My first experiment with a mechanical keyboard was brief, I returned the Keychron C3 Pro because its height messed up the ergonomics of my desk and my wrists hurt when using it. I normally use the Logitech MX Keys Keyboard that has a very low profile. For some reason I didn’t think about the additional height of Keychron keyboard, to use it properly I would need to elevate my chair high enough that my feet wouldn’t touch the ground.
Blogbook is an app in development that one can use to make PDF and EPUB files by exporting from WordPress, Micro.blog, or Ghost blog to a single Markdown file. Filter by categories, authors, tags, and dates–then open in Marked 3 for PDF, EPUB, and more. I can create a physical book from an export of my micro.blog to Day One, but that takes all posts in a date range while what I really wanted to do was only publish in book format essays.
Avoiding Dead Links
I currently subscribe to the basic micro.blog plan and I have been monitoring the features that Manton adds to premium for any that I might find useful. Today Manton posted a video demonstrating a feature he is experimenting with that could be added to premium that would help prevent dead links.
A problem that exists with adding links to other sites in my blog posts is that over time the pages I link to disappear. Chances are good that if you click a link on a post that I wrote five years ago the link no longer exists, which is a bit of a pain.
The new feature that Manton is experimenting with enhances the Bookmarks feature of micro.blog that creates an archive copy of a web page. Booksmarks is similar to Archivebox. The enhancement associates the original source URL of a archived page that one may use in a blog post and provides a “single click” way to convert the URL to the archived copy of the page on micro.blog and then you can update the post.
Of course, the problem with the current approach is that one has to know that the source URL is no longer available and make the change. For this to really be useful there needs to be some form of automation, which I can imagine could increase the costs of running micro.blog.
Perhaps a compromise is providing micro.blog users a method to initiate a scan of archived posts for dead links, check for the ones that are dead, see if there is an archived version and offer to convert the link. Such ad hoc scans might result in lower compute costs.
Another thing that would useful, if this becomes a real feature, is provide a way for the micro.blog user to an archived copy of the linked to page at the time of writing the post. I don’t know if Manton would want to automatically create an archive of all destination pages of blog posts, but that would be useful for people like me who often write posts using an editor other than micro.blog’s.
A final thought…. I wonder whether this could be integrated with the Internet archive is some way? It seems the purpose of the Internet archive is to do this type of web page archival and their storage may be a way minimum the costs to micro.blog.
Sadly, the 250th “birthday” of the United States feels less a celebration and more like a wake. I don’t know how anyone associated with Trump, particularly his enablers, can profess the ideas that are part of our founding when they are actively working against them. Perhaps we have always truly been the land of the not yet free and brave for all. I would like to see someone start leading by making strong contrast between what is happening right now and how it started. The real issue is not the individual acts, it’s the sum total of them all in context to what the United States is supposed to be about.
Throughout the extensive litigation over the AEA, in this case and others, the Trump Administration has claimed the president deserves absolute deference when he claims that an “invasion” exists. The absurd implications of this position were highlighted in yesterday’s argument, when Fifth Circuit Chief Judge Jennifer Elrod (appointed by George W. Bush) asked whether the president could invoke the AEA in response to the “British Invasion” of rock stars, like the Beatles. “What if,” she asked “the [President’s] proclamation said ‘we’re having a British invasion.’ They’re sending all these musicians over to corrupt young minds…. They’re coming over and they’re taking over all kinds of establishments.” Could courts then rule the president’s invocation of the AEA was illegal? In response, Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign admitted the government’s position would require courts to still defer to the president, and allow him to wield the extraordinary emergency powers that can only be triggered by an actual “invasion.”
In my opinion the above ought to be evidence of the problems caused by dualistic politics. When one is obliged to support a person or cause completely then there is no room for common sense, and making stuff up becomes a norm. If the President can never be wrong and if the courts cannot that the President is wrong and Congress never opposes the President then you have a Dictator.
I am really getting tired with the cold weather. We have had highs in the teens for days on end, right now it’s 13 out. The highs for the upcoming week are supposed to get to the mid 20s, which will seem warmer, but still below the average temperature of 32 degrees for this time of year.
This is probably only of interest to myself and a few others.
I spent more time today to move my Daynotes outline from Dave Winer’s oldSchoolBlog app, which is the blog CMS for Drummer, to pagePark. As I initially reported yesterday, attempts to load my OldSchool site is now returning a “The file name contains illegal characters” message, and the browser terminal shows the web server is returning a 400 status. I strong suspect that the use of my email address in the directory path of the rendered web pages is causing the problem.
To work around this I configured my instance of pagePark to render the original blog public outline but noticed that pagePark seems to have problems rendering nodes with type values. Today I decided to create a new OPML file. I copied all of the January items to it, made it public, and configured pagePark to render it instead. The direct URL is https://info.frankmcpherson.net/Daynotes.opml and I have configured my simpler forwarder URL, http://daynotes.frankm.info to forward to that URL.
In this configuration, my instance of pagePark is mirroring this new OPML file that is stored at drummer.land/frank.mcp… Note that this URL also has a “fully formed” email address in it, and thus my fear is whatever update that may have occurred on the server hosting oldschool.scripting.com might end up on drummer.land and the same problem will re-appear. I think if that happens that may break many publicly shared OPML scripts created using Drummer.
A work around that I have direct control over is figuring out a way to host the OPML file on my own server rather than on drummer.land, but right now I cannot think of a nice automated way to do that. I can download all my OPML files from Drummer to my PC but that requires manual steps. For now I will cross that bridge when I get to it.
Last week I shared a quote of James Madison in Federalist 51 that explains how the founds expected Federalism is supposed to prevent tyranny. Today I read an article that I think explains this in more detail, at the heart of it is the tenth amendment.
Something has happened with the server hosting my Daynotes site, it is running a 400 Bad Request and it looks like there has been a change blocking a GET for a URL with an email address that has been working in the past. The url is oldschool.scripting.com/frank.mcp… I have created a redirect from my own instance of pagePark so that I can access the file and this is only useful for me.
As I imagined it would be.
