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In preparation for a trip I’m starting tomorrow, I’ve joined Instagram and Swarm, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think, and for the reasons you might think. I’ve spent some time building tools which I use on my site(although not enough), to add location awareness, among other things.

But obviously, professional teams of programmers who spend all day working on things can probably do a better job than I can, so I am taking advantage of tools that automatically send posts made on these services to my site. Many of the people who use my code have pointed out it doesn’t work perfectly with those tools and this gives me an excuse to try and fix it, while posting more to my site.

Chris Aldrich, a user of more social networks and tools than I can shake a stick at(if you don’t believe me, click here), suggested I think of those services as highly customized mobile apps that post to my site. Let’s see how that works out. However, if you aren’t interested in following me on my website, you can continue to follow me elsewhere, including the two latest places. Anything you say on those sites should be pushed back here.

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.

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?

Thinking about Mary Tyler Moore

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hmpmcen4eEs

I’ve been a fan of Mary Tyler Moore for a long while. The Dick Van Dyke show, where she was a supporting character, and the Mary Tyler Moore show where she starred. I even remember her appearance on Shalom Sesame, which I found this Youtube clip of.

The laughs aside, the thing that stays with me out of her body of work the most is the end of the Mary Tyler Moore show. In the show, a new manager has arrived and wants to do something about the low ratings of the news program the characters produce. He fires the production staff, but keeps the on-air talent…a well meaning type known for flubbing his lines. The same individual tries to write his own goodbye to his friends, deciding that the right words are, for reasons unknown,  “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go.”

The scene is one of the most memorable in TV history, with Mary’s character expressing that a group of people who work together, who spend time together…become like your family. Despite all of the sadness in the scene, the characters leave their office…their home away from home…for the last time, heads held high, singing. There is a lesson in that scene that resonated with me.

It’s a long way to Tipperary. It’s a long way to go.

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.

My 2017-01-01 Commitment – Location Support Returns

I decided as part of my annual end-of-year Indieweb commitment, to complete an update to the location services on my site. I originally announced location support on this site in April of 2015(See Link). I’ve been working on a rewrite on and off for nearly a year now, and wanted to finally release it.

This post, for example, is set as if it was made at the Empire State Building.

Coming in the future is venue support. A venue is sort of the location equivalent of a bookmark. There are other names for it. It would allow more information about the location, and you would be able to view all posts associated with that location. This leads to what has become common on social media sites…the check-in. I used to store more information about the location in the post, and won’t be doing this anymore.

More to come on location and more, but I’m glad I got a version of this out. Thanks to Chris Aldrich for testing this out.

 

 

Location Support

 

Once again, unveiling new features for the site. WordPress does not have built-in location support for posts by default. There is a Geolocation plugin that is not actively maintained and does not support HTML5 geolocation, which allows me to click a button and have the coordinates retrieved.

For those interested, the plugin, known as Simple Location, is now available for download in the WordPress Repository.

The map and address information are courtesy of OpenStreetMap.

Now I only need to start going places.
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