There are 2 posts found on this site published on June 22
- June 22, 2011
- Your Input Needed: Survey on Collaborative e-Government
crowdsourcing, egov, opengov, opengovernment
In the context of the collaborative production in eGovernment study (more information on www.ourservices.eu) that a consortium I am part of is carrying out for the European Commission, we have prepared an online survey that is focused on innovators – initiators and evangelists of collaborative online services delivery, people who are improving public services “from […] - OGD Austria 2011
ogd2011
Last week I visited the Open Government Data Austria 2011 conference in Vienna. It was a great meet-up of the very active and lively Austrian open government data community. I spoke at the conference on the change management aspects and societal impact of open government data, and not about the operational aspects of technology or […]
- Your Input Needed: Survey on Collaborative e-Government
Alan Levine recently posted his description of how to add an overview to your blog of postings from previous years on the same date as today. He turned it into a small WordPress plugin, allowing you to add such an overview using a shortcode wherever in your site you want it. It was something I had on my list of potential small hacks, so it was a nice coincidence my feedreader presented me with Alan’s posting on this. It has become ‘small hack’ 4.
I added his WP plugin, but it didn’t work as the examples he provided. The overview was missing the years. Turns out a conditional loop that should use the posting’s year, only was provided with the current year, thus never fulfilling the condition. A simple change in how the year of older postings was fetched fixed it. Which has now been added to the plugin.
In the right hand sidebar you now find a widget listing postings from earlier years, and you can see the same on the page ‘On This Blog Today In‘. I am probably my own most frequent reader of the archives, and having older postings presented to me like this adds some serendipity.
From todays historic postings, the one about the real time web is still relevant to me in how I would like a social feed reader to function. And the one about a storm that kept me away from home, I still remember (ah, when Jaiku was still a thing!).
Adding these old postings is as simple as adding the shortcode ‘postedtoday’:
There are 3 posts found on this site published on January 18
January 18, 2009
On the Real Time Web This post is triggered by Fridays posting on RWW by Bernarnd Lunn ‘Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web!’. In it Lunn rightly describes how keeping track of things that are happening right now is a new area of innovation, where big incumbents like Google don’t have much to bring to the table. (Consistent with […]
January 18, 2007
Jaiku As Story Teller (or: Jaiku Works) Mark Wubben posted this great and telling screenshot, which precisely shows what Jaiku does. (just as this one about what Plazes does) Today a big storm is crossing the Netherlands. On behalf of the police the national railsystem has been halted. As I was on the other side of the country today I am stuck […]
January 18, 2004
Jay Allen’s Spam Filter Added After having been hit with a considerable amount of commentspam starting on New Years Eve, I’ve finally took the 15 minutes it costs to install Jay Allen’s comment and trackback spam filter. Tested it, and it works fine. A big thanks to Jay Allen for this effort! Latest developments in the fight against spam in […]
The ‘on this day in earlier years‘ plugin I recently installed on this blog is already proving to be useful in the way I hoped: creating somewhat coincidental feedback loops to my earlier blogposts, self serendipity.
Last week I had lunch with Lilia and Robert, and 15 years ago today another lunch with Lilia prompted a posting on lurking in social networks / blog networks. With seventeen comments, many of them pointing to other blogposts it’s a good example of the type of distributed conversations blogging can create. Or could, 15 years ago. Re-reading that posting now, it is still relevant to me. And a timely reminder. I think it would be worth some time to go through more of my postings about information strategies from back then, and see how they compare to now, and how they would translate to now.
Today I came to the realisation that my ‘x years ago on this day you blogged…‘ widget is a great way to every day do a recap of those postings and capture the ideas in it in my notes. In a year it would mean all readily apparant ideas mentioned here since 2002 would be included in my notes as well as their interconnectedness, in two years it would mean I’d have had a second iteration on it.
I also realised that after a year (or two), having processed my blog that way, I could do the same thing on the thus emerging collection of notes themselves, as I have a way of surfacing all notes from e.g. July 12th in any given year.
This is akin to how I am my own blog’s most intensive reader already, reading back and forth, following links etc. But it could now be aimed at capturing some of that in a different form than the blog’s timeline.
Probably I could do the same for my existing Evernote collection, although I suspect it would be much less fruitful. My blog is my own writing, output resulting from my own thinking, doing and curation. A large chunk of my Evernote is a snippet collection from around the web without much context. Except for elements I already marked during note taking for action or as ideas, those would be easily findable.
Ever since I was a child in primary school, my mental image of a year has been that of a circle, with January and December at the bottom, and July and August at the top (you’ll notice that this means the months aren’t evenly spaced around the circle in my mental image, spring takes up less of the circle than the fall. It’s a mental image, not a precise graph, likely influenced by my childhood sense of the endlessness of summers, and the long period of darkening days of fall and winter).
My mental image of a year ever since childhood
This Monday I completed a full circle around that image: I’ve been reading my own blog posts from previous years on each day, to see which of those I can take an idea or notion from to convert into a note in my digital garden (named ‘Garden of the Forking Paths‘). Peter has been going around the circle with me I read today (which in turn prompted me to write this), starting from my posting about it last year. He’s been reading his old blogposts every day, not just to reread but also to repair links, bring home images to self-host, clean up lay-out etc. I’m sure I am and have been my own blog’s most avid reader ever since I started writing in this space 19 years ago, and like Peter had been using my ‘on this day’ widget to repair old blog posts since I added the widget in early 2019.
Now I’ve come full circle on reading those blogposts for a year to mine them for their ideas and notions. The next cycle until the summer of 2022 I am adding a layer.
I will of course be making another round through my own blogposts like I did before. Because sometimes I missed a day, I haven’t repaired all of them each day, and I may take new meaning from them the next time I read them.
The layer I’m adding is also reviewing the personal notes I made on this day last year. This concerns the daily notes I make (a habit I started in April 2020), the other notes I’ve created on a certain date (work notes, ideas, travel etc), and indeed the blog posts I converted to notes dated on this day last year.
I see Frank has also picked up on Peter’s posting, and is embarking on a year of reading his own daily postings as well. Like Frank, I have never blogged on this day of the year since this blog started. And like for his blog, that has now changed.
Going in circles… I suspect life is circles, not turtles, all the way down. At least when you get a bit older that is.
A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
Theme related tweaks
Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
in the entry-footer template and the comments template
Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
Added a widget with projects I support
Added to the single post template a section that mentions and links the number of Hypothes.is annotations for that post, where they exist.
Functionality related tweaks
Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
Added an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
Added a /feeds page
Added a Now page
Added a Hello page
Added a way to share book lists / feeds.
Stopped embedding slide decks, and stopped embedding new Flickr photos (as well as removed older embeds, currently 23 postings between January 2013 and July 2018 still have them, and 22 postings from June 2006 to July 2009)
Removed all affilliate links to Amazon books as it entails tracking
Added an Index (using a plugin)
Added my own basic check-in and Dopplr style posts
Other tweaks
Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)