Well, it’s started. My habit, when I start a new venture, is to jump in with both feet and thrash around after doing just enough research to get me into trouble. :-)

So, yesterday I found an excellent 1950’s Royal at a local antique mall. I have to confess, I also have two other typewriters on order. One from eBay and another from an online refurbisher/dealer. More on those purchases when they arrive in the next few days.

The advice given to search locally: antique stores, resale shops, old long established office equipment stores, is sound. I visited three local antique malls and found quite a few typewriters at decent prices that compare well with prices on eBay but have the advantage over eBay in that you can physically inspect and test the machine, dicker on price and you don’t have to pay +$40 for shipping.

Ahead…

1. Ultra Portables: for some reason these appeal to me the most right at the moment. They are always so slim and sleek.
2. Brands: I’d like to have an Olympia, these were always so expensive. Olivetti, see Ultra Portables above. Otherwise, brand is a factor but I’m not really checking a tick-box trying to buy one of each brand. I guess it’s a secondary consideration.
3. Condition: I’m trying to buy machines that are either refurbished, serviced or in proven good working order. Right now, I don’t know enough to attempt refurbishing typewriters on my own and it’s not something I’m interested in right now.
4. Style: This is a key consideration. I’d love to have a Remington Streamliner from the late ‘30’s to early ‘40’s. Looks, definitely play into this.
5. Price: Another big factor. I definitely like bargains.

This is my crude guide to adding third party commenting to Micro.blog. Right now Micro.blog only has commenting in the social timeline. If you want non-Micro.blog members to comment on your post pages you will need a third party service I know @Manton intends to add commenting on the post pages to MB at some point in the future so I consider this to be an interim solution.

Pick a comment service and sign up.

Pick a comment host and sign up. Look it over so you understand the administrative aspects. The service will give you either a custom JavaScript code or HTML code that they expect you to copy/paste into your theme. You will need this later.

Edit MB Theme

1. Read Help File on Custom Themes
2. Watch Manton’s Screencast I watched this several times until I was pretty sure I knew what to do.
3. Go to Edit custom themes in your admin panel.
4. You want to fetch the template files for the theme you are using, so find the repository name for your theme. I’m using Marfa theme so I typed in “theme-marfa” and if memory serves all the Marfa templates were fetched.
5. You only need to edit one template \ layouts/post/single.html
   

You are going to paste the JS code from your custom comment provider right where my super crude arrow is pointing below.

Save and you should be done. I’ve only done this with IntenseDebate using their “Generic” code so I can’t tell you how the other services will work on MB. YMMV.

I messed up. Reading the instructions more carefully on IntenseDebate I thought there was a way to import old Wordpress comments via XML file but there is not.

If you want to Import your old comments from Wordpress you need to install Intense Debate on your old Wordpress site first. It will then import all your existing comments. At least that is the way I read it.

This makes sense because it insures the comments get matched up to each permalink.

So if you are going to migrate from Wordpress to something like Micro.blog and want to use IntenseDebate you should install IntenseDebate first on your old Wordpress blog first, let it import the comments, then install IintenseDebate on Micro.blog after you have successfully moved your posts and domain to Micro.blog.

While it would have been nice to preserve my old comments, it’s my bad and I can live with it. The primary reason I wanted a comment system was for the occasional non-MB visitor to be able to leave a comment. It does not happen often but when it has happened it was important.

Watch: Agatha Christie’s Criminal Games: Hickory Dickory Dock Sn 2, Ep 1.

Watch this series if you can. These are light hearted reworkings of Agatha Christie stories in French with English subtitles. I didn’t think I would like these when I first tried them but Season 1 completely won me over and this first episode of Season 2 continues the winning streak. The writing, charactors and cast are all supurb. And there is a real mystery in each episode and yet they manage to make it light hearted without getting smarmy.

My first post got eaten so I’ll try this again.

Upcoming Film: “Lancaster Skies” WW2 Bomber Command Movie

I really want to see this. I’ll even drag myself out to a theater to see this if they show in in the US. I really hope it is good so I can add it to my World War 2 Movie List. Which reminds me I need to add “Dunkirk” to that.

