I just joined the indieweb.social Mastodon instance.

Read: Google’s ads just look like search results now | The Verge. Methinks Google is getting a little desperate to keep revenues up.

Thousands of WordPress Sites Hacked to Fuel Scam Campaign | Bleeping Computer.

Following: Art is My Religion the personal blog of writer Rich Novotney as he discusses art of the written word, Art, authors, and stuff he likes.

“Baby Jabba” is trending on Twitter. Heh.

I really prefer blog themes that have a sidebar for my own blog. And a sidebar that I can add content to without editing the whole theme code or farting around with editing CSS. Just saying.

Vivaldi has upgraded it’s community portal at Vivaldi.net. At the community portal you can get a free blog without advertisements, free email and participate in the forums if you choose.

I want to focus on the Vivaldi’s blog hosting because I think it’s an underappreciated blogging resource. You can learn about all the recent upgrades to blog hosting from Vivaldi’s official announcement here.

Vivaldi contracts out it’s blog hosting to WordPress.com. But with some extras which I will detail below. Your blog is on a subdomain of Vivaldi.net ie yoursite.vivaldi.net. Because they use WordPress the UI and base features will be familiar to a lot of people. This is not some light weight, bare bones blogging script. It’s Wordpress.com with extras that you don’t get from Wordpress.com.

Features:

1. Free Hosting. There are people that want to blog but just don’t have $5 per month to spare or they lack credit cards. Free blog hosting on a good platform matters when money is tight. Note: Google has made no significant upgrades to Blogger in years and it shows and free blogs on WordPress have ads.

2. No Advertisements.

3. Important plugins, from Wordpress.com are there. Like Akismet, to keep spam comments away (you have to get an API key).

4. Extra Plugins: a SEO plugin, Instant Images plugin and a Polls plugin.

5. Import/Export. If you ever decide to move on you can take your content with you in the most widely accepted format in the blogosphere. And you can import fairly easily too.

6. Gutenberg post editor (block editor) by default. You can decide if this is a plus or minus but at least they are keeping things state-of-the-art. You can also use the Classic Editor!

7. Predefined categories. 20 predefined post categories are now standard. This is good for beginners. You can still create your own custom categories. The predefined categories help your posts to get found on the Community Portal page.

8. Community Portal. They have improved the blog search. The portal helps blog posts to get found and helps unify the Vivaldi community.

I think the reasons above are pretty compelling for trying Vivaldi.net if you need a free host. If you got the itch to start a blog, give them a try.

Further Reading: Here is a review by a Vivaldi.net blogger - New Blogs - My Thoughts | LonM’s Blog

Spelling: Okay, I’m sick of this whole “ie” and “ei” spelling thing in English. Lets just make up some totally new single letter that stands for both “ie” and “ei” in words and be done with it.

I’m all for electric vehicles. I’m all for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I’m not so sure about “self driving” vehicles.

There are way to many video streaming services.

The good part about nasty Winter weather days is I have an excuse to stay indoors and do Web things

Ritz Crackers are made in Mexico. WTF? Can’t we even make our own crackers in the US?

Earth: planet, infested with humans and Baby Yoda dolls.

Running Linux on your smartphone: everything you need to know in 2020 | Tuxphones

This is a good article that shows how much progress is being made. But the bottome line is that until you can buy a phone, with Linux OS pre-installed and you can slip in your SIM card and it works, only then, linux on phones will be ready for mainstream user adoption. It ain’t quite ready yet but it’s getting there.

If you have a monopoly or a near monopoly you ought to be taxed like a monopoly. Without loopholes.

Last night I had a dream about ghosts. Today, I bought 2 ghost story anthologies.

#winterreading

Somebody should test all the paywall online newspapers for how easy it is to cancel a paid subscription online and make a list showing which papers are easy or hard. Because I’m not paying until I know.

#onceburnttwiceshy

I think all my posts are on 10 - 30 minute delay before they hit the MB timeline.

