I have been thinking about how to share check-ins or announcements of upcoming travel, and wrote that down in the wiki section: Individualised Plazes. Previously I imported my Swarm check-ins into this site, but I do not want to use such apps anymore.
The purpose for me of sharing location information usually was to enable serendipitous meetings. When I’m at or just left some place, or will be in some city. Crossing paths between me and people in my network have led and can lead to serendipitous meetings. Such meetings are valuable.
Another purpose can be sharing a little review of a place where I’ve been that day.
I’ve named check-ins Plazes (after the first social location sharing service I used), and travel plans Dopplr (the service that used to do this so well in the past). The forms are really simple at the moment, and I’ll gradually make them more useful to me. At the linked page I’ve added some considerations on how to make such posting more useful outside this blog as well, by determining location and location related information beforehand, and by enabling discovery after posting. For now just posting is a start.
I’ve posted an example of a check-in, and an example of a future location. I draft postings through a simple form on my device that uses micropub to post it directly to this site. The forms can be extremely simple because I only need to cater to me and my habits. My personal preferences are predictable to me, and thus easy to code into a function with a handful of variable parameters. Depending on the input of the form it adds the various microformats to make the posting semantically interpretable by machines.
I think there’s no risk for RSS readers of over-sharing (nor for site visitors as the postings won’t show on the site for now). Only when I think there might be an opportunity for meeting someone I’d otherwise not meet, will I share my location. Or when I want to post a review of a place. Unlike in Swarm/Foursquare there’s no gamification going on, nor a leaderboard each week, to nudge me to check-in as often as I can to score more points. No locations to be ‘mayor’ of. Just me going about my days.
A screenshot of my check-in form, and of my ‘dopplr’ form for future locations. Both extremely simple.
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Again a busy week. September and October usually are filled with events, and this often means many sessions and presentations. This year is no different. Also I have too many client projects on my plate, so I this week I discussed handing off some of my work to colleagues.
This week I
Had a half day meeting with my business partners discussing and working on internal things.
Did some invoicing
Discussed the tasks colleagues can take on within the scope of my work for my main client, for which the work is to start next week
Enjoyed being read to by Y. She’s getting better at reading fast, and likes to read to us before we read to her in the evening.
Prepared multiple sessions to present at and facilitate
Presented at and facilitated a half day session with the national statistics office on the incoming EU regulations
Had dinner at the ‘Greenland’ restaurant in Driebergen with our team (or rather 7 of the 9), to celebrate our 11th company anniversary. We had planned to go there a year ago, but a lockdown prevented it. My company, The Green Land, is named after this restaurant, because it is the place where in 2011 my business partners and I decided to start working togehter.
Created a presentation and presented to representatives of all Dutch regional water authorities about the impact of EU data regulations.
Had the weekly client meetings
Had a conversation with the World Bank colleagues I worked with in Central Asia and non-EU eastern Europe. Since the start of the pandemic my WB work stalled, but I’m still on their roster of consultants. The Russian war on Ukraine makes work in the region I used to be active in difficult, but there is still lots going on. I intend to contribute my work on EU data regulations and the EU data space as well as data and AI ethics to WB programmes. Not this year though, as I’m too busy with client work as it is.
Discussed the next steps for the interprovincial ethics committee with the representatives of all provinces in their ethics working group, and with the steering committee. We’re now at the point we can approach members for the ethics committee. Official launch will be in January by a deputy minister, for which the data was confirmed this week.
Took it slow on Friday morning, reading feeds, making some notes.
Took Y to her swimming lesson. She’s making good progress, keeping herself afloat without aids now and learning to swim longer distances under water. She’s slowly getting to the point where we can be sure she can get herself out should she accidentally get into the water somewhere in our surface water rich neighbourhood.
E’s eldest brother dropped by for coffee and lunch, it was nice to catch up.
Created the ability to quickly post a check-in or Dopplr style posting, as part of bringing that type of functionality within the scope of my own site.
It was a week that didn’t feel focused, with a lot of time leaking away on things I could have done without but were necessary.
This week I
Finished the little scripts I built last week to do my own check-ins and future travel announcements, so that they include the right microformats etc. Right on time to use a check-in as a first review of a new coffee place in the neighbourhood.
Spent half a day in the office, mostly on internal things. A recent hire whose first six month contract ended, and accepted our offer for a permanent contract. Another colleague will spent the coming months in South-America and I signed an additional contract with them to cover her temporary part time work and a period of unpaid leave.
Spent half a day at the office of the NGO I chair, to catch-up with the director, and participate in a little farewell party for a team member who is changing jobs.
Spent an evening in the company of other personal knolwedge management interested people, comparing practices and feed our inner nerd with demo’s of fun tools.
