Andy's Old School Blog

Podcast Announcement: GeorgiaVTrump.com

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 21:53:38 GMT

I have started a new website, GeorgiaVTrump.com, to cover the Georgia 2020 election interference trial in Fulton County, Georgia. Links to pertinent news coverage will be posted, as well as timeline information and court documents as they are made available. In addition, since the trial proceedings are being made available on YouTube, this site will host a podcast with the audio from those proceedings.

Comments and suggestions are welcome, they can be added to posts, or emailed to info@georgiavtrump.com.

Followup on tools for activism

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 15:49:59 GMT

Ken Smith writes again on this topic, referring again to the need to organize to be successful in activism or other group projects. I recently finished listening to a podcast called "Panther: Blueprint for Black Power". The podcast tells the story of fighting for voting rights in Lowndes County, Alabama in 1965 and 1966, after passage of the Voting Rights Act. The "blueprint" is not very specific, basically the community organized with the help of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) for voter registration and voting. The community also created a separate political party, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, to provide an alternate slate of candidates to oppose white supremacy Democratic candidates. Their symbol was the Black Panther, and this was the inspiration for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

Ken Smith also brings up the topic of tools for organizing that were part of the 2008 Barack Obama campaign website. Thanks to Google, I found a site that collects presidential campaign websites, and saw there were several captures of the original Obama website. I looked at a page with the site after the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Reviewing the home page, there were ways for people to register with the site, to sign up for a newsletter, to find a local group where they could get involved, an area to volunteer to help, and (of course) a donation link. The bottom half of the page looked like a news blog where stories of interest could be posted and read. I assume that these "tools" are what Ken Smith is talking about.

All of these "tools" are pretty standard elements of website design for political websites (link is to collection of 2024 websites). I did a quick review of BuddyPress, a WordPress plugin that "helps you build any kind of community website using WordPress, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups, messaging, and more." (from the home page). I found an example of a NGO using this application, as well as a collection of 20 other examples. On a broader note, the Action Network provides organizing tools for groups (at some cost). I mention these examples to demonstrate that there are tools and applications available at little to no cost to provide ways for people to organize, read, and write on a topic or issue, so I do not see the "tools" issue as a problem (they exist, but require time and effort to set up and use). The "problem" is that there needs to be a group of people sufficiently interested in an issue to want to organize, and to take the time to use available tools to support that organization. As I have written earlier, the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is a comprehensive set of tools/methods to help communities identify issues and organize to address them. I welcome Ken's input on if the examples in this post meet his expectations of what people need to organize and take action.

My experience with intermittent FeedLand app problems

Sun, 03 Sep 2023 21:36:07 GMT

I decided to look at my FeedLand news feed today (was on a tab I had not looked at recently) and saw the newsfeed problem that Dave Winer wrote about today. I am still blocked from commenting on his Github repos, so posting a comment here. I ended up opening a new tab and doing a hard refresh (Ctrl-R), and the page refreshed.

Using MyStatusTool to capture open browser tabs

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:35:19 GMT

Yesterday, I was able to use MyStatusTool, my minimal blogging tool, to capture URLs from a set of open tabs on my phone. I structured the posts with the website link, then the title of the post. I was able to post to my instance, all from my phone. The hardest part was selecting the text for the link. I use the Brave web browser, and another menu would pop up before the editor toolbar, so I had to tap several times to get to the link button. I think I will keep trying this as a way to capture links for later use/classification.

Followup on consumerism and activism

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 23:47:25 GMT

Ken Smith posted recently, continuing to riff on musical performances (here, being on Ed Sullivan) and also remembering his posts on Pete Seeger, and relating them to acts of activism. In the recent post, he notes how people go to concerts and are more disposed to spend money on things related to the concert/group they heard. As consumers, they already know how to spend money on things that they want. For a performance by a musical activist, there should be information/flyers/greeters at the end to communicate about "how to affiliate with others and help move the issue forward in our civic life" (my idea) (quote from Ken's recent post).

For any issue, there are people for it and against it. Attending a concert where an activist performs could be considered an act of activism, but (as Ken Smith says) if there is no follow-through, the momentum/energy of the event fades away. So - what to do about it? Here, I think some distinction should be drawn between the person who is already an activist and a person who thinks they want to be an activist, but are not sure what to do. If a person is an activist, and is not having much success in promoting an issue or cause, perhaps one of the ideas from my Activism in Atlanta post is appropriate (find the organization that is already working on that problem). Hillary Rettig, in her book "The Lifelong Activist", has an entire section on how to be more successful in pursuing activism ( the full text of the book is available as a free PDF). In a November 2022 post, Ken Smith lists 6 areas of what he calls the "activism toolkit" that could also apply here.