Tonight (Fri) Rain 1 - 2 inches.

Sat. Rain. Half inch. Wind 20 - 30 mph.

Sat. Night Rain turning to snow. Snow late. Snow accumulating 1 - 3 inches. Winds could gust to 40 mph.

Midwesterners: Yawn.

If you ate too much at First Breakfast, it’s okay to skip Second Breakfast. Right?

#hobbitlife #hobbitculture

After reading all the ugliness on your normal Twitter timeline you should be able to switch to an emergency timeline filled with nothing but cute cat pics, cute dog pics and unicorns farting glitter. So your brain can heal. Just saying.

I’ve heard all sorts of conflicting opinions on how to revive passenger rail in the US. I don’t think we can just build a new ultra high speed network from scratch right now. I’d settle for this as a start:

1. Run 110 MPH trains on upgraded existing tracks to major cities.
2. Make these frequent and on time, giving them priority over freight. Get people used to frequent reliable train travel.
3. Expand where demand builds.
4. Do the above while planning and building a modern high speed rail network.

We will learn a lot just by running a country wide 110 MPH network for a few years - stuff we have forgotten.

How do we pay for this: shift Federal subsidies for air travel and NEW highways towards rail.

The Australian wildfires have already burned an area larger than Switzerland and they are just at the start of Summer down there. The rural firefighting services, mostly volunteers, are being pushed to the limit both in manpower and equipment with no end in sight. If you want to help but don’t know where and how, this is a good article with links on where to donate: How We Can Donate to Australian Bushfire Relief Efforts | Stylecaster (just scroll down). Whether you want to help the fire services, animal rescue or displaced people the links are all there in that article.

I have a theory that #indieweb #webmentions like we see on Wordpress, help excite Googlebot. Webmentions, between blogs encourage longer, more frequesnt replies/comments to a post. Googlebot responds to that added activity and text. Sample is limited tho.

Pine.blog is: 1. A web based feed reader, 2. Sort of, a social network, 3. A blogging platform (host), 4. A searchable directory of RSS feeds.

Basic membership is free. This gives you access to the feed reader, social aspects and lets you add your pre-existing blogs to the directory. For a small fee, of $5 per mo. you get a hosted blog.

1. Feed Reader: You get this in the form of a timeline of posts from the RSS feeds you subscribe to. The timeline is similar to Micro.blog or Twitter. You can have multiple timelines which is a bit like folders on a traditional feed reader.
2. Social Network: You can Like and Recommend posts from the feed reader and you can opt to have the recipient be notified. I fuzzy on whether you can comment and if/so how. Somehow webmentions are incorporated into this and the blog.
3. Blogging platform: I didn’t sign up for the free blog trial, since I don’t need a blog, so I do not know the answers to things like: A. does it have comments? B. how much customization (themes, widgets etc.) is allowed, C. if there is a way to import or export your blog’s content (Important). I do know they have blogrolls as an option and a nice discovery hat tip to old time blogging that is. If someone has a Pine.blog blog maybe they can leave a comment and fill us in on the features.
4. Directory of RSS Feeds: This is the part that excites me and it separates Pine.blog from it’s competitors and shows a deep commitment to aiding in the discovery of blogs. You can add your feed for free even if you have an outside blog(s). Once accepted into the directory, the directory spiders the text from your RSS feed, this means that searches of the directory are of your content not just the name of your blog. Be excited with me, we have not had this capability for years! This is Big! This is also a reason to keep revisiting the site because the web has a real spidering RSS search directory. Again.

Source: From my notes at: Tiny Web Directory Forum

Next Step:

I’m going to add a bunch of feeds to the timeline(s) and see how this works out as a reader. I have some reservations about the timeline format as I find my timelines at Micro.blog and Twitter to be relentless so I have a hard time keeping up. Anyway I’ll test this over the coming weeks and report back. Also it will be interesting to see if I pick up new readers from the directory over the coming months.

More info about Pine.blog:

Feature Roadmap

Knowledge Base