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March of the Living: Part 2

This narrative is exactly as written in 1999. No corrections have been made to any grammatical mistakes I may have made in 1999. Any items in italics are editor’s notes, circa 2016. The journal includes a film log and the pictures are captioned as per my notes in the log.

Stepping off the plane in Krakow
Stepping off the plane in Krakow

Sunday, April 11th, 1999 – Krakow, Poland

Arrived in Krakow around 4PM local time, 10AM EST. Was bussed from plane to airport where I went through customs and waiting around for our luggage, I met our guide, Peter, and got on the Orange Bus, 105.

I recall that Krakow did not seem equipped for a 747, and they had a single man driving the luggage cart and unloading it, then going back for more. And when we tried to assist in unloading, we were stopped by the armed guards. In 1999, the airport had less than half a million enplanements. It had over 4 million in 2015. The airport has a variery of discount carriers, and a new terminal opened in 2015. The older terminal is being remodeled.

Jewish Quarter – Isaac Synagogue

We arrived in the Jewish Quarter of Krakow and walked to the Isaac Synagogue, which is over 300 years old and now a museum. We all davened minchah there and Chaim Lauer spoke of his feelings and mentioned the Song of the Day for Wednesdays. Then one of the Rabbis, a survivor, I think it was Moskowitz, spoke of his feelings, of how all Jewish buildings would someday be in Israel. He quoted off the wall on which fading words were written from the Midrash.

He urged us to experience and capture a moment. We then sang Kol Haolam Kulo, which was written in Krakow, and returned to the bus.

The Isaac Synagogue was built in 1644 in the Kazimierz district of Krakow. The synagogue was funded by Isaac Jakubowicz, aka Isaac the Rich, who is buried in the Remuh Cemetery. The Gestapo destroyed the interior of the building during the war, after which it was used by a theater company, an exhibition space, and ultimately renovated. I cannot recall the details of who allegedly wrote Kol Haolam Kulo in Krakow allegedly. The words are based on a quote from Reb Nachman of Breslov. I believe the composer of the tune we sung was Shlomo Carlebach.

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Working on Integrations

Spending some time working on integrations. Specifically, integrating data from my home automation systems into my website. In previous iterations, I have added support for weather to posts…but not directly from my own weather station. Added support for location, but not directly from my own phone’s location.

I am trying to decide how far I want to go. For example, in addition to actual coordinates, I have a property for my location that allows for the following options: At Home, Just Left Home, At Work, Just Left Work, Just Arrived Home, Away, and Extended Away. do I want to actually identify where I am, either with granular or general location just because I can? Or do I just want to add context to a post when I’m saying something else.

There are lots of other integrations I’m looking to do, for various reasons. There is a lot of data I’d like to store in my site that you won’t be able to see, for historic and future purposes.

This is a problem people may have solved on other sites, but I’m trying to solve it for myself. Especially since anything I post on my site is syndicated elsewhere.

Replaced my front doorknob, changed the battery in my security camera, arranged a refund and warranty replacement for a malfunctioning component, made it so the recessed light over my TV turns off when the TV turns on, continued my redesign of a part of my website posting interface, went shopping and got some supplies for the next week or two, found some paperwork to try to renew my driver’s license for a second time and still got to get extra sleep…why can’t I be this productive during the week?
Liked https://choycedesign.com/2018/01/07/coaching/ (Mel Choyce)

At the urging of some colleagues, I’ve started working with a professional coach to help me work through some obstacles I encountered in this last year as a WordPress focus lead. I’m fortunate in that Automattic will pay for me to receive ten coaching sessions per year.

(Since I’m also taking a…

Showing someone how webmentions work by sending them some.
Replied to https://choycedesign.com/2018/01/07/coaching/ (Mel Choyce)

At the urging of some colleagues, I’ve started working with a professional coach to help me work through some obstacles I encountered in this last year as a WordPress focus lead. I’m fortunate in that Automattic will pay for me to receive ten coaching sessions per year.

(Since I’m also taking a…

I envy that. Sometimes I feel I could use some professional and personal development, but the closest I get is buying myself books on the subject.

