Articles

Rinse and Repeat

10th June 2015

I find myself most nights tinkering in some way to my website with the goal of making it the best personal publishing platform it can be.

The only problem is, is that because I spend the time tinkering with the site, I find myself not publishing as often as I’d like. I do write notes throughout the day which get published and shared out in most cases, but I’d like to be writing long form more often.

So what I will try my best to do is write something everyday in a more long form style — within my journal section. I was inspired by Jeremy Keith’s 100 Words he has been writing every day. Its all about keeping the drive to produce results in whatever creative profession is yours -i no matter how busy you are or how you’re feeling.

I’m looking forward to seeing what everyday writing will produce. Likely it will produce a bunch of ramblings on everyday things but maybe I’ll find a little gold nugget every once in a while.

We shall see.

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🏷️ Writing
ownCloud – first thoughts

3rd June 2015

I have just installed ownCloud on my laptop as a testing ground. I am soon to be buying a new computer off a friend and will be using my current one as a personal server.I decided to go with owncloud because it seems to do everything I need it to right out of the box. Cross device file syncing with as much storage as I have on my computer. All I had to do was install owncloud via the ubuntu terminal following these steps.I am starting using it on version 8.1 and first impressions are that it is very nice. It has a clean UI and straight forward settings controls. This is going to be a big step in me taking control of my own data and moving away from services like Google and Dropbox.The big job now will be to import all of my photos out of Google as well as re-downloading all of my music from google play music.

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🏷️ Own Your Data
Going Alone and taking control of my data

22nd April 2015

You see so many horror stories about companies such as Google, Twitter and Facebook. About how they use your data to whatever end they want. I heard a story once about how through facebook’s various smart algorythms, someone’s profile had inadvertantly been made an endorser for something inappropriate to their own mom!Now I’m not saying that these companies are super evil. Infact it is simply their business model to use you for the collection of data; to learn everything they can about you; to sell that information to their real customers – why do you think Google, Twitter and Facebook are all free?As Aral Balkan from Indie puts it: “you are the quarry being mined”Take Google for example. The services that they give you for free are great. They give us maps of every place in the world imaginable… every place; free photo storage; free document storage; free email. Great. But at what cost is free?I became aware of the importance of owning ones own data through reading about, and implementing several principles of, the IndieWeb. On top of this the work that Aral Balkan and his team have been doing at Indie has inspired me to take a more pro-active approach to my data.Like I said, I have already begun implementing several aspects of the IndieWeb: I write any potential tweets as notes on my own site first; I reply to other people’s tweets from my own site first.The next logical step for me is to move away from using Google for many of the things I currently use it for. This is quite a lot.EmailPhoto StorageDocument StorageCalenderBooksStreaming MusicMaps and its associated location trackingYoutubeSome of these I will still use. But many of them I will be finding other alternatives.EmailI have been using protonmail for about three months so far. And so far I really like it. Take a look at their security details to see why I have chosen them them to go with.Photo StorageWhen I take a photo on my Nexus device, it automatically gets synced to my google cloud storage. While I love the convenience of this, I’m going to be putting together an alternative where I will store my photos on a home server – with automatic backups – and the only ones online will be ones that I upload to my website. As with my syndication of notes/tweets, I may syndicate images out with notes that I make.Document StorageAs with photos, I will be looking to store any digital documents on a home server.CalendarI am yet to look into this. Although I very rarely use any form of calendar, it may be nice to have a personal one. I may decide to build my own – possibly incorporating it as a secret area of my website.BooksStart buying physical books again as opposed to digital downloads. That’s a pretty easy one.Streaming and Storage of digital musicThis is one thing that I wont be changing. I love how I can have all of my owned albums digital stored in the cloud. On top of this I also love how I can pay eight pounds a month and get unlimited streaming and download of countless artists and albums. Many of the artists I now listen to have come as a direct result of just randomly picking an album to listen to.MapsGoogle maps is probably way out there in front of its other competitors. However I love the idea of Open Street Map. So this may be my alternative in the near future.YoutubeI will continue to use youtube as normal as it now comes with features exclusive to Google Play: All Access customers.

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🏷️ Own Your Data
Thoughts again about an indieweb CMS

14th January 2015

Some time ago I wrote an article on planning to build my own CMS. I started to work on it using CodeIgniter as its framework. When I started to get overwhelmed by all of the moving parts I was trying to think about all at once I immediately went over to my current site – which is powered by WordPress – and thought “this’ll do me perfectly”.And to be honest it does.The thing is there’s still this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that says to me: “build your own CMS; it will be lightweight; you’ll know it inside-out; you’ll learn all about the IndieWeb’s moving parts”. But then the critic in me says: “Don’t be stupid – that’s why there is a community of talented people who have solved a lot of these things – so you don’t have to, Dave.”But that thought process of mine is negative and against the true spirit of the IndieWeb – building your own tools for yourself; Building something that is 100% to your own specification and something you will use everyday.Now don’t get me wrong I’m hugely grateful to the WordPress plugins that I rely on every day that have made my getting on to the IndieWeb so easy. But I feel it is time to step up my game which is why I am going to set myself a deadline – in the spirit of Tantek’s IndieWeb commitment for 2015-01-01 – of having my site in place with a home-built CMS by 2015-07-01.And apologies in advance to all the great people at IndieWebCamp, for no doubt I will have countless questions for them in the coming months as I hack away at my new CMS. Thank you.

