I have a project I’ve been thinking about, off and on for about 9 months: I want to write down what I can remember of my family lore and also my own family memories from my youth.

1. Stories told to me by family members about themselves or other family members.
2. Stuff I was a part of.
3. My memories of parents and grandparents.

I had been considering some sort of blogging platform for this.  A blog is not quite the right script for this because of posts always being pushed down, but categories and tags could help keep things organized.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about this because Wordpress and their dreadful Gutenberg project have put a massive monkey wrench in the gears.  I do want this to have some archival qualities and daft Gutenberg “blocks” held together with mass globs of JavaScript does not sound very archival to me.  Nor do I want to write this on a platform that is going to be reinvented every month for the next 3 to 5 years.  I’m not going to be Automattic’s beta tester.  So what was my platform of choice, Wordpress has been ripped out from under me and darn few other blogging platforms have the breath and depth of features of Wordpress.

(It gets worse because I had some other projects that I was going start that would have used Wordpress and those are now on hold too.  But I’ll leave them for another post.)

On this family memory project: as I was thinking about what to use besides Wordpress it occurred to me that a wiki might be a better platform.  The people characters are sort of constants and every time I named a person it would be great if that was automatically hyperlinked to a page about that person.  Same for locations.  I’m still playing  with the idea but a wiki is starting to sound better than a blog for this.

Editor’s Note: The following post was originally written on Twitter by @SuperWendy. I edited it and republished it here because I agree with the sentiment. Over the past few yearsContinue reading

Hat tip: Adam Tinworth

Taking the time to comment or repost is important.  Nobody likes to talk to blank walls.

Source: The Danger of Medium · Adam Tinworth

I have been using Blot, a simple blogging platform with no interface, for quite some time now for running my blog. I am not alone when I say this, but am mighty impressed with how simple it is to post things on blot and maintain the overall site. They are just some files in Dropbox - that’s about it. So, it was pretty straightforward to customise the theme to my liking and to enable the support for IndieWeb principles.

This is a continuation of a series.  You may want to start with the first post:  Populism and Today’s Social Tech vs. Blogging

What is Micro.blog?

Micro.blog (MB) has two elements the 1. hosted blog and 2. the social network. They exist sort of separately but they are also intertwined. You have to have a blog, either hosted on MB or elsewhere, to be a member of the MB social network.

“Micro.blog is an easy way to host and share your posts, photos, and even a podcast in a way that maximizes what’s great about social networks and minimizes what’s troubling about them.”

Now watch a 2 minute video: Welcome to Micro.blog

Micro.blog can certainly be many things to many people–possibly too many. In large part, what it is depends on what tools you’re bringing into it and how you’d like to use it.

It can be:

• a web host
• a Twitter replacement
• a Twitter client that allows you to own your own data
• a Instagram replacement
• a microcasting platform
• a full blogging platform
• a new, well-curated community with a strong code of conduct
• a customized feed reader for a new community
• a syndication platform for one’s personal blog
• a low barrier entryway to having your own IndieWeb-capable blog on your own domain.
• a first class IndieWeb citizen with support for multiple types of posts, IndieAuth, Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub.

Chris pretty well sums up all the things you can do on Micro.blog.

As the name Micro.blog implies the primary thing you can do on it is write short form posts like Twitter and Facebook.  But you can also post long form posts just like you would on a conventional blog, just keep typing and when you hit 280 characters in a post a Title Field appears and you are long form posting - effortlessly.  There is no friction or barriers between you and just writing.

Posting is easy, like posting on Twitter and the blog just auto-generates itself.  You can post, “I like pizza.“  You can post a picture of your cat plus a poem about your cat. You can post a 600 word essay about the Chicago Cubs. Whatever you want, however short or long you want. It’s one of the features I like the most.  Posting photos is very easy on MB.  There are quite a few dedicated photoblogs there.

And you can move.  If you decide to move you can export all your posts and import them on a different blogging platform.  This is exactly why MB strongly encourages you to use your own domain it makes moving easier.

Migrating from Twitter or Facebook to Micro.blog

What is the difference between Twitter and Micro.blog?

I was going to write a big long comparison between Micro.blog and Twitter then Facebook, but I don’t think I’m really up to the job.  Which is why this post has been sitting in my Drafts bin for several weeks.

Here is the best thing to do:  Micro.blog offers a free trial.  Sign up and really try it for the trial period.  You can set MB to cross post to Twitter so all your posts appear on both MB and Twitter at the same time.  Give it a try.

