Category: metablogging

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Thanks ChatGPT!
Commenting is open on this website, and that means being engaged in a permanent asymmetric battle against spam. Asymmetric in the sense that like on any social media platform it is multiple orders of magnitude easier to automatically create and send out spam, falsehoods and hate speech in extremely large volumes, than it is for actual people to weed those out of their timelines and websites.
Most of incoming spam filtering is automated away these days, but always some and especially novel types are left for me te moderate myself, as the arms race continues.

A new entrant in the spam battle are AI generated spam comments that have clearly been fed the content of the actual blogpost that is being commented. Like other spam they stand out due to their blandness, what they link to and that the same things get submitted multiple times from different origins, but they are building on the content itself. I guess I should feel flattered.

It is also logical, as both spam and AI generated material are based on the exact same asymmetry. ‘Efficiency’ gains through AI generated text, are at best only that at the generation end of things (now see me generate oodles of text in seconds!), yet increases the effort needed at the receiving end to read it, see through the veil of plausibility, verify it and judge it inadequate.


Two examples of AI generated spam comments using the content of the actual blog posts (here a recent week notes posting, and one about donating money for ebooks rather than spending it at Amazon.) One commenter giving ‘undetectable AI’ as their name is a bit of a give-away though.

Any comments on this site already are subject to a Reverse Turing test, with all received material deemed generated until determined created by a person. Clearly this is no longer just a precaution resulting from tongue-in-cheek cleverness, but a must-have part of my toolkit for online interaction.

It seems using Micropub to publish to a Gutenberg WordPress site no longer works. For my company’s site, where we use Gutenberg, pushing a new blogpost through Micropub now causes a fatal error and lets the site crash. Removing the offending post fixes it. May well have to do with our use of other plugins for page design (such as Avada). It doesn’t seem like the IndieWeb MicroPub plugin is getting a lot of attention (not a criticism, just an observation). On my own blog, where I don’t use Gutenberg everything’s fine.

I use MicroPub to publish directly from within my local markdown notes, which reduces friction to write quite a bit. Having to write or copy paste stuff into the WP back-end is something I’d rather avoid.

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Bookmarked Blog posts are breadcrumbs by Peter Rukavina

A wonderful posting by Peter on how different people and their stories connect to eachother with some sort of breadcrumb written in his blog that serves as the kernel around which that connection can happen. Like Peter I think that is a very happy and energising effect. Emergence, like here the connections between people and their stories, can happen when conditions are right. When random encounters are encouraged, in this case due to search machines indexing Peter’s words for decades, for instance. When you pay attention to your surroundings, like the weaving of the great variety web of links and connections that are already in his blog, for instance. All of that is underpinned by a simple thing: leaving more and longer traces. Traces others can stumble across and follow if they want. It’s how ant highways come into being. Peter’s blog, as is mine, is likely the single largest public trace he creates. Offering plenty of others opportunity to stumble across it and follow where it leads. When that happens, and you get to hear about it, that is a thing to behold. It’s an opportunity that silos and algorithms actively destroy in social media. It’s what drives the open web.

It’s a web, a very personal one that’s part of a worldwide one: the posts I write are breadcrumbs—public, searchable, hyperlinked—that connect me to you, and bits of my past to bits of your past. I love it when a bit of happenstance web magic happens, and connects me with a tenant of my grandfather’s, the friend of a late friend, or a painter with vivacious laugh.

Peter Rukavina

In reply to a bookmark by John Johnston

The templates contain what I want to have inside a blogposting for a reply, favourite, bookmark, rsvp or check-in. I apply them before I submit something to WordPress, so they are fully outside of my blog and get send as HTML to my blog.

Two main ways: if I type something in my editor (e.g. WordPress back-end or in my local text editor) I have text expansion snippets that paste the right template into my text. The little header above this post with the SVG image and the bit that contains the right microformat, I add by typing .ureply, and I have similar set-ups for .ufav, .ubmark, .ursvp and .uplaze. This is what I did to reply to you now.

