Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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Great Olympics opening show in Paris last night. I thought I’d have a quick look on tv, and then kept watching to the end at midnight. Impressive celebration of French cultural identity in a hugely inclusive way and embedded in the wider European context. Reactionary heads around Europe and the world must have exploded, at this display of embracing one’s national identity without resorting to othering anyone for it.

The beheaded Marie-Antoinettes rocking to heavy metal and opera while arterial blood spouts from the royal’s last Paris residence, liberty in part interpreted as a polyamorous trio celebrating French romantic literature in the library before discretely closing the hotel room door on us, the Dionysian festivities turned gender and age diverse catwalk on the bridge rocking to Euro disco, the golden statues rising from the Seine river of impactful French women, among them two who worked to legalise abortion, the dancer using sign language in their choreography, Assassin’s Creed Arno Dorian phantom like parcouring across Paris with the Olympic flame later taken over by not just one but a whole range of French and international sports heroes (including the oldest living French gold medallist at 100), to collectively light the Olympic fire, while La Giaconda floated away unnoticed on the Seine. Aya Nakamura, who endured a racist storm of abuse at the mere suggestion she might as France’s current internationally best selling artist have a role in the opening, performing with the 176 years old French Republican Guard band. All the little nods and layerings of intention and connections woven into it. It was joyous. It was meaningful.

Joyous too was having the opening ceremony not just escape but completely doing away with the customary stadium setting. The entire city center along the Seine was used as a stage. The city as a platform is an often used metaphor and it came to life here. The national anthem sung by Axelle Saint-Cirel from the enormous glass dome roof of the Grand Palais, the parcours route of the Olympic flame I mentioned, the boat parade on the river of the over 200 national olympic delegations, using the Eiffel Tower for a tremendous light show in sync with the music, Celine Dion performing from half way up the Eiffel Tower itself, and letting the Olympic flame rise above the city from the Tuileries on a balloon (a final nod to ballooning’s French start in 1783).

With all that, who cares they raised the Olympic flag upside down. They got the humanly important details right. Stuff happens, c’est la vie.

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Yesterday we visited the Centre Pompidou in Metz, which we greatly enjoyed.

As usual the exit was through the gift shop, and there I came across Steal Like an Artist, the 10th anniversary updated edition from during the pandemic, by Austin Kleon.

I have read the original and own it. But when you come across the work of someone, who like Austin Kleon has been in my feedreader for a very long time, and especially if you’re in a museum like Centre Pompidou, how could I not pick up another copy?

I re-read it yesterday and today, and in my current burned out state some of the familiar advice resonates differently this time. What are the things that give me a sense of wonder, what strikes me as beautiful? What and who do I choose to let influence me? Time to recalibrate and up my game in stealing like an artist.

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I am currently reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond. I picked up a paper version of the book in a Utrecht bookstore two months ago, while browsing book shelves.

So far I find it fascinating, and I’ve been annotating quite a bit. For the next stage of working through those annotations I realised I might want to also buy the e-book version, so I can digitally connect source text and annotations together, lift out quotes etc.

Do you at times use the paper and e-version of the same book in parallel?

For this book I enjoy being able to easily inspect the structure and main topics, using the paper book. But lifting out the smaller parts that speak to me would be more easily done from the e-book.

Or perhaps I should do all that first by hand as I do normally, and only then start down the exploratory path I feel brewing behind what I’m reading and thinking. I’m not entirely sure what I’m after here, the ability to switch easier from analog to digital, to actually combine the prime affordances of both? Or is it seeking faster gratification from exploring notes, rather than first work through the source material?

The cost of course doubles more or less if you do this. So likely it only applies to books that trigger a more intensive engagement with their contents.

In reply to a bookmark by John Johnston

The templates contain what I want to have inside a blogposting for a reply, favourite, bookmark, rsvp or check-in. I apply them before I submit something to WordPress, so they are fully outside of my blog and get send as HTML to my blog.

Two main ways: if I type something in my editor (e.g. WordPress back-end or in my local text editor) I have text expansion snippets that paste the right template into my text. The little header above this post with the SVG image and the bit that contains the right microformat, I add by typing .ureply, and I have similar set-ups for .ufav, .ubmark, .ursvp and .uplaze. This is what I did to reply to you now.

A second way is that I have integrated these same little templates into the response form I have in my feedreader, and in a little blogform on my local device. There I indicate with a radio button if something is a reply etc, and the php script that processes the form adds in the right HTML before sending it to my WordPress site’s micropub endpoint.

I wonder if these are an alternative to IndieBlocks or something else.

John Johnston

In reply to a reply by David Shanske

No worries, David. I think we had some exchanges about it at the time (2021) in the IndieWeb IRC chat. A migration tool would be useful for others I’m sure. In my case, I used the opportunity to style things differently too. So it wasn’t just a migration out of the plugin, but also additional changes to how I do things in my site. In the end it was less work than I had dreaded beforehand to move over 800 or so postings.

I do have one other oddity since I removed the plugin: post previews are empty, except for the title. Probably I’ve done something to the Sempress theme that causes this. Will explore. Update: this must have been something else, I can’t replicate it now.

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I disabled the PostKinds WordPress plugin, created by David Shanske. I stopped using it 3 years ago for new postings but disabling it then would have broken many older postings.

What makes the plugin useful is that it allows you to turn postings into different, well, kinds of posts. Such as a reply, or a check-in, rsvp, bookmark or favourite. It adds the right microformats so that computers can semantically analyse a post’s purpose, and adds the styling to display them.

My main issue with it was that it places key elements such as the weblink you’re responding to outside the posting itself. It gets stored in the database as belonging to the PostKinds plugin. Meaning if you ever switch it off, that gets wiped from your posting (although it’s still in the database then). This was a dependency I needed to get rid of.
For new postings from summer 2021 I did that by deploying small templates that allow me to mark a posting as reply, rsvp, favourite, bookmark, or check-in, within the postings I’m writing.

I used the PostKinds plugin heavily for 3 years, and most heavily in 2019. That legacy from 2018-2021 was still there, requiring the PostKinds plugin to remain enabled. Until today. Over time I had slowly changed posts when I encountered them, and in the past week I did the remainder.

Another issue is that PostKinds only works in the classic WordPress editor, and not in the now default Gutenberg editor. At some point that would hinder the ability to upgrade WordPress.

Solong PostKinds, thanks for all the fish!