Category: Day to Day

Day to day finds and observations, not presented on the front page.

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Bookmarked A Visual History of Delicious Bookmarks by Sarah Hibner

Surprised to see a capture of my old Delicious profile in this sequence of screen shots. I still think there’s room for a Delicious remake, and I even at some point started sketching out my own approach under the moniker Linqurator (currently way way back beyond the furthest backburner)

After his acquisition of Delicious, Cegłowski made the decision to shut down its functionality while leaving it in read-only mode as of June 15, 2017. He explained that his motivation was to preserve an important piece of internet history, something I agree with and appreciate wholeheartedly.

Sarah Hibner

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Julian Elve writes about capturing notes from various sources, in response to my new little script to capture web articles directly from my feedreader into my markdown notes. I will need to reply to it more later, but to signal I’m continuing the conversation, I want to respond to one thing immediately, specifically to this bit

Hypothes.is (only just starting to play with this, but if I can’t see how I can process what I might capture with the tool, there is no point in starting down this track)

Julian Elve

I follow along with Chris Aldrich’s Hypothesis stream in RSS and it’s highly informative for me to do so. Similar to Julian I have concerns starting to use it myself, if it means adding a silo next to my regular workflow. The type of interaction and annotation I have/do with a source text I normally do locally. Unless it can be a PESOS (Post Elsewhere Syndicate to Own Site) flow, exchanging that current value of processing things locally for merely the potential for interaction and conversation is likely a bad trade-off for my learning.

Hypothesis does have an API, which offers a way forward perhaps. A few weeks ago I added at least tracking who else is annotating my blogposts to my list of things to create. Julian’s nudge maybe means reevaluating that starting point, and aiming higher to also fetch whatever annotation I might make myself (I do have Hypothesis running in my Firefox browser, despite not using it much).

It starts I think with playing with the Hypothes.is API anyway. I have a day off later this week, hopefully I can use part of it to fire up Postman and explore the Hypothes.is API.

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Mid-september is het Nederlandse WordCamp, een tweedaagse bijeenkomst over alles dat WordPress is. Ik ben niet zozeer de doelgroep lijkt me, maar het oogt wel als een goede manier om de IndieWeb ervaringen van mijzelf als WordPress gebruikende blogger te gaan laten zien. Wie weet kan ik een lans breken voor het vaker adopteren van IndieWeb bouwstenen in WP themes, plugins of zelfs core. Daarom heb ik nadat ik de oproep bij co-organisatoren Marcel en Remkus tegenkwam deze dagen, me aangemeld als spreker. Ze zoeken nog meer sprekers en workshops, tot 1 juni kun je nog een voorstel indienen. Eind juni hoor je dan meer.

Ongeacht dat voorstel is het misschien ook de moeite waard om te kijken of er iets meer te organiseren is, zoals een homebrew website meet-up of zelfs een IndieWebCamp. Daar moet ik nog even over nadenken.

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I extended the capabilities of my microsub feed reader with the option to save web articles directly from the reader to my Obsidian notes in markdown format.

Until now if I wanted to save an entire article I found in my feed reader, I would open it in the browser and then use the markdownclipper browser add-on to add some context and then save the article in markdown in my notes. I wanted to cut out that step of opening it in the feed reader, by saving it directly to my markdown notes. In my feedreader I already have a response form to e.g. post a reply to a posting on my own site. Posting it to my notes means adding a path to how I process that form.

I had to find a suitable script for converting HTML to MarkDown first. Which I found in PHP League’s HTML-to-Markdown, as suggested by Jan Boddez. It requires Composer which I already had installed on my laptop.

I tweaked my feed reader’s response form to also (as a hidden field) include the original HTML of a posting (using htmlentities to stuff it into a form field value). The script that processes the form I altered to both have a path for posting to websites (using micropub) and a new path to make a note in Obsidian, which is then saved as a .md file to the folder I store all clipped articles in.
To make a note I shape the available input the same way I template clipping things from the browser. At the top is my rationale for clipping something and reference to the source, followed by the original posting after which I add some keywords as tags and again the reference to the source.

