Some people asked why I am actually in Manila. Simple answer…business. So, while I have explored a bit on my off time, I’m here to accomplish a goal. This is actually my first trip to this part of the world. Never been this far east(or west, which I flew to get here).
Year: 2017
Map
A Jewish grave marker at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. Time will not dim the glory of their deeds.
The Memorial is 152 acres, with 17,097 headstones, 164 of them are Stars of David like this one. The memorial includes 36,286 names of soldiers missing in action, and 25 ten foot maps portraying important World War II Pacific campaigns. The cemetery is the largest in the number of graves and the names recorded on the walls of those missing. The government of the Philippines granted the land in perpetuity with charge or taxation.
On my way to Manila, I stopped off in Portland, Oregon for the annual Indieweb Summit. It was actually the other way around. I was going to Portland, and it was suggested I should just keep going. This Summit was better than last years, which was a great event. Hosted by Mozilla Portland,
I got to attend the Leadership Summit, for community leaders(apparently I am one), where we agreed we needed to meet more often to organize our efforts…and got some Indieweb stickers. Despite my misgivings, we now have an Indieweb WordPress chat room as part of the Indieweb suite of chat rooms. So far, it has kept the WordPress stuff in one place.
My attachment to WordPress and involvement in the community seems to have made me an ‘authority’ on the current state of how Indieweb concepts apply to WordPress(which, by the way, runs this site). And we have accomplished a lot this month…with many Indieweb plugins seeing updates.
I always feel inspired to work on my Indieweb projects after meeting inspiring people, like the great Ryan Barrett, who maintains Bridgy, the software that translates likes and comments on Facebook and Twitter into comments on my site. It’s fortunate that I have nothing to do but eat, sleep, and work in Manila, because it has given me a chance to continue that inspiration.
Here’s hoping for more Indiewebcamps. Anyone interested in one in New York?
For three years now, on and off, I’ve been working on a plugin for WordPress called Simple Location. You can see it on many of my posts(View All Location Posts here). It adds a location and optionally a map to posts on my site. It also will change the displayed time and timezone on those posts to match the location(this post is set for Manila, for example, instead of the default of New York).
It is the most mainstream of the plugins I’ve developed, but has only 30 active installations, which suggests location may not be important to that many people who have WordPress sites, or I haven’t made the plugin good enough. I’m working on the latter now. Anyone have any suggestions?
After 3 weeks, finally starting my 21 hour journey home.
First flight complete. Next plane is a 747. Hope I have a nicer seat.
Only one more flight, a two hour jump to New York and I am home.
Welcome to LaGuardia Airport, where I don’t care what the local time is as long as I am local to it.
I’m attending the Sunday Hack Day only of Indiewebcamp NYC 2017. Disappointed to miss the sessions, but at least I’ll be there for part of it.
IndieWebCamp NYC 2017 is happening this weekend, 9/30 and 10/1. I will be there on Sunday only, as I cannot be there the day before. Sunday is Hack and Create day. Hoping to help some people set up their websites if I can, and maybe improve my own.
Looking forward to seeing Tantek Çelik, who has been a fixture at every IndieWebCamp I have attended, and Marty McGuire, who I met at the last IndieWebCamp in NYC. The rest of the attendees I’m not as familiar with. Should be a fun day, following Yom Kippur, which is substantially less fun.
There have been times on this site where I have not posted something because it was too technical, or I haven’t distributed it to its normal locations because of the audience. So, I’ve arranged to contribute those topics and thoughts to another site, Gadget Wisdom.
So, when I want to talk about my latest tech obsession, and I do have a few, I’ll be doing it over there. Feel free to subscribe. The site already had it’s own Twitter, Facebook, and other feeds as well.
For those of you Indieweb-inclined…I made sure it supports webmentions and such, and will likely add more of that in the future.
Counting down the minutes till fast time. I know I’m not supposed to focus on that…but I really do not enjoy that aspect of the holiday. To anyone else who is fasting, have an easy one.
H-Card is a standard for publishing information about people and organizations online. I have done some work on creating H-Card tools for WordPress.
So, today, I’m going to take some opinions on this and crowdsource some input, since I’m at IndieWebCamp NYC. What belongs on my page in regards to details? Here are some examples.
- A better bio of me? I never know what to say about myself.
- More places to find me. I was thinking of joining Instagram and posting more photos.
- I have my resume up on the site somewhere, but that is different than a bio.
So, any ideas? I’m not good at self-promotion and I know I’m opening myself up by asking the web as a whole.
I haven’t logged onto AOL Instant Messenger in a conventional way in some time. I’ve been keeping it logged in through a proxy.
Oath, the successor to AOL, announced that the platform will shut down for good on December 15th.
But today, I shut my instance down. Goodbye two decades of an online identity. Let’s just take a moment there to think about that. The friends and connections made on this service by not just me, but others. We may have moved on to other places, I may have lost touch with some, and migrated to new services with others, but I still think about them now and then.
You can usually find me on Hangouts…until they shut that down, or several alternative platforms.
In preparation for a trip I’m starting tomorrow, I’ve joined Instagram and Swarm, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think, and for the reasons you might think. I’ve spent some time building tools which I use on my site(although not enough), to add location awareness, among other things.
But obviously, professional teams of programmers who spend all day working on things can probably do a better job than I can, so I am taking advantage of tools that automatically send posts made on these services to my site. Many of the people who use my code have pointed out it doesn’t work perfectly with those tools and this gives me an excuse to try and fix it, while posting more to my site.
Chris Aldrich, a user of more social networks and tools than I can shake a stick at(if you don’t believe me, click here), suggested I think of those services as highly customized mobile apps that post to my site. Let’s see how that works out. However, if you aren’t interested in following me on my website, you can continue to follow me elsewhere, including the two latest places. Anything you say on those sites should be pushed back here.