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🏷️ indieweb, wordpress
My IndieWeb Setup

9th January 2015

Please note: This is now out of date somewhat

This post is an outline of my IndieWeb setup. I describe some of the key plugins I have installed as well as third party services I use. All of which play nicely together for the IndieWeb.Built with WordPressMy personal site is built using WordPress and is a completely custom-built theme. WordPress?—?with its plethora of plugins and diverse, active community?—?provides one of the best platforms from which to build an IndieWeb site today – outside of rolling your own. When I first heard about the IndieWeb and found myself wanting to implement its principles on my own site, I went ahead and installed a plugin I was recommended?—?the IndieWeb Plugin?—?which links to a collection of other plugins that implement certain functionality to tie into those IndieWeb principles.Plugins I have installedYou don’t have to limit yourself to only the plugins I list here?—?I have just listed the ones that I myself have in use in regards to IndieWeb.IndieWeb PluginThis plugin, once installed, provides links to the recommended IndieWeb plugins?—?some of which I have listed below?—?that will help bring you into the IndieWeb. I have also provided direct links to the plugins themselves, or you can search in your admin area’s new plugin interface. I haven’t described them all yet as I am not 100% on what some of them do. As I gain an understanding of others I use, I will include them below. The ones that I have described below are the ones I actively use and understand what they do for me. Download the IndieWeb PluginNextScripts : Social Networks Auto-PosterThis is a great plugin for easily syndicating content out to many third-party silos. I use a custom fork of it with editsThe plugin creators have very kindly added in my code edits to allow twitter replies that create those tweets as replies within the Twitter timeline. Social Networks Auto-Poster?—?or SNAP for short?—?has a flexible way in which to template how and what to share to each silo when posting your content. For example in a small note you may send the full text content only, however for an article you have written you may want to send the post title and permalink. Download the SNAP PluginRel-Syndication for WordPressThis plugin works beautifully with the Social Networks Auto-Poster plugin. It will grab the SNAP plugin’s syndication data for a post, and append a list of links to that post’s content. It will also include the necessary microformats2 meta data in the links of those syndicated copies. Download Rel-Syndication for WordPressWordPress Webmention PluginThis sets up webmention support on the site. It allows me to receive webmentions and automagically creates them as comments to those posts. It will also parse the post content for posts I write for any links contained within, and send webmentions to those links. Download WordPress Webmention pluginIndieWeb Custom TaxonomyThis plugin adds an extra semantic layer to posts. It allows you to categorize your posts as being one of the following: “Bookmark”, “Favorite”, “Like”, “Reply”, “Repost” and “RSVP”. All of which are actions that are found on social networks. It also allows you to save a URL to which you may be replying to. The plugin will then pull in that URL to give a preview of the link with the post content. This shows the context to which your post content may be replying to. Download the IndieWeb Custom Taxonomy PluginWordPress Semantic LinkbacksWhen you receive webmentions* from a site?—?or from Bridgy if you use that (see below)?—?then those comments are added to the site. What the semantic linkbacks plugin does is generate semantic comments using microformats2. *Please Note: you will need to have the WordPress Webmention plugin installed for this plugin to recognize Webmentions. See above. Download the Semantic Linkbacks pluginOther Tools I useBridgyBridgy is absolutely bloody fantastic. It is a web app built by Ryan Barrett and automatically polls a number of third-party silos?—?whichever ones you choose to connect?—?and pulls in any links to your website and any new responses to posts you have sent. Once it pulls in links and responses, it will send them over to your website as webmentions. The WordPress Webmention Plugin?—?mentioned above?—?knows exactly what to do with them. There are a couple of configurations that you may need to do also?—?at least these are what I needed to do. Firstly when bridgy finds replies to a tweet that originated from your site it will need to know where that original link is on your website. For example if you just sent twitter a note with no links back, bridgy will need to look on your site for that original message. But how does it know where the post is? It looks for the post that has, within it’s h-entry markup, the syndication link to that twitter copy. If you are using the Rel-Syndication Plugin for WordPress, then your content should already have the syndication links appended to them. One thing I had to also do was to add a “feed” meta link into my site’s header, in order to tell bridgy where those links could be found on my site (as they were not on my homepage at the time). And that’s my IndieWeb setup. Like I said before, there are some other plugins that were recommended from the IndieWeb plugin. However I have not included these here as I am not yet confident in describing those just yet. Any questions about this setup or any other IndieWeb queries please ask. I’ll do my best to help.

📂 Articles, Programming

🏷️ indieweb, wordpress
Throwing mud up a wall

8th November 2014

In my experience, learning is like throwing mud up a wall. On the first throw some will stick and some will fall off. Then on the second throw more will stick and so on and so on.

Whatever it is you want to learn or create, there really is no substitute for lots of hard work and practice. When first starting out you may cringe at what you have produced or may even find yourself comparing your work to that of much more experienced people, convinced that you’ll never be as good as them.

