Year: 2018

Map

Simple Location Version 3.5.0 Released

Version 3.5.0 of my location plugin, Simple Location, is now out(forgot to push a fix and had to release 3.5.1 as well). Simple Location is, as time goes on, anything but Simple. It is all about location, including the weather at your location. It adds this to posts, and offers several simple widgets to show current weather and current location on the homescreen.

The new version completely redesigns the interface inside the post editor to work in both classic and Gutenberg. It doesn’t integrate with Gutenberg in any way. It relies on Gutenberg’s compatibility functionality. Because of that, the box with the Gutenberg settings is now in the sidebar, rather than below, and expands to show the various options.

The interfaces with weather APIs like DarkSky and OpenWeatherMap were reorganized to improve the quality of the return data. And all data will be stored going forward in international units. While I am a Fahrenheit and Feet user, most of the world isn’t. So everything will be converted on the fly for display for those of us in the imperial system, making it much less fragile. Flip a setting and it changes.

Simple Location uses the WordPress REST API, and there are new endpoints for frontend use. The geocoding endpoint now has an option to return the weather as part of the lookup instead of requiring a second request. New abilities to lookup by airport code are also built in, mostly for the current conditions widgets. This will be fully functional in a future version.

For those of you worried about hitting or being charged for API usage on commercial sites, I added a simple weather provider courtesy of the U.S. National Weather Service. This will only work with locations inside the United States. It finds the nearest NWS Weather Station to you and uses the current conditions from that location.

There is a new Weather Station widget, split from the other Weather Widget, which allows you to display from a specific station.

There are a lot of good features here, but there will be more in future. So try it out.

As an update to the release I did earlier this week, I’ve released version 3.5.2 of Simple Location for WordPress. It fixes a long standing visibility issue, fixes widget titles which were introduced in 3.5, and adds a variety of style changes provided by a third party submitter(Thanks Asuh.com).

In new features, I added a location provider which will, instead of looking up the browser location, will use the location in your user profile. I also added an endpoint to update the user location so I can set up a macro on my phone to trigger an update whenever I want. Finally, if you are logged in, you can now see location on private posts.

Spent some of the weekend working on removing and rewiring all of my living room. It is going to take some more time, but fortunately, I have tomorrow off for some reason. Too many extra wires though.
Replied to http://tantek.com/2018/357/t1/questioning-motivations-posting-publicly by Tantek ÇelikTantek Çelik (tantek.com)

I’ve posted a lot less, recently, and this past year.
As I’ve used social media less, many motivations for posting faded, replaced with questioning motivations for posting and interacting with posts publicly.
From a broader community, technology, and social perspective, I think we must…

I question whether or not anyone will care about what I am posting publicly and often talk myself out of it. I think the question is always why you want to share the information. But I know one of the reasons is because I hope to interact with others. The pieces for interaction…the plumbing of posting and responding, consuming with a reader are coming together. There are still some gaps to make it a smooth experience for many. I have made an effort to post more. But it is how easy I have made that which helps, and how rarely it starts a dialogue that disappoints me. The incentive for public posting is interaction as private posting is just for you.
Replied to https://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com/2018/12/24/you-begin-with-the-wrong-question-dont by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)

You begin with the wrong question. Don’t write because you want “others to care” write about what you care about and if you push content those who have similar interest will find you.

David Shanske is an encyclopedia of cool stuff! Get it out there. Set a challenge to write a 150 words a day for th…

I agree, but the question posed was why to publicly post, as opposed to private.

Using the Last Seen Function in Simple Location

One of the features in Simple Location that doesn’t get much notice is the Last Seen functionality.

Simple Location adds a section to your WordPress user profile called Last Reported Location. It allows you to set the last reported location for a given user.  It reports latitude, longitude, altitude, and whether or not the location is public, private, or protected.

In the Simple Location Settings, you can set this to update each time you publish a post if the location isn’t set as private. So it would reflect the last post you made.

This feature can be used in one of two ways. You can add the Last Seen Widget to your page and display the last place you were seen. Alternatively, this can work in reverse. You can set it so your posts will set post location from the last seen location of the author.

But, what use is that if the only way a to update the Last Seen setting is to set it from a post(creating an endless loop) or to set it manually? If you always want to always set a default location, this can be an option.