Like: Return to the Open Web! vs Join the Open Web!

It makes me wonder how we can bring others along with us. The people for whom it’s not a return, but striking out into the wilderness outside the walled garden they are familiar with. We say it’s easy to claim your own space, but is it really if you haven’t done it before?

I wish I had a good answer to this. I think Ton comes close in that I need to offer to help people get started.

I refer to Starbucks as “Fourbucks” because everything seems to start at about that price. It’s been years since I’ve been in any sort of coffee house so when I went into the local Starbucks I found myself totally bewildered by the terminology and jargon.

I had 2 goals: 1. get a fancy coffee to go, 2. NOT to be that person in line that takes 3 minutes to order a coffee.

I ordered a latte to take to my meeting. It cost over $4 with tax. I’m not sure it actually had any coffee in it.

I think I’ll stick with coffee from home.

Cloud Storage.

I have my cloud storage all mixed up in 4 cloud providers: Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft Live Windows Live Drive and it’s a pain in the rump.

I was looking at something self hosted on my own server like Nextcloud and consolidate all my stuff from the other services. It does not have to be Nextcloud but something like it. Is anyone doing their own self hosted cloud storage? How is that working for you?

I’ve been pondering on how to make a blogroll/following page on Micro.blog and sort of weighing different approaches. Here are a couple:

1. Static Following Page: Here is a big one. The problem I have with these is they become difficult to maintain. Everytime I make one of these I end up not updating it. However, as you can see from the example, it can be massive and you can easily subcategorize such a list. It’s also very durable - there is no moving script parts or database to fail.
2. You could make a “Following” category in Micro.blog. This is a variant of linkblogging except you are using a category for that purpose. Use one post per link followed and whatever description you want. Then link to that category in your main menu and you end up with a dynamic list of blogs or newsletters you are following. I’m thinking this might be easier to maintain on Micro.blog than a static page. However, a downside is you cannot sub-categorize and right now MB has no dedicated site search for each blog so finding something later might be difficult.
3. Another approach that would work for a shorter list on Micro.blog would be to use tiny type and put your list on the bottom of your index page or in the MB footer. Kicks Condor does this well in his right sidebar (scroll down a bit.) Notice how he actually makes it fun to explore while giving you a little context for each link.

None of these difficulties are exclusive to Micro.blog, blogrolls have always been work to maintain, but they are very useful in helping visitors discover new blogs.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

Is anybody using the new Arabica template on Micro.blog. By accident I switched to it for a little while and I think it’s really good looking. One thing I noticed when I switched to Arabica from Marfa is the custom changes I made to the Post template still showed up in Arabica. Nice. One change I would make is to try and put a site search form on it.

I also like the Typewriter theme. If I ever needed a short post blog, like a linkblog I think I would use it.

Some email contact resources for Micro.blog.

We don’t have CGI or Php for contact forms on Micro.blog, so if you have a hosted MB blog and you want a contact form it has to be remotely hosted.

Free Contact Form Providers

I’ve looked at a quite a few. Some I tried and didn’t work, others looked dodgy. Very few people ever used my contact form on Wordpress so I think most of us can get away with a free form. I have not used these or tried them yet, nor are they in any order.

Just remember that if you are getting it for free the provider is getting something out of it also.

• Squaresend
• Allforms Update 6 Feb 2019: I signed up, but once logged in, I got a notice that form creation was disabled for free accounts. Skip this one.

Email Address Encoders

Some people might want to place their email address in a mailto link but encrypt it so it is harder for email harvester robots to read.

• Mailto Encoder
• Email Address Encoder

Bonus Link: Other Remotely Hosted Do-Hickies

ScriptSocket

ScriptSocket stuff will have banner ads on them per their FAQ.

