The Victorian Internet

I read this post from FEE (Foundation for Economic Education) about the commercial development of the telegraph. The main premise of the post was that government efforts to start/promote use of the telegraph were unsuccessful, but entrepreneurs took the ball and ran with it. The response of the British Admiralty was that they were going to continue to send messages via semaphore, which reminded me of this Ken Smith tweet about the use of semaphore in communication and this reflective post. The article has some good links, including the book “The Victorian Internet”, hence the title of this post. We have come a long way in communication, but it is good to be cognizant of our roots.

Some choices for how to host a podcast and create a podcast feed

I was talking with Ken Smith about hosting audio files and how to make them available. Here is a summary of the tools/techniques we discussed.

The key elements of a podcast are the audio file and a RSS feed which points to where the audio file resides. If you are using the Old School blogging tool in Drummer, you have a way to create a RSS feed which can reference audio files. The Drummer Change Notes blog has a post on specifics for referencing an audio file. Now, the audio file has to be hosted somewhere. If you have an Amazon Web Services account, you could store static audio files there and point to those files. Amazon Web Services has a page on how to host a static website (which could just be the audio files, or some website as well).

The method I use for my podcast Thinking About Tools for Thought is to use a standard self-hosted WordPress weblog to create the RSS feed and host the audio file. To my disgust, I could not find a single page with the minimum info needed to add an audio file to a WordPress post, so here is my short list (this assumes you are using a current WordPress install with the Gutenberg block editor):

1. Create a new post

2. Add whatever text you want

3. Click on the Audio block in the Gutenberg block editor and navigate to the audio file on your computer, then select the file. WordPress will display a player in the post.

4. Publish the post. Once the post is published, you can load the feed URL for the WordPress site (https://site/feed/) (example) to a podcast player, and the player will pick up the episodes.

Adding value to information

Ken Smith read my post commenting on his “Why write?” post, and focused on a link talking about adding value to information. Ken tweeted about it, and I would like to explore this more.

I follow multiple RSS feeds using River5 and specialized lists by category (my main list has 155 feeds). I view these feeds through a standalone river-of-news app that displays the feeds and has its own URL. The newest items are at the top of the page. River5 truncates the items to be less than 500 characters (I think). When I see an article I want to read fully, I right-click on the link to open a new browser tab. I usually scroll through the news app page until I get to the last place I read to, then start reading the tabs I have opened.

My process has mostly been to be a “collector” (see this excellent article on the “Collector’s Fallacy”, I have this disease), with multiple link dump documents (mostly not organized, one or two documents organized on a single topic.). I spent a little time exploring how to organize these links, but have made little progress. From the link I mentioned at the start of this post, I am past “reading” and I am at the “collecting quotes” stage (if I change “quotes” to “links”, I think that is a better description what I am doing).

The next step up the value chain is “creating excerpts”, or a summary of a text (think “blog post” or “story”). Sometimes I add a sentence summarizing what a link is about, most of the time not. This would be a new area of refinement for me, and I am considering it. The zettle author Christian has a great post on how to process the reading from RSS feeds, and how to create a “knowledge cycle” (think “workflow”) to manage the moving of the information read from RSS feeds into a zettlekasten or other knowledge system. I am going to spend some time unpacking these posts this week and see if I can improve my information processing workflow.

One last note on the notes in a zettlekasten system. There has been much discussion about “atomic notes”, which represents the key ideas from a person’s research on some topic or source (sources one and two). These are not the kind of thing I am interested in creating/collecting, or at least not what I have been doing. A far more typical thing for me is something I did at work today. I was trying to figure out how to convert the output of a program into another format. I did some searching, installed a tool, found a script, played with the script in the tool, figured out how to use it, then wrote down a summary of my steps and added links to what I found in my search. Since I am not doing research for a book or for writing academic papers, the idea of an atomic note does not fit into my information world. However, capturing the steps of a discovery or how I worked out a problem. is very real and concrete to me. I used to know a fellow engineer who wrote “technical notes” to capture work he was doing (like a journal entry). Maybe that is how I should consider this type of knowledge creation. 

