Complete code and build instructions for a glowing pear-shaped night light. The discovery of this cheap, translucent enclosure is a boon. I am definitely going to build this project with the fourth- and fifth-graders.
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And while Beaker will need to figure out how to scale complex swarm-style apps, I think most beginners will start with a dynamic blog or a photo gallery—these uni-writer apps are immeasurably improved by Beaker. I don’t feel like this is an exaggeration.
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Quick thought about @beakerbrowser: since there is no ‘server’, this improves web app development hugely for learners. It is the difficult problem of: where does the server start and the client begin? (Big problem with interleaved PHP, for instance.)
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“There is no need to attach an @-style username to the main text…” Really? The doc says otherwise (bullet 4): Replies and @-mentions/.
After playing with it quite a bit, it seems that—if you reply to a specific micro.blog post using a link (in this case: https://micro.blog/jd/820446), it’ll add the @-mention to the beginning if you send a Webmention. And you can also force the @-mention(s). So, if you’re mentioning several people, you’ll want to put those on—and, in that case, it’ll leave them however you have them.
Great work on your site! I also use Jekyll and have been working on a fork of the ‘jekyll-webmention_io’ plugin that adds a bunch of features. I wish Jekyll was faster—my site takes over a minute to build now. Maybe I’ve done something. I have.
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Slurping up lots of HTML, so that I can get comment counts. But the microformats templates in use out there are all over the place. I can’t imagine the number of templates in use across the Indieweb.
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In my Href Hunt, I mentioned this intriguing article. Now it has appeared, a beckoning ghost single as it were. (via Peter.)
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I don’t know that I’d want reactions on micro.blog. It’s a pretty shallow form of communication, and primarily just creates a vanity metric.
I think shallow responses are kind of nice—sometimes you don’t have time to reply fully and it can be polite to just 👍. In fact, I sometimes go back to likes and flesh out the reply. So it acts like a bookmark, an ‘ack’ and a reminder to return. That’s not too shallow?
It’s the vanity metric that is the issue. It’s a similar problem with ‘friends’ lists. Usually all we see of someone’s ‘friends’ is a number. Which makes me miss blogrolls, when people took the time to say “Ok so this is Heather, she is an archivist…” and, yeah, that starts to feel like a friend.
Both likes and friend counts are also fed into algorithms and become a basis for popularity (aka ‘value’, according to these networks). But popularity stems from discussion anyway—you don’t need an algorithm, if people are talking and linking, it’ll happen. There’s a larger algorithm at play here that the networks can’t replicate.
@herself 👍!
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PSA: Indieweb.xyz and my blog both work well with Microsub readers now. That was trickier than expected. It is neat, though.
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Ok, a new list of personal home pages, blogs and such. My point in doing this exercise is to explore sites that aren’t linked to, that failed to launch, that Google won’t take me to. It’s very easy to attempt to advertise your site and have it disappear into the stream. Each time I do this, I discover new, unknown links that are amazing. Keep in mind that this is a raw dump, which I offer up to practice my directory-building skills and to give you a chance to peek as well.
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Ok, a few folks out there let me link to them! Oh, I’m so excited! It’s strange how hard it is to ask a question out on the open Web and to get a reply. If you have any idea how I can find new, unusual personal home pages and blogs—please clue me in.
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(Pronounced: ney-burro.) not an ideal burrough. (Or: nai-tribe.)
(Pronounced: ney-burro.) not an ideal burrough. (Or: nai-tribe.)
Communities tend to implode. You start with a few people who are fascinated with each other or collaborate well. Then more get in on it and you have a very good group, maybe one or two buggers in there. Then you get waves of new people and everyone has to adjust.
And, eventually, either the originators tire of change and welcoming and the gradual mutation of the group, or the newbs misbehave and tear the group up because, well, they have nothing to lose anyway. They probably have some good points in the process—but it’s not worth it, the group implodes.
So I think you need to go into a new group with a ‘nai-burrough’ feeling. It’s very much like a real neighborhood—you completely understand that you’ll like and dislike each other, but you also have a keen understanding of what you share. I think any group that starts with ‘this is the best group ever; finally the best people are here’ is DOOMED. (Related: Those Delirious Tales, the last story there.)