Thinking of Homepage Mentions

Going to get a bit technical. This is your only warning.

One of the challenges I have been looking at has actually come because of others. Now, if you’ve been looking at my website, you might notice that, thanks to the efforts of myself, Matthias Pfefferle, and Ryan Barrett that there have been major improvements to the presentation of different types of responses on my site. I have a screenshot of the replies on a recent post.

Facepiles, the row of faces representing people who ‘liked’ or what have you, was actually the first project I tackled when I joined the Indieweb community back in 2014. I’ve learned a lot since then.

Either way, the current work not only builds on what I’ve learned, but the contributions by Ryan, who really wanted this feature available, really jumpstarted things. Now, all of these people below don’t know they commented on my site…as they commented elsewhere and I pulled it back to my site via webmention.

So, it brings me to a new problem I want to solve. Homepage mentions. What is that? So, in June, we implemented the ability to direct webmentions(which I’ve talked about before) that reference your homepage as opposed to a specific article to a designated page.

WordPress doesn’t allow the attachment of responses directly to the homepage, and david.shanske.com represents me, having a direct relationship to me on Twitter, Facebook, etc. So, any mention of my website or my username on one of those sites generates a mention that is sent to my site.

This is a problem in display. In recent weeks, I’ve had the following scenarios my website doesn’t yet deal with in a satisfactory way

  • Someone referencing my website as me, effectively tagging me in their post as having been somewhere. Example: With David(david.shanske.com)
  • Someone referencing my website as me in mentioning something I did. Example: David(david.shanske.com) kindly helped me.

Neither of this usages by others are displayed properly website, which is why they are not showing at all. I’m not sure how or where to display them.

Should someone mentioning me in this manner give me the option of generating a post, ala Facebook’s service of letting others post on your timeline, even if I moderate it somehow?

At the least, it should generate a message appropriate to the situation. And if it does, where should it go? Should I display recent mentions on the sidebar of my homepage? On a dedicated page?

The Indieweb declares a person tag as a tag on a post that refers to a specific person by URL and is done as a explicit action. Many of these mentions are explicit, but some are less so.

My goal is by mid January to figure out how I’m going to display these, one way or another, and write some code to do this. Perhaps as my project for Indiewebcamp Baltimore, coming up in late January.

 

I haven’t logged into Twitter in months, though I syndicate content there from my website.  Someone mentioned me, which got pulled back to my site. Turned out to be confusion with my cousin. But, I decided to clean up my Twitter account. I removed a bunch of inactive accounts accounts I didn’t think I needed. I considered starting from 0, but I’m not sure. I have a lot of social media accounts I send stuff to, but I’m never really on any of those services. So, I mostly respond to responses, with some rare exceptions. Maybe it is time to prune things down.
Replied to An update to read posts for physical books by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

Inspired by gRegor Morrill’s IndieWebCamp Austin project, I went back and took a look at some of my read posts, and particularly for books.
For online material, I use the Post Kinds Plugin which does a good job of adding h-cite and p-read-of (experimental) microformats classes to the data for the…

This just gave me an idea…

https://github.com/dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds/issues/134

 

Meditations on my Grandfather

Unlike many of my posts, this one is not being syndicated to social media, as they automatically do. Some of you heard that Monday, December 4th, my grandfather passed away.

I flew to Florida on the first flight the following morning to be with my family. While it was not unexpected that my grandfather, turning 102 in April, would not live forever, there was a part of all of us who thought, due to the sort of person he was, he might just beat the odds on that.

I was set to come visit the following Monday, and it saddens me to know that I was only days away from seeing him, even if that had been the last time. I spoke to him, although he was not entirely responsive, from his hospital bed only the morning of his death.

But, that is about me. Let’s turn to my grandfather. There is a lot that people have said about him over the last few days, as not only did people fly down to Florida, family and otherwise, to call on my grandmother and provide comfort, but people in the halls, the local shops…everyone who knew him wanted to say that they had fond memories of him.

