Kind: Articles

During this month’s Pop-Up event, as part of the overall topic of sensitive data we were discussing the continual challenges in getting a method of having private posts on one’s site. As a community, nothing has gained enough traction for adoption.

Last summer, a conversation on the most promising at the time, AutoAuth, prompted a new contender Ticket Auth. Ticket Auth turns the relationship in the other direction.

Let’s use our favorite two example people, Alice and Bob. Alice has a post on her site which she doesn’t want to be public. For most sites, the default is public. Alice wants to share her post only with Bob.

AutoAuth doesn’t get into the idea of how Bob, or the client Bob is using, decides he wants to get access to Alice’s post. Ticket Auth, by comparison, puts the onus on Alice. Alice, when she decides on her audience, sends a ticket to those she wants to have access. Bob has to have a ticket endpoint…the place he received tickets.

The ticket is a code that is available for a limited time, that can be exchanged for a longer term token to access the information. It is, essentially, an invitation you are free to accept or ignore.

In trying to develop more, this is a good place to start. Once we start sending and receiving tickets, we can iterate on this and figure out the next questions.

• Can you ask for a ticket and how?
• How can you give the ticket or the token you redeem to your reader or other client?

But first things first. Let’s build something.

 

 

On March 31, 2021, took another family drive. This one looping around the Ashokan Reservoir.

The route started out along State Road 55 past the Neversink Reservoir, and spurring off onto Route 55A, which goes along the other side of the Roundout Reservoir.

Spurring onto Sundown Road, we headed into the Sundown Wild Forest. The 30,100-acre Sundown Wild Forest covers a large swath of the southeast Catskills, including several ridges and 10 mountains over 2,000 feet. We had planned to stop by the Peekamoose Blue Hole, but missed the turnoff and only saw it from a distance. It is a depression in the streambed rock of the Rondout Creek, a unique natural feature formed by sand and swirling gravel in an ancient whirlpool.

The route continues into the Slide Mountain Wilderness, which encompasses more than 47,500 acres and is the largest and most popular wilderness area in the Catskill Forest Preserve.  This brought us into the Town of Olive, which is inside the Catskill Park. The Catskill Park is 700,000 acres, of which 287,000 acres are owned by the state as part of the Forest Preserve.

Heading through forest, we finally reached state road 28A and the Ashokan Reservoir. The Reservior, part of the NYC water system, and is the city’s deepest reservoir at 190 feet. It was built between 1907 and 1915.

The Ashokan Reservoir, of all the ones we’ve visited in the last year, has the most walking and biking trails. This includes the 11.5 mile Ashokan Rail Trail. While I’m always disappointed at the loss of rails, this was well executed.

We stopped to eat our lunch at the Woodstock Dike Trailhead. It was windy, and it is cold this year. But at some point in the future, we may return to walk the trail further.

The return trip looped around the remainder of the Reservoir, before cutting back to Accord, NY.  When my mother was a child, she stayed at bungalow colonies in Accord.

We passed through Ellenville on Route 209 back to our starting point.

Post Kinds for WordPress version 3.5.0 has been released…though I had to quickly go back because I forgot to add a PR that was sent in.

There are no fancy features in this version. It is a major version shift because it removes and rewrites several features. Specifically

• Removes the Kind On This Day Widget, which is now in the new Tempus Fugit plugin.
• Rewrites the rewrites…all the Kind rewrites are done much much effectively. This includes things like /kind/checking/2020, for example.
• The media fragment script, which adds the timestamp to the URL when playing a video or audio file, is not enqueued on AMP loads, per a PR received.
• Uses new features introduced in 5.5 and for which I added compatibility functionality in this plugin to improve the archive page descriptions. I also rewrite and improved what they say for multi-kind archives… /kind/eat, drink or such.

In the previous version, I had added automatic rewrites for /kind/food, which displays both eat and drink, /media for the watch, listen, play, and read posts, and /reaction for bookmark, repost, like, and favorite, allowing you to archive by topic.

I have more tweaks coming in future, but always moving forward.

Simple Location 4.4.0 was released early today, and I’m already working on 4.4.1, as there are things I’ve noticed in production that I did not in testing.