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I admit that the Indieweb (and the blogosphere before it) seemed repellent at first - I thought it was navel-gazing. Blogging about blogging. I think I discounted the beauty of innovating a medium by simply using the medium.
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First time I’ve seen something like this — a simplified Arduino project to simulate the 302 neurons of a certain worm’s brain. Also led me to the Open Connectome Project — can you imagine loading a ROM of a mouse brain onto a device?
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A neural net/A.I. kind of thing writes a Christmas song. I think I like the pop song even better. “I’d seen the men in his life, who guided me at the beach once more.” The vibe reminds me of a sterile, eyes-don’t-close version of The Shaggs.
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To me the directory of the future needs to be a hybrid of directory and search engine: It needs to combine both recency and curated static PLUS a crawler.
So, with Horror Fiction, how do you decide how to rank things? PageRank clearly benefits all of the incumbents. I’m sure recency was important—people want to announce their new stories and articles and reviews. I’m sure people want to find lists of the most beloved stories. But I’m sure topic was important too: demonic possessions, monsters, mannequins. Although there might be spoilers in that kind of designation.
The ability to follow authors has got to be paramount in a community like that. So it would make sense for that kind of community to congregate in the Indieweb. Authors would post on blogs. (But don’t they usually post on wikis?) And then they ping the directory when they have new material.
Indieweb.xyz doesn’t have a crawler, but it does fetch the page and parse it and use its metadata. In a way, it works like a crawler where pages are submitted one by one. Even Reddit is a kind of crawler, performed by humans. So the crawler question is one of: how much do we need to go out and find random stuff unprompted?
Well, and the crawler would be useful for finding stuff outside the Indieweb. Unstructured, mostly undiscovered stuff. But the Indieweb’s insistence on structure has the benefit of weeding out spam. (For now.)
So, yes, I agree, directory + crawler. The next question is: have tags worked for discovery? (Good subreddits are just permanent, high-value hashtags.) Or can hierarchical directories still find a place?
Interestingly enough, I think two of the best hierarchical directories out there are eBay and Craigslist. And both are self-categorized! I wonder what they do to solve miscategorization.
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It seems to me, at some point, the problem of commercial silos of web search engines must be addressed since 1. a near monopoly is held by Google, 2. both spidering engines (Google and Bing) are oriented towards brands, data mining user profiles, advertising and the commercial. […]
Niche directories can still work when tied to an interest community (just ask almost any local Chamber of Commerce). Filter blogs might work too.
Fantastic. Yes! This is exactly the problem. It’s very difficult for a new participant to make headway because they simply get lost in the pile.
I think all of these approaches need to be reconsidered just like you’re doing, but I want to focus on directories—which are still very much in vogue, but are unrecognizable when compared to the old Yahoo. The big directories these days are Reddit and Pinterest. (And Wikipedia, like you say.) Delicious was one of these too. They are directories because they are topic-based catalogs of thought.
Niche directories exist in the form of stuff like Pinboard, Hacker News, Lobste.rs and so on. So, Hacker News acts basically like a directory of thought for its community. And the users there spend their time pruning and curating this directory.
All of these directories struggle with a sort of memory failure—no one really plumbs the archives of these sites—but that makes perfect sense given that the focus is on absolute recency. Part of the spectacular failure of Yahoo-style directories was due to no sense of recency (a heartbeat) on all those links.
The nice thing about Yahoo was that you could categorize yourself. Reddit, Pinterest, Pinboard—you have to wait for someone else to find you.
To your point about filter blogs: I think there used to be an answer here. It used to be that for topic-based technology blogs, much of their grassroots content came from mailing lists. Mailing lists used to be the primary announcement system for software. (If you look at technology blogs, they are much more commercial now.) So the mailing lists acted like a completely open submission system where you could safely self-promote. And then blogs skimmed their favorite stuff out of these. (IRC and web forums also acted as support systems here.)
So here’s what I’d like to see in a directory:
I am trying to accomplish some of this with my directory Indieweb.xyz, but I’m also not sure it will all work due to self-promotion having problems of its own—in addition to being a dirty word on its own.
At any rate, wonderful post. Thankyou!
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For the last week-plus, I’ve had The Bee Gees’ “Nights on Broadway” on repeat in my head.
