post. No follow-up actions occur either such as sending a webmention where appropriate or mailing me to advise that a comment has been submitted.
Obsessions and change
It’s been hot, at least it’s been hot for us in the UK. An uncomfortable, muggy heat that really drains you.
I want to blame this for not writing much lately but I know it’s only one factor. There has been an apathy stemming from other matters (read work) and a change in focus.
I decided to make the switch from Feedbin to News Explorer – thanks to Jon for piquing my curiosity. It’s an initial investment to buy the app for both Mac and iOS but it uses ICloud to sync so doesn’t need you to pay for a third party service.
📚 I finished Before the Storm by Christie Golden on the way to work this morning. It took just over three days worth of commuting to finish.
As with Durotan and the Warcraft movie novelisation, the previous Warcraft books by her I devoured, she writes wonderfully empathetic characters from both sides of the WoW divide – both Alliance and Horde.
Vouch
David Shanske wrote about a brainstorming session held at Indieweb Summit 2018 about implementing “Vouch” – a trust/anti-spam extension for webmention.
The idea of Vouch is that people create a list of webmention senders they trust and make this available to others. If a domain is in a published trusted list then it has been “vouched for” meaning it’s safe to accept and approve webmentions from that domain.
It’s been so easy to fall back into the “gamer” mindset, getting absorbed in a virtual world (just one more quest) and it’s suddenly 2am and you should be going to bed.
Maybe I’m being unfair, maybe things can’t be fixed. Human beings have such capacity for creativity but have also always had an equal capacity for cruelty. We might like to think we have evolved beyond this but perhaps it is our baser instincts in control – survival of the fittest, by any means necessary.
“On this day” reminded me that it was 10 years ago that I wrote about “the 5 C’s of social media” – arguably my most successful post in the history of the blog.
Liked: Beacons of virtual proximity…
“In an era where our closest friends don’t live on our street, much less our city or country, these little, oft-overlooked and sometimes-subtle markers of proximity are small lifesavers. They tell us that though we may be far away in distance, we are close in spirit and in fondness. They tell us that we are part of a community that will be there for us in our times of need. They tell us that people love us, they notice us, and that by noticing them, we send them our love, too.”