At the end of the trial, you have a choice:

1. pay $5 per month to continue the hosted blog on MB, or,
2. discontinue the hosted blog, it will no longer work but the social network will still work. See below.

Paying the $5 for easy posting is the easiest way to go.  The five bucks pays for the service, keeps it free of ads and tracking and helps keep the riff-raff out. (That’s my opinion.)

But either way, if you are looking for a replacement social network I urge you to give Micro.blog a try on the free trial.

Launched: Hyperlink Node Directory This started out as a thinking out loud type post a few weeks ago. At that time I couldn’t really think of a straight forward…

In case you missed it.

Despite Gutenberg, it looks like this blog will remain on Wordpress for awhile.  There is nothing else that has all the features, stability, and Indieweb stuff I want.  Each platform I have looked at is not quite ready yet, but a few may be ready someday.

With that said, I do want to change things up a bit:

Theme

I’m currently using Sempress (on two blogs), I like Sempress a lot but I’d like to make the blogs look more distinct and different from each other while retaining Indieweb functions.  Of the Indieweb compatible themes, Indieweb: Twenty Sixteen looks good.  Zenpress is really nice but I always want a sidebar theme and Zenpress does not have that.  There is talk of fixing the Indieweb problems with Independent Publisher theme and that would be ideal as I like the look of that theme.

Blog Directory here on Ramblinggit.

I already removed it from navigation.  It was rarely used or looked at, in conversation people confuse it with Indieseek.xyz, it duplicates part of Indieseek.xyz and I don’t see a future for it so I think it can be made redundant.

Guestbook

Nobody even looks at it.  It has been deleted.

“And let us at this time remember in his name the poor and the helpless, the cold, the hungry and the oppressed; the sick in body and in mind and them that mourn; the lonely and the unloved; the aged and the little children; and all who know not the loving kindness of God.” Source

This is a favorite for Christmas.

Has anybody tried any of the free countdown clock plugins for Wordpress and If so, which ones are best?

href.cool:

No review yet, that will come later.  Just getting the word out about this cool new curated web directory by Kicks Condor.

I’m finally laying the groundwork to either quit Facebook althogether or make my account inactive. But first I have to turn over Administration duties on 2 FB Pages and one private FB group and then I’ll be able to pull the plug.

Over that last few months I have been fairly inactive on FB. Which makes this easier, but I still have friends and neighbors on there which still makes this hard.

The most recent revelations about Facebook and privacy tell me that Facebook’s values do not match my values which makes it time to leave. Soon.

There is a lot of discussion about adding categories and/or tags for posts on hosted blogs on Micro.blog and I just thought I would post this note on some search engine traffic stats I have observed here on Wordpress and how they might be useful to Micro.blog.

Archives:

The same sort of thing applies to categories.

Benefits:

Micro.blog

I think the movie “A Christmas Carol” aka “Scrooge” at times, may be the most remade film in history.  I have not seen most of the modern versions and don’t care too.  Two classic versions of the movie are inscribed on my memory and remain my favorites.

I’m kind of posting this for Gen X’ers and Millennials who may have never encountered these older versions.

A Christmas Carol (1938) - This is the version that dominated my childhood from pre-school on, on my local television station played this every year at Christmas time and I and all my friends watched it religiously each year.  Young children like repetition and familiar things so us kids ate this up.  And it’s a good version for young children, scary but evened out by just a touch of Hollywood schmaltz to make it not too scary for kids.  Reginald Owen does a fine job as Scrooge and Gene Lockhart is very good as Bob Cratchit.  Leo G. Carroll is good as Marley’s Ghost.

Scrooge (UK), A Christmas Carol (US) (1951) - This is a grittier, grimmer, darker version.  As Art, as a movie, it is a better adaptation.  Several critics think this is the best version ever made.  British actor Alastair Sim plays Scrooge to perfection, the supporting cast is far stronger than the American 1938 film, and the script more detailed, deeper, richer.  The grimness might not be for small children but for adults it makes the happy ending all the more enjoyable.  Foe adults, if you are only going to buy one version this is it.  Pro Tip: DO NOT get the colorized version.

Google executives ignored internal warnings about their censored China search plan and threatened that employees would be fired if they spoke out.

This is deeply disturbing.  Again, I think it’s time for Google to be split up and regulated.

Around Thanksgiving, I started seeing a fair amount of traffic to my WGN-TV Family Classics Movie List page and it continues.  I’ve been moving that page around from blog to blog since at least 2004 and a few weeks ago I moved it here.

If you are a late Baby Boomer and grew up in the Chicago television area you will know about the WGN Family Classics movies.  More info on that page.

