Jeremy Cherfas

I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.

George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep. 

🎉 I’m now a proud supporter of IndieWeb. You should support them too! opencollective.com/indieweb #opencollective

Thanks Chris. I’m using 0.9.9 The likes with stars are from Quill, those without are bookmarks from Known directly.

Clammr was a service that enabled you to tweet little bits of audio. I signed up in the hope that I could use it to market my podcasts. In the end, I barely used it, because its audience didn’t seem to include people who wanted to listen to my stuff.A couple of weeks ago I got an emailDear Clammr Users:It’s time for our team to move on to new adventures. We write to inform you that we will be shutting down the Clammr service at 11:59pm ET on 2 July 2017.Thank you for all of the creativity and joy that you have shared with the world using Clammr. We’ve been inspired by the community every day and cherish having had the opportunity to get to know so many amazing and talented people.We realize that some of you may wish to keep the Clammr clips you created. We have posted instructions with a hack on how to do that in Section XIX of the User Guide. In short, you need to take three steps (1) share the clip to twitter using the Clammr app; (2) go to twitter and copy the url of the tweet; (3) enter the url on a tweet-to-MP4 conversion site to generate an MP4 video file that you can download.On the same day I saw a link to an item on Hacker News from someone at SoundCloud who was concerned that the company was in financial trouble, and wanted advice.Once is coincidenceThe HN article dated to a couple of weeks before the Clammr email, and I made a note to maybe write about it here, but I was in catch-up mode and the HN piece wasn’t signed. So, it slipped. Then Chris Aldrich linked to a piece in the New York Times announcing layoffs at SoundCloud. That offers a cloak of respectability to cover my schadenfreude.I can see why people found SoundCloud attractive: in return for an easy audio life, you put your stuff behind bars, bars that prevented other people, like me, sharing it without jumping through an absurd number of hoops. Some of those people did the smart thing, and syndicated to SoundCloud from sites they controlled, but many, many did not. Too bad. I hope some of them are now thinking about securing the availability of their work.

Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.Scrabblers of the world, unite!

Rats! All links, here and at boffosocko, link back to the article, not out to NYT.

I’ve been reminded by Chris Aldrich of something I think I knew before:[M]ost major CMSes (including Known) strip out or severely limit (for security reasons) the html that is accepted in comment fields. … Many also will mark as spam comments that have one or more URLs in them. As a result doing fancy or even mildly complicated html or markdown in replies is something for which most platforms just don’t build.That’s fair enough. As ever, spammers are spoiling things for everyone. I do have an objection, though. If I am legitimately signed into my own site which, in the #indieweb, is where I will be if replying to some other site, then I’m unlikely to inject malicious code. And if I’m a spammer, and signed in under a false flag, then I’m not likely to need such subterfuges.A really helpful CMS would, surely, allow me to do all the formatting I want on something I am generating myself, regardless of the specific type of entry.Chris makes another point:The other issue in status updates and replies is that they’re often syndicated to other platforms and it’s a more difficult issue to properly do this with each snowflake social media silo depending on how they individually handle html/markdown (or not).Well, yes. But that’s not my problem on my site. Let them strip all they want, frankly, as long as the leave the link to my reply alone. As Chris acknowledges …Either way, the end result on the other person’s site isn’t something I can ever control for, so I try not to sweat it too much. :)For now, I think I’ll sweat this just a little, and add the u-in-reply-to by hand, and hope that does the needful.

Peter Molnar’s excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That’s the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.

Flippin' useless, @withknown import.

I winnowed the stopping place down by searching for things, using that splitting by halves technique, and discovered that the Import had choked after 318 lines – of 12058.

In reality, I ought to just give this up, but I’ll have a quick look at the database and see if I can’t screw that up.

I should have guessed; looks like it may well screw up on photos. But almost all of them are originally from Instagram, and I have the originals.

For the sake of completeness, and as a necessary stage in my web plans, I am now going to attempt to extract my files from vaviblog.com and import them here.

We’re both on the same version of #withknown, so it Should Just Work, right?

Using Quill gives me the option to create a new post as a reply. Again, my useless brain cannot remember whether Quill speaks Markdown. And currently, the bookmark opens in the same window, which means I have to remember to copy the URL I want to reply to.

Seconds later: … Nope, Quill does not speak Markdown.

Disable Markdown, and nothing changes in the bookmarklet editing window. So there IS an issue.

I pray that you’ve known this all along, you’ll forgive my “indiesplain”, and that I’m not catching the subtlety of your original post.

That post is here.

Thanks to Chris Aldrich for reminding me of the bookmarklet, which I do sometimes use, and which I sometimes forget to use.

I do seem to vaguely remember that there was a bit of a problem with Markdown. So let me test that here, with some bold and italics.

Seconds later: As I feared …

I probably have to abandon Markdown. But why should I have to? People have been asking for the ability to switch on a per post basis forever.

Of course one can do it by hand. Manual till it hurts and all that. But one shouldn’t have to. I am not a developer so I don’t know how hard it would be to give the New Post entry form the same Reply field that Status has. And logically, I would have thought a Post was more likely than a Status actually to be a reply.

Glorious listening. @nicolakidsbooks run, don’t walk, to hear this. www.npr.org/2017/07/0…

Finally reached a key milestone in the deliverables of a big work-for-money, so was able to treat myself to an excellent video from the IndieWebSummit 2017.

First up, for me, Lillian Karabaic offering A brief history of my website. I noted a few things.

First, the video, audio and editing were top notch. Huge kudos to everyone who made this happen. They say content trumps technical quality, and it does, but when you’re not fighting quality, the value of the content is so much more obvious.

Second, and much more important, Lillian’s trajectory mirrors my own and, not surprisingly, I can relate strongly to everything she said – good and bad – about the #indieweb. The help available is stellar, the documentation isn’t great (I hope to work on that) and it is hard to evangelise.

So much left to do …