I am adding this to Frank McPherson’s collection on organizing information.

Some thoughts on “Why write?”

Ken Smith wrote a stream-of-consciousness post on why writers write, or why people should write. I have collected a few resources, and wanted to share them today.

From the first two episodes of my podcast Thinking About Tools For Thought, I discussed writing as a primary tool for thought.

Anna Havron at Analog Office recently wrote about how pen and paper (simple tools) can be used to create complex things (all artifacts of writing)

Sascha at Zettlekasten.de had an excellent breakdown of how value is added to a zettlekasten system (writing/knowledge system)

Swyx proposes a “three strikes rule” for blogging (three stumbles across something means you have to write it down/share)

Josh Bernoff shares his top three reasons why writers should blog (practice, testing ideas, building an audience)

So – there you go – get started! I’m going to try to keep up this writing streak…

Back in July 2022, Dave Winer said he never suggested people should run their own web server. However, in the last week, he tweeted a link to this post from 2015 where he says “If you’re a journalism educator, please make sure every new journalist you graduate has the ability to run a server, install blogging and river software”. Just saying…let’s be consistent…

Explainers on Donald Trump legal troubles

In an earlier post, I gave some examples of explainers (a form of journalism that provides the essential background knowledge necessary to follow events in the news). Recently, I have seen some good examples concerning Donald Trump and his legal troubles.

Axios.com – Presidential Records Act and Trump search explained

JustSecurity.org – Expert Backgrounder: Criminal Statutes that Could Apply to Trump’s Retention of Government Documents 

CNN.com – Opinion: Trump is worried after FBI search — and he should be

A tale of pizza shops – then and now

When I was in college (early to mid 1980s), I remember that Domino’s Pizza’s big selling point was “Delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free”. I did not eat a lot of Domino’s, or have much pizza delivered, but I saw a lot of their ads. I don’t remember ever getting a pizza in more than 30 minutes. Another watchword was “don’t order without a coupon”. Paying full price was a pretty significant hit. Every pizza I ever got from Domino’s had a sheet of coupons glued to the top of the box, and I saved those for my future purchases. It wasn’t the greatest pizza, but it was fast. 

Now, fast forward to today’s Domino’s Pizza. In my town, there is one Domino’s, along with Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, Papa Murphy’s, and a local chain, Abby’s Pizza. You can see that we are covered pretty well for pizza, and that they are all doing well. I have seen 6 cars at a time at Little Caesars waiting to get their “Hot and Ready” pizza. Anyway, this summer we have been taking advantage of ordering Domino’s Pizza online and picking it up at the store. The average order time is 20-25 minutes. Every time I have picked up pizza, and been there long enough for them to answer a phone order, they tell the person that it is a two hour wait for delivery. And some people still order the pizza! So much for fast delivery. The coupon rule is still a good one. The online site tells me how much I am saving versus the regular price (almost 50% most of the time). When someone walks up to order pizza, and doesn’t have a coupon, the “specials” that the employee tells the customer are considerably more expensive than ordering online. Oh well…some things never change. From my observations, most of the orders are online for takeout. 

As a cross-check, I got some pizza from Abby’s Pizza this past week (the local chain). Before they started accepting online orders, you either had to go there or call ahead. Sometimes, I had to call up to 10 times before I could get someone on the phone (kept getting a busy signal). They are a pretty popular pizza place, and could always use a few more employees. After making my online order, I headed over to the restaurant. Their standard time for pizza orders is “ready in 30 minutes”. The pizza was ready within 30 minutes, but I had to wait for them to make a sandwich. While I waited, the next four people to come to the counter were all picking up online orders. Yep – online ordering is the current wave, all right. 

I added another example OPML file to the OPML Includes demo app (a subscription list from Ton Zijlstra). He had an include of another OPML file which appears to render correctly. I tried a second file from Ton that had a “circular include”, that one seemed to have a problem, so I removed it for further analysis.