If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I never quit writing link posts, even after they became the backward, less developed countries of the internet.
“The sharing moved to social media and got lost with the ephemera.”
Source: CJ Chilvers: A Love Letter to the Link Post via @numericcitizen.
Testing to make sure I’ll be able to use the micro.blog tools when they start supporting posting to blogs. I can post here using Quill, so micropub is working, but running the test suit at micropub.rocks produces only failures.
I get a steady stream of email from people saying, “I saw you linked to some webpage and I thought you might want to share this other webpage with your readers!”
This is never going to work.
What might work is treating me like a person who might have common interests: Send a link. Tell me what it says (so I have a reason to follow it). Let me decide if it’s so interesting I should share it with my readers.
I’ve been using micro.blog right along and have a good, basic understanding of what it can do, but I’m very much looking forward to the release of the book, which I expect to fill in any number of gaps.
The one good thing about this is that it presents a space where alternatives to Google can compete.
The most discouraging aspect is how Google now doesn’t even bother to return results about vast swaths of the internet. —Bit Rot and Search Engines | Bierfaristo Blog
On Sunday I ran in the Rattlesnake Master Run for the Prairie 10k.
Usually I expect that I’ll write a post when I participate in an event like that, but it turns out that I don’t have a lot to say about it. It went fine. I ran very slowly, which I expected because I’d done all of my training very slowly, but I did not come in last, which was nice.
I’d suffered with a nagging sore foot for several weeks leading up to the race. The pain was in the heel of my right foot, which made me figure it was probably plantar fasciitis. I think I’ve figured out though that it’s actually peroneal tendonitis. Understanding that gives me a clue toward recovery. The peroneal tendon, which reaches down the outside of your ankle, through the heel, and then forward across to the inside edge of the front of your foot, is heavily involved in balancing, especially standing on one foot. I do a lot of single-leg standing as part of my taiji practice and teaching, and since figuring this out I’ve been especially careful about being gentle with myself in this part of the practice, and in just a few days I’ve finally seen dramatic improvement.
The realization didn’t help in time for the race though, and my foot was a little sore right along. It wasn’t so sore that I thought I was doing real damage though, so I just ran the race anyway. It did impact my gate a bit, which meant that my opposite-leg knee started hurting about halfway through the race.
Part of the reason for this post is to test the GPX exporting at Polar (which had been broken for a while) and the GPX tracking plug-in that I’ve got here (which has been updated a couple of times since I last successfully got a GPX track exported from Polar). So, here’s the track of my run. The heart rate data doesn’t seem to be working.
[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/Philip_Brewer_2019-11-03_08-55-36.gpx”]
(I didn’t want to fiddle with my phone at the start or finish of the race, so I started tracking my run about 5 minutes before the start of the race, and then I forgot to turn it off until about 5 minutes after I crossed the finish line, so both the time and the distance are a little off.)
My official time was 1:17:13.4 meaning a 12:26/mile pace. That’s as fast as I’ve run in years. (Overall results. Age-group results.)
It was pretty cold at the start—cold enough that I didn’t manage to get my race number in my pre-race selfie:
It had warmed up a lot by the end of the race, when I captured the selfie up at the top with Jackie (who along with a lot of the Master Naturalists had volunteered in the race).
I’ve had a blogroll since I first started using blogging software instead of rolling my own site with hand-coded html and php. Even before that—almost 20 years ago, when I was getting set to go to Clarion—I was linking to the websites of writers I knew. Probably a dozen people in my class (or the Clarion West class of that same year), plus a few teachers, editors, and other writers that I had some connection to had blogs, and several others had websites. I made a point of linking to all of them.
I kept it up pretty well for a while, following people to their new sites and new links as they acquired domains and changed software. I figured one big benefit of getting to know a crop of fellow new writers was being able to link to one another’s websites, and then preserve those connections as (to varying degrees) we became famous. But various things—time, differential success, fashions in internet presence—have made blogs and blogrolls less of a thing. At the same time, my interests have expanded in other directions besides writing.
Sometime in the next week or so, I’m going to go through my blogroll and check what I’m linked to. I’ll delete dead links, and shift sites to the “website” category if the blog is there but no longer being updated. I’ll make similar changes to my list of websites. (Note: as part of my “Facebook is evil” thinking, I’m going to be dropping people whose only link is to a Facebook or Instagram page. Sorry, but: Evil.)
If you’re on my blogroll but your site is moved or idle, let me know what you want me to do—link to your new site, keep you on the blogroll (because you’re going to start blogging again one of these days), etc. If you’re not but want to be, let me know that too.
This is a test to see if emojis show up in post titles and post content. (Emoji functionality seems quite flaky in comments.)
Some emojis: 🌸💃🧚♀️🧜♀️🌸
(Interesting. They’re there, at least in the preview, but they’re from a different character set than what I see when I paste an emoji from elsewhere. Here’s two I’m typing: 🦔❤️. Yeah: Again not what I see when I pick an emoji via the native special character typing on the Mac; the native Mac hedgehog is facing left rather than forward, and the heart has some fancy tonal shading.)
My brother found a microblog feed from the Free Software Foundation, and with a bit of searching I was able to find their announcement post.
They run the whole thing with software from status.net.
For my own personal use, I remain entirely pleased with micro.blog as my microblogging solution.
