This was a week of rest, recovery, and hanging out. Of course, it was Thanksgiving, but I also took Tuesday off to compensate for working last Saturday. I made some bread, renewed my passport online, and caught up on some much-needed household admin work.
For Thanksgiving, it was only the three of us this year, but we had a nice relaxing day. I made a ham from Hemlock Hill Farm, homemade scalloped potatoes and rolls, and green bean casserole. Cranberry Galette for dessert. We sipped a scotch cocktail with cranberry syrup and oolong tea. Charlie spent the day going between playing outside in the leaves, helping in the kitchen, and playing in the living room. It was nice!
Friday Amanda started cleaning out some stuff in the basement we wanted to get rid of, which we then dropped off at a second-hand store. We went to a birthday party for a 3 year old and connected with some new parent friends, got some coffee, ate leftovers, and played with Charlie.
Saturday we went to IKEA to pick up a few things to help us turn part of one of the basement rooms into a play area for Charlie (the reason for Amanda’s clean-out!), then we went to some friends’ house for pizza, wine, and a toddler play date. I know I’ve said this before, but feels like we are getting more of a community here, which is nice.
Sunday was more playroom clean up and assembly, grocery shopping, a trip to Home Depot, laundry, and getting ready for the week ahead. It is fun giving Charlie little jobs like putting screws from a disassembled bookshelf into a container, or wiping down the baseboards with a paper towel. He loves helping.
Charlie has a new pre-bathtime ritual: Bringing us the Barnyard Dance book by Sandra Boynton and then pointing to the computer so we will play the song that goes along with it while he dances along. He loves it!
Charlie is making his wants and interests more clear, which is great. He gets a thrill when we understand what he is communicating, and it is helpful to us to know what he wants. At the grocery store he made it clear that he’d like some raspberries and pretzels by getting very excited and pointing at them while we walked by.
What do you call a gnome in the military?
A nom de guerre.
New infusion going: a ginger liqueur akin to Domaine de Canton. Ginger, vanilla bean, orange peel, sugar, water, and an aged rum.
Every year around Thanksgiving I get a harebrained idea for a new project.
- 2015: An interactive infographic
- 2016: Inflation graphs for Thanksgiving dinner prices
- 2017: Opioid crisis data viz
- 2018: Learning spoon carving
- 2019: Plant Gantt
- 2020: Woodturning Christmas ornaments
- 2021: Making a generative art project for fxhash
This year the idea is to make a tool that will turn Jetpack likes into webmention-style likes as WordPress comments, kind of how brid.gy does for Twitter and Mastodon likes. The WordPress.com API exposing likes seems pretty straightforward and returns names, URLs, and avatars, which is all you really need for a Like comment with the Semantic Linkbacks plugin.
I think this will be a one-time tool (you run it once to migrate, then turn off Jetpack Likes for posts) rather than a syncing tool. Probably something run with wp-cli. I need to look further into how the Semantic Linkbacks plugin is storing metadata in order to figure it out.
Speaking of IndieWeb stuff, I’ve been on a mission recently. Yesterday I set up brid.gy to backfeed likes, shares, and comments from other platforms as webmentions, and I backfilled hundreds of comments on old posts. What a cool service. That brings my current state to:
✅ Sending and receiving webmentions
✅ Backfeeding mentions from other platforms via brid.gy
✅ Syndicating via RSS, JSON Feed, ActivityPub, and autoposting services
✅ Microformats and my representative h-card
To do: Implement bookmarking + script a way to make that sync from other bookmarking services, set up short notes like tweets that originate on my site then get syndicated
What else should I work on?
I had some excitement on Twitter this week. I replied to a post by Archduke Eduard of Austria (one of the Habsburgs who used to be the royal family of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) where he said he was skeptical of “vox populi, vox dei.” I pointed out that we likely know the phrase from Alcuin, who said: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.” Translated: “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”
The exchange got hundreds of likes, RTs, and replies, including a couple from Eduard himself.
Work win of the week: I suggested an improvement to Tumblr’s open graph tags to make tumblr blogs show up better on Twitter. The fix got shipped within a couple hours and improved Twitter sharing for everyone. Twexit!
Speaking of, have you heard of the 1973 Scorsese mafia film Goncharov? It was so good. You should watch it if you haven’t.
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