Kind: Notes

short content: a post or status update with just plain content and typically without a title

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.

 

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.

  1. A better bio of me? I never know what to say about myself.
  2. More places to find me. I was thinking of joining Instagram and posting more photos.
  3. 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

I’ve been in Portland, Oregon for the last few days attending the Indieweb Summit. This is the second year in a row I’ve attended this event. There is something inspiring about being in a room full of people who share the same interest as you. It encourages me to want to do more. Not only did I get a chance to help other people with their personal websites, I built something based on feedback given by an attendee and was able to have a basic version to demo by the end of the weekend.

And now, onward and outward.

About a year ago, I was looking to reorganize my music collection. Well, 2017 is here again and I am once again being annoyed about the data associated with my music files. No matter what tool I use, it seems keeping these things under control is a massive effort.

After three days, I have given up on directory by genre and am going solely with artist. Meanwhile, I am still trying to fix the genre settings for music players that use them. Allan Sherman is not genre Christmas. The Beatles are not Data. Someone contributed this data to a service. I’m not sure if they were not messing with me.

I have organized much of the files, but it looks like I’ll have to do an audit of all music I backed up from CD, because the auto-organizing tools seem to have reclassified a lot of material. But, for now, I’m pausing with forty-nine gigabytes worth of MP3s and a lot more tagging. Organization is frustrating.