The smaller items:

• Add MapQuest’s own API in addition to the existing OpenMapQuest Geo Provider, which is a hosted Nominatim.
• OpenMapQuest and LocationIQ are now descendants of the nominatim provider, as they all use the same output format.
• Add Pelias Provider. OpenRoute is a hosted instance of Pelias, so the OpenRoute class inherits its workings from this class, but allows for using a self-hosted Pelias provider, though I didn’t test that.
• Fixed an issue with the Google geo return.
• Reviewed all geolocation APIs and updated the returns.
• Standardized the country codes returned on all APIs to the ISO2 2 letter country codes.
• Standardized the addition of region codes, special casing US and Canada.
• Added a Home Country setting to allow omitting the home country from location displays. Example: If you live in the United States, it won’t say New York, NY, US. It will just say New York, NY.
• Support generating street addresses for countries where the house number appears after the street name, instead of assuming it will always be before.
• Tried to put labels on the weather form fields for accessibility.
• Added historic weather lookup to Micropub enhancements.
• Add a bulk action to lookup and add location(private by default) for multiple posts.

The biggest piece is the introduction of the location taxonomy. This is different from the proposed venue taxonomy. Location is a coarse location, whereas venue is a fine location.

The new Location taxonomy is designed with three levels. Country, region, and locality. Locality is the city, village, or town. So, the system is not designed to go down more than 3 levels. By default, this allows for archive pages like /location/us/ny/new-york for all posts in the locality or city of New York. Or /location/us/ny for all posts in the region or state of New York.

When you look up any location, it should automatically create the terms reflecting that location. This is where the problem comes in. Despite my attempts to standardize the returns from the reverse geolocation lookup, not only will the returns vary by provider(if you switch), but the return will not always match what you’d expect.

For example, Rome sometimes shows up as the Italian, Roma. So, I am already working to try to improve matching different versions of the same location. But this may require some manual action(merging, marking, etc not sure yet) to garden. But you have this same problem when trying to organize your digital music collection, or anything you categorize. The goal is to make the need as infrequent as possible.

What might be next? Other than 4.4.1, which will address some of the more obvious issues I discover as I use the feature myself(or from others), possible features related to this include:

• Displaying the location taxonomy instead of the location text.
• Functions to improve the archive experience, possibly if the theme is aware

Curious to see opinions as people have them.

This is a bit overdue as the release was pushed a few days ago.

IndieAuth 3.6.0 was started after the latest refresh of the IndieAuth spec(summary of the changes to the spec here). It actually made things a lot simpler, by eliminating many complexities and fixing some minor issues.

My Simple Location plugin offers the option of several different reverse geocoders. All of the providers, like the weather providers, standardize the output into a modified array based on microformats properties.

• street-address – house/apartment number, floor, street name
• extended-address – additional street details
• locality – city/town/village
• region – state/county/province
• postal-code – postal code, e.g. ZIP in the US
• country-name – full name of country or country code.

The problem is, returns are not so consistent.  Not only will the same coordinates not always produce consistent results, but the fields always change. So, the logic to map to the above properties isn’t always consistent or easy to write.

The second part of the problem is display. How to actually display the information. This isn’t the same as traditional address issue, this is how to display it in context on posts.

For example, for the White House…

• • Nominatim – White House, 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, Washington, D.C., 20500, United States
  • Mapquest – 1602 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, District Of Columbia, United States
  • OpenMapquest and LocationIQ – White House, 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Golden Triangle, Washington, District of Columbia, 20500, United States of America
  • Google – 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, District of Columbia
  • HERE – 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500-0005, United States, Washington, District of Columbia, United States
  • Bing – 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20006
  • Geonames – District of Columbia, District of Columbia, United States
  • OpenRoute – 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC, USA, White House Grounds, Washington, District of Columbia, United States

Reverse geocoding…taking coordinates and returning a location name, will never be 100% consistent, But I decided I needed to do better than this, and am working to adjust to be more consistent. Unfortunately, with 9 different providers, it takes a while to figure out what I’m going to do. Redundancy is good, but has its challenges.

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.

Since shortly after I returned in March, I’ve been mostly isolating myself. I haven’t gone to my place of business since early April(working remotely). I hopped from my apartment to hiding at my family’s home in upstate New York, and now I’m hiding out at my parent’s apartment.

During all this, I have not left the house without wearing a mask, fitted over my nose and mouth. I find masks uncomfortable to wear. Even in cases where I pulled it down outside, when no one but my immediate family was around, if anyone else approached, I pulled it back up.