In the images below you see the corresponding elements marked both as they appear in the reader as well as the resulting note.

The article as shown in my feed reader:

1: the original HTML content from a feed
2: title of the article (prefilled by my feed reader)
3: name of the author (prefilled by my feed reader)
4: original article’s URL (prefilled by my feed reader)
5: the reason and context why I am saving this to notes (also used to write a reply to a post, or the reason for bookmarking something if it will be posted on my site)
6: a quote I want to highlight
7: keywords that will become tags or categories on my site, and tags in my notes
8: selector for which site to post to (zyl is my blog), or ‘obs’ for making a note in Obsidian

Except for that last one those numbers are marked on the image of the resulting markdown note.

The resulting note in Obsidian:

1: the original HTML content from a feed shown in Markdown as the main body of the note
2: title of the article, both shown as part of the content of the note, as well as the title of the note (where a timestamp is added)
3: name of the author (mentioned with the source both at the top and bottom)
4: original article’s URL (mentioned with the author both at the top and bottom)
5: the reason and context why I am saving this, always at the top as it helps me process the content better
6: a quote I wanted to highlight
7: keywords that have become hashtags

(This posting was also written in my notes and, except for the images, posted directly from Obsidian to my site. Meaning I can both automatically move material into Obsidian, as well as automatically move material out of Obsidian. I quite enjoy the feeling of using that ‘magic’.)

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I use ConvertAPI to on the fly convert PDFs of my presentations into individual images (something Keynote can do for you locally on your Mac, btw), to create embeddable versions of my slidedeck. This is how I create my own Slideshare service as it were. I started doing that in the fall of 2020, and the last time I converted a slidedeck was in the fall of last year.

Today in preparation for a talk I gave this afternoon I went through the same routine, but nothing happened. No conversion of slides, no embeddable files. There were no error messages either, it just stayed stuck in the conversion step. I assumed it might be an API issue and logged into ConvertAPI to check.

Or tried to login, as it said my mail address or password were wrong. I clicked reset password, but did not receive an e-mail from ConvertAPI for it. Turned out my entire account had been deleted without me being aware of it.
I recreated my account (using the same email address as before thus proving my account no longer existed), copied the new API key to my WordPress config and was all set again.

Running the same routine as before now almost immediately gave the expected result. I did have to remove the uploaded PDFs from earlier attempts in WordPress though, as trashing those items in WP does not delete the uploaded PDF file.

I don’t know why my account was deleted or why I would not have received a message announcing deletion. Perhaps it’s an automated cleanup of dormant non-paying accounts like mine. ConvertAPI is a useful service, and they generously provide 1500 free seconds (my slide decks take about 2 to 4 seconds, so that would cover 375 to 750 slidedecks)

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Screenshot van 4 mei-rede in de Nieuwe Kerk, de link gaat naar YouTube (ik plaats geen YT embeds vanwege tracking).

Indrukwekkende rede van Hans Goedkoop in de Nieuwe Kerk tijdens Dodenherdenking op 4 mei 2022.

Over je eigen zicht op goed en kwaad niet verliezen, ook als dat ongemakkelijk is. Ook als je in een concentratiekamp bent opgesloten.

Als het toen kon, kan het áltijd

zegt hij over hoe Abel Herzberg en anderen het gevoel voor beschaving in stand hielden in Bergen Belsen, en vergelijkt het met welk antwoord we geven op de Russische oorlog in Ukraïne.

En hij geeft een waarschuwing, waarin hij Hannah Ahrendt, en ook de woorden van Herzberg zelf over het Eichmann proces, in slechts enkele woorden weer helder actualiseert naar vandaag. Tegen schuilen achter bestaande systematiek om te verklaren dat je weinig kunt doen.

De banaliteit van het kwaad: nazisme heb je er niet voor nodig.