Replied to http://tantek.com/2018/357/t1/questioning-motivations-posting-publicly by Tantek ÇelikTantek Çelik (tantek.com)

I’ve posted a lot less, recently, and this past year.
As I’ve used social media less, many motivations for posting faded, replaced with questioning motivations for posting and interacting with posts publicly.
From a broader community, technology, and social perspective, I think we must…

I question whether or not anyone will care about what I am posting publicly and often talk myself out of it. I think the question is always why you want to share the information. But I know one of the reasons is because I hope to interact with others. The pieces for interaction…the plumbing of posting and responding, consuming with a reader are coming together. There are still some gaps to make it a smooth experience for many. I have made an effort to post more. But it is how easy I have made that which helps, and how rarely it starts a dialogue that disappoints me. The incentive for public posting is interaction as private posting is just for you.
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.

Simple Location Version 3.5.0 Released

Version 3.5.0 of my location plugin, Simple Location, is now out(forgot to push a fix and had to release 3.5.1 as well). Simple Location is, as time goes on, anything but Simple. It is all about location, including the weather at your location. It adds this to posts, and offers several simple widgets to show current weather and current location on the homescreen.

The new version completely redesigns the interface inside the post editor to work in both classic and Gutenberg. It doesn’t integrate with Gutenberg in any way. It relies on Gutenberg’s compatibility functionality. Because of that, the box with the Gutenberg settings is now in the sidebar, rather than below, and expands to show the various options.

The interfaces with weather APIs like DarkSky and OpenWeatherMap were reorganized to improve the quality of the return data. And all data will be stored going forward in international units. While I am a Fahrenheit and Feet user, most of the world isn’t. So everything will be converted on the fly for display for those of us in the imperial system, making it much less fragile. Flip a setting and it changes.

Simple Location uses the WordPress REST API, and there are new endpoints for frontend use. The geocoding endpoint now has an option to return the weather as part of the lookup instead of requiring a second request. New abilities to lookup by airport code are also built in, mostly for the current conditions widgets. This will be fully functional in a future version.

For those of you worried about hitting or being charged for API usage on commercial sites, I added a simple weather provider courtesy of the U.S. National Weather Service. This will only work with locations inside the United States. It finds the nearest NWS Weather Station to you and uses the current conditions from that location.

There is a new Weather Station widget, split from the other Weather Widget, which allows you to display from a specific station.

There are a lot of good features here, but there will be more in future. So try it out.

Episode 12()


In the latest episode of An Indieweb Podcast, Chris Aldrich joined me for a late night(for me at least) discussion of Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor, and the usual project talk. I felt I was a bit off due the lateness of the hour, but I still enjoyed the conversation.
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.
I decided to work on my website theme for a bit.  In order to support it, today I shipped(with a minor bug, sorry), a new Indieweb plugin that adds the ability to add the rel-me links inside the h-card widget instead of by themselves. I’m now using it. In my theme, I added support for a dedicated h-card page. I’ll be turning it on on my site likely in future as I experiment with moving my feed off of my main page.

Parkeology Challenge November 2018

On Wednesday, November 28th, I participated in the Parkeology Challenge. It is a marathon of sorts where you try to ride every ride at Walt Disney World in a single day. That is 4 different parks, and 49 rides…although only 46 were in the challenge this week due long-term closures. You can only use things available to the average guest.

In order for the people who run Parkeology to certify the results, you have to provide a Twitter record of same. That was handled by one of my four teammates, but I kept a recording on my site of all of the locations I was in. This would be my timeline for the day. The pictures are backed up from the original challenge.

To see the individual posts, you can click here.

It was a day I can honestly say I will not soon forget.

Challengers Meetup at end of Night

Parkeology Challenge 2018 in Brief

“To all the awesome teams that ran the @Parkeology today we offer a huge congratulations! It was freezing, rides broke down, hours were lost and you still crushed it! Thanks, we look forward to seeing you again soon!” via Twitter.

A few facts

  •  The Park Operating Hours for the Day Determines Difficulty. Less than 18 hours is considered Expert.
  • The last completion of the challenge was August 18th, though there have been many attempts since.
  • Over 39,000 steps
  • Over 17 miles of walking
  • The numbers above are based on my phone. My watch actually has a higher number.
  • There were 10 teams competing that day. Only one other team had 4 people on it.
  • The range of completed rides were 11-42. The other 4 person team got 42.
  • 6 Teams Completed the 3 Parks We Did. It seems like a lot of people were looking to complete on that day, which is a rarity.