Posts tagged "blogging-and-writing":

journal

In early december I began to look at the expenses associated with maintaining servers and other related web services and decided to economize. I decided that in place of a self-hosted WordPress installation I would bring back my static site and host it on some extra storage I had in my email system.

Fediverse

Yesterday I signed up for yet another server, this time KNThost, because they have a managed service for Hubzilla (also Streams). At this stage I really think I need to have some help with running Hubzilla instances. The one that I hosted on an unmanaged VPS has gone bad, and no longer shares posts. It's a one way hub, with a growing queue and database problem.

Diary: software, blogging, estrangement

The new woman who is set to replace me when I retire in a couple of months seemed a little surprised today. First of all there was a screaming match going on in the next room over the submission of a fundraising proposal. I wasn't paying much attention to it as I was busy trying to explain some things about the job (maybe that surprised her too). Then, when I got into explaining about Piwigo (the photo gallery software we use), and kept praising the recent changes introduced by the "developer", she asked me what I meant by "a developer." She is used to big companies with hundreds of developers, not free open source software. She said she didn't feel safe otherwise because "What would happen if the developer goes away?"

Diary

There's something about social media that it's both a time-suck and an energy-suck. I've been so busy with it lately that I have not found the time or the energy for my blog. Not that I have been active on social media: that would not be true. It's more that I have been either reading timelines, or evaluating and playing with its possibilities. Or installing, or reinstalling, and not getting very far with anything.

The tathatā of time-wasting

Usually when we choose the title of an article, or a network, or a domain name, we want something that will express the essence, the spirit, the suchness or tathatā of the thing we are naming. Or we are being humorous. There's a new instance on the Fediverse called the "godpod", whose owner has chosen a god-avatar for himself and makes bold declarations, such as that it was a mistake of his not to include mastodons in the ark. Well, "godpod" has a certain ring to it. Whereas Mike McGirvin - the author of several social networks and social networking protocols and of attempts to bridge between them and others, was expressing the suchness of his despair when naming his instance "unfediverse".

Dystopia as a muse for fiction

There is one positive aspect of the increasing darkness we see all around us - the climate emergency; the victory of anti-democratic forces; the increasing number of refugees; the continuation of proxy wars; the smouldering animosity between nations; the expansion of hate-speech; the erosion of civil rights; the development of technologies for mass surveillance; the spread of motiveless crime; the destruction of the biosphere; the resurgence of religions; the growing gaps between rich and poor; the prevalence of modern slavery, the subservience of the state to corporations; the loss of culture and of cultural diversity and all the rest - it is a fertile bed for the imagination. Ugliness and nastiness are a perfect palate for great art. Good books and films are incubated in dark places. The horrors of World War II and the fascist regimes of the time continue to be a source of great movies. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are a recurring feature of science fiction. The horrors of the feudal era and of warring kingdoms inspire fantasy like that of George R R Martin. As things get worse, the literature gets better. Regardless of the consequences, whether, say, novels and films about climate change, are actually effective in spurring us to action, or whether imaginative fiction about dark regimes can urge the populace to vote for change, such art has a value in its own right. It keeps us engaged, entertained and enthralled, immerses us in realities that are even worse than the one we are presently suffering. The present is dark and the future may be blacker, but we live not only in reality but in our dreams, and usually these stories of wretched hyper-realities are populated by sympathetic figures and heroes who need to find their way in the darkness; either through ingenuity, by discovering their superpowers, through the exercise of compassion and humanity, or by cleaving to other hapless human beings in a similar plight.

Blog and photos back where they were

I spent the last few days messing with servers on Kamatera's VPS hosting. After abandoning the attempt to set up an Epicyon fediverse instance, I tried to re-utilize the same server for the blog and photo galleries. I'd chosen a NGINX based server, and somehow I couldn't succeed with it, so eventually I gave up.

2022-07-15-blogging

I was just reading the definition of the "Read Write web", which was a revolutionary concept in the early 2000s - the idea that browsers could be used not just to consume content but to create it, and I was thinking again about blogging. Having set up this blog on the new server and finally reinstated a passwordless command for updating it within emacs, I realized how important this step was for encouraging me to write.