That is not uncommon after a death, but my grandfather had special skills in talking to people. I remember going into a store with him, many times in my childhood. He’d make quick friends with anyone…get their story, where they were from, make them smile a bit. And clearly, that paid off in dividends in the many people who remembered him.

I was touched by people, even those who had only heard me telling stories about him, sending me messages to say that I had painted such a vivid picture of the sort of person he was that they felt like they knew him.

It was always the skill of talking to people that I, often finding it difficult to start conversations with strangers, that I most tried to copy. He would often ask people what they did, or where they were from, or other similar questions to start a conversation.

His random question to one individual, asking them their maiden name, revealed a distant family relation with someone who had lived, unknown, in the same building as them for years.

So, one final time, I’m going to answer the question he loved to ask me. He asked so many times, I had my own unique way of responding in the Spring of 2016 when I took my current position.

I have been looking at this picture a lot in the last few days, and others. Even at over a century, and him having been in my life for longer than most have their grandparents around, no amount of time would have been enough.

My grandfather always asks me what I do for a living. When I changed jobs, I wanted him to know.

My October in Review – Courtesy of Google

I have Location History with Google enabled. In October, as you may have noticed, especially if you visit my site, you may notice I was traveling around Ireland fro pleasure and business. Google sent me this email. I’ve taken some screenshots of it.

It shocks me how good Google has gotten with this over time, even going back to old dates, it has enhanced the information and cross-referenced the photos I’ve backed up to Google Photos. It has created a timeline and trip report I’d love to have a copy of. I can extract the data…but not the presentation so easily.

But this is the level of presentation I’d like to achieve someday on this website for my own trips. Not sure how I’ll get there, but being as Google has teams of engineers and I play with my website as a hobby…might be a while.

IndiewebPress: Improving Comments

This is the one of a series of brainstorming posts I am putting out about how major functional Core changes to WordPress could result in an improved experience for those interested in pursuing Indieweb philosophies in WordPress.

Comments in WordPress were originally thought of as a way for visitors to a site to have discussions on the site. I’m going to refer to the traditional comment idea as ‘local comments‘. This is where someone fills out a comment form on a post, which adds a comment to the page, either with or without moderation.

Also built-in to WordPress are pingbacks and trackbacks. These are where another site notifies of a link to the page and this is displayed as a comment on the page. Pingbacks and trackbacks have their issues, and admittedly, WordPress, except for some minor tweaks, has left the presentation and features of these mostly unchanged, save for some security efforts. Therefore, it has become common to disable them. Webmentions are a replacement for the older pingback and trackback protocols.

There are also custom comment types used for things like logs, receipts(See mention in Trac Ticket which notes that popular plugin Easy Digital Downloads does this), etc. which are not part of the general vision of what a comment is. Of course, custom post types aren’t all traditional posts either.

Meanwhile, other areas of WordPress are getting functions to register functionality. 1n December of 2015, a ticket was opened for Custom Comment Types. This would, in theory, mirror the functionality of Custom Post Types, where a registration function would declare the functionality and behavior of a comment type.

But there are issues here beyond what is identified in the ticket. How will a theme know how to display the new comment type? There needs to be a way for this to be specified by the registration and overridden by themes that know what that comment type is. There is a possibility there may be some breaking changes in that design.

Meanwhile, comments cannot be referenced uniquely and distinctly. There is another ticket equally old, proposing comment permalinks. Whether this is just to find the comment on whatever page it is on, or allowing a comment template that emphasizes the comment by itself, it is an aspect of the comment system that needs replacing.

That addresses the structure, but not what could be done with it. Not only would this allow for webmentions as a medium to create comments(webmentions being the successor to pingbacks), but support for responses that are popularly used today such as like, emoji, annotation, etc. The Semantic Linkbacks plugin tries to create these relationships in comment meta, but it is not as robust as a supported implementation would be.

Annotations and marginalia recently have been of interest in allowing people not to just comment on a post as a whole, but on specific areas of it. This could also be a promising piece of a comment overhaul…supporting this. In my contributions to the Webmentions plugin, I started this by supporting URL fragments(see fragmentions), which would allow for a specific part of the post to be highlighted.