Activism in Atlanta

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 22:44:40 GMT

I did a search for "activism 101" yesterday, and found an episode of the podcast While Black, recorded in 2019, interviewing an activist called City. City does activism in Atlanta, Georgia, with a current focus on police brutality. I listened to it today, and jotted down some notes when the interviewer asked for three things that someone who wants to get involved in activism should do (35-40 minutes into the podcast):

Find what problem that you are going to be passionate about

Half of the people only find problems that everyone is talking about, but are not passionate about it

Find your organization that is already working on that problem

You don't have to join them, but you can work along side them

Put yourself in a position where economically your problem can be fixed

Make sure that your livelihood is not affected
Have something or someone that can take care of you/family

Everyone is needed - even social media activists
You need goals

If you don't have that, you will be running around with your head cut off

Tools and activism

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 23:13:48 GMT

Ken Smith posted some quotes from Pete Seeger recently, where Seeger states that working within one's home community is the most important work we have to do right now (Ken's post title is "Essential Local Politics"). I feel that there is a great amount of information available online to help/assist/train individuals how to do work/activism within their communities. I have a list of resources available here, but I think the Community Tool Box from the University of Kansas is an excellent place to find frameworks for identifying an issue or issues to get involved with, and to identify concrete next steps.

In an earlier post, Ken Smith appears to express the opinion that he would like to see tools that help people get together to do work, to create content, to organize activities, and to have identity to allow them to affiliate with others and have a stronger voice. In a similar way to my first paragraph, I think there are many available online tools to help people with this work. Stephen Downes has created a massive resource called "Creating an Online Community, Class or Conference - Quick Tech Guide". I think the tools identified here could satisfy a lot of what Ken is looking for supporting activism. I welcome Ken's input on this.

More on curation workflows

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 19:54:28 GMT

Ken Smith has written a reply to my post on engaging and curation. In the post, he discusses "standing searches" for a topic or phrase, and how (to me) that curating RSS feeds can be a search at a particular level. He also addresses the topic of activism, and how the concept of search might apply there, but that activism needs something more. I would like to explore this more.

The most common type of "standing search" I am aware of is Google Alerts (see link to this at Google). I am sure there are other services providing this type of functionality. As for curating RSS feeds, this can be done for private consumption using any feed reader (Feedly, River5, The Old Reader, FeedLand, and so on). I like using River5 because it supports display of aggregated feeds (or rivers) easily in a single page application (such as bloggers using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, bloggers using the 1999.io blogging tool, and writers from Politico following the Ukraine war).

So, curation can be performed by collecting feeds that generally post on a topic. However, these feeds may benefit from further curation, in that if a user is interested in a subset of stories/posts contained within those feeds, it could be distilled into an even more focused list of stories/posts. The Radio Userland tool supported creating feeds of this kind in an easy manner, displaying items from subscribed feeds and checkboxes next to the items if you wanted to copy those into an editing window and then post them in a particular category on your weblog. I think there is a need for this kind of tool - I am going to try to prototype this in the near future.

Another level of curation could be to provide additional text/narration/analysis of the stories/posts - to add more value than just a link and the initial paragraph from the post - to tell the reader why they should take a look at this post. Blogger Jason Kottke been practicing this type of blogging for a long time. Currently, several people whose work I follow add this analysis within the context of a newsletter (Stephen Downes' OLDaily, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from An American, and Joyce Vance's Civil Discourse are excellent examples).

All of the above examples can feed into groups of people interested in activism related to a particular topic. Jennifer Hofmann runs the Americans of Conscience Checklist. Started as a single person effort, this site has grown into a group of people who review items to include in the checklist, and organize the work of distribution. The checklist itself is a set of concrete actions to protest or support different issues. From past posts to the website, it is apparent that multiple people are monitoring activities of multiple websites/organizations, and the group draws on this information to select issues to push out to subscribers. Ken Smith himself has created lists of things to do in Indianapolis, which is another example of organizing information for use.

To sum up, I think that there are tools that can be used and workflows that can be defined to support curation and engagement. I have tried to collect some resources/food for thought in this post. I welcome Ken's further thoughts on this topic.

Engaging and curating

Sun, 13 Aug 2023 23:14:15 GMT

Ken Smith recently wrote about engaging others on a topic and on curation - I have a few comments.

