Excursions

I had recently realised the project I had much plan for wasn’t updated since sometime back. So much that for an observer it very well looks to be “potentially defunct”. There are many reasons why I couldn’t push regular updates to this. Priorities at home and at work just didn’t allow me enough time.

However, deep down I knew I just wasn’t satisfied with what I had achieved. I had a huge list of things that I needed to implement and the effort required I thought was huge. But I just couldn’t look at the stagnant progress of this service. I found it useful at multiple times and I know it can be improved so that others do too. So, I have decided to take up the project, small improvements at a time.

To start with, all the threads, mainly from posts featured in discover section and Emoji collections, are up to date. Well, @manton’s hard at work and has already grown the list of Emoji collections. Well, all the Emoji Collections from Micro.blog are available at Micro.threads now. So I (and others) can now get all the recommendations for that one 🍕 parlour or one’s 🗺️ogue.

But there’s more. The huge list of limitations I talked about at the top? Yeah, I have decided to start addressing them small updates at a time. Firstly just by noting them down.

• Threads concept itself is limited. Currently it takes a post id, fetches the conversation (thread) and then pull out all the links and only show these links as a thread.
• Creating thread is a mess and so is updating it.
• No way for external users to generate threads. Keeping threads updated is a chore at this point.

So, I have been back to drawing board, working on the ways I want to address these and present what I have in mind. I have a clear objective with this service. What’s to come has already found its place on the homepage, just as a placeholder for now. I wish I manage to deliver it to my satisfaction, first and fore most. If along the way, it helps the community, well and good.

Back to work.

★ Liked “re-setting my mental clock” by @ayjay

I have always told myself that I have time to think about what, if anything, I want to write next, but I haven’t really believed it, and I think that’s been due to my immersion in the time-frame of Twitter and other social media.

The recent experiments with blot.im has given the perfect opportunity to explore if I can get a Micropub endpoint created specifically for my needs. Till now, I have been using a custom fork of a endpoint from Pelle Wessman for my Hugo site. It has served me well.

However, I always wished if I could get one written specifically for my simple needs. One that I know and understand every part of. Given that I have no endpoint yet for the blot site, this is clear opportunity to create one geared for making this site micropub enabled. Hugo site will address my third-party-posting needs till then. So here’s the start. I will capture this journey, of course, here and will keep this updated with progress (I hope). Below are the things at this point that I need to get started.

• https://indieweb.org/Micropub#How_to_implement
• https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/getting-started-with-python#introduction
• http://dropbox-sdk-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/moduledoc.html#module-dropbox.dropbox

I want to explore python first as an option to get this implemented. I have come to realise that I do not like Javascript as a language. I can get work with it, but at times the inconsistencies and the constructs get in my hair.

Whatsapp is following Facebook’s footsteps — fighting fake news problem with full page ad in news paper. Wish these ads reach the victims — I myself know few and I know they can’t be convinced so easily.

Update: I had sent these questions to David, the developer behind Blot, on the support email address. And of course, given how gem of a person he is, he did address all of them quickly. I am updating the original post with his responses. This dedication of David makes me love this service even more!

I have some questions I need to explore and find answers for some issues in using Blot. Just jotting them down for reference. The list may continuously grow and shrink as I find the answers.

1. What’s going on with \{\{Summary\}\}? I do not think it generates what it says it does - “first line”. It ignores lines with links, it ignores codes in the line. So what’s outputted is something inaccurate.

[David]: You can override summary in the metadata at the start of a file. If you know a little javascript, you can read the rules for how the summary property is generated automatically.

2. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{title\}\}? It is especially important for title-less posts as currently, the file name gets used by default. You need to explicitly set Title: to blank.

[David]: You can also override title in the metadata. However, based on what you are trying to do, I’d make use of the property. This refers to a markdown or HTML title tag in the file itself. For example:

3. Point 2 is also important for posts via just the image files. As of now, it adds the image name as the title. I would prefer not the post to have any title at all.

[David]: I think I have solved this point in #2, please let me know if not.

4. Can we override the behaviour of \{\{\{body\}\}\}? Just want to explore possibility to modify behaviour of URLs of image sources. Currently, relative URLs to blotcdn without scheme are added.

[David]: No, it is not possible to modify body. Please can you explain what you are trying to do? Would you like Blot to stop uploading your images to blotcdn? You can disable this behaviour on the settings page under Images > Cache and optimize images

5. How can we make reference to any Post parameter in a post? If we include the parameter (for example , it gets converted to the title on build? Can we escape the { and }?

