July 2023
DIY Television: A handbook
Community Media: A handbook for revolutions in DIY TV (via Frank Meeuwsen) – I read through this site today, it has a nice history of alternative television (my words) and suggestions on tools/methods on creating your own television (notice I am not using the word “videos”). The impression this handbook gives is that distribution is as important as production (if no one is watching, is it TV?). In today’s splintered landscape of news/information/entertainment in video form, I don’t know if this will take hold to any significant degree. However, it did make me want to make a video…
There was also some discussion of podcasting as a democratic new medium. As a podcast producer myself (Convocast, Thinking About Tools for Thought, In The Car Podcast), to me this might be the way to go to get your message out (and can still be done cheaply on WordPress.com or using my notes on self-hosted WordPress).
MyStatusTool Update – 7/14/2023
I recently added a feature to use the medium-editor toolbar when creating new posts, and wrote a post about how I integrated that into MyStatusTool. I added it to my site, and will be rolling it out to my beta users this weekend. I also did a little manual tweaking to remove some posts for one of the beta users that had some errors. Based on feedback from the beta users, I have created a number of feature request issues on my Github repo.
If anyone is interested in trying MyStatusTool, reach out to me via my About page and let me know, I will set up a test instance for you!
Creating software that is easy to use is hard to do…I am re-learning this as I work on MyStatusTool…
Owning your content
With all the hoopla about the Threads app from Instagram/Facebook, I was reminded of a post from Tantek Celik (Own Your Notes), bringing out these points (see this comic for context):
I am once again asking you to own your notes, rather than tweeting them into Big Chad’s garage.
Maybe you left the big garage and now toot in your neighborhood Chad’s garage. It’s still someone else’s garage.
I have also written about owning your content (here, here and here). Of course, posting this on my Old School blog goes against this (although I have an OPML backup that I could render somehow), which is why I am also posting this on my main blog (WordPress self-hosted). People may feel that what they post on services like Threads, Twitter, Mastodon, et al, is more like conversations that do not need to be “owned”. However, if there is a way to pipe your conversation into a flow where you still own the content (like MyStatusTool), why not do it?
Why I won’t be on Bluesky, Threads et al any time soon
I already have accounts on Twitter, Mastodon, and Micro.blog – that’s enough social networks for me. I have a Drummer Old School blog, my main WordPress blog, and now my minimal blogging tool MyStatusTool (here is my instance) – that’s enough blogging tools for me. Someday I will get my Federated Wiki instance working again (hopefully soon), meanwhile I have my OPML Zettlekasten file to file things. I think that’s enough!
Dave Winer talks about bootstrapping a federated 140-character loosely coupled network. I think MyStatusTool fits the bill! You don’t have to get an account on Threads or wait for a Bluesky invite – just download, install, and get started making some news of your own! PS – I already wrote about this bootstrap.
IEEE Spectrum: How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah – Adobe and Pixar founders created tech that shaped modern animation – I used image generators from Evans and Sutherland earlier in my career, then they were purchased by Rockwell Collins (now Collins Aerospace) to be part of their simulation business. Exciting times back then!
Zettlekaste.de: Building a Second Brain and the Zettelkasten Method – This post goes into great detail contrasting the “Building a Second Brain” ideas of Tiago Forte and the Zettelkasten Method as practiced by Niklas Luhmann. The author states that both methods can be used simultaneously with little to no overlap (BASB is project focused, ZKM is knowledge-focused). It’s worth the time to read!
Notes on adding a feature to MyStatusTool
Looking at adding medium-editor to MyStatusTool, downloaded zip file from medium-editor repo.
Made a copy of my current setup
Updated config.json and app.js to use port 2030
Looked at this demo of use of textarea with medium-editor, will work on adding this to admin.js
Updated views\admin.js to add references to medium-editor CSS and JS files, and add other stuff to support.
Added medium-editor CSS and JS files to public\css and public\js folders
Was able to get the medium-editor working, but could not see the labels on the toolbar. After a fair amount of searching, found a set of options for button labels that made me go back to the demo page I was using for an example. Instead of “false” (the default value), the button labels option was “fontawesome”. I had issues with some other app in trying to correctly access FontAwesome fonts, so I decided to change that to “none”, and then I was able to see the labels – awesome!
I then was able to add links in some text, and that worked correctly in the displayed text and the RSS feed. I did notice that there were paragraph marks in the RSS feed description. I had seen some mention of medium-editor adding paragraph tags, so I added some logic to app.js to strip the tags before creating the feed (I was already doing this for the post itself).
I then tried all of the buttons on the toolbar, and they had the desired effect – nice!
During this effort, I briefly looked at some other options (TinyMCE, Quill), but found there were restrictions or payment requirements, so I am glad I was able to get the medium-editor working. I will be adding these changes to the repo and doing a little more testing before rolling out to my beta testers (let me know if you would like to be a beta tester for MyStatusTool!)…