A second way is that I have integrated these same little templates into the response form I have in my feedreader, and in a little blogform on my local device. There I indicate with a radio button if something is a reply etc, and the php script that processes the form adds in the right HTML before sending it to my WordPress site’s micropub endpoint.

I wonder if these are an alternative to IndieBlocks or something else.

John Johnston

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I disabled the PostKinds WordPress plugin, created by David Shanske. I stopped using it 3 years ago for new postings but disabling it then would have broken many older postings.

What makes the plugin useful is that it allows you to turn postings into different, well, kinds of posts. Such as a reply, or a check-in, rsvp, bookmark or favourite. It adds the right microformats so that computers can semantically analyse a post’s purpose, and adds the styling to display them.

My main issue with it was that it places key elements such as the weblink you’re responding to outside the posting itself. It gets stored in the database as belonging to the PostKinds plugin. Meaning if you ever switch it off, that gets wiped from your posting (although it’s still in the database then). This was a dependency I needed to get rid of.
For new postings from summer 2021 I did that by deploying small templates that allow me to mark a posting as reply, rsvp, favourite, bookmark, or check-in, within the postings I’m writing.

I used the PostKinds plugin heavily for 3 years, and most heavily in 2019. That legacy from 2018-2021 was still there, requiring the PostKinds plugin to remain enabled. Until today. Over time I had slowly changed posts when I encountered them, and in the past week I did the remainder.

Another issue is that PostKinds only works in the classic WordPress editor, and not in the now default Gutenberg editor. At some point that would hinder the ability to upgrade WordPress.

Solong PostKinds, thanks for all the fish!

I topped 1000 annotations in Hypothesis today. That is a year and 9 months after reaching 100 after the first month, or about 45 per month in total. Almost all of them are public annotations (97%).

While I do use it regularly, I don’t use it daily or at high volume. Annotations are automatically added to my local notes through the Hypothesis API, which is where I continue working on them. About the same number of annotations I make directly from my browser to my notes using a markdown webclipper, mostly when I save an entire article. Any annotations of PDFs I do in Zotero, and then there’s the e-book and paper book annotations. So at most a quarter of my annotations is in Hypothes.is.

In my annotations I have become accustomed to referencing existing notes (I have a little hotkey that lets me search and then paste a note title as markdown link in the annotation), using tags, and adding to-do’s that are picked up by my to-do lists. Things I started doing in the first month, like adding webarchive urls as page note, I still routinely do. All good reduction of friction I find.

I made it possible to post a first page annotation to Hypothes.is directly from my feed reader a year ago. While in theory that is very useful, in practice I’ve used it sparingly. Mostly because I have been spending less time inside my feed reader I think.

Many annotations are just basically bookmarking an article with a first remark for curation and being able to find it back in my own terms. While I do return to some of those for more extensive annotation, that is not often. Partly because I may do that in my local notes, partly because as always you encounter more than you can process. I do regularly re-find my annotations in my notes when searching, which is useful, and that sometimes results in revisiting an article for further annotation.

There is some performance effect involved in public annotation I suspect. I annotate mostly in English and am always aware others may read that. Especially criticism brings that awareness. It makes it feel like a form of blogging, but with an even smaller audience than my blog’s.

The social effect I experience of using Hypothes.is is very small. I’m not involved in annotating groups, which undoubtedly would feel different. I have had some conversation resulting from annotation however, which is always fun.

While I am enthusiastic about Hypothes.is as a tool, it hasn’t become a central tool, nor the primary ‘place’ for annotating things. I wonder if that would be different if I was more capable in interacting more with the API (e.g. to send changes or other annotations sources to H.), or if I could run a personal instance of it and federate that.

I started using Hypothes.is after the summer of 2022 because of reading the book Annotation by Kalir and Garcia in the spring of 2022 (although my Hypothesis account already existed).
My perception of annotations has permanently changed because of reading that book. It is now a much more everyday occurrence and practice within my sense making, not just for academic articles or books, and can take different shapes and forms. Just that most of that takes place outside of Hypothes.is.