Kind: Notes

short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title
Tomorrow is ten years since US Airways 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River. The miraculous confluence of circumstances that resulted in a plane full of passengers surviving such a situation is amazing.  I could talk about that for a long while, but the first thought that came to me as I pondered it tonight was the first pictures being posted on Twitter.

The “Miracle on the Hudson” was the first event I recall noticing how the news was coming from Twitter. Twitter at that point felt new, open…encouraging of developers to build on top of it as a platform. It was when I realized that real time reliable information could be delivered to me as it was happening. It changed things for my perception.

It is now 10 years later, and people are looking for a way to recapture that, in the same way people look to recapture the old neighborhood when it changes.

Went to see Mary Poppins Returns last night. I haven’t been to a movie theater in a while. The critics had mixed reviews about the sequel. I think that anything people waited 54 years for has trouble living up to their imagination. But the people who made it clearly were trying to honor the spirit of the original. It is definitely worth a look.
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.

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.

Been brainstorming about getting better location data in my posts. Right now, there are two ways location data traditionally gets added to a post.

  • Indigenous for Android can add Location from a phone, and my code does reverse geocoding to look up the location name and weather
  • On the Browser, HTML5 geolocation is used to get the location.

But the problem is that HTML5 geolocation is often wrong, and for automatic posts, there is no way but IP address location, also often wrong, to get accurate data.

The easiest way to solve is for me to run a server to store my location and query it, but I’m not ready to do that. So, I wrote a quick hack to interface with my home automation system, which does geofencing on my location. But its not ideal.

So, I have two efforts I want to do:

  1. I’m going to add a webhook so my site can receive updates from my phone and save them…so I can press a button on my phone and send the info while I’m writing, using a simple web query. I have an HTTP shortcut app for this.
  2. Look into adding a dummy location provider that always returns something.

I wrote into my site the ability to query any API for the location. Anyone have one I can use?

 

I added a hidden feature to the Post Kinds plugin for use on my site. I haven’t figure out the best way to link to it, but if you add /onthisday/12/13, the first number being the month the second the year, it will return all posts made on that day in history.

I previously added /kind/photo/2018/12 – Date(year, month, and day) archives for my post kinds. As well as the ability to pull a tag archive of some, such as..  /kind/photo/parkeologychallenge .

Available on all Post Kinds enabled sites right now.

Did a lot of little changes to the plugins and theme that run my site as part of a bigger goal to move the main feed of my site off the main page. That included adding links to the various feeds, and fiddling with the h-card/bio. Curious what people think. I don’t think I’m done by a long shot, but it is a much cleaner site than before. I have a few more things planned.