From others, however, I’ve seen a casual attitude toward the wearing of masks and the downplaying of this. Forcing people to wear a mask during a pandemic is an acceptable infringement on their personal liberties. Society in general is a shared consensus to agree on limitations of personal freedom. If you want absolute freedom, to do anything and everything, we call that anarchy.

I tend to take a centrist point of view to most things. So, let’s accept that some people do not want to wear masks and do not believe in it, and others do.

If you fall into the maskless category, and you encounter someone who is choosing to wear a mask, you can:

• Approach them or otherwise infringe on their six foot bubble as if nothing was happening.
• Give them the six feet of distance their mask indicates they want from you
• If you carry one, pull your mask up till you are out of their presence.

Out of these three categories, the only one I object to is the first. So, you don’t believe in wearing a mask….respect those who do. This is what we call courtesy and decency. It applies regardless of belief. You can’t claim ignorance of social distancing as a thing in the current environment.

I personally believe that wearing a mask protects both parties. It isn’t a 100% solution, but what is?

So, if I want to avoid people who won’t respect my beliefs, I could either constantly be vigilant any time I leave my safe zone, which I am…or, as some of those people would suggest, if I don’t like it, I can just lock myself up till this is over.

I’m looking forward to the time where my face can be seen freely in public. However, until then…kindly put on a mask(over the nose and mouth) any time you are within six feet of me, or make an effort to give me space.

On Wednesday, went to Lion Country Safari, which is a drive-thru safari park and a walk-through park in Palm Beach County. Due to the pandemic, only the drive-thru portion is open right now.

Lion Country Safari dates from 1967. The park consists of over 1000 animals in seven sections. Most animals can come directly up to the car, the exception being the lions, who were separated from the public by a fence in 2005 because visitors would not follow instructions and keep their doors and windows closed.

There were previously five other Lion Country Safaris operated by them, but the last closed in the 90s. There are several other companies offering a similar product in various parts of the US. It seems like a great business in the pandemic. You never have to touch anyone.

I was a bit surprised that their solution for contactless payment is eventbrite, but it worked out.

 

 

In a normal non-pandemic situation, my parents would spend the winter in their place in Florida, and come to New York in the spring/summer. They would move freely. They came to New York early in the pandemic in March. However, with the weather in New York turning, they wanted to return to Florida.

Unwilling to travel by plane, they opted for ground transit to Florida. the best option for this, without having to drive the roughly 1300 miles, is the Auto Train.

The Auto Train runs from Lorton, VA, near Washington DC to Sanford, FL which is near Orlando. It makes one rest stop for crew at the halfway point in Florence, SC. There are no passenger stops.

One train operates in each direction daily, leaving its terminus at the same time.

The Auto Train is unique for Amtrak in that it contains car carriers where you can bring your automobile. This worked perfectly for our needs. We drove from New York to Lorton and gave over our car.

The train has a maximum capacity of 320 vehicles. In order for you to buy a ticket, you must be bringing a car. Otherwise, there are other Amtrak trains.

To avoid traffic, we picked November 26…Thanksgiving Day. According to the announcement made, the train had 47 coach passengers, 141 sleepers, 114 vehicles and no motorcycles. So, about a third full.

My previous time on the Auto Train was May 10, 2010, from Sanford to Lorton. During that trip, where I wanted to experience the Auto Train, I’d been in a coach seat. As the whole purpose of this trip was isolation, this was the first time I got to experience a bedroom.

Amtrak offers roomettes, which do not include a bathroom and shower(it’s down the hall), and bedrooms, which include a combination bathroom shower. We opted for the bedroom so we could isolate.

Except when the attendant helped us set up the beds, and when we received our meals, we did not leave the room for the entire trip. As of this January, coach passengers do not have meals included in their fare, however, those who have rooms do and they will bring the food to your room.

Taking the train is an experience that I encourage. The advantage of the Autotrain is this….you bring your car along. On arrival in Sanford, we waited till they offloaded our car…wiped it with disinfectant, sprayed Lysol, and went on our way.

During the pandemic, Amtrak is requiring mask wearing at all times in their stations and on their trains, unless you have a room, in which case you may remove your mask in there only. They claim to clean the train thoroughly between uses, however we took no chances and disinfected it ourselves.

The last Amtrak train I’d taken before this was from San Diego to Anaheim in September 2019. Prior to that, Baltimore to New York City. I think Amtrak is best suited to the medium-distance journeys of 5 hours or less. But a long distance train trip is a unique adventure.