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.

The first migration I have to do is this blog.  That will be soon.  I need to get this migration done before I start on the next one.  Everything is sort of hanging fire until I get this blog sorted.

Migration #2.

Steps:

1. Backup everything, both Wordpress and WSNLinks.
2. Pay WSN support to somehow separate WSNLinks from Wordpress.
3. Install WSNLinks index page at the root domain as a stand alone script.
4. Then I have to Unistall Wordpress.
5. Install B2evolution at a subfolder: probably /blog
6. Set up B2evo and configure.
7. Import Wordpress posts into B2evo.
8. Clean up loose ends and any mess.
9. Test everything.

Just a quick note: You can import your Wordpress comments into Disqus.

Good to know.  If I ever had to use a hosted comments solution like Disqus, I think I would start out with Disqus.  Why?  They have the most tools to import your old comments AND most other hosted comments services will import from Disqus.

So start with Disqus, see how much it is actually used and if need be you can always move to another service.

Do you ever get a song in your head and it just won’t go away?  Well this is what keeps repeating in my brain:

Tubular Bells: “Piltdown Man” by Mike Oldfield.

Really.

A platform move for this blog is coming.  Wordpress is frozen on ver. 4.9.9 which is fine by me, but untenable in the long term because eventually I will start missing needed security upgrades.  Also, I’m beginning to suspect that my Indieweb stuff is not working everywhere with everyone and I’m not willing to put the time in tracking down where the problems are on a platform I intend to leave.

So I need to prepare to migrate.

I’m not sure if WP Pages get moved with backups or not, so today’s project is to manually copy the content of all important pages here on the blog so they can be easily recreated wherever I move.

Not hard, just busywork.  And right now it’s 1 degree F outside with a high of 11 degrees F so it’s a good day to stay home and tackle it.

Okay I lied, I do have to make a store run for weekend food, plus doughnuts er, because doughnuts are a food group

The subject came up via John Philpin and Gray Areas.   And using a webring to denote sub-communities within Micro.blog.  For example:

1. Analog things.  A big catchall for stuff below.
2. Fountain pen collectors.
3. Paper journal keepers.
4. Typewriter collectors
5. Paper note keepers.
6. etc.

A webring plays to the strength of MB users actually having a blog.

Currently, Micro.blog hosted blog users can put a webring code in their footer area.  The size is a bit cramped but it is usable.  I expect this to get better in the near future when Micro.blog rolls out improved template/theme editing capabilities.

The easiest, off the shelf, webring hosting solution is Webringo.com.* It works and has some nice features.

1. People joining a Webringo ring have their choice of 3 stock ring codes: A. HTML (either vertical and horizontal), B. an I Frame, C. a JavaScript ring code (like Webring used to have).
2. Webringo automatically produces an Index page of sites within the ring. If you link to this it gives people an alternative way to explore the ring.
3. A webring is opt-in, that is membership is voluntary.  A @JohnPhilpin noted it can denote a club or tribe.
4. I would strongly recommend that the ring owner provide some example, optional, “minimalist” HTML ring codes that members can customize to work with their membership if they want.
5. The advantage to using Webringo is it makes managing the ring much easier and joining the ring less labor intensive.

I’m just throwing the idea out there, for whoever is interested to think about.

I will make this offer: If people start forming webrings for sub-communities within Micro.blog  I will create some sort of index of the webrings so people can find different rings.

Reference: Webrings.

*  I’m not married to Webringo, it’s just that when I investigated the other two ring hosts, Webring and Ringsurf, I was getting error messages when I tried to sign up and they were still giving errors when I came back a couple of weeks later.  Whereas, Webringo is still fully functional.

This was also posted to /en/linking.

I wrote a review of B2evolution CMS, but I didn’t get into too much detail.  I’ve taken a closer look and here are some thoughts.

Blogs: you can have multiple blogs on one install. You can control who can see each blog.  This is handy if you want to keep a journal or diary something only logged in members can see.

Manual:  This is really neat.

1. You can create a manual.
2. You could use this for a diary or journal.
3. You could outline a book with this.
4. You could write a web book with chapters and/or sub chapters.
5. Moreover the manual has wiki features.

Main features:

• Similar to a Wiki but with added hierarchical structure
• Unlimited nesting of Chapters & Sub-chapters
• Easy linking between pages via WikiLink syntax – links stay valid even if you restructure the table of contents differently or if you rename the pages
• Collaborative editing, including versioning of edits, history, diffs and rollback.
• Multiple markup options making editing easier and more consistent than HTML editing
• No frames, so each page has an URL and it’s easy to share links to individual pages
• Allows user comments
• Allows user rating of manual pages
• and of course all the other b2evolution standard features (Analytics, Antispam, etc.)

All said, that Manual feature is a very powerful thing to have at your beck and call.

Forums:  A full featured forum. See Forum Demo.

Tracker: For Issues or tasks.  See Tracker Demo.

There’s more!

You can manage your own email mailing list and newsletter.  Plus you have polls.

As far as I can tell these things are not half done.  They are tested and robust.  That’s a lot of stuff to have available with one install and for free.  The more I look at B2evolution the more impressed I get.

The Hardy Boys 1 -58 collection I bought on eBay has arrived.

These are from the 1960’s to the early 1970’s which are the editions that were for sale when I was a boy.  Much to my chagrin these are now “vintage” editions.

These are not the original text versions.  Around about the late 1950’s the Hardy Boys books from the 1020 and 1930’s were edited to change some out dated language and technology references.  If I wait a few years I can start reading the original versions as they become public domain.  I’m keen to do that.