I do not ‘remember’ most of the books I have read. I can recall which ones I liked and roughly why I liked them, but I cannot recount the plot minutely or repeat all the points made in a non-fiction work.
Quite please to read this! My wife has a great memory for books read. I do not.
After Storm Amy it brightened up a little this morning. This Red Admiral to the chance of a bit of sunlight. I wonder how many more we will see this year. A bit later I saw a white flying around too, despite the wind. #butterfly
In this episode of the Fediverse Flows series, host Matthias Pfefferle sits down with pioneer technologist Dave Winer. The inventor of blogging, podcasting, RSS, and text casting. Together, they unpack the evolution of the open web, discussing why true interoperability and openness matter more than ever in an age of restrictive social media platforms.
The shownotes and transcript on this podcast are wonderful. The Takeaways, provide a great summary and worth reading after you listen.
I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog since I discovered rss. I’ve tried many of his more recent tools, including WordLand & FeedLand which he discusses here1.
Matthias Pfefferle is an IndieWeb & WordPress developer. I use his sempress theme & several of his plug-ins2 on this site. Recently he has been developing the ActivityPub – WordPress plugin . This allow your WordPress site to function as a federated profile. I’ve not tried that as I currently posse posts from here to mastodon via micro.blog.
Anyway, I’m a big fan of both participants.
of the many in the podcast.
I don’t believe in comment sections on blogs, though. I think we could live without that, actually
Dave Winer
Like Alan I do like comments. I’ve read about bloggers who do not and mostly they are the ones with huge audiences. Apart from valuing the conversation, comments & even likes, which I fetch back via brid.gy, it does let me know that sometimes I am not writing into the void. I’d still blog for the void but it is nice to get some contact.
I’d guess bloggers like Dave dislike comments because of the way they can go on big sites.
But over time, what I hope happens is that people find that Wordland’s editor isn’t what they want. They want a different editor because you know what? There’s no one kind of editor that would please everybody.
Dave Winer
I’ve found this one of the most compelling reasons for exploring WordLand. WordLand is quite an opinionated editor. It has led me to think about all the different ways I’ve posted in the past and try out a few other options.
I think most of the younger generations are not aware of what a link is, what a URL is. They simply use one social network, and if they search for other users, they have that little search box and they search for the username. They do not understand that in a decentralized world that they may have to copy and paste URLs to find a new.
Matthias Pfefferle
This really spoke to me as a teacher. I am saddened by the way that even browsers hide paths after domains, and pupils just grab whatever google tells them. I have been surprised twice in the last few years by young kids, 9-11, doing something smart with urls or parameters.
I really enjoyed listening to this episode, lots of food for though. The ideas discussed become complicated quite quickly. A bit like the IndieWeb in general. Dave has of course been aware of WordPress but only recently started using it in earnest. Matthias comes from a different direction, the IndieWeb and Activity pub.
I’ve also now listened to another WordPress podcast with Dave: #186 – Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing – WP Tavern.
In this one Dave’s optimism and enthusiasm really shines through. I don’t know who it was told me, or maybe I read it somewhere: if you wait long enough Dave Winer is always right
, Not sure that is true of anyone, but Dave Winer is always interesting & though provoking to read or listen to.
Likes blocktober.fun.
Idea: Create a block every day for October using Telex as the creation tool.
I had a quick try with Telex last month. This is something else!
#SilentSunday
Read: Ripeness by Sarah Moss ★★★★ 📚
Edith in her 70s in 2023 and 17 in the 70s in alternative chapters, the echos of the holocaust, family, belonging to a place, refugees & friendship. Excursions into Irishness & ballet.
Mike’s friend Phineas in Dublin is a sound engineer, hears whole orchestras of weather, traffic, birds that for her are only ambient noise. Sound and signal, she thinks, meaning in every atom and cell if you remember to look and listen. And Dennis the chef, eyes half-closed as he attends to his tongue, names each herb and the provenance of the oil in a salad, and the perfumery up the hill here, every note in a scent, they say, music the metaphor for smell, all of everything, everywhere.