I think Thanksgiving and Christmas bring a lot of reflection on the past and our childhood memories which causes people to search the web for this list of old classic movies.

I think Family Classics might still be on TV, but the specific movies have changed as old contracts finally ran out, so this list matches what my generation enjoyed.

Anyway I thought I would share, just in case you are of a certain age, grew up watching Chicago television and want to amaze you cousins with your trivia knowledge at Christmas dinner.

Geoffrey writes from his Gmail address to ask how he can stop Google from intruding into almost everything

Good article.  I’m anxious to see what the /e/ Foundation comes up with. They are developing not just a replacement of Android (minus the spywear) but a whole ecosystem of open source apps that will replace the Google Android apps and omit the spywear.

I thought I should post a quick review of the US version of Unbubble.eu a neutral and privacy based search engine.  I used Unbubble as my default, daily search for two weeks to test it on typical searches.

It is important to note that this is a review of the US version of Unbubble.  Unbubble is a European search engine and really isn’t intended for American audience nor should it be.  Therefore much of what I say may not apply to the German, Spanish, UK English, French, Dutch, Turkish and Polish versions.  You should try them for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Unbubble is a metasearch engine, which means it draws it’s search results from many other search engines and directories and does not have it’s own index.  This is how Unbubble is maintaining neutral search results and getting around any bias a single search engine might have.  As Unbubble’s name implies they eliminate the search bubble because of having many sources and by not tracking you and adapting the algo to match your past behavior.  This is a good thing.  I think they succeed in this goal so points to them for that.

Like most metasearch engines, Unbubble US does a decent job on broad searches.  Where it falls down is on detailed searches and some navigational searches.

Broad searches: when I search for “science fiction” I get a respectable set of good results.  I like that they list the source engines.  I’m seeing: Mojeek, Exactseek, Yandex, BigFinder, Faroo as sources which is good, give the smaller engines a chance.  I found that all these smaller engines put together produce some good results for nice broad searches.  Unbubble’s use of these smaller search engines and directories is what got me to try it.  Points to them

Navigational searches: I found that sometimes Unbubble could not find the URL of the company or website I was seeking.  It did list other websites that either mention it or link to it or sometimes you would see an interior page from the website you wanted but not the index page.  This shows that the sources just didn’t have indexes that were big enough to handle the job.

Detailed searches: these are generally five or six word searches trying to find very specific information. Many times on these, Unbubble just did not do very well, and if they did, I got just one page of results. None of the sources had the really deep indexes required for these searches.

One difference between when I did my test and what I’m seeing now: a few weeks ago, on more detailed searches, I would see some German sites slipped into the results from Fastbot (if I remember right) today I’m seeing some results from Fastbot but they are in English.  The results might be improved because of this.

Speed: This is Unbubble’s weakest feature. It’s slow. When you do a search you get a little swirly thing and you feel you are back on dialup.  There is a lot of JavaScript on the site and that may be the reason in addition to trying to call results in from many different sources, but the end result is slowness.

Conclusion: Unbubble US is not what I would chose as my daily search engine.  The slowness and the lack of good results on detailed searches became an obsticle for me.  As I said above, the US is not really the intended audience for this search engine.  I would urge people from the countries listed above to give Unbubble a try.  You have nothing to lose and you might really like the results.

A beloved Robert Frost poem is among the many creations that are (finally) losing their protections in 2019

Back in the early ‘00’s before Kindle, when most ebooks were either public domain or self published the ebook community and I railed against the Disney/Sonny Bono copyright act.  It didn’t do any good but as the article says a whole generation has missed out on some classic books and music over the last 20 years.

This is exciting, every year we get a new treasure trove from now on. You can find lots of public domain books both old and newly made public at:

Gutenberg Archive

Manybooks.net

These are my two favorite public domain ebook archives still around from when I used to read on a Palm Pilot PDA.

If you have a Kindle, I have a list of some free public domain mysteries, ghost stories, science fiction, horror stories that I have enjoyed in the Library here on the blog.

One of the reasons I remain so confident in Micro.blog is that it was built for moments like this, when public opinion shifts against the big social networks.

I can recommend Micro.blog as a replacement for Facebook.  I’ve never used Instagram but Micro.blog can replace that too. No ads, no tracking, no evil, no orcs - ever. So with one Micro.blog account you can quit 2 bad services.

The difference between Google and Bing in this case is consistent with something I’ve noticed lately, which is that Google seems to be forgetting a lot of old stuff.

