Tag: website

Not posting clickbait. Really.

My brother complained that the two posts I put up earlier this morning (where I shared links to interesting articles) amounted to clickbait. I deny it categorically. This is actually a Twitter issue.

As evidence, let me point out that Micro.blog gets it right, that Facebook has the link right there, and so does Google+. Of course my RSS feed includes the link.

For reasons I can only guess at, Twitter is stripping the link out of the post before sharing it.

Given that he is quick to criticize Twitter for its many similar misfeatures, I was a bit surprised that Steven aimed his criticisms at me rather than at Twitter in this case.

Still, there’s a silver lining. I had already added the link to my microblog at micro.blog to the “social media” menu at the bottom of the page, but writing this post prompted me to notice that I hadn’t gotten it added to the list of social media links on my Contact page. Fixed.

Installed Webmentions

In part of my continuing preparation for using Manton Reece’s micro.blog stuff, I went ahead and installed the Webmentions plugin for WordPress on this site.

So, if you use Webmention (whether on a WordPress blog or some other kind of site), you should get notified when I link to your stuff, and I should get notified when you link to my stuff.

This will be so much better than having these discussions on some lame blend of blog comments, Facebook, and Twitter.

Fixing what I hate about Twitter, Facebook, etc.

I’m moderately active on Twitter and Facebook. I post photos on both Flickr and Instagram. I try to keep my profile reasonably up to date on LinkedIn. I even use Google Plus. I hate all these things.

(Actually, I don’t hate Flickr—it’s pretty good.)

There are a lot of things I hate about them, beginning with big corporations deciding which ads appear next to my words (not to mention keeping the money from those ads). I also hate the way they keep making their services worse (the needs of the venture capitalists outweigh the needs of the users). But the worst thing is: I can’t find stuff I remember writing!

“Oh, yeah—I put that one on Facebook.”

“Oh, yeah—that one was a tweet.”

“Oh, maybe I wrote that back when I had my LiveJournal going?”

My partial solution, for a while now, has been to put almost everything—all but the shortest bits—on my own blog. Then I link back to them on Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. That’s still unsatisfactory in several ways, but especially for those short bits—tweets and Facebook posts—that don’t get their own blog entries.

There’s no good solution. My blogging software supports “asides” or “status” posts which are supposed to be for things like Twitter or Facebook posts. I used those briefly, and didn’t like it. Those little posts cluttered up the main flow of my blog. Worse, different blog themes displayed them differently. (Maybe I’ll try posting an “aside” or a “status” again after this post, and see if they’re better now.)

I even considered setting up a Diaspora node for a while, and then arranging to have things I posted there flow out to Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Then at least everything I posted would be just one of two places (my website and my Diaspora node). That turned out to be too much work.

Just yesterday I ran across something that may go some way toward solving this problem: Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing, which I have backed on Kickstarter (video below).

I don’t yet know if it will solve my problems, but I’ll try it out and see if it works.

One key feature of the Indie Microblogging thing that makes me think it might be satisfactory is that it’s built on RSS. (The fact that it provides RSS feeds is the reason I don’t hate Flickr, and the fact that they don’t is a big piece of what’s wrong with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.)

Anyway, check out Indie Microblogging, and see if it’s something of interest to you, too:

Using https

Now that Let’s Encrypt is up and running, and now that Dreamhost has integrated it into their tool set, I have finally gotten security turned on for my website.

Just visit philipbrewer.net using https instead of http and you can browse the site secure in the knowledge that the pages will be encrypted in transit. As if that mattered for a public website. But still—might be useful, and costs nothing except a whole bunch of cycles on your computer and my hosting service’s computers.

I had actually turned on encryption some time ago for the admin pages, so that I could securely administer the site even when my access to the internet wasn’t secure (over public WiFi, for example). But I hadn’t pulled the trigger to route general traffic over https because the certificate I used was self-signed, which meant that I could trust it, because I knew which certificate I’d installed, but the general public couldn’t tell the difference between my site and a fake site set up by a some perfidious fraudster. The new Let’s Encrypt certificate is signed by a well-known issuer, so any modern browser will show the handsome green padlock.

clipUpdate your bookmarks appropriately!

Boring post: Fiddling around with my website

I started having odd troubles with the theme I’d been using for this website, so I thought I’d look into alternatives.

I tried quite a few, most of which had one problem or another. Among the things that made me reject themes today:

  1. Header image was completely integrated into the design, so it couldn’t be changed.
  2. There was no way to show the full text of each post on the front page.
  3. Post titles were forced to all-uppercase.
  4. A full third of the page was dedicated to showing a featured image for each post, except my posts often don’t have a featured image—in which case the theme showed a dumb icon instead.

This theme isn’t perfect either. In particular, when I use an image in a post and mark it as the featured image, it appears twice, which is usually not what I mean to have happen, but I’ll experiment for a bit and see how I like it.

Intended as a placeholder, the header image is a photo I took of plaster casts made of the Elgin Marbles. (The casts, on display at the Spurlock Museum, were made before the ill-fated cleaning attempt that so seriously damaged the originals. Scholars come from far and wide to study our plaster casts.) Now that it’s up there, I kinda like it. I may just leave it like that.

Using tt-rss

I’ve experimented with various alternatives to Google Reader for quite a while now. I used The Old Reader for a while, and then Hive Reader for a while. Both had limitations. (Hive is still in beta, and isn’t quite ready for prime time. TOR is closer, but had various issues, probably the biggest being that it doesn’t get feeds updated promptly enough.)

I had earlier tried using tt-rss, which also isn’t quite there yet, but has a different set of issues.

It requires a server. Steve had tried to cobble together an instance that ran on the server where we host our websites. It had just almost worked, but kept bumping up into the limits of running as a cron job, rather than a daemon. It eventually had several bad days in a row (which we later traced to an unrelated heavy load on the server), and we gave up.

Now Steve has installed an actual server machine in his house, and is running a tt-rss instance there, and has made me an account on it.

Running on an (essentially) dedicated server with a (reasonably) high-speed connection to the internet, it’s now doing a fine job of keeping all my feeds up to date. I’m having some minor user interface issues, but nothing that would keep me from using it as my rss reader for the foreseeable future.

So, I have officially switched over. You can follow the interesting stuff I share via a feed from that site, and have updated the “interesting stuff” item in my sidebar to draw from that feed.

Bruce Schneier removing anti-security features

Security expert Bruce Schneier wrote last week about some changes he was making to his blog to remove some anti-security features. Reading over his list of changes, I was pleased to see that I’d mostly avoided adding anti-security features to my blog in the first place.

  • No offsite tracking. Although I’ve experimented with them a couple of times, I don’t have “like” or “share” buttons on my blog posts, so your visits here are not automatically transparent to Facebook, Twitter, Google, or other social media sites. It means you’ll have to copy the link yourself if you want to share my posts. I’d be delighted if you did, so I hope that’s not too onerous.
  • No offsite searching. Similarly, the site’s search facility runs right on the site itself, just doing an SQL query of the database that holds the content of my site. Doing a search here doesn’t expose your query to anyone else. (I once looked to see if I was logging queries and couldn’t find them; as far as I know, doing a search here doesn’t even expose your query to me.)
  • No offsite feed. I also run the RSS feed for the site right on the site, and always have. I thought for a while that I ought to use feedburner, but I never got around to it, and now it’s clear that laziness led me to the right choice.

Any attempt to keep internet activity private is probably hopeless, but that’s no reason not to try.