From the engaging others post:

The famous speaker works up the crowd about this or that issue, and then at the end the audience files out and recedes and fragments into their many private lives. It is a parallel case for blogging and other social media, isn't it? We nod at the end of a message that moves us, but the publishing platform is not set up to encourage and simplify further steps: affiliation with others, for one thing, the power move that gives political beliefs a kind of social body moving, speaking, and echoing widely in the world.

From the curation post:

Used to be if you followed the daily writing of 15 interesting bloggers, each one would be following 10 different bloggers and journalists you weren't following, and so your 15 would keep you informed about the best writing each week by 10 x 15=150 people they respected.

These are important ideas. The first suggested that there should be ways for readers to engage and stay engaged with a subject or topic. The second suggests that there are workflows that could be created to follow posts on a topic and create linkblogs or other collections that could curate the best info out there. For both of these, it sounds like users and developers should start to "party" and work together as mentioned in a number of Dave Winer posts (Dear Doc and Dave, What I Wanted from Blogging, What I Wanted from Blogging Part 2, Scripting News from January 22, 2020). If anyone is interested in working together on these ideas, let me know!

Owning your content

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 03:27:13 GMT

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 all any time soon

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 03:28:21 GMT

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!

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 16:52:08 GMT

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!

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 03:55:58 GMT

Just added the medium-editor to MyStatusTool, wrote about the integration of that feature on my main blog.

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 16:41:22 GMT

River5 update - the missing feed re-appeared in the Old School Drummers river - go figure! I may still do a fresh install and restart, will continue to monitor this situation.

Making progress in the world

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:11:43 GMT

It is easy to fall into a "consumption" mode of life, where most if not all free time is spent taking in news and information about things, but not producing anything with that news/information, or not producing anything at all. Similarly, it is easier to comment on the current state of affairs in the world than it is to take action to make something happen. It is easier to complain about your job, or neighbors, or other people or events, than to make some change (get a different job, find new friends, move).

To me it comes down to three things: (1) what do you want?, (2) what do you need to do to get what you want?, and (3) what are you doing about it? I have problems with the first one, for sure. Trying to make a decision about what to do with my free time, or what thing I want to change in my life, can be a difficult process - there are so many choices, and only so much time. If I do not decide what I want, I can't move on to items 2 and 3.

Here is an excerpt from a post by Gary North (paywalled), writing on "What Do You Really Want to Achieve?":

Here are the three inescapable questions: (1)What do I want to achieve? (2) How soon do I want to achieve it? (3) What am I willing to pay (do without)?
When you have this on paper, you are ready to develop a plan to achieve this. This plan must have time markers: quarterly, yearly, five years. It must have specific intermediate goals that will let you measure your progress.
This is psychologically difficult to do. Most people will not do it. Those few who do will not follow through with self-evaluations on time, which involve plan revisions. So, time dribbles away. Progress is catch-as-catch-can.

Finally, this post breaks down this method of making progress (even though it focuses on screenwriting, the advice is sound for any endeavor):

"A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true."

Time to get started figuring out what I want!

Anyone losing feeds in River5?

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 22:52:48 GMT

During the month of June, I noticed that items from Ken Smith's Old School Drummer blog were not showing up as part of the Old School Bloggers river. I checked the river file generated by the River5 feed reader, and saw that items from Ken Smith stopped after May 31st. I created a duplicate of the Old School Drummers list, but did not see any recent items from Ken Smith's feed after I created the list. I am going to install a fresh copy of River5 today for testing, but thought I would send out this word in case any other River5 users are seeing this issue. The strange thing to me is Ken's feed is the only one affected out of nine feeds. If you have seen this issue, let me know!

Sat, 24 Jun 2023 20:25:39 GMT

Test post for new river

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 02:14:02 GMT

I have captured some images on the Trump federal indictment in this post.

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 21:54:39 GMT

It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 20:31:57 GMT

Test post - checking to see if my post appears in the Old School Drummers river.

Tue, 30 May 2023 00:14:21 GMT

I have posted a new version of MyStatusTool on Github (more info in this post) - give it a try! I also have an instance of it running here.

Mon, 08 May 2023 01:01:57 GMT

I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker's MST-PHP implementation - looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability...

The will of the majority

Wed, 03 May 2023 23:16:45 GMT

There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:

"Minorities -- whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate -- enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove."
"Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society."

Keeping track of a topic

Wed, 03 May 2023 15:16:37 GMT

Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.