Oh, yes, I had this happen. I was at a taco shack and the song came on. And I ate that taco very slow. I thought it was the full realization of the Bee Gees sound—which I hadn’t ever really ever appreciated before. I probably put in three months of that song.
Do they have other great ones?
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And this one, if you haven’t seen it: https://philosopher.life.
Know of any other public ones out there?
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🔹Websites are encouraged to follow SEO guidelines. 🔹Google decides that ‘excessive’ linking effects your PageRank. 🔹Blogs stop linking to each other, blogrolls disappear.
Think this might injure the open Web?
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The whole thing could be written in Javascript (with a small dat.json and HTML file). This is a huge improvement on even, say, needing to learn Node vs browser scripting. It’s possible that libraries could even mitigate needing to know HTML and CSS (at least in the beginning). And the only software setup is Beaker. I think that could be a big deal…
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<a onclick="window.title='<?= $title ?>'"> this type of code is common in the
beginning - and they don’t realize which language runs first. There are still
issues with learning callbacks w/ and w/o Beaker.
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I very much appreciate this encouragement. 😎 Let me know of other links you happen to find out there in the wild…
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Oink Games has redesigned Reiner Knizia’s classic Modern Art to fit in a wee box—quite stunning and it appears that they have even innovated the funny money.
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This round-up of recent OpenFL changes is impressive. I particularly appreciate all the asynchronous additions.
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Place reflections on toast in your ear.
In the 1960s, using the most primitive of tools, an American plant scientist demonstrated that a small family, working not all that hard for about three weeks, could gather enough wild cereal seeds to last them easily for a year or more. Jack Harlan’s experiments on the slopes of the Karacadağ mountains in Turkey offer a perfect gateway to this exploration of the history of bread and wheat.
I’m not a podcast listener—but I think I’m beginning to understand them. At least, the two kinds that are: a conversation or a story. (The recent hypertext conversations on my site can feel stilted and I miss the natural alternate listening cycle of a vocal conversation. And simply just reacting with nods and movements of the eyebrows.) And, strangely, I always did like radio, being a long-time listener of WFMU.
So this podcast about bread is by Jeremy Cherfas—who I see around the Indieweb here and there—and it’s all about bread, which is a favorite topic of mine, having saved my brother-in-law’s sourdough starter after he died and continued its lineage. He did 31 podcasts throughout August.
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Does owning your own domain = owning your content? I am not so sure.
I personally don’t care about the domain thing. It’s nice to own a TLD, but I’d be happy with kicks.neocities.org. My thing is being able to reply and write on my own site so I can style it and have a place to call home.
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‘He was a pekingese, and as such he had a peculiar, droll manner of walking that aroused my sympathy no less than his facial expression, which was a constant meld of almost tearful sorrow and unreasonable, condescending arrogance.’
— p501, The Island of Second Sight by Vigoleis
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‘I had a memory of reacting similarly to my own mother’s breakups, to cutting off my emotions for the men I had once loved or for whom I’d at least felt an affection. Once I failed at such an attempt; I sobbed and mouthed the name of my mother’s ex while a new man slept in her bed. I sobbed similarly on subsequent nights until I had finally rid myself of any lingering affections.’
— p195, Person/a by Elizabeth Ellen
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Would love to see this on NodeMCU + a small LED screen! With Voxatron this becomes a “fantasy” platform that runs on a “fantasy” platform. (Cartridges are seriously stored in PNG files??)
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Very interesting read; I too didn’t realise quite how effectively Google sucked all the fun out of the web, even though I was there at the time. Pure serendipity to read your comment about Pinboard and reread this talk from Maclej on the same day. http://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm
Great talk! Reminds me of some of Brad’s comments about the sci-fi/horror directories he’s worked. I’m sorry for the delay in responding (and your Webmention showing up here)—my blog has been broken for a week.
Enjoy your conference. “Food and Communication”—wild! You should write about it…
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Playing on the Wayback Machine on Archive.org. I just found my first real directory/portal. This will generate some new posts.
Ooo goodie goodie. Looking forward!
I’m on the Wayback today too, reconstructing a lost site. Fellow packrats unite.
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Looks like I am collecting links again on Hacker News. Anyone else out there? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17673352
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Peter Stuifzand passed on this pic in #indieweb-dev on Freenode. Thanks for all the help today!