Had the weekly client meetings
Wrote a draft Memorandum of Understanding for the collaboration between a client and a directorate of the European Commission, for a period of four years
Had some internal conversations to transfer some of my work to colleagues as I’m too overloaded
Took time to enjoy making notes
Discussed with a client their European and national strategy for the coming years, in the face of the new EU data legislation
Started organising a workshop for late November, to plot the new EU legal instruments on an existing case w.r.t. energy transition where currently getting, sharing and using the data that is valuable in getting things done is extremely complex and convoluted. The new instruments may make it easier for those involved to organise
Did the monthly salary payments
Spent an hour on the phone with the bank of the NGO I chair, once again. Since mid-September we’re trying to arrange the activation of a bank card for our bookkeeper but it keeps evolving into ever weirder administrative hoops to jump through. It seemed solved last week but it wasn’t, so with this phone call a new round of hoops seems to have initiated. Entirely frustrating, and more than enough to consider moving banks.
Had coffee and lunch with the three of us, kicking off a week of school holidays. E splurged on a Nintendo Switch which absorbed quite a bit of our time during the weekend, playing together.
Did a lot of work in the garden. Disconnecting the irrigation system for the winter, putting the parasols and the hammock in storage. A lot of pruning, especially of the apple tree, and turning all the pruned stuff into mulch for elsewhere in the garden.
The IJ river in Amsterdam at sunset, walking back to the central station from the offices of the NGO I chair, housed on the naval yard.
Today at 14:07 twenty years ago, I posted my first blog post. Well over 3000 posts later, this blog has been an integral part of quite a stretch of my life, to the point where it is unavoidable that if you’ve read along you now probably know more about me than I think I’ve actually shared in writing.
In the past few years I’ve taken this blog’s anniversary as a moment to reflect on some of my blogging practices. That yearly reflection started 5 years ago when I was just leaving Facebook. This time it coincides with #twittermigration, where many people are exploring federated options now that Musk has taken over Twitter. Whether that is something that will stick is uncertain of course, but it is interesting to watch playing out. Other earlier such reflections: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021.
Last year I wrote:
Indeed, that is exactly what I did from early this year: ensure that I could post directly to this blog in different ways. The key to that was create a Micropub client, which posts to this site. Once I had that I could create different paths to feed a post to that Micropub client. From inside a feedreader, directly from my notes in Obsidian, or through a simple web form. More recently I created different versions of that web form, to also post check-ins, and announce travel plans. In all fairness, my habits in how I post things haven’t fundamentally changed yet: I’m writing this in the WordPress back-end. But increasingly I am using those other paths to get content into this site.
Making it easier to post, puts the friction of blogging where it needs to be: wanting to write something.
Connecting things up into flows, blurring the lines between my site, online interaction and my notes for instance, stays an interesting thing to experiment with. In the past months I started using Hypothes.is more intensively, to annotate things I read on the web. Already all those annotations seamlessly end up in my local notes, from where I can work with them, and where they concern my own site I’ve made them visible here.
But most of all, aside from all the more nerdy things of tweaking this site and my information flows, this blog has been a source of conversation for twenty years now. It was my original hope, and my ongoing motivation to keep blogging.
Which brings me back to the earlier mentioned #twittermigration. Musk declared the bird is freed, but it seems quite a few people think the bird was caught and rather take wing on their own. Quite a few of those are the people I early on conversed with through their blogs too. If there’s a key difference between ActivityPub/Mastodon and Twitter, it’s that the federated version only ‘works’ if you actually interact with other people. Likes don’t matter in highlighting a message. Boosts do only share a message with your own followers, and has no other effect. It doesn’t mean it will be put higher in the timeline of others, it’s all in the now. There’s no amplification. Conversation is the key, if you interact then others may also see it and join the conversation. Twitter used to be like that too.
Conversation is key, and that is why I blog.
Here’s to another year of blogging and conversation.
I just watched this video about using the Map View plugin in Obsidian, which allows you to visualise the existence of notes grouped by geo-location on a map. The Map View plugin allows viewing and organising notes along a dimension that is currently missing in my notes, geographic location. I do have an overview of all my travel since the late eighties in my notes. The creator of the video, Zsolt is the creator of both the Obisidian Excalidraw and Brain plug-ins, which I both enjoy using and recommend. So when he suggests a plugin by someone else, it piques my curiosity.
Now I am of course thinking about integrating that with my check-in forms for this site enabling individualised Plazes. Specifically it may play a role in determining venue or location.
Would it be doable to, like I’m already posting from my notes to the site, automatically create an optional check-in record here when I create a geolocated note in Obsidian? Or the other way around, to have a check-in made through the webform also create a note in Obsidian?
I hadn’t really looked, but it turns out that Mastodon has incorporated microformats. It has h-feed and h-card, h-entry (a status), and h-cite (a boost). Plaint text properties (p-), e-content, and link properties (u-) are implemented. Indeed, they all surface when looking at a profile’s HTML source. This is what makes it possible to e.g. follow Mastodon feeds as h-feed, next to the existing RSS output and ActivityPub, and that e.g. Brid.gy can do its work to carry over any interaction on a Mastodon post to a blogpost here.