Nevertheless continue.

Keep on down your chosen path and if you feel the end is getting no closer to you, then you’ll have learnt a very important lesson in learning itself – the end of the path should never be reached.

If you get to a point where you truly believe that you have learned everything that you need to know, you’ll stop trying and, ultimately, stop caring.

Never let this happen.

You should keep throwing mud up the wall, metaphorically speaking, and when you think the wall is well and truly covered, move round to the opposite side and continue.

Just keep learning, keep getting excited about what it is you do, and keep working hard.

The people you admire and compare yourself against will have, and probably still are, going through similar thought processes to your own. They themselves will have their own heroes whose admiration they’ll seek and to whom they will compare themselves.

And who knows, keep working hard and you may just have people looking to you for inspiration in the near future.

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🏷️ advice
WordPress as my IndieWeb Foundation

30th October 2014

From the very beginning of its creation, WordPress has been all about empowering people to publish online.

It now has a huge user base and a community that is always working to update, improve and extend it.

That’s not to say that you need WordPress to become Indie, in fact many people use a whole range of CMSs — some even custom-built, but WordPress is a great solid foundation to start from.

When deciding to move towards the IndieWeb, I was already using WordPress and began in the simplest way I could think of — publishing status updates on my site and then simply pasting them into a Tweet or Facebook update.

Although the idea was there, I was missing the link between the original and syndicated copies. I had the desire. All I needed now was guidance.

Indie Web Camp

The Indie web camp site has been — and continues to be — an invaluable resource for me and many others. All the people I have spoken to in the IRC channel have been super friendly and guided me through certain areas that I found tricky.

If you need any help whatsoever, just ask in the IRC channel, or ask me and I’ll do my best to help. The first thing I did when I discovered the IndieWebCamp site, was follow the getting started guide.

I couldn’t do a better job of guiding someone through the process of getting their website indiewebified, so I will simply link to it. Because of the fact that the IndieWebCamp site is the best resource out there, my own posts on the subject will be specific to my own implementations and any gotchas that I found.

As you level up, you can track your progress on the IndieMark page.

An IndieMark is a set of metrics that show how ‘IndieWeb’ your site is. At the time of writing this post, I am half-way into level 2. One thing to always keep in mind is that it is okay — and encouraged — to implement each thing one step at a time. Just have fun with it!

WordPress Indie Web Plugin 2.0

The WordPress indie web plugin calls itself the IndieWeb version of WordPress’ Jetpack plugin and it really is. Once installed, it provides you with direct links to download and install recommended plugins for getting your website on the IndieWeb path.

I installed all of them at once without reading what each one did and so got myself into a bit of a muddle. However as I work through each one I shall be writing it up under the tag IndieWeb and share what I learn from them.

Sharing to Social Networks with SNAP plugin

SNAP is a WordPress plugin that enables the automatic posting to your chosen social networks when you create new content. I have forked SNAP in order to add extra features that I find I need.

For example, I have added the ability to post to twitter as a reply to another tweet and have it link the newly created tweet as a direct reply to the targeted tweet.

I have also made it easier for myself to write quick status updates and post them out to silos as duplications of the content.

And that concludes my first steps in transitioning to the IndieWeb. As I accomplish more, I will write it up and post it under the tag IndieWeb.

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🏷️ indieweb, wordpress
The Dvorak Keyboard

21st March 2014

When I took a trip to Paris a few years back, I had to pop into an internet cafe to find the location of a place I was after. Because – it seemed – I was hopelessly ill-prepared.

So I paid my money to the nice man in the corner; sat down; quickly typed my search and hit enter, only to find I had been presented with an empty results page. It seems Google didn’t recognise ‘me wenith’ as a Parisian Live Music Venue. This is how I was introduced to the French keyboard layout.

In telling this story today to a friend, he introduced me to another layout that I had never heard of – The Dvorak Keyboard (also know as the Simplified Keyboard).

The Dvorak Keyboard was originally patented by Dr. August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, Dr. William Dealey. It was developed to be an improvement over the well-adopted ‘qwerty’ layout that we still use today. The design of the Dvorak layout was based on much research into how people typed as well as percentages of the time spent typing in varying areas of the keyboard. It was stated that the Dvorak Layout would make it easier to type common words with the minimal of movement and finger strain.

Despite the research and slight adoption of this layout, it never really made it into popular use and so the ‘qwerty’ layout is still the primary keyboard used on western computers / devices to this day.

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Jumping the Shark

19th March 2014

The term jumping the shark, I discovered today, is an idiom that is a way of describing when a television show’s quality begins to decline. It originated from the television show Happy Days in its season five premiere, where The Fonz literally jumped over a contained shark on a beach front.

This was quite a step away from its usual family and adolescent related story lines set against the nostalgia of the 1950s.

The usage of “jump the shark” has subsequently broadened beyond television, indicating the moment when a brand, design, or creative effort’s evolution declines.
Wikipedia, Jumping the shark

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🏷️ Sayings, TV

Indie Web Camp

Sharing to Social Networks with SNAP plugin