Stuff I need to work on:

1. Contact - this could be either a contact form or encrypting my email address in such a way that harvester bots can’t read it and putting that on my site. The lack of access to CGI or Php means I’m kind of back to static html website days and can’t just find a contact form script or plugin. It has to be remotely hosted which means either pay for the service or put up with data mining and ads. I’ll probably do the email thing. Fortunately I found an encoder
2. Hosted Comments: I at least want non-Micro.blog users to be able to comment on Posts. Micro.blog can send Indieweb notices but as far as I know it cannot receive them, or at least they don’t get displayed on the post so that is an obstical. Plus I’m old school, I believe blogs are more than just having a soapbox, they should be a place for conversation and that means commenting. Conversation raises my game, making me want to write better, clearer.
3. Now Page - it’s not a high priority but it would be nice.

Speaking of pages, I know I’m going to be adding more pages. Without a sidebar on the theme it means they all have to fit in the top level navigation menu. We shall see.

Things I am Missing from Wordpress

• Sidebars on Themes
• Widgets like Top Posts and Pages. These helped draw visitors in and get them to read more posts.
• Related Posts: displayed below each individual post, again this helped draw people in to seeing other posts I had written on the same subject. I really miss these.

Time for supper. At least I got to practice a little Markdown in this post with some help from this Markdown Cheatsheet

I just deactivated my Facebook account. I did not delete it (yet) I figured I would see how this goes for a few months. I really wasn’t using FB much, just to keep track of some good friends and neighbors.

Facebook sure does not make deactivation easy. If I use FB ID to login to a third party service it reactivates my FB account automatically. Not a problem for me but, beware. Also, FB deactivation does not deactivate FB Messenger. I was hoping to get rid of that but I’ll delete all Messenger apps instead.

SubToMe has a universal subscribe button (code at the link) that you can put on any Micro.blog footer, Page or anywhere that takes HTML. SubToMe has a great list of real feed readers that the subscriber can choose from without all the social network sites garbaging up the list.

Readers include: Inoreader, Feedly, Wordpress Reader, and a bunch more. The button is free.

I’ve merged my Micro.blog blog and my Wordpress (main blog) together on the Micro.blog platform. Oh and I’m now testing the Micropublish online editor to while I type this.

Migration went well. The Wordpress Importer at MB is really smooth. Thank you to Manton for helping to get the swapping out of domains and SSL sorted!

So what this means is, my personal long form and short form blogs are now one under the Ramblinggit.com URL, with no more having to decide which to post what on. By using Micro.blog I also preserve the original URL of each post I Imported from Ramblinggit on Wordpress and that is important because it keep any incoming links from other web pages intact and also keeps the same URL’s that the search engines have indexed. So nobody gets a 404 and I don’t have to learn how to do Apache mod rewrite 301 redirects (or whatever they are called.) Works for me.

The big choice between migrating between Micro.blog and B2evolution was a very near thing. In the end, it came down to the advantages of merging two blogs together, and the support I know exists on MB from the community itself, and from the Micro.blog team of Jean and Manton. All of which is incredibly valuable if you stop and think about it.

Still To Do List:

1. Tidy Up. Recreate Pages from WP. Change Footer stuff.

2. Figure out how to do this newfangled theme editing. Stuff like how to get the theme out of Github and on to the editor because it’s not obvious to me. I have a theory or theories, but that doesn’t mean it will work. All I know is when I open up the theme editor it’s blank which means I got to get something from somewhere.

3. After #2 above, I want to get some sort of hosted comments do-hickey (Disqus or IntenseDebate) inserted into a theme and then working so non-MB members can comment.

4. After #3 above. I’d like to import my comments from Wordpress into that third party comments do-hickey. I really hated losing those comments in the migration. There were some long comments by others that were brilliant and some long threads. That was a high toll to pay, but maybe reversible.

5. Find an editor either online (this Micropublish editor is looking good) or a software client. I need one for both Windows and Linux because I switch back and forth every week.

6. Put some serious thought into how to use these new Categories for posts feature on MB. I never liked the categories I was using on Wordpress, not those are gone so this is a good time to rethink and start fresh.

Enough for this post. I hope this works.

Added: Micropublish failed. I got a big fat error on trying to publish. It sure looked good on paper.

