Yeah!
Jack Baty converted his eponymous site to Hugo, and I liked the look, and decided to think of a reason to try out his theme. I decided to create two linkblogs, one for personal links and one for liveblogging the Trump administration. In the spirit of “imperfect progress is still progress”, I am declaring the sites live, they need work, but I got something out there, at least one post each – yay!
RFK confirmed as HHS secretary – really? Trump has really managed to keep Senate Republicans in line, only one bozo was kicked off the clown car – ugh!
Dave Winer again talks about twitter-like apps using RSS. I created mine (MyStatusTool) in May 2023, and Colin Walker created a PHP version (PHP-MST). Working versions are here and here. When is Dave Winer going to create his tool?
Recently, I posted some ideas about podcast subscription lists/listening lists, and one of my readers (John Johnston) suggested I look at the Huffduffer podcast feed service. I found out that I already had an account – amazing! Must have forgotten!
I tried it this evening. After I logged in, I clicked on the “Huffduff it!” button at the top of the page. This took me to another page which had text boxes for the audio URL, title, description, and tags. I filled in the fields and saw a file added to the previous file that I had “huffduffed”. I then took the feed URL, and was able to subscribe to it to PocketCasts, and to listen to one of the files. Bing!
This service provides the basic functionality of creating a feed from audio files, and also hosts the feed, so the user does not have to provide any hosting. Nice! In the next few days, I will review some other services that I discovered after Huffduffer. Many thanks to John Johnston for mentioning the Huffduffer service.
I recorded this on 1/12/2025, so I am using that in the title, even though I am posting it several days later.
Links to topics in the podcast:
Via Brian Beutler, the response from the Mexican President on convicted felon Donald Trump’s idea of changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America:
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested Wednesday that the United States revert to a historic name for the territory, America Mexicana, in a clapback at President-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico.
And on the subject of making Canada the 51st state of the United States, MP Elizabeth May puts forth a proposal for Washington, Oregon, and California to become the 11th province of Canada:
Take that, Mr. Convicted Felon!
In November 2024, I wrote about Lauren Kapp, who led the @kamalahq social media effort. I noticed yesterday that Lauren had a post on LinkedIn recapping her work in 2024, did not say what her future plans are – hope it is something good!
I sing in a church choir, one which typically sings four-part harmony. For many hymns, we start in unison for verse 1, then add parts in later verses. Sometimes, my fellow tenor and I will try to sing our part, but decide to shift to unison. Sometimes, when I sing, I sing the wrong pitch, or the wrong words. However, the music goes on – in general, the choir continues singing. Even in cases where the director may make a change (going to another verse due to the entrance of the priest not being complete), the choir follows, using their musicality to keep the music going.
In all these instances, the printed music provides the framework for the musical performance. As a counter-point, source code for computer software is a fragile language – one semi-colon out of place and everything stops…
Interesting that Dave Winer did not know that YouTube had feeds (posted in 2016!) and that he did not point directly to Andrew Shell’s blog, but pointed to a search of his site for “Andrew Shell”….
