The Definitive Location
A Westchester County family had gathered for a traditional Passover meal, but carbon monoxide was an uninvited guest and 15 people ended up in the hospital.
Unclear who will benefit from polemical decision.
The first underwater tunnel ever built opened in London in 1843, paving a path for cities everywhere to expand beneath rivers and oceans. Today, the tunnel’s grand entrance hall reopens to the public for the first time in 147 years. The underground event space is part of an engineering museum that celebrates the famous family who built the tunnel—and much of London.
A Film by Michael Levine In Theaters April 20th from Menemsha Films Synopsis: As it has since 1925, the Streit’s matzo factory sits in a low-slung tenement b…
Over the last few years, as the smartphone has become more popular, we’ve moved from being excited about notifications to being worried about notification overload. Companies are hoping to get more data on us so they can tailor their interactions with us. We install analytics on our websites to determine how many visitors we get and what they did on our sites. At its simplest level, a linkback is a way of having a site(the sender) notify another site(the receiver) when it links to it. It sounds like something we would want to know and would have many potential uses.
WordPress has two built in linkback protocols: Trackback and Pingback. To many users, they seem like the appendix of WordPress. People don’t care about them until they are exploited by bad actors. There is a newer protocol, the first linkback protocol to be accepted as a draft specification from the W3C, the main standards organization for the Internet, called Webmention.
Webmention improves upon the previous protocols. It uses an HTTP POST request to send two parameters…the source and target URL. By comparison, trackback, which also uses HTTP, only sends the source URL and does nothing in its WordPress form to verify the trackback is legitimate. Pingback, like webmention, sends both source and target, but it uses XML-RPC as opposed to a POST request. XML-RPC has had some controversy around it as well. There are also several practices that are recommended by the Webmention specification that would make an implementation more robust than the implementations of Trackback and Pingback.
WordPress has a longstanding reputation of commitment to backward compatibility and isn’t going to flick the switch and remove pingback and trackback code from WordPress Core so easily, with or without a replacement. It makes sense to make improvements to the older protocols concurrently with adopting webmentions, although it would also be a good idea to consider gradually deprecate the older protocols in favor of webmentions. Trackbacks have no source validation built into WordPress as it was not part of the original specification. The pingback code could use some love. However, with some refactoring, new webmention code could be used to update the older pingback/trackback code as well. This would create a better linkback system overall.
Even if webmention is a better delivery system for linkbacks than its predecessors, no one but a developer cares about protocols. People care about what it can do for you. All of the protocols converge in one place. Once you know a site has linked to you, what do you do with that information? That is where the exciting parts come in and where WordPress falls flat.
If one person would like to speak up in favor of the presentation of […]Useless Context. […], I’d love to hear it. The burden of presentation and use in a linkback relationship goes to the receiver and can be infinitely extensible. What WordPress lacks is a good base presentation for people to enhance and some innovative examples from the community of usage. If you can parse a page of HTML, you can come up with richer content and relationships by marking up the elements of a post with Microformats. WordPress already has some microformats embedded in most WordPress sites and supporting in many themes, and there are other efforts that can be made to better improve this side of things. But there are limitless possibilities, for example:
So, why not do all of this with an API? We have a new one coming into WordPress…and that’s a great thing I’m fully in favor of. But reading content from a website using an API creates a burden on both sides of the relationship. I have to write an API and you have to learn how to use it if you want to interface with my site. Why shouldn’t your website be your API?
If you are interested in trying webmention support, there is a basic plugin for WordPress. There is even a second plugin that uses Microformats2 plus linkbacks to generate richer comments. Both of these can be used to develop the more robust implementation that would be required for WordPress Core. For more information on how people have been using webmentions, visit IndieWebCamp.
Libraries often put me in a rhapsody, but never quite like this!
A provocative new book that argues required algebra has become an unnecessary stumbling block that forces millions to drop out of high school or college.
Insert Comment with Meta
wp_insert_comment has a modification that allows comment meta to be added to a comment at the time it is created.
// If metadata is provided, store it.
if( isset($commentdata['comment_meta'] ) &&is_array($commentdata['comment_meta'] ) ) {
foreach($commentdata['comment_meta']as$meta_key=>$meta_value) {
add_comment_meta($comment->comment_ID,$meta_key,$meta_value, true );
}
}
do_action( 'comment_post', $comment_ID, $commentdata['comment_approved'], $commentdata );
Music video for “Shed a Little Light” produced in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
The hardest thing about digital music for me is metadata. Being able to play music of a specific genre, group, etc. is useful, as well as my interest on the year of the song released. Genre is a particular issue because poorly selected genres make it more difficult to find the type of music you are in the mood for.
In researching this issue now, I came across the advice of Dan Gravell, who maintains a commercial product named Bliss that he wrote to solve his own digital music collection problems and sells. In his article, MP3 genres: one size does not fit all, he comments that a problem for owners of large MP3 collections is out of control genres. The solution he suggests mirrors what I was thinking. Come up with the genres you will allow in your collection and make sure all your music complies with this list. Here’s his starting list, compiled from the common elements of four different online music databases.
The Fundamental Music Genre List
If you try to apply a list like this to a collection, you end up with a lack of balance. I, for example, have no Electronic in my collection that I know of. This is when you need to split your genres. What some would call sub-genres get promoted to better divide your music. You can then merge categories. For example, in my collection, Blues and Jazz would have to merge as I don’t have a large collection of either.