[David]: This is not possible right now, it is a bug, I will fix it. Sorry!

It’s fascinating when you find art all around you. And some looking down at you. Inspiring.

★ Liked Privacy Policy for ascraeus.org

When you send a webmention to this site, you are explicitly providing metadata in your site’s markup, and this information is used to display your comment/reply on this site.

Webmentions is one aspect I need to call out that I collect information via, even though I do not persist any of the information. I think I may stitch something up inspired by this.

So, I had recently got a blog created with blot.im. It will continue to exist in parallel to existing site built with Hugo. And as @jack recently wrote, it’s fine. Hope is eventually one will get tiring.

I think I may have hit the right ingredients to what I want to achieve with my blot blog. Look wise I am surprised the default theme suited me the best. Minor modifications with styling and I was good to go.

Content wise, I will use this space to record my experiments, thoughts I want implemented.

I read this nice article on how being a parent might (or might not) affect one’s writing. It made me think hard if parenting does affect my creativity. I just could not let the thoughts linger. So here’s a response.

h/t @herself

@colinwalker Do you have a different feed that is fed to micro.blog than your exposed rss? Your titles are shortened for longer posts in your rss, while not in m.b. I was recently exploring the option to control the titles in my feed.

‪This how-to series from Apple on Twitter is brilliant marketing. Showcases the product, ‬guiding users at the same. Done well too.

★ Liked “An Interview with Andy Hertzfeld - Architect of the original Macintosh”

We’ve all seen the legendary Apple keynotes and how personal computing has transformed the way we live and work, but what I was really interested to learn from Andy was what it was like to shape that vision from scratch, what it was like to work as an engineer when most people didn’t even really understand what a computer was, when the frontier of what it could become was wide open.

I and queues have some animosity. I know everyone thinks so, but it’s not the regular “my queue moves slowest” complaint that I have. It’s that the only place with queues is where I need to go.

And, of course, they move slow 🙄

Though micro.blog hosted blogs typically are a lot cleaner, I still prefer to read the long posts in a reader view. However, I do not think it is ever enabled for any such blogs — very similar to medium posts. @manton

★ Liked A Vision of Paradise by Jeremy Martin

Amy Hoy writes so effortlessly about the web and websites as the internet around was changing. With one plaint to end with.

There are no more quirky homepages.

There are no more amateur research librarians.

It is good premis to explore, but wit such a shitty, linkbaity headline - “How blogs broke the internet”.

All thanks to a quirky bit of software produced to alleviate the pain of a tiny subset of a very small audience.

Blogs didn’t break the internet, it made the internet mainstream.

Not every user is a tinkerer — early natives of the web may have liked the web controlled that way. But most users have stories to tell. Blogs, might be quirky for some, gave them voice. And that’s no “tiny subset”.

I would have liked a Shortcut invite getting into the weekend — but then now that I haven’t got it, better. I already have too much of experimenting planned for this week.

I’ve finally decided to give blot.im a try. I like the simplicity of posting. Couple of surprises the moment I got in though — I think blot does not like title-less posts much. May need some additional work to get it working.

Anyway always wanted to try this out, heard so much.

Whenever I read a book instead of Twitter for half an hour, I’m like: “Oh yeah! Words can make you feel good sometimes!”

‪At times, Musk behaves very similar to the president of his country. Goes after everyone who is critical and follow all his supporters. ‬

‪For that matter, this behaviour from celebrities of repudiating and attacking criticism via followers on social media looks to be on rise.

I think I might give up and start using the official Twitter app. Don’t think at this point I can stop using Twitter - it is a valuable platform.

But I don’t like how they keep screwing up with their dev ecosystem. Sigh!

There are days when you figure out things are broken with your site and you just can’t find why. It’s one such day today and it’s on days like this that I wonder is it really worth the effort of hosting a static site. Man I want simplicity - or may be that time again I guess. 😤

A great read. Defining facts is hard — and hence is writing about and surfacing it. It is not that no one is willing to be “arbiter of truth”, but rather no one can be. So people with agenda keep beating the algorithm with “natural” posts.

For a person not interested in football as a sport, I still try to remain informed on FIFA updates. I thought that was enough - apparently it isn’t as my daughter’s school proved to me.

A fun quiz there had questions on “weight and manufacting country” of the ball. Sigh🤷🏽‍♂️