July 2016

There were 6 posts published in July 2016 (this is page 1 of 1).

Homeland, by Cory Doctorow

Just finished Homeland by Cory Doctorow – a good read.  Strange to read the book’s after words by Aaron Swartz and Jacob Appelbaum – the former driven to suicide; the latter recently banished from Tor for alleged sexual misconduct.

It’s odd as well to see Doctorow speaking of services like Skype and dedicating the last section of the book to Amazon. “The founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! Amazon’s in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can’t think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.”   If he can mention large corporations without irony or prudence, how can I trust him?

In the balance, he’s on the right side, urging people take back control, cautioning against government tyranny and corporate power. But it seems to me that a genuine social critic, or someone with well-honed critical thinking skills, or someone who is just honest, does not choose certain large targets, while letting others off lightly.   It’s because the heroes of his novels are people who are both streetwise and distrustful to the level of paranoia, that it strikes an odd note when essential players in their and our world seem to get an easy ride.

Confession, I downloaded both Little Brother and Homeland for free from Doctorow’s site: but perhaps I will pay for the next one.

 

Facebook

Just caught up with the Guardian post of Hossein Derakhshan, “Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web”, from December last year.

All true, but the bloggers, and other “content producers” (horrible term) are also helping to kill the web, by playing along with the rules. I can’t so much blame them for using Twitter. Facebook should be seen for what it is – the enemy of the open web. Facebook is evil in so many ways I need to breathe deeply whenever I think about it, so I’ll let Derakhshan’s article suffice.

Twitter is an evil mainly because the web depends on it too much. There are basic flaws in the way it is built, and it’s always only “somehow” worked. My main complaint is still that it is centralized – and, as we know, Twitter deliberately killed off its ecosystem of third party clients, through control of its API.

It would be so beautiful if we could create a decentralized, federated system of social networking on the model of email; or early email – as we’ve let the big companies take over there too. The means exist – I’ve just brought back my status.net instance for the umpteenth time. But it’s a pie in the sky dream, unfortunately. Mainly because we collaborate. Netizens unite; take back your power!

Intentional communities

Auroville, and a few other communities around the world, hold many of the keys for the improvement of our civilization and the survival of humankind. Among these keys I would count the attempt to affect an evolution in human consciousness, the use of education as a means to transformation, the placing of curbs on materialism, the adoption of sustainable practices of food production, nonviolent and democratic governance practices, embracing of pluralism and heterogeneity, abandonment of sexism, racism, homophobia and the attempt to live in greater harmony with our environment. Not all of these keys will be expressed in every intentional community, and no doubt there are others that I have forgotten. My own community, Wahat al-Salam – Neve Shalom, for example, focuses on showing that two peoples who are in conflict can change the nature of their relationship to one of working together for peace. It does not try to address environmental issues at a community level. So it holds “some of the keys”, but not others. Still, it is very easy to take a contrary view of communities. One can say that nobody is listening, that such communities are too few and marginal to make a difference. One can say that, even on a small scale, communities are incapable of living up to their own ideals, that human beings are imperfect, and the negative qualities of the larger society tend to affect communities more readily than the communities spill their positive qualities over into society.

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Biodiversity

The Guardian has an article headed “Biodiversity is below safe levels across more than half of world’s land – study” (Habitat destruction has reduced the variety of plants and animals to the point that ecological systems could become unable to function properly, with risks for agriculture and human health, say scientists)

From what I saw at Solitude Farm, here in Auroville, the solution is there, in Permaculture. But it requires quite a radical change in the way our societies would work. But Permaculture would also create the change, from the ground up, in a fairly simple level, and no doubt incrementally.

Websites:
Auroville
Auroville Permaculture
Solitude Farm

Shades of RTL support in WordPress themes

It seems, in WordPress, that it is not enough that a theme shouts about its support for RTL. And even when a theme gets positive reviews from a site like onlyrtl.com, that may not be the full story. The proof is in the pudding. And, because of such positive reviews, it isn’t so easy to check before purchase.

That’s my experience after purchasing Elegant Themes Divi theme, whose developer makes claims about RTL support on its pre-sale pages.

I’ve used themes (like Weaver II – another Swiss knife type theme) that simply work out of the box with RTL, but now I see that this isn’t the case with Divi. There are complications; and their forum is full of attempts to fix things with custom CSS. That’s not how it should be.

I can’t prove it, but my hunch is that themes that start with RTL built in from the ground up, from when the theme’s coding began, probably work better than those that add it later as an after-thought.

In any case, a little honesty is called for from web developers. It’s better to be up front about what a theme supports rather than deal with disappointed users later. Sometimes a user may be willing to get his/her hands dirty and try to deal with short comings simply because a theme is, in many ways a good solution. And user needs, just like themes, come in different shades. For example, it seems that the Divi theme works more easily in an environment where only RTL is needed, but may be more complicated in a case where a multilingual site is needed. (Now I’ll have to see.) Or, a user may require only slight and occasional use of right-to-left languages. I happen to need the theme for multilingual sites with hundreds of articles in Hebrew, Arabic but also LTR languages. I previously have extensively used SPIP CMS, which works very successfully with multiple languages. SPIP got it right. I don’t think it’s rocket science, just a matter of dedication, on the part of developers.

Update on use of the Divi theme

On the small site on which I’ve been working, the main RTL problems have been resolved by quick responses from Divi’s tech support. Every issue required a separate custom CSS fix. For all I know, there may be dozens of further possible RTL issues.

The fact remains that some WordPress themes get it right from the beginning; I’m not sure how. In the case of Divi, it seems to make better economic sense for the developers to rely on their tech support than to ensure proper RTL compliance from the base up.