OPML rendering options

Mon, 01 May 2023 18:37:44 GMT

Ken Smith posted this morning asking about ways to render an OPML file as a static page. The Awesome Drummer site lists six different methods to do this, I also have a OPML Includes Github repo showing how to include OPML files within an OPML file, and Dave Winer's opmlPackage has a demo of an HTML rendering of a OPML file.

So - lots of ways to do this task. Ken's second question was "is one of them preferable"? My answer is "it depends on your objectives". If you have an OPML file online, and you want to quickly display it using several of the methods where you can just add the URL in a path to an online tool that will display it, and not have to think about it any more than that, then those type of things can quickly take care of your problem. If you want to have control over the manner the file is displayed, or do not want to depend on another online service/tool to take care of displaying the file, I would suggest using opmlPackage or one of the rendering scripts on the Awesome Drummer list above and hosting it yourself. The "hosting it yourself" option can be a problem for some, but is the best way to make sure your file is displayed the way you want and is available as long as you want.

Watch your quotes when creating JSON files

Sat, 08 Apr 2023 17:45:52 GMT

In using my Glossary Plugin for Micro.blog, John Philpin has noticed that there are two types of double quotes, and that one of them does not produce a valid JSON file or object. There are double quotation marks (like on the keyboard next to the Enter key on my laptop) and double prime marks (think six minutes and 37 seconds 6'37"). If the wrong type of quotes are used, Micro.blog will not render a post using the plugin. A way to check this is to paste your JSON object into a site like JSONLint, which parses the text and can provide feedback on errors (source code for the app available here). Finally more technical info on JSON is available at JSON.org.

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 22:50:52 GMT

Via Ben Werdmuller, read this post about "Open Podcast Standards", seems like an effort to promote new "tags" within a feed. I hope that their "new" feeds are still compliant RSS 2.0 feeds...

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 22:22:18 GMT

More on Twitter API death watch - saw this post by Ryan Barrett (developer of Bridgy federation tool)(check out Bridgy for Mastodon!) where he references a Twitter Community post that April 29th is the final date for original Twitter API support. Oops! Guess I misread that.... my app is still working, even if WordPress.com is not!

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 16:21:39 GMT

Twitter API death watch - my Portland Protest news river is still flowing, made up mostly of RSS feeds created by a Twitter API app - so much for turning off on March 31...

The subject of organizing in activism

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:10:17 GMT

Ken Smith recently wrote about how Rosa Parks was successful because "Rosa Parks had this skill set, these allies, this long-term strategy with her people . . .". To me, this implies organization, or an organization with goals and plans to achieve those goals. In Jacobin Magazine, Clement Petitjohn writes that social movements in the US have typically relied on "professional organizers", while in France this formal role is scarce. Quote: "This doesn’t mean that no organizing is done in France, of course. It just points to the fact that the various tasks associated with organizing work break down differently in France and in the United States.". Petitjohn has a new book from Haymarket Press titled "Occupation: Organizer - A Critical History of Community Organizing in America", based on research he did for his PhD at the University of Chicago. The Guardian newspaper has a recent article on the efforts of the French unions on protest the raising of the national retirement age.

For other looks at organizing, Joe Burns' recent book Class Struggle Unionism "draws on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition ... and outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democratic and fighting labor movement. ". Finally, for people trying to figure out where they might participate as an activist, Hillary Rettig's book The Lifelong Activist "...is based on my many years’ experience as an activist and coach: work in which I learned which personal habits, thoughts and beliefs tend to help people succeed at ambitious goals, and which don’t.". This book is now available free online.

Update on MyStatusTool development

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 22:53:51 GMT

The MyStatusTool project was on hold for a period of weeks while I was developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog (and specifically for John Philpin). That appears to be working at least for John and me, so I am resuming work on this project. In conversations with Colin Walker (developer of MST-PHP), I am planning to move to update my user interface to match Colin's, so our tools will be more common to users. I made a start on this by getting the simple version of username/password authentication using Passport.js set up (since my initial version did not have this). I have also spent some time familiarizing myself with how MST-PHP styles its user interface. The following is my projected list of tasks:

Login feature (in progress)
Display static set of feed items on home page
Display items on login page
Read feeds, add to posts file, update display on home and login page
Create admin page to manage feeds
Add posting feature and create a feed for posts
Add static pages for each post

My thoughts on the current AI explosion

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 22:38:26 GMT

For some time now, people have been exploring public AI models like DALL-E and GPT-3/GPT-4. From the software development standpoint, it appears that with the correct prompts, these models can generate source code that can do 80-90% of what you want (for specific tasks). Simon Willison has a great walkthrough of one of his experiments. Another area is training models on your own data. Dave Winer is working with Chat Thing to create his own personal chatbot which can answer questions about the content he has published since 1994 (Ton Ziljstra has shared some thoughts on this topic). I don't think that these types of applications will be replacing programmers just yet, but they are already helping programmers be more productive. The uptick of people using these apps to create content is somewhat troubling, I would say the "jury is still out" on those types of use cases.

