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Took a trip on Tuesday up the Antrim Coast Road. The road is right up against the coast and Hurricane Gonzalo whipped up the winds….the wind got progressively worse throughout the day…here is the water overwhelming the highway. Still beautiful though.
The wind was blowing so hard at the Giant’s Causeway that it felt like it could blow me away. Just as this picture was taken, rain began to fall, and the combination of rain and wind made it feel like I was being pelted. Still…a beautiful place. Hope to someday go back, preferably when I can get all the way to the end. This is when I turned back. The wind practically propelled me back up the hill.
Checking in for EI105, Dublin to New York…rerouted on the flight to Boston.
Discovered the backing of my rugs had turned into fine powder, which has prompted a multi-week cleaning project.
I’ve been trying to reduce my clutter. I have boxes full of stuff I should be going through. The major thrust of the project so far involved rearranging my living room into a more open configuration. Now I’m getting into the…what do I throw out phase. I’m going to have to make some hard choices. I got rid of a broken bookcase for which Ikea no longer offers replacement parts.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to part with things?
From the classroom to the courtroom. A highly regarded Long Island teacher is suing the state over a bad grade.
So, if you are a great teacher…there is little room for growth…so you aren’t growing and thus a bad teacher…
Join us for the very first IndieWebCamp Online. IndiewebCamp Online is a one-day IndieWebCamp conducted entirely online without a physical venue.
Today I am attending IndieWebCamp 2014 Online, of which I am a co-organizer.
Why not tune in on Hangouts here?
There will be a recording later for your enjoyment.
I am planning on attending my first meeting of the Homebrew Website Club this week. This is a meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, designing their own website, in the same structure as the Homebrew Computer Club meeting, and is attended by the same group that does IndieWebCamp, which I am involved in.
Attending this event: yes
Cleaning up, I’ve discovered how many of those blue Ikea bags I have.
The Problem With and the Future Of Mentions
My involvement with the Indiewebcamp movement continues, and I want to encourage what is possible.
One of the building blocks of Indiewebcamp is the webmention.
Webmention is considered an update to pingback. Pingback was proposed in 2002 as an automated version of the Trackback concept that added link verification. The basic principle of  a Pingback is Person A posts something. Person B posts something that links to Person A’s post, which sends a pingback. Person A confirms by visiting Person B’s site to check the link exists. The pingback specification uses the XML-RPC framework as a method of transport.
Akismet, a hosted anti-spam service, has taken the measure of blocking all of them by default, because they’ve become such an avenue for spammers. We certainly think Trackback support should be discontinued, and Pingback likely behind it. It isn’t just that they’ve become an avenue for spammers…but they add no value.
Webmention is similar to the pingback specification in use, but it is carried over plain HTTP as opposed to XMLRPC. This means it is easier to implement, and a simple HTML form can send webmentions.
Most pingbacks and tracks contain title of the post that sent the trackback and ellipsed […] … […] summary text, which is of little use. No improvement of presentation is likely to go forward without addressing the underlying protocol.
The proof of concept of this is the WordPress webmention plugin, which adds support for webmentions, and its companion plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, which takes the output of any sort of linkback and turns it into human readable text, along with a profile picture. It allows for a much nicer presentation.
The way Semantic Linkbacks does human readable text is that it parses the site that has sent the mention. It counts on the site being microformats 2 complaint, although it will try to fall back on the original microformats standard and other information if needed.
I’ve thus filed a feature request with the people at WordPress, the start of my attempt to make WordPress more friendly. It is specifically for Microformats 2 support in WordPress, which would allow better parsing of WordPress sites.
With this, more sites will display markup that will allow sites receiving mentions from them to better present those mentions. Part of the reason mentions are mostly garbage is we have made them that way with neglect.
I’d like to not only see Webmentions baked into more sites, but improved presentation tools and discussion around them, and then…the Spam problem will be one worth solving. There are efforts underway to address this.
The Many and the Few was written by Woody Guthrie, who wrote many Chanukah themed songs during his time in New York City. This version was performed by Lorin Sklamberg and Susan McKeown. While the original Guthrie recording is an upbeat tempo, the two musicians have given the song a much different tone.
Eight candles we’ll burn and a Ninth one too
Every New Year that comes and goes
Chanukah concludes tonight.