Excursions

★ Liked “Dave Winer on the decrentralized web”

I think the “decentralized web” can’t be anything other than the web itself.

★ Liked “The Outline “slams” media for overusing the word”

It’s all about courting our love of sensation; nobody is really getting hurt.

★ Liked “The conventional wisdom about not feeding trolls makes online abuse worse”

The story of the internet has always been the same story: disaffected young men thinking their boorish and cruel behavior was justified or permissible.

And it was always wrong.

★ Liked “‘The discourse is unhinged’: how the media gets AI alarmingly wrong ”

“Making real progress in AI requires a public discourse that is sober and informed,” Lipton says. “Right now, the discourse is so completely unhinged it’s impossible to tell what’s important and what’s not.”

I recently received a great feedback and a query from @cygnoir at Micro.blog.

The links you share are so interesting! I especially love that you give a bit of an excerpt. Are you auto-posting these somehow? If so, would you be willing to teach me (or point me in the right direction to learn)?

Yes, I do read a lot of articles on web and share each one I like. And the reason I share them is I want others to read them too. I think it is difficult to convince people just with a title. So I also include an excerpt from the post that may give the readers an idea what the post is about (sample)

For me this usually happens while am on mobile and so it is just isn’t simple to copy and paste. So I have a system worked out on iOS with iA Writer and Workflow apps that allows me to easily post the links with excerpt.

It starts with a template in iA Writer with placeholders for all the relevant sections - date, title, link and content that is to be shared.

--- title : “” date : {date} --- ★ Liked "<a href="{link}" class="u-like-of" rel="like-of">{title}</a>" > {content}

I then have a Workflow which prepares the actual file with this template. I trigger this Workflow from Safari as Action Extension, which runs through the below process.

1. Gets the current URL and puts it into a variable link.
2. Gets the title of the current page and puts it into a variable title.
3. Gets the contents of clipboard and sets it variable content.
4. Gets the current date in required format.
5. Picks up the above template and replaces appropriate placeholders with the actual values fetched earlier.
6. Creates a new markdown file with this content and opens it in iA Writer for further processing. And publish.

This system, though not perfect, works for me currently. I want to simplify it further - mainly using Micropub endpoint. But haven’t got a chance to implement that yet. Till then, I am going to use this one.

I have similar template and Workflow combinations for reply, image, link posts.

title: “” date : 2018-07-28 14:40:00+05:30 —

Time to be on a train, a rail road trip with family is always fun!

Every wardrobe has that one shirt that uncovers itself after many days, from beneath the pile of new, blot-less clothes and mirrors back the reality to you. The reality that you have been ignoring the most important possession of yours, your health. It just won’t fit anymore.

You reminisce when this was part of your go-to attire. When nothing else looked good on you, nothing else suited you, fitted you, this one shirt always did. And now it doesn’t. As if it never was yours.

It hasn’t changed much. You, on the other hand, have.

So now the choice is yours. You either accept the signal, get back into shape. Or ignore it, pay for the consequences later.

I think it is the same with life. And those forgotten habits, those expressions that had made you look good. That had suited you, defined you.

And that one event that makes you realise you have changed enough that they don’t suit you now.

That’s when you choose.

I hate podcasts, because the medium is demanding. It demands so much time from me, demands focused attention to follow along. I wish I didn’t find them so damn useful to keep giving in to the medium’s demands.

But to do so, I have to alter my regular habits to accommodate podcasts in the daily routine. Time that was consumed by music for majority part of my life is taken over by podcasts now. If I have even a minute free, earphones are plugged and I continue what I was listening to. There are times when I question whether the medium actually deserves so much of attention from me.

So every now and then I look and relook at my subscribed podcasts list to decide which podcasts earn their place. I relook at my habits to see what I can change to make this manageable.

• If there is a podcast which I hardly listen to, it’s unsubscribed.
• If there is one whose last episodes I hardly remember, it’s unsubscribed.
• I rarely stay subscribed to podcasts that might talk about the same sets of topics (that means very few tech podcasts).
• I do not want news from the podcasts, I want views, perspectives.
• None with daily episodes. Rather I prefer podcasts that are spread across the week. So if I find that there are multiple (more than 3) podcasts delivering episodes on the same day, few are simply unsubscribed.
• I always listen at 1.2x speed. “Trim Silence” mode is always on in PocketCasts. I do not care of the lost fidelity. I recently tried to let the silence stay on and I felt everyone was deliberately being a slow speaker.
• There is a big reason I use PocketCasts. Overcast is a loved app amongst the tech community and I tried hard to use it. But it just doesn’t respect data usages limits. It either allows to download all episodes every time or not notify about a new episode at all. I, on the other hand, want to look at the episode, read what it’s about and then decide whether to download. PocketCasts’ a lot more flexible.
• I like if the podcasts, especially long ones, do chapters. It’s easier to skip over the topics I just have no interests in.
• I listen to ad reads if they aren’t robotic, if the host believes in the product. That’s least I can do to contribute for their efforts.

So, in one of the recent posts on indiewebifying the blot.im site, I was faced with a roadblock.

I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Well, I had reached out to David and apparently there is a yet-to-be-documented way.

As per the official document for developers, the standard way to get the post’s publish date is with property { { date } }¹. However, if so inserted, it inserts the date in a default format - MMMM DD, YYYY. Even though it is a format that displays well, it does not provide the complete information on date, up to time level. For the microformats2 dt-published time tag, it is important that the post publish date is inserted as valid ISO-8601. So to do that, just use the below code snippet instead of { { date } }.

{ { # entry } } { { # formatDate } } MM YYYY DD { { /formatDate } } ... { { / entry } }

Make sure you remove spaces in between the curly brackets (refer footnote 1). Wherever the snippet { { # | / formatDate } } is added, it would be replaced by post’s publish date in the format defined in between the tags.

In David’s own words, “any of Moment.js’ date formatting tokens work (formatDate is basically Moment.js behind the scenes)”. So you should be able to customise it completely as per your need.

Given the recent focus on the working on Micro.threads, I hardly had any spare time for working on exploring Blot. Micropub remains a distant dream. In line with the first update, I thought the best way to get going would be to IndieWebify the site first.

So I took some time out today and started with incorporating the basic principles. Some were addressed without much hiccup. Some have left me with some questions.

1. Web Sign In is enabled. However, it did throw a curveball. Given that I already have my primary site active, how can I include rel=me links point to any of the Twitter/Github services? Concern is primary as I cannot link my Twitter/Github profiles to multiple homepage. May have to identify a different unused profile?
2. h-card microformat is incorporated; so the site provides information on me now.
3. h-entry microformat is added to all the post entries. There is one issue though. I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Stuff to sort out next

• Webmentions, both send and receive. I think I may keep this for later. I do not think I want to bring in the interactions at this point
• Support for different posts types - replies, likes and reposts. I need to be able to add these posts type. However, more I think about it, I come to realise biggest benefit is going to be once Micropub is setup and site is able to send the Webmentions at the least. So even this might take some time.