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The point is, everyone has some skill, idea, knowledge that is worth sharing and equally, there are other people looking for the information you have in your head and take for granted.
Yeah, hey, great discussion! Thanks for pointing it out—missed it somehow.
On your points:
We, the little people, need to rebuild the web. […] This is the foundation of everything. Yes, cool—you see this at a football game when things get heated and two guys start fighting. Then another guy stands up and says, “I’ll fix this,” and he starts walking down. Oh boy. Sure.
So, like: not only is another social media site going to solve this, but no one of us is going to have an ‘answer’. TiddlyWiki doesn’t work for me—but h0p3 and sphygmus are doing great things for themselves—and I think there are many people who will be served well by it (as compared to micro.blog).
Someplace to go is actually many places built by us. Sweet! I get really excited at the prospect of more places to go.
Link freely. This has the added benefit of creating a TON of noise for Google. 😘 If the tradeoff on something is “bad for bots, good for humans,” I’ll take that trade.
Discovery, and search, will sort itself out, if we do #1,2, and 3. Trying to decide if I agree with this. I kind of agree with “it’ll all come out in the wash” but I also don’t think discovery gets better than Brad linking to Simon and me reading Simon.
Once I start relying on a bot, what else is it giving me? And do I begin to get lazy with my discovery effort? And then am I isolated again?
We may end up with 5, 6, 10 or more favorite places we go to search and that is good. More and more, I’m finding myself just using Stack Overflow, Pinboard and YouTube search directly. Google just does this anyway. I tend to use Google more as a glorified address bar: ‘indieweb.org author’ and click the first link. I know this will take me to Indieweb wiki’s page on authorship. (So there is a specific page I already know—basically a ‘feeling lucky’.)
Love being a part of this discussion. I am working hard on my directory to finish it—hopefully by end of October. (Again, it’s not a directory people can submit to: it’s my model for the modern Little Web Library. Just trying to get a good amount of links, categories, fun to use, all that.)
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How to teach — with an eye to Plato and Vygotsky
It was Christmas—and I binged on Piaget videos. And later that week, the grainy Seymour Papert documentaries where he has kids acting like robots in a field. Left! Left! LEFT! And I made several meals of Susan Engel’s essay on Curiosity. And then had it all dashed apart by Vygotsky.
Okay. Good. However—how should I teach? All this theory swimming around so impressively. What to actually say and do?
I was recommended The Educated Mind by Bret Victor at the 20 minute mark in a talk of his[1]. Turns out this is truly a lovely book. It attempts to sum up all the theory. Everything from Plato to Piaget, Vygotsky to Carl Sagan. (Even devoting a hearty portion to irony—a virtue which never seems to get its due.) After half the book mulling over the theories, we move into practical discussion of how to materialize all of this lofty thinking into teaching our real classes. Much like the real classes I teach in one corner of an old brick elementary.
Now, it’s funny. At the same time that I find myself troubled with how to teach, I realize there is almost no other way to do this. As the King of Hearts said, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
We recapitulate. We take a young one through the alphabet and all the numbers and symbols, the great novels and how to sketch with perspective and how to disassemble a frog—all that we once went through. We relive a history with them.
It is through this interiorization of historically determined and culturally organized ways of operating on information that the social nature of people comes to be their psychological nature as well.[2]
This interiorization happens through understanding. Kieran Egan covers the many ways of understanding—he lists his five most crucial types—like Mythically, in which we deal with binary concepts and construct imaginary beings that dwell at the extremes. Romantically, in great stories that pretend to have some grand purpose. As well as Philosophic, Somatic and Ironic.
These are not mere gimmicks. We often rely, in small children, on their mythical understanding. We don’t need to explain Hansel and Gretel.
The narrator does not explicitly discuss and explain the concepts of opposition—in this case, security and fear. We presuppose that in some profound way children already know these concepts; the narrator is using their familiarity to make events in some distant forest at some distant time meaningful.[3]
These early chapters on mythical and romantic understanding are wonderful. The mythical section studies the import of fairy tales and Peter Rabbit to toddlers; the romantic part studies both Herodotus and The Guinness Book of World Records, the appeal of high drama and human limits to adolescents. I found so many of his questions to be top notch.
