Category Archives: Micro

Posts that go to to micro.blogs/johnjohnston

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Liked One More Reason #ChatGPT Seems Like a Sweetheart by Maha BaliMaha Bali (blog.mahabali.me)

This ChatGPT thing, quite apart from all the other AI writing tools, is disturbingly addictive and… likeable? I had tried before with you.com/chat to make it say mean and biased things, but it wouldn’t. And this surprised me because if it trained on internet data, the internet is full of stuff like that, right? So…

An interesting experience with chatGPT.

Who trained you to be so sensitive and polite and politically correct?

I couldn’t be angry with it, because it was such a sweetheart about not giving me what I wanted.

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I’ve been testing and using FeedLand for a while now. Today Dave posted the roadmap

1. FeedLand is a feed management system for individuals and groups. So far it’s only been offered as a free service on the web.

and

4. Here’s the big news: The new FeedLand server software will be available as open source, so anyone will be able to run a FeedLand instance. It’s a Node.js application. Uses MySQL. You may want to hook up an S3 bucket for special features like RSS feeds for Likes. At first email sending will be via Amazon SES, the method I currently use. It will be possible to plug in new drivers to use other email services.

As someone who has been pretty excited about RSS for years this sounds great.

Wayback when ScotEduBlogs was a ruby app1, I had this wild idea that a visitor could create a subset of the feeds on the site, save that and view the subset in some way. I think an instance of FeedLand could do just that.

Apart from the unknown of how running FeedLand would work2 I think there are a couple of barriers:

  1. The lack of blogs about Scottish education, maybe twitter problems will help that).
  2. The lack of knowledge about RSS. Andrew McLaughlin’s post Education needs free, safe spaces for creation, collaboration and discussion. and TES Article How a return to blogs and wikis could benefit teachers | Tes gives hope there.

Most online discussion of education and even news from schools has been on twitter. I’ve always felt uneasy about that. More than ever now 3. Maybe 2023 will see a RSSurgance;-)

  1. Created by Robert Jones with the help of Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself.↩
  2. I am hoping to be able to test than soon. ↩
  3. For example: Twitter team responsible for removing child exploitation on site cut in half since Musk takeover, report claims and No more Tweetbot or Twitterrific on Twitter | Mashable ↩
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Replied to Why I Haven’t Embraced WordPress Blocks by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
As someone who maintains a very specific set of WordPress plugins, over the last few years, I’ve been asked why I have not updated them to the block editor. The simplest reason is I don’t use the block editor, and I write the plugins for me, not for a commercial purpose, so while I keep saying I...

But it adds the microformats for different types of Indieweb posts outside of the traditional content block using WordPress filters. That is something I never particularly liked, and wouldn’t mind replacing with something integrated into content.

I’ve been using Post Kinds and other indie web plugins on this blog for a good few year now. Very grateful for the work in developing and maintaining them. I don’t yet use the Block editor very often on this blog either.

Adding the microformats, I presume links & quotes, to the main contents of the post would be great. I am guessing it would future proof the content of the classic editor goes away.

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Liked a tweet by Matt Mullenweg (Twitter)

Can we all agree that giant per-post image headers look terrible on most blogs? It’s been a curse of default WP themes past few years, too. We need it to be easier to have posts without image headers and even without titles.

Mostly, sometime the image is the thing, it is carefully created or curated. I do dislike them more on web pages I’ve gone to to look for information.

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According to my Books page, I’ve read 46 books this year. I started adding star ratings as tags so can give a list of 5 star books (weight by my enjoyment ) using the lovely display posts plugin.

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The idea

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Feed Readers

Another sort of RSS reader is a Podcatcher. Podcast listening apps depend on RSS. My favourite on my phone, I listen to podcasts while commuting, is Castro.

Folk to Follow

RSS Feeds this week:

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The idea

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns | Chris Aldrich

Folk to Follow

Chris Aldrich, who started #FeedReaderFriday has a great feed, but I also follow his hypothes.is stream Feed. I don’t use hypothes.is myself, and the number of items in the feed would be overwhelming if you tried to keep up, but it contains many nuggets that you would not find elsewhere.

Not a person but tinywords: haiku & other small poems has an RSS Feed

Feed Reader Tip

Ignore the unread count. Some feed readers show you the number of unread items. forget FOMO and ignore items, feeds and the whole thing if you have something else to do.

This post is part of a series with a wee bit about readers and a couple of suggestions of feeds to follow.