Read: Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller
After The Land in Winter, this turned out to be quite different. Reminded me of Kidnapped! An atrocity in Spain, an English solider, running from another sent to kill him, heads for the Hebrides. Excitement & sympathy for all the characters.
Below them, the last of the drinkers had perfected himself and swum away into the summer night. One by one, the landlady’s breath put out the stars.
There were tears on his cheeks. He hoped the doorkeeper, this woman whose name he had failed to learn, might notice them
A red admiral In the pink. As I took the wings closed image a bee flew very close, wings snapped open.
Photos, notes & map from a walk on Tuesday: walkmap
I saw a link to Telex – AI-Assisted Authoring Environment for WordPress Blocks this week and thought I would give it a try.
A few (eek, 10) years ago I tried to make a plug-in for WordPress that would take a gif url and an audio url, it would then, on the fly, make a static version of the gif. Clicking that would play the gif and loop the audio. I did get it working, eventually adding a dialogue to search for gifs on giphy & audio on freesound. I even managed to incorporate it into the tinyMCE editor in WordPress. It never got finished, but it was fun. I didn’t see any make a site for it: GifMovie.
Making that plug-in involved a big effort on my part, and a ton of searching. I’ve occasionally thought it might make a WordPress block, but didn’t know where to start. I have baby steps, php, JavaScript and css. I’ve occasionally manages to add something to WordPress that I’ve needed mostly through creating shortcode. Simple stuff far short of creating a block.
Test Telex, I thought something similar might be an idea. I simplified a bit leaving out the freesound and giphy searches.
On opening Telex you are shown a typical ai prompt box. But behind that is a WordPress site. I am presuming this is WordPress playground, everything in the browser? I am not familiar enough with playground to be sure. I put in the prompt:
I’d like a block that would allow me to add a gif from the media library. It would allow me to choose a sound from the media library. When the block loads it would show a static image from the gif, generated on the fly with JavaScript with a play button. Clicking the static image would show the gif and loop the audio file.
And off the ai went, showing me some codes scrolling past and telling me how many lines of code it had written. After a while I had the block in the editor in front of me!
I could upload a gif and a mp3 to the block and it showed a preview. All looking good, I could preview the block right in the page. When I went to look at the published page, it looked ok, clicking the image started the sound, but the image vanished.
So I reported this and the ai offered a fix. At that point things went a bit wrong. The page stopped loading and restarting the whole thing failed to load the editor. After a few tries I gave up as I’d run out of time.
This evening I thought I’d try again, but a on a desktop rather than my now aging, 8th gen iPad. As this is all linked to my WordPress account I just opened the project. Getting the same problem I reported it to the ai and it fixed it again. To no avail. I repeated this a couple of times and tested each iteration. After a few goes everything just worked.
I downloaded the plug-in, uploaded it to a test site and it worked fine there too.
I also ran the plugin check plugin and almost no few errors. Presumably because this sort of plugin has fewer opportunities to make mistakes.
I guess this is as near to pure vibe coding as you get? I didn’t see any code at all in the process or discuss it with the ai. I just reported the problem. There is a code view where you can see all of the files created. They look as if they are very well organised and commented. I am sure if I was learning to make blocks this would help a lot.
The few times I’ve asked Claude.ai or chatGPT to do some coding I’ve had more of a view and understanding of what is going on. I’ve also noticed that if chatGPT tried to fix something it either manages straightaway or just repeatedly fails. Telex made a better job of fixing things on at least this one off.
I wonder if this will eventually make its way in to WordPress itself? What sort of overhead would having a bunch of extra block plugins added?
I guess that this could be a good learning tool, but that might require a bit more discipline in reading the code produced and other tutorials on creating blocks. I do feel I’ve learnt something when I’ve DIYed some simple stuff. Not that I’ve retained a lot, that would need more frequent application on my behalf.
I am looking forward to watching the progress with Telex and see where it goes if it gets out of the experimental phase.
Gif my own creation, ripped from video years ago. Sound from https://samplefocus.com
