Won again.
David Shanske
- New York New York United States
My day job is in training for an airline. I also develop Indieweb WordPress plugins so that others can take control of their online identity.
I won. This is using the 1910 expansion pack of Ticket to Ride USA. Also my first Play post.
As I’ve been backfilling weather on old posts on my site, I’ve also been fixing photo markup so that old photos will show up in the photo grid I added not long ago at /kind/photo. You can also look by year by adding the year to the end of the URL(/2020 or such). May add some links.
Simple Location 4.3.0 Released
Simple Location 4.3.0 has been released. This continues on the work released last week in 4.2.2.
Measurements in Simple Location have been stored in scientific units(celsius, meters, etc) since 2019, with an option to display in imperial on the frontend. With 4.2.2, the admin will now show in imperial units if you set the setting. This can be overridden on any page by adding the ?sloc_units=metric or ?sloc_units=imperial to the end of the URL.
4.3.0 introduces Meteostat and Visual Crossing as weather providers. Visual Crossing is the first provider that not only offers 1000 queries per day, but pay per use at a fraction of a cent after that. All of the other providers offering a free tier require a monthly fee after that point that well exceeds justification for the amount of posts even the most dedicated poster makes.
Meteostat is a historic only provider. It offers not only an API(key required), but the ability to download all data on a specific weather station(which requires no key). A future version of the plugin could download and cache the weather stations you use the most. For now, only the list of stations is bundled with the plugin, which it uses to determine the closest station.
The National Weather Service, the Met Office(UK), and the Custom Station plugin also cycle through lists of stations to find the closest one.
Expect more enhancements in the weather station category, with so many different ways to get weather stations data.
4.3.0 introduces historic weather support, for providers who offer this without a premium account. This includes Dark Sky(if you still have an API key), Meteostat(which only offers historic data), and Visual Crossing. If someone is paying for premium service on OpenWeatherMap and wants to talk me into adding this, send me a note.
The Fallback Weather provider feature introduced in 4.2.0, which allows for a secondary provider, will be checked if the primary provider does not offer historic weather.
Please remember, somewhere on your site, to provide attribution to the services you use. I’m off to backfill weather on my old posts.
Walking through the park.
https://boffosocko.com/2020/12/25/automating-syndication-of-reply-contexts-in-twitter-cards-using-ogp-metacrap-and-plugins-in-wordpress/ (boffosocko.com)
I think I understand what you’re working towards Chris and it’s very interesting. One of the problems I have with the current Post Kinds plugin…
But Frank, it already does this. If there is no mf2, it tries JSON-LD and OGP.
First time at Dania Beach. Interestingly, about 24 hours after these pictures were taken, a plane made an emergency landing right here.
Refbacks for WordPress Version 2.0 Released
The Refbacks plugin is now updated after nearly two years. The plugin doesn’t need much attention, it always worked it’s based on the Webmentions plugin, and we’d done some work over there that I brought over, including a new retrieval class, improved type support, etc.
The way I implemented Refbacks is essentially this. When someone visits a page on my website, and it has a referer string, it forks into the background a process to retrieve that page, verify it does link, and creates a refback comment. Semantic Linkbacks parses microformats and enhances that comment. It excludes links on the same site, as these are handled already by webmention or even pingback.
One of the things I’ve used this for in the past is to show mentions of my site on the Indieweb wiki.
Last month, Herb Solow passed away at the age of 89. Solow was well known as the executive in charge of production of the original Star Trek. I recently found this picture of the time I met him and Bob Justman in Boston in 1997 when they were doing a signing of their book, Inside Star Trek.
WordPress allows for custom archive templates. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to change the archive for my photo posts to show them in a photo grid. So, I’ve now done that at /kind/photo. You have to click the photo to see the full context, but I like the presentation of all photos I’ve posted. This does not include photos in other types of posts, but it’s probably the most visual item I’ve put out in a while. I hope it causes me to post more photos.
Waikiki Beach Hotel, Sunny Isles, Florida
For the 80s and into the early 90s, my family would spend time at the Waikiki Motel in Sunny Isles, Florida. The entire stretch of beach, once littered with 3-4 story hotels, is now filled with high rises, which block the view of the beach from the street and cast a shadow onto it.
I have many family photos of time at this place.
For the last day of Chanukah, I dug into the archives for this polaroid.
Remembering Six Flags Atlantis
As part of my continual nostalgia series, today I’m continuing my Florida memories by remembering Six Flags Atlantis, below brochure is from my own collection.
Six Flags Atlantis was a water park that existed in the 1980s, and ultimately was demolished after damage from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.
Where the park once sat is a series of retail shopping establishments.