2022-07-03

In the course of my search for a good Activity Pub server, I found that there are a number of options in development. Here's a curated list. I was specifically looking for an option that expressed the KISS principle (was simple to install, use, maintain) and geared towards single users.

Journal

I just noticed that there are many blog posts, mostly from last year, that I haven't moved over into this blog. When I find some time I will do that.

2022-06-05-Wordpress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress's changes, but maybe it's a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I've tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but Wordpress usually messes it up.

2022-05-24

I have successfully passed all of the home-spun html entries from recent months into org-static-blog, meaning that I now have a continuous archive for the last three years. The ones from before that time can be found on WordPress. I don't plan to move more of them.

2022-04-22 - Hubzilla | state of the web

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but, in my free time I have been tidying up my Hubzilla site and making various improvements. One intended improvement resulted in the accidental deletion of one of my wikis, but it was not such a significant loss. After going back and forth on the question of how to collect web links - such as for comment in blogging. Hubzilla's bookmarks module looks like it still needs some work, though it is very easy to share bookmarks to it, via a browser bookmarklet. See my channel timeline for a discussion on the pros and cons of the system. In the meantime, I will be using another Hubzilla module.

2022-04-13 A walk | the blog | browsers | Signal messenger | links

I have been feeling a need for a bit of seclusion lately. Maybe because in Israel-Palestine the holiday season with its seasonal tensions is on us again. I went for a walk in the woods and fields today and ran into a battalion of boy/girl scouts. One of them - maybe their security detail - was waiting for me as I approached, with questions about where I lived, whether I was Jewish, how relations are between Jews and Arabs there - he got mostly a stony silence from me as I marched through. Luckily I'm harmless.

2022-03-13 Tidying the blog

I had a problem with my server computer the last couple of days; apparently because of a failed update. In the meantime I tidied up the html on this blog - I was thinking there was something wrong with it because bluefish editor incorrectly highlights some of the syntax. SeaMonkey has a link to an html validator. It found a few errors, but these were not the reason for bluefish's wrong syntax highlighting, which continues, though all the code now validates.

Diary and links

2022-02-02 22:22 - Wow that's quite a time and date! Not intentional, I swear. Today was also my brother's birthday, and the day my eldest son moved to his new house. Our own house suddenly got bigger since they were moving out from the part that we divided off to rent out. I think we're done with renting, so we'll have a couple of guest rooms.

2022-01-23

As I grow older, I seem to forget projects that I had gotten into a while back. In 2020 I discovered org-static-blog and apparently forgot all about it in a few months. I remember having tried various static blogging systems, and recently read about Barry Kauler's static blogging system, and was thinking to try that, due to its simplicity. But this is even simpler, therefore better, if simplicity is what I'm looking for. I'm just afraid that one of these days I will lose even more of my marbles and be left blogless and helpless. Hubzilla is great, and Wordpress has many advantages, but both of them require a complicated setup (if they are on a home server), including php and mysql (or MariaDB). I may decide to go back to this, and, if I require something beyond a blogging system, to use ordinary html in SeaMonkey or Bluefish.

Gradually importing my Wordpress blog

I've made a bit of progress in importing my Wordpress blog, though I must admit it is quite a struggle. Although I'm using Emacs for the blog, I'm very new to Emacs. As someone has said, it isn't so much an editor as an engine for the LISP programming language, with many arcane functionalities. You basically program Emacs to work in whatever way you want and do the things that you want. But I'm not a programmer and don't know LISP, so that means trying to figure out what other people have programmed for it and incorporating the useful parts.

Authoring

Social media and news site talkbacks have ushered in an age where everyone feels a need to comment, discuss, and venture their opinions. A few years ago, one had to be quite upset or sure of one’s authority to go to the trouble of writing “a letter to the editor”, and till today, when we read a book, it’s very unlikely that we will be able to enter into a discussion with the writer. Well-known authors often cherish anonymity, writing under pen-names. Many refuse all public appearances. In any case, the most we can expect is to learn about them through the intermediary of a journalist, who, we hope, will ask the same questions that we have.

Blogging in the mainstream

I’m not sure how popular blogging is these days; I’ve read about a mass turning away from traditional blogging in favor of Facebook. My own evidence is only anecdotal. I find quite often when going through my bookmarks that blogs I had once visited now lie dormant, neglected and forgotten, or worse, show a 404 error code.