What I haven’t found was what I was looking for.
The ActivityPub protocol in its specs has several so-called Activity Types that drew my attention:
Announce, to well, announce things, such as any of the following
Arrive, which can be used to check-in at a location
Leave, to check-out, or as I sometimes do, to announce I’ve been somewhere after the fact.
Travel, which can be used to announce ongoing or planned travel.
In short ActivityPub supports FourSquare and Dopplr like check-ins and travel plans. I’ve recently added that to my site in terms of microformats and was still wondering how to create a useful stream for it. I’ve been thinking about an OPML outline with schema.org attributes, or a dedicated RSS feed or h-feed. An ActivityPub stream might be of interest too, or even more. There’s a PHP implementation of ActivityPub that includes these Activity Types as well, meaning there’s potential to experiment for me.
I wonder, are there any actual implementations of these ActivityPub types currently?
Brief overview of how I’m active in the fediverse.
My site
I would prefer this site to be the centerpoint of my fediverse presence. For now that isn’t fully feasible, but it will be over time. Already the building blocks for WordPress to be a fediverse actor exist. The Activity Pub (AP) plugin and Webfinger plugin by Matthias Pfefferle are useful, just not allowing enough granular control yet to my taste. For one, the AP plugin exposes actual usernames of my WP site, a disclosure I don’t like. I need to be able to set the actor names for AP, through the AP plugin and/or the Webfinger plugin. Second, the AP plugin allows sharing my blogposts but only all blogposts, and I want to be able to only publish certain categories of posts as well as individual posts marked for sharing through AP. Third, the AP plugin doesn’t yet take into account the interaction parts of AP (like follows etc.).
Mastodon
I run two Mastodon instances, one hosted at Masto.host. Masto.host has been a very reliable service since I started hosting with them in 2018. I ran a personal instance (m.tzyl.nl) with them until late November 2022, and started one for my company (m.tgl.eu) early November 2022. I run my personal instance of Mastodon on a VPS with Yunohost, at m.tzyl.eu
Discoverability hack
I have added simple text files to /.well-known/webfinger to both this site and my company website that allow discovery of my existing Mastodon profiles through my site’s and work e-mail addresses. This is just a hack, and I should replace it with actual functionality to disclose actors on both those sites.
Bookwyrm
Bookwyrm is the book reading application on AP. I have an account at the primary instance and supported them financially for a while, but haven’t used it much since spring 2022. This is one of the things I want to do myself through this site.
Potential AP projects
As said above I’d like to be able to share my reading through AP from this site. I would also like to be able to share my planned travel and/or check-ins through this site in AP. Specifically travel plans (Dopplr like) are of interest to me. AP, unlike this site, would allow non-public sharing of this information to followers only.
In reply to How can my posts integrate better with ActivityPub? by Chris Aldrich
I’m trying to add AP to my site here to be able to provide streams to approved followers of otherwise unlisted content in my site. E.g. travel plans like Dopplr did, or Swarm style check-ins (normally posted to WP with micropub, e.g. here). Both those activities exist in ActivityStreams and thus in AP. That would be possible to follow with various existing AP clients. If more people do it, it might be useful to create a client surface to combine the various travel plan streams of others I follow and show crossing paths etc.
The WordPress ActivityPub plugin by Matthias Pfefferle has been updated. It now allows you to @mention ActivityPub users and they will be notified of the mention in your blogpost, through ActivityPub.
This is useful. Yet, I’m holding out on using the plugin myself until three things are possible:
Set the user name of the ActivityPub account: Now the username is the login name of the user doing the posting. I recognise using WP user names is a straightforward way of turning WP into an ActivityPub client, and prevents having to add addditional stuff to the database. As I use non-obvious user names for additional website security, having those exposed as ActivityPub users is undesirable however.
Refuse follow requests: currently the plugin allows follows, and defaults to accepting all follows. As on my separate AP account I want to decide personally on follow requests.
Determine flexibly which postings get shared through ActivityPub, and through which ActivityPub user account. The current set-up is that all postings get shared through ActivityPub. I’d rather be able to determine not just on a post by post basis what gets shared but also to have specific categories of postings to be shared through a specific account.
I want to actively use the affordances ActivityPub allows on top of those WordPress as blogging tool provides. For me that is the ability to use the different activity types that AP can support, and to use dealing with followers and follows to selectively disclose content to different groups of people.
My current usecase for this is to have a separate AP account that shares my travel plans (posted in an unlisted category on my site) with accepted followers. The first part requires selectively sharing a category of postings, the second part doing so to a group of accepted followers on an AP account that is meant for just this type of postings and not my general AP account.
The plugin will develop in this direction, but is not there yet. I am slowly going through the code of the plugin myself to understand its architecture and choices. Perhaps it will give me an idea either on how to build on its core to create the functionality locally I want for myself, or maybe (though my coding skills are likely not adequate for it) add to the plugin itself.