Jeremy Cherfas

I do wish people wouldn’t do Medium’s dirty work for it. John Naughton (and plenty of others) said what a great couple of pieces Dave Eggars had written in Medium, without saying that the work wasn’t available without signing up for Medium. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but is it too much to hope that Dave Eggars will syndicate his own work to a place where anyone can enjoy it? Maybe eventually it will be in a book I will happily pay for.

I haven’t used it,but I think Jared Sinclair’s Stormcrow app is intended to build a tweetstorm from z bigger chunk of text, so it would be reasonably easy to use either before or after writing the blog post, if that’s what you’re doing. There’s clearly a difference between text and tweetstorm, though, and, like @nitin, i would prefer to promote something I had written with selected tweets.

This anguishing about comments has been going a good long while. Fun to uncover this one.

All packed and ready for trip that culminates at #hearsay17, hoping that cheap Irish airline doesn’t notice the weight of my handbag.

I dunno. I see this Add a “tweetstorm” UI for chaining status updates with chained POSSE tweets and I think of something I wrote a while back: Or you could write a blog post. Does the #IndieWeb really need to make indie copies of everything the silos offer? Even the workarounds?Maybe I misunderstand, and a feature like this is what weans people off the silo pap. All I know is, I don’t think it would work for me.

I thought I was losing my mind, but this fixed it, and restored me to sanity … once I remembered to quit and restart the application I was writing in.

Wouldn’t it be cool if micro.blog had whatever it takes to work with Launch Centre under iOS?

I’m sure I wrote this yesterday, but it seems to have vanished without trace.

Finished the first phase of moving two WordPress driven sites from one hosting service to another this morning. I was a bit wary, having read all the things that can go wrong, and I took a few wrong turns into dead ends. But I managed to back out and didn’t screw up too badly on the first one. The screwing up I did accomplish was mainly the result of my impatience, doing things in quick succession when I should have given them time to settle down in between. But I learned my lessons, and this morning’s transfer went much more smoothly. Scarily so, in fact.There’s plenty left to do, moving various ancillary things, all part of an ongoing effort to tidy up in general, but I don’t foresee any more difficulties, touch wood.And in case anyone cares, I couldn’t have done it nearly as easily without the Duplicator plugin for WordPress, which truly is a life saver.

Funny, as I continue slowly to bring old posts in, to see what I wrote about my tools, in 2007 and then again in 2013.The conclusion remains as it ever was; although the tools change, the jobs they need to do remain more or less the same. Find things and write about them.

Quick gotcha: I moved this WithKnown site from shared hosting to a VPS yesterday, and today photos were not displaying and not uploading. Turned out that in the move the path to the Uploads directory had not changed. Fixed that, and all seems to be well again. I hope.

John Naughton’s bookmark about the Douglas Bader story ("… these f***ers were in Messerschmitts") reminds me of the equally good, and possibly equally apocryphal, one about the celebrated Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs giving a lecture in Leeds.

In his article A Problem with Apple News Sites, Gabe says: “I don’t wonder why indie blogs are dying any more. Link posts are killing them.” I’m not sure it is blogs that are dying, but I do agree that it is why most “independent” news sites are dead, at least to me.

[T]he sort of dining rooms that tend to do better on the World’s Top 50 Restaurants list than they do in the Michelin guide; the kitchens where the artistic imperatives of the chef tend to outweigh any questions of what a customer might want to eat; the meals after which a cynical diner, confronted with 20-plus courses of kelp, hemp and tree shoots, makes jokes about stopping for tacos on the way home. Yeah. No.

On your own site, you can at least distinguish between quick one liners, like this, and longer posts that are also replies. Of course, the recipient may not be able to see them, but that’s just a question of implementation.

Playing Lyle Lovett singing Texas River Song, even though I know it’s a stretch, to celebrate having eaten a giant bowl of my own dogfood.A couple of weeks ago I followed Chris Aldrich to reading.am, which is a neat little spot for just putting down a marker for something that you’re reading. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to save links to the things I marked. And now, a little over two weeks later, I’ve done it.I have a PHP file that fetches the RSS feeds of things I’ve marked in reading.am, looks for any that are new since the last time the program ran, and then POSTS the results to Known’s micropub endpoint. #IndieWeb PESOS for my bookmarks!There is no way I could have done it without amazing help from people on the IndieWeb IRC, and it isn’t perfect by any means. There’s more work to be done, for sure, before I even think about sharing the code.But hey, it works.And, as my main helper said, “Launch early and iterate often”.I’ll be doing that.