I’m a big fan of Old Time Radio (OTR) and hard boiled detective shows.  If you want to hear all sorts of Noir type crime shows on Internet Radio, I suggest Audio Noir.  There you will hear mysteries, hard boiled, police proceedurals and more.

But the recordings of Old Time Radio make great podcasts and most are available at Archive.org.  Below is a list of some of the hard boiled detective shows I have enjoyed.  Philip Marlow and Sam Spade are the best of the genre.  There are others but these will get you started.🎙🎙

On some of these you have to download zip bundles of mp3 files.  So load up your iPod and enjoy.

Adventures of Philip Marlow. The Gerold Mohr episodes (most of them) are the best. The Mohr episodes define the genre on radio.

The Adventures of Sam Spade. Really good. Lighter than Marlow these are still amongst the best.

Broadway is My Beat.  The Larry Thor episodes are best.  Some of the characters are just weird but over time I grew to really like this show.

Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  Starring Dick Powell.

Let George Do It.  First few episodes are sadly played for laughs, but later episodes are hard boiled.

Barry Craig, Confidential Investigator.  Pretty standard.

Your’s Truly, Johnny Dollar.  I’ve singled out the Edmund O’Brian episodes which I think are the best and most hard boiled of this long running series.

Jeff Regan.  The 24 shows starring Jack Webb are the best.

Pat Novak, For Hire. Another Jack Webb show.

I used to collect browsers way back when, I don’t anymore although I do check out different browsers on occasion.  This conversation started me thinking about why I don’t care much about browsers anymore.

1. Back in the early oughts there was a race to add features to the browsers. Each browser had a different feature set, UI and different resulting workflow.  It was fun to test them and see how they fit in with my routine.
2. There were more rendering engines which made switching between browsers and adventure.
3. Everyone was on dialup. Speed really mattered. Today, not so much.
4. Security.  One reason I used Opera was because it was a little more secure against exploits having an oddball rendering engine.  It also didn’t auto download things from websites the way IE did.

We defeated the IE mono-culture for awhile to slowly have it replaced by the new Chrome mono-culture while Firefox seemed to drift for awhile. Apple developed Safari, but then quit the Windows field.  Many of the smaller Open Source browsers never quite seemed to ever be finished.  Opera got sold and the new owners ripped the guts out of it to make it minimalist.

In the end, almost all browsers seemed to be alike claiming to be: fast, clean, minimalist but maybe extendable, tabbed, and boring.  And if you use Chrome, also loaded with Google spyware which you probably can’t shut off even if they provide you with an alleged switch buried deeply in the UI.

Mainly I use one browser on each device, with a second as a rarely used backup/second opinion.  The days of having 4 or 5 browsers are for me pretty much over.

I was heartened to see The Correspondent has made their starter goal.  I donated a coouple of weeks ago only because I’d get my money back if they didn’t raise enough to start.  To my surprise, they did.  It’s still a win-win for me.  I’m hoping I’ll like the Correspondent’s brand of corporate free journalism.  Now they have a few month’s to put together a news and editorial team before launching in mid-2019.  Good luck.

Source: The Correspondent - Unbreaking news

As I got to the sidewalk a black limo glided up and a couple of educator types got out, armed with rulers, grabbed me by the arms and hustled me to the back of the car.  “McVerry, wants to show you something,” said one, with a pencil stored over her ear while the other one shoved a hood over my head. “The hood is for your own protection so you can’t reveal our destination to any of them later.

All I can say, is we ended up at one of Greg McVerry’s many super secret bases, heavily guarded by librarians and dusty library cats. I was in the Area 51 of Greg’s cyberworld getting a behind the scenes look at a secret Known install.

And you know, Known is really nice.  The script is really cool and easy to use.  Understandably, I only got to see it from a posters POV and not an admin’s but what I saw was slick and clean UI.  And it does Indieweb right out of the box - also cool.  I understand there are plugins to add more features to Known but I didn’t get a chance to see those.  I like the wizard sort of feature that prompts you to add all your social networks and other websites upon signup - that takes care of your h-card at the same time, I assume.

Some things Known is missing:

1. Templates: I always like a sidebar and as far as I can tell Known does not have this.
2. Import: I’m told there is no Import feature currently.  That makes it hard to migrate in from an existing WP blog.  There is an Export function, which is good.
3. No automatic updates: I suspect this will come after Known hits 1.0 release but I’m just guessing.

Many thanks to Greg McVerry for the tour.

After chaos, the EU’s plan to censor the internet takes a huge step backwards

I don’t know the details, but I’m not bound by EU rules, I will link to whoever I want to.