Okay I'm testing the [Quill](https://quill.p3k.io/) online editor.

I was just thinking how iPhone X models left me behind as an iPhone user and how that is similar to Wordpress and the Gutenberg project is making me want to discontinue using Wordpress.

On iPhone X phones:  I always used a numeric code to unlock my iPhones, but where I did use fingerprint recognition was to unlock certain apps like Apple Pay which I like and trust more than Google Pay.  I just don’t like the idea of standing in line, mugging for face recognition so I can pay for something.  1. Fingerprint ID was not broken, it worked really well for me, 2. For the price Apple want’s for the X phones I expect fingerprint ID and ID with my ugly mug.

Underlying that, is I had gotten a bit bored over the years with iOS stability and respectability.

Wordpress Gutenberg is similar, the changes both now with the editor and the future theme and widget changes are certain to keep my plugins constantly broken over the next several years.  While I’m sure some will be happy, these just are not for me.

Time to find something different and move on.

We are launching several major new features for blog hosting on Micro.blog today. Any one of these features alone is a big change, and together I hope they will serve as a great foundation for years to come. The goal was to make blog hosting faster and more flexible for new features.

These are huge additions to the features and an amazing roll-out.  This all paves the way for a more stand alone blog experience on MB.  It’s all very good.

It’s very thoughtful the way Manton set it up so that MB users can share their custom themes with others.  I really appreciate that attention to detail he has built in.

I think categories is going to be a sleeper hit, people might not talk much about them but everybody will quietly wonder how they got along without them.

The gas tax hasn’t budged since 1992, and highway trust fund is running on fumes. Could a Green New Deal pushed by Congress be a fix?

We’re honored to share that 2018 was DuckDuckGo’s best year yet 👏. From where we stand, it was a breakout year for online privacy, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the surveillance revelations of 2013.

In terms of growth, 2018 saw our average daily private searches leap 63%, from 19 million to 31 million.

A comprehensive overview of the history of search engine technology companies. Read about search’s origin in 1945 and innovation through today.

I know I have posted this before but it is worth repeating.  This is good.

The company’s stance on privacy is at odds with the way the biggest search engines operate. Maybe there’s a better way.

My take:

1. Apple should have bought Yahoo and it’s search technology a decade or more ago.  Or Apple should have started from scratch.  They wasted a lot of time.
2. I’m not sure the article author realizes how dependent DDG is on Bing search feed.
3. Yes they should own a search engine now.
4. I’m not comfortable with them owning DDG, but they could invest in DDG or they could make DDG the default search engine.
5. They could buy Yahoo’s search technology and the AltaVista domain from Verizon at fire sale prices and start a new AltaVista. (Preferred.)
6. Because we need more major search engines (with their own crawlers) not further consolidation.

The following are four remotely hosted comment solutions that have caught my eye.

1. Commento.io - privacy focus, no ads, lots of features, Akismet anti-spam, starting at $3 per mo.
2. Intense Debate - Owned by Automattic,  Akismet, Lists Trackbacks and Pings in addition to comments.  Silent about ads.  No mention of pricing prior to signup.  That always gives me pause.
3. Commentbox.io -  looks more basic. Talks about comment filters and blocking for antispam.  No import from WP native comments.  Free for under 100 comments per mo.  Costs if you go over.
4. Disqus -  we’ve all encountered it. Has lots of import features.  Don’t expect privacy. I don’t know how good their anti spam is. Might be able to get it free without ads for personal blog without ads.

Read: The Agatha Christie Book Club by C. A. Larmer

📚   Another contemporary cozy mystery.  No smarmy sweetness.  The book is well written with good characterization and lots of clues and red herrings.  The problem I had was the motive of the amateur detectives to get involved.  I thought it a little thin.  And I thought the ending a bit of an anticlimax.  Beyond that I think everything was competent.   I’d probably go 3 stars although I did enjoy it.

Vermont social network Front Porch Forum has become a useful online community for the entire state, helping users with everything from recommendations to disaster recovery. The key is simple: keeping it focused on local communities.

Removing anonymity is huge.  Great article.