However, that doesn’t work for me. So, I built a way to update your location from an outside service.

First, you need an IndieAuth token. If you installed the IndieAuth plugin, you can get one manually under Users->Manage Token.

curl -i -H 'Authorization: Bearer FAKETOKEN' -d "latitude=30&longitude=-115&visibility=public" "https://www.example.com/wp-json/sloc_geo/1.0/user"

Here is an example of updating your location via a curl command line command. It figures out which user based on the user of the token you created.

The parameters currently used are latitude, longitude, altitude(will be automatically derived if not present), and visibility(public, private, protected).

If you are successful, it will return ‘Updated’ and automatically lookup the name of the location you are at.

So, what can you do with this feature? Keeping in mind the day, though I call today Tuesday…Let’s say hypothetically you are in the package delivery business and you want to share your location with the people who are eagerly awaiting your deliveries. You could use this to send your location from your phone to your website to keep the display updated.

Alternatively, if you don’t trust the browser on your computer to know where you are, you could rig up a shortcut on your phone to update the location so it would be accurate if you post, for example on Android with Tasker.

There is more that is needed to enhance this feature. On my list for future is Geofencing…the idea of zones inside which the location would either be set to private or display a generic ‘Home’ or ‘Work’ etc. I already have the code to calculate this, but haven’t figured out how the UI would look. This would allow much more granular controls than the global privacy default.

Leaving the WordPress Project

I’ve decided to leave the WordPress project. Not leave being a user of WordPress. but being part of the WordPress project as a contributor.

A few years ago, there was a call for Component Maintainers, and I asked what a Component Maintainer would have to do. I never quite got an answer, other than, “You are now a component maintainer.” So, for a few years, I tried to be the Pingbacks and Trackbacks component maintainer.

There is only one problem with trying to guide a WordPress component. Someone other than you has to care. Namely, anyone guiding the project overall. I’m not a Core Committer. I’m not involved with anyone in a leadership position. So, I would periodically try to get interest, but none came. So, this week, I decided to tender my resignation. I couldn’t find anyone to tender it to, so I had to do it in chat to ask to be removed.

This is something I think of emblematic of the way the WordPress project has worked for me. You can open a ticket, put a patch in, get no guidance, wait 3 years, and then be told your simple patch is being punted because no one who has commit privileges cares enough to review it. Does not really make me feel like newcomers have support. In defense of this, the project is so big and used by so many it can be easy to get lost in the shuffle.

Pingbacks and Trackbacks are a subcomponent of Comments. Comments in general have not gotten much attention of late. There hasn’t been a comment component meeting in ages, or any major feature work in this area.

But, after years of not making any progress, the other reason I’m pulling back is the direction the WordPress project is going on. For two years, the project has had development of anything not related to the Gutenberg editor pretty much frozen.

At the 2018 State of the Word, it was announced that Phase 2 would turn the Navigation menus, Widgets, and other Theme Content areas to Gutenberg blocks. Phase 3, in 2020, will focus on collaboration and workflows. and Phase 4 on multilingual sites.

I was hopeful when it was implied that the feature freeze was over and that, regardless of having a focus and a goal, other improvements could now get some energy. But, I fear after two years of Gutenberg sucking the oxygen out of everything else, that will take a long time.

I nearly resigned before, when I was contacted and told that all component maintainers should be putting their efforts toward Gutenberg or Gutenberg related matters.

So, I’ve tried Gutenberg. I’ve written some posts with it on sites. I’m not going to knock it and say that it is horrible. I think it has some positives and negatives. But it is indicative of where WordPress is going and what audience it is looking for.

I’m just hoping the project doesn’t change so much that I decide I want to stop using the software entirely. I’ve invested a lot in extending WordPress. But I can’t try to be involved in that direction when it is not the way I want to go.

The Twentysixteen Indieweb theme has been renamed. This is out of necessity as it was using the same slug(twentysixteen) as the item it was forked from. The new slug and repository name is IW26.

While I’ll be keeping the basic style of 2016, I’ll be cutting out a lot of things. I will continue to backport changes and improvements from both the _s project that 2016 is based on and the stock 2016 theme.

But the split will allow me to do some things that I think Twenty Sixteen would have done if it continued to iterate. But I’ll also be cutting out a lot of pieces that aren’t needed in the fork, including two digits of the name.