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

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

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

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.

Making progress on MyStatusTool updates, but…

This afternoon, I started migrating the feed reading parts of MyStatusTool to my new version with authentication. I was able to get the feed subscription to work, but when the app received a POST from the rssCloud server indicating that a feed had been updated, I saw a POST /feedupdated 403 message. I did some searching on POST routes when using Passport.js, I got the impression that the service doing the posting has to be authenticated. I do not know how to make this work – Lazyweb, help!

Watch your quotes when creating JSON files

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.

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…

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!

Made some progress on incorporating the MST-PHP post styling within the sample app for user authentication! This is a static feed, but helped me to understand the formatting and how to access JSON data within an Express application.