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 18:29:43 GMT

Where were you when Trump was indicted? I give my story here. Let this be the first of many indictments!

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 18:56:05 GMT

I posted a question on Dave Winer's chatbot about fat pages, got a decent response!

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:17:37 GMT

Frank McPherson would like a personal search engine for his writing rather than an AI. I don't think I have enough online writing to make use of an AI of my writing.

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:43:11 GMT

My Micro.blog glossary plugin is now updated and working!

Sat, 25 Mar 2023 00:53:12 GMT

John Johnston notes a podcast on a WordPress plugin (Friends) for a social network (although back in 2021). Seems to be lots of activity in the social area - why not MyStatusTool and MST-PHP?

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 21:15:46 GMT

I like reading Jack Baty's stream of ideas writing, thought I would give it a try...

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 22:39:58 GMT

Here I have added a new line on the day's post - what will it look like?

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 23:01:32 GMT

What I see in MST-PHP and FeedLand is that the latest post appears at the top, even though the RSS feed does not have the latest item at the top of the feed.

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 23:09:20 GMT

I have been working on developing a glossary plugin for Micro.blog, and that has been taking up my time the past few weeks. I plan to get back to MyStatusTool development, as well as some blogging.

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:01:30 GMT

I like how Ken Smith continues to write about activism (Indiana legislature, lack of journalism influence, etc.), but what I don't like is how he does not link to any resources of people who are in this fight (like this list of resources I put together and referenced here). Ken, please make an effort to add this type of material to future posts.

Blogging on a jet plane

Sat, 25 Feb 2023 05:15:11 GMT

I am on a trip, and the Wi-Fi on the plane is working well - so of course a blog post must be created!

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 17:01:44 GMT

During the break in Old School blogging, I worked on a minimal blogging tool in Node.js called My Status Tool. This provides the basic posting and reading capabilities of Twitter, but using rssCloud for notification and RSS for data storage. Since then, I have released the tool on Github (demo here).At the same time, another blogger, Colin Walker, released a version written in PHP (called MST-PHP), and both of us have instances of MST-PHP running (Colin instance, my instance). Give it a try! if you need help, feel free to reach out to me via email (see my URL...).

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 21:18:23 GMT

With the change in blog URLs for Drummer, I am reconstructing my feed list for the Old School Drummers River of News. From Github and/or other bloggers, I was able to get 9 feeds, and have restarted the river with the new feeds. If you know of anyone who has restarted their Drummer Old School blog besides the ones listed on this Github thread, please let me know.

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 16:38:44 GMT

Testing, testing - this is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System - this is only a test.

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 15:59:30 GMT

Based on the recent Twitter news from Dave Winer, I have downloaded my Drummer files. It would be nice if there was a way to download my Old School weblog - any ideas, lazyweb?

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:14:37 GMT

Earlier this week, Ken Smith wrote about redlining and segregation in South Bend, Indiana, where he lives. I have started reading a book about the history of the Black Panthers in Portland, Oregon. There is a section which describes the same practices, and how the Albina neighborhood and the former town of Vanport were the only places where Blacks could live.

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 17:04:48 GMT

Dave Winer writes today about his Morning Coffee Notes podcast as a place that documents the history of podcasting. In my links zettlekasten, I also have a section on podcasting history (go to Podcasting, then History).

Update on MyStatusTool development

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 21:34:47 GMT

Recently I published a roadmap of the major features for a "Twitter using rssCloud" tool that I am calling MyStatusTool. As of this weekend, I have the major pieces in place (have a text box to enter a short post, to create a RSS feed based on the posts, for each post to have a page, to ping a rssCloud server when a post is live, to have the posts be displayed in reverse-chronological order, and to display posts from other tools that create RSS feeds supporting rssCloud). I spent some time looking at integrating Passport.js to provide multi-user capability, but it turned out to be more than just a day's worth of work. As a result, I am going to push my current version to Github this weekend after writing some docs. More news to come!