In addition to loading genres into metadata, they are a part of my filesystem organization. I still organize music into a directory structure of Genre -> Artist -> Album. Now, the simplest thing to do would be to eliminate that and go to Artist -> Album, but estimates are I have several hundred albums and artists. And multi-artist compilations seem to confuse it more.
By organizing it, I am hoping to get into the areas of my collection I forget I have and listen to more diverse playlists. It’s going to be a while though. At least I’m not alone in my problem.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Mount Hertzl National Cemetery is the equivalent of Arlington for the United States. The cemetery contains not only people who sacrificed their lives for the state of Israel, but state leaders. The Presidents and Prime Ministers of Israel, as well as Speakers of the Knesset can be buried here. Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem from 1965-1993 is also buried here.
Near the cemetary is Yad Vashem, established in 1953 and contains the Holocaust History Museum, the Children’s Memorial, the Hall of Remembrance, and several other exhibits. My photos at Yad Vashem were limited. Photos are not permitted in several parts of the complex out of respect for the subject.
A new museum was dedicated in 2005 which consists of 10 exhibition halls, and thus the Yad Vashem I had visited in 1999, and my father had visited in the 1970s had been transformed.
It is hard not to be silenced by the weight of the Holocaust. The Children’s Memorial is a tribute to approximately 1.5 million children who perished. Inside an underground cavern, light is reflected into infinity while the names, ages, and country of origin of murdered children are read.
The Hall of Names is a room in which the Pages of Testimony…short biographies of each Holocaust victim, are contained. Over two million pages are stored in the room. The ceiling of the room consists of a cone in which 600 photographs showing the diversity of those who were lost reflect into a pool below.
After a long day of touring, we returned to the hotel, ate at a place across the street that we saw, and went to bed for the final touring day
Friday, June 12, 2015
Masada is an ancient fortification built by Herod the Great. Almost all information regarding Masada comes from Roman historian Josephus. Herod himself, from most reports, never spent any length of time at Masada. The fortress is built on a plateau. The cliffs on one side are 1300 feet high, and on the other 300 feet high. The approaches are all rather difficult.
Masada is accessible by cable car as well as two hiking paths…the Snake Trail which is gains 980 feet in elevation over its length, and the Roman Ramp which is less steep. We took the cable car to the top. I have a long discomfort with heights, and I think I have satisfied my desire to see Masada for a long while.
In 73CE, the Romans laid siege to Masada for several months. They constructed an assault ramp, built a giant siege tower with a battering ram, which they ultimately used to breach the walls of the fortress. The Romans employed some 15,000 troops at Masada. To prevent the rebels inside from attacking those building the ramp by throwing stones down at them, the Romans used Jewish prisoners to construct the ramp.
When the Romans finally breached the walls, they found that the 960 inhabitants inside had set all the buildings inside on fire and committed mass suicide. Only two women and five children were left alive. The figure of 960 comes from Josephus, although there have not been that many skeletal remains found. Inside Masada, they have unearthed 28 people, and at a cave at the base of the cliff, another 24. Josephus was not actually at the siege of Masada, and got his information from the accounts of the Roman Commanders, so there is a distinct possibility of inaccuracies.
After Masada, we headed toward lunch and the Dead Sea, with a stop at the Ahava factory. Ahava makes beauty products out of dead sea minerals. We hadn’t done much in terms of purchasing on the trip, but we did purchase some gifts there at a factory discount. I was recently in Costco. They were carrying an Ahava warehouse pack…I could have saved some space in my suitcase.
The Dead Seat is 1407 feet below sea level and is bordered by Jordan and Israel. It is one of the saltiests bodies of water in the World. Because of its density, trying to swim is much more like floating. There is concern about the future of the Dead Sea as in January of 2015, it was reported as dropping by three feet a year.
We accessed the sea via one of the hotels, where we had lunch and where we had access to their locker room and shower facilities, as well as their pool and…of course the sea itself.
After our dip was over, we returned to Jerusalem for Shabbat. On Friday night, we attempted to attend services in the hotel, but despite being there at the posted time…no one showed up but us.
Saturday, June 13, 2015
After the lack of services the previous evening, we decided to try the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem, which happened to be a short walk away. The building opened in 1982 and the sanctuary holds 850 men and 550 women. However, we never saw it. When we arrived, we were trying to find services, and wandered into another synagogue that is in the Great Synagogue building, the Heichal Jacob Synagogue, which is a small Sephardic synagogue in the building, and ended up attending that.
It is interesting to me, that despite the differences in tradition even from Sephardic services in the United States I’d attended, I could follow the service after I got used to the accent. In my experience, a blessing by the Kohanim is only done on holidays, but apparently in this tradition, they do it every Shabbat. At the end of the service, we were asked to smell a plant on the way out.
After services, we had lunch and took a walk, then rested up for the flight home.
The plane arrived later than scheduled on Sunday, and I was at my desk working that afternoon.
Conclusion
Obviously, I did take many more pictures than I showed in this ten part series. They may make a reappearance in future.
As a teaser, coming soon(or someday), I will be adding a trip log of the events of April 10 through April 25, 1999, when I participated in the March of the Living. I had mentioned previously they had ‘encouraged’ us to transcribe the trip and I dug up those notes and the images of same.
