Three years ago on this date we got the first snow fall of the winter season. No snow is in the forecast for today, but we might get rain. I hear the leaf blowers of the lawn care guys outside.
I might not agree with the reasons why a person chooses to not get the COVID19 vaccine, but I respect their decision if they own the decision and the consequences. By owning the decision I mean don’t lie and do the right things while being around others like wearing masks and keeping a distance.
Blog Posts and Stories
While thinking about how I use micro.blog and how I am using Drummer it occurs to me that both blogging platforms have the same problem with handling what I call long form writing. The root cause is the publishing of the full content of every blog post, regardless of whether the post has a title, on the home page.
To my eyes it makes no sense embedding a titled post that has multiple paragraphs on the home page because it just makes the home page too long. The reader ends up scrolling further and further down a page. Another problem is the reader sees these entries as just another blog post whereas I want such titled posts to be seen as a story or essay.
My ideal scenario would be a publishing platform that is smart enough to handle a couple of scenarios. One scenario would be to enable the writer to create what I will call an introduction post that has a title, a specific introduction that I wrote, and a link to the page with the full article. The idea is that a story, or essay, stands alone on its own page and one is simply writing a blog post to link to that page. Micro.blog even has a pages option that could support this, but it’s not integrated in the manner that I am suggesting.
The other scenario, or approach, would be for the blogging platform to just automatically limit a titled post on the man page to the title and three sentences, with a cut and a read more link. I emphasize I don’t want a publishing platform that requires titled posts, I want it to smartly handled untitled and titled posts and not necessarily treat them the same.
I’ve always held that a blog post is only one, maybe two paragraphs long and something longer is different, what I call stories but others may call essays. This very item you are reading right now is an essay, not a blog post, it just happens to be published on blogging platform. In fact, perhaps what I am advocating is for a web publishing platform that is more than a blog publishing platform.
I can manually implement this approach by only writing blog posts here and publishing stories on another site, but that forces me to maintain two sites and use two different writing flows that I have find fatiguing. My desire is to use one writing and publishing flow for both forms of writing.
I write many of my blog posts on this site using the Drafts app on my iPad, and I can do that because micro.blog supports an open API that provides the ability to integrate any editor to it. In this manner micro.blog is the most open platform that I have used. In fact that means I can even use Drummer to write and publish a post to this site. The irony is, I cannot do the reverse as there is no way for me to write a post in Drafts to be published to my Daynotes. The cause in my opinion is that Dave is focused on a file format rather than an API.
One thing that annoys me about the micro.blog app on the iPad is when I follow a link that someone posts and I return back to the app it doesn’t remember my place but instead puts me back at the top of the timeline.
This summary about Matter makes the app sound appealing, but I am pretty happy with my current reading flow that uses River5, Radio3, IFFT, Pocket, Kindle Readwise, Roam and Evernote. The flow enables me to review and consume a high amount of information across every computer operating system that I may use.
“People are not really voting on issues, which I think is why polling is not working. People are voting on fear and mostly fear of the other side.” Still holds
I am planning on buying a new Macbook during the holiday season, so I am keeping my eyes on the deals being offered. I am not in the market for the new high-end Pros as I don’t need that much nor do I want to spend that much, but I do want at least 512 GB of storage, which pushes me to the high-end Air or the 13-inch Pro. I am leaning toward the Air, does anyone think the 13-inch Pro is the better way to go? I basically need a computer that runs current operating systems and I want it to last. I do hope to also run Windows 11 on it using Parallels. As a sidebar, I am curious if anyone has strong opinions about buying refurbished Macbooks from Apple versus new, it seems to me there is little risk and attractive prices.
Congratulations to Atlanta Braves fans who are celebrating their teams World Series championship victory. Watching the game last night gave me all the feels as it was the five year anniversary of the greatest game every played. I will forever have a bit of disbelief that I lived to see the Chicago Cubs win the World Series. I know that as a fan I am supposed to want my team to win it all every year, but even though since 2016 the Cubs have ultimately lost in the playoffs those loses were not as crushing in context of 2016. The Cubs NLCS loses in 1984, 1989, and 2003 were crushing as I had never seen them in the World Series. I’ll always be bitter about 1984 because frankly, they were the best National League team that year and should have played the Tigers.
Five years ago today was the greatest game ever played. I still tear up thinking about it.
Microsoft now has a Notion clone, while I don’t really get Notion. Every time I have checked Notion out I just think it has too much.
Wholehearted Faith, which is Rachel Held Evans last adult book, downloaded to my Kindle app today. Given her tragic death, I have mixed feelings about reading it.
Epilogue is a new entry in the micro.blog suite of apps, currently in beta, that can be used to manage your micro.blog book shelves. You can also write blog posts to your site from within the app. I am not sure a separate app is the way to go here, but I think I will find it useful all the same. Shortcut support (or share sheet support) to provide some integration between the Kindle app and Epilogue would be great. Since bookshelves are lists, export to OPML format would also be great. I managed my 2020 reading list in Little Outliner and I like the end of year result.
I am so tired of advertising bombarding everything, particularly YouTube. For me, YouTube is becoming less and less usable. Not only are there advertising cuts every three minutes but also banner ads placed over a good amount of the video display.
Does anyone know of where one can legally buy a Windows 11 license (product key) to use for a virtual machine? Please reply with links if possible.
Zavala is an outliner that runs in iOS and iPadOS that exports to OPML. The developer is working on integration with micro.blog using Shortcuts.
I read these stories of Manchin in the middle of all the current politics and I can’t help but think about how much of an ego trip that must be. Right now he has all the attention and power, Trump must be envious.
Android 12L reads to me to be a bit like iPadOS. Interesting how Google and Apple interact, although foldables don’t appear to be on Apple’s radar.
In my opinion, obsessing over Facebook from either a journalistic or free speech point of view is wrong. Facebook is operating within a system that incentivizes its behavior, so you really can’t address the root cause without looking past Facebook and to the system. Ever since the New Deal capitalists have been working to dismantle any constraints put on them by the New Deal laws. For capitalists life is all about wealth, wealth, and more wealth. They think they can to use their wealth to escape to some far away island or Mars when the world as they know it ends, and it will end.
Looking through the pictures that I took during my most recent trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and I think this one of the Cut River Bridge is one of the best.