[B]y far the most common learning principle urged on teachers is that children’s learning moves “from the known to the unknown,” and that, to engage their interest and make new knowledge meaningful, one must begin with something relevant to their everyday experience and connect the new knowledge to that. If this indeed is how children learn most effectively, one must wonder what does the fattest person who ever lived have to do with their everyday experience, or the most expensive postage stamp, or the longest beard?[4]
So the theory isn’t too detached from practice. Find the extremes in the subject you’re teaching, the soul of it. Play to the bizarre and the novel. It’s not quite as simple as that, of course—leave room for a touch of irony.
By preserving the earlier kinds of understanding as much as possible, we may develop a kind of irony that enables its users to recognize validity in all perspectives, to believe all metanarratives, to accept all epistemological schemes, to give assent to every belief. […] we do have other pursuits than understanding, and for some of the more exotic amoong them magic will trump science.[5]
Wow, this kind of thing has got to be a heresy in today’s society! The predominant notion today is that our goal is progress, our goal is a perfect truth and knowledge. To be brought back to Socrates and Nietzche—who suggested that the pursuit of truth is only driven by “wanting to be superior”[6]—gives the feeling of an old great truth: that we are really just working with scraps of the universe here. Not the keys to ultimate truth that we pretend.
As a technology teacher, this helps remind me that maybe technology is more of a magical substance than it is a great medicine for society. A realization that cannot come quick enough now that our ideals about social media have been dispelled by the absence of the interpersonal advances we were promised. No, it was all just a trick of getting messages from here to there, not a new form of living.
The final chapters take apart how to structure actual lessons. He falters a bit here—I feel there aren’t quite enough good examples given. But he does give a few very good ones. Such as when he discusses teaching about the air around us in a mythical way.
All in all, though, very near five stars here. I read books not to agree with the authors, but to think. To mull over someone else’s thoughts, in order to find where mine stand. But this book very much influenced me. I know I will be staying close to it from now on.
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reality is darker than you are willing to recognize, but it could be brighter than what you can imagine.
reality is darker than you are willing to recognize, but it could be brighter than what you can imagine.
Courtesy of h0p3. This is close to articulating the feeling I live in. I think I take issue with the ‘is’/‘could’ dichotomy. I am more like: it is ‘is’/‘is’.
I’m also tempted to make it more phonetic, but I think a phrase like this deserves to be pronounced Rid Tee Yawter—or to be butchered senselessly every time.
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The brick phone brought into this century! While the hardware design is definitely impressive, the software looks good, too. To come up with a nice UI for a 96x64 pixel screen is something of an accomplishment.
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glitchyowl, the future of 'people'.
jack & tals, hipster bait oracles.
maya.land, MAYA DOT LAND.
hypertext 2020 pals: h0p3 level 99 madman + ᛝ ᛝ ᛝ — lucid highly classified scribbles + consummate waifuist chameleon.
yesterweblings: sadness, snufkin, sprite, tonicfunk, siiiimon, shiloh.
surfpals: dang, robin sloan, marijn, nadia eghbal, elliott dot computer, laurel schwulst, subpixel.space (toby), things by j, gyford, also joe jenett (of linkport), brad enslen (of indieseek).
fond friends: jacky.wtf, fogknife, eli, tiv.today, j.greg, box vox, whimsy.space, caesar naples.
constantly: nathalie lawhead, 'web curios' AND waxy
indieweb: .xyz, c.rwr, boffosocko.
nostalgia: geocities.institute, bad cmd, ~jonbell.
true hackers: ccc.de, fffff.at, voja antonić, cnlohr, esoteric.codes.
chips: zeptobars, scargill, 41j.
neil c. "some..."
the world or cate le bon you pick.
all my other links are now at href.cool.
Reply: Micro.blog Limitations
Oh definitely! I apologize if I’m coming across as critical - I’m kind of working in the dark here as to how one should connect with micro.blog from the outside. (How to craft replies, where Webmentions show up.) But this isn’t unusual—every blog has its quirks, its templates and conventions. There are a jillion microformats and there are Salmentions and so on. Anyway, on the contrary, I’ve enjoyed sorting out how to participate here and hope I can perhaps provide some useful stuff to you.