Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

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Well I am quite excited. There is a new plugin in Glow Blogs, H5P. This is quite different from anything else in blogs.

H5P is a system for creating interactive HTML5 content. It can work inside several types of publishing platforms including WordPress.

The range of content types that you can create with H5P is pretty wide. Some are ways of presenting material, accordions, image galleries. Others are learning activities, quizzes, multi-choice questions, word searches and crosswords. More sophisticated types include interactive video. Videos can be paused by viewers to respond to questions and quizzes and 360 tours. Responses to quizzes, cloze procedures etc are gathered from logged on users.

You can combine these content types , or display them on a blog in different ways.

I’ve spent a bit of time making some simple examples for Glow Blogs which has allowed me to start to think about how best to use these.

I’ve also started to build up a small bank of resources for spelling for my class: igh example. So far I am only scratching the surface.

I’ve always enjoyed making online resources for my classes to use. but these can take a lot of time and can be difficult to make presentable or present. The H5P plug-in solves many of these problems and are made “inside” the blog.
Having them on a blog allows resources to be quite easily organised. The Display Posts plug-in or using the make theme helps. Post listing in Gutenberg will be useful too.

Here are a couple of examples embedded from Glow Blogs.

A 360 tour:

and a fill in the missing words exercise.

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screenshot of pi.johnj.info/gb

One of the things I am interested in as part of my work on Glow Blogs is what people are using Glow Blogs for.

Glow Blogs is made of of 33 different WordPress multi-sites. One for each Local Authority in Scotland and one central one.

The home page of each LA lists the last few posts. Visiting these pages will give you an idea of what is going on. In the past I’ve opened up each L.A. in a tab in my browser and gone through them. I had a script that would open them all up. I’ve now worked out an easy way to give a quick overview.

Recently I noticed shot-scraper ,Tools for taking automated screenshots of websites . I’ve used various automatic webpage screenshot pages in the past. These have usually been services that either charge money or have shut down. I used webkit2png a wee bit, but ran into now forgotten problems, perhaps around https?

shot-scraper can be automated and extended. It is a command line tool and using these is always an interesting struggle. I usually just follow any instructions blindly, searching any problems as I go. In this case it didn’t take tool long.

Once installed shot-scraper is pretty easy to use. shot-scraper https://johnjohnston.info Dumps an image johnjohnston-info.png

There are a lot of options, you can output jpegs rather than pngs. Run some javascript before taking a screenshot or wait for a while. you can even choose a section of the page to grab.

So I can use shot-scraper to create screenshots of each LA homepage. Then display them on a web page for a quick overview of Glow Blogs.


    #!/bin/bash

    cd /Users/john/Documents/scripts/glowscrape/img

    URLLIST="ab as ac an ce cl dd dg ea ed el er es fa fi gc glowblogs hi in mc my na nl or pk re sa sb sh sl st wd wl"
    for i in $URLLIST ;
    do
        /usr/local/bin/shot-scraper -s "#glow-latest-posts" -j "jQuery('.pea_cook_wrapper').hide()" --quality 80 https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/"$i" -o  "$i".jpg && continue
    done;

This first hides the cookie banner displayed by blogs and then screenshots the #glow-latest-posts section of the page only.

The script continues by copying the image over to my raspberry pi where they are shown on a web page

I hit a couple of problems along the way. The first was that the script stopped running when it could not find the #glow-latest-posts section. This happens on a couple of LAs who have no public blogs. adding && continue to the screenshot fixed that.

The second problem came when I wanted to run the script regularly. OSX schedules tasks with launchd. I’ve used Lingon X to schedule a few of these. Since I recently updated my system I first needed to get a new version of Lingon X. I then found that increased security gave me a few hoops to jump through to get the script to run.

I think it would have been simpler to do the whole job on a raspberry pi. But I was not sure if it would run shot-scraper. I’ll leave that for another day and a newer pi.

This is a pretty trivial use of a very powerful tool. I’ve now got a webpage that gives me a quick overview of what is going on in Glow Blogs and took another baby step in bash.

The first thing that surprised me was the lack of featured Images on the blog posts. These not only make the LA home pages took nicer they also make display blog posts on twitter more attractive.

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One of the best $10 I’ve ever spent was on the micro.blog kickstarter. For my money I was pledged:

PDF and ePub versions of the book, plus early access to Micro.blog. You can reserve your Micro.blog username even before the book is finished.

My username is johnjohnston on micro.blog and it has been a big part of my online life since April 2017

This week I got an email from kickstarter. The draft of the Indie Microblogging book is available online at book.micro.blog.

I’ve started dipping into the book rather than reading it through. Being beautifully organised online makes this easy.

The book is lot more comprehensive than I expected. Everything I’ve read so far has delighted me. It includes, history, different platforms, interviews with lots of interesting folk. There is also technical information about microformats and other indieweb technologies. This looks like being very readable and useful.

Manton’s personal way of telling the story makes it easy to read and digest.

A couple of quotes, that might not capture the range and depth of the text but resonated very strongly with me:

Toward decentralization · Indie Microblogging

We want smaller platforms again as was common in the height of Web 2.0. Back then it was more like a fabric of web tools, where one app might build on Flickr’s API, or another app might plug in missing features in early versions of Twitter like search or photo hosting. But with indie microblogging we want to go further, even more decentralized, where platforms fade away and all we have are our own blogs, woven together as a new foundation for the social web.

Part 2: Foundation · Indie Microblogging

There weren’t enough blogs back in 2002, and there aren’t enough now. I have no doubt that some of the blogs created today will be important in the years ahead, maybe contributing to a debate on politics, or showcasing new writing or art, or serving as an archive that reflects today’s culture.

Manton asks for feedback, I’ve not spotted anything I think could be improves so far, my only feedback would be lovely stuff!

In classic primary school book reviews a question is often, who else would like this book? If you are interested in any aspect of social media, blogging or online life you will find something of interest. If you are uneasy about Facebook algorithms, or you dislike the politicians and government announcing and pronouncing on twitter, this is for you.

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The weather outside is frightful, but I want to avoid the usual internet distractions.

A while ago I signed up for the Vmail newsletter. This is from VOLE.wtf and seems to be put together from stuff submitted by anyone!

One of the items was Wilderness Land a map of links generated from a google spreadsheet which leads to many rabbit hole sites.

Here are a few:

Featured image: Image from page 130 of “The Canadian field-naturalist” (19… | Flickr found via a search for Public Domain photos and the word Serendipity.

Another favourite source of daily serendipity is the dailywebthing daily pointers.

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I am back using the blogging bundle for TextMate to post to my blog. > 400 posts on this blog were created using textMate. I really liked using it.

I stopped using TextMate for blogging when I started using IndieWeb concepts on my Blog. TextMate has no way of doing post kinds. I am now thinking I can blog to a draft (see the screenshot below) then sort out the post kind in the browser.

Since TextMate went to version 2 it no longer had the templates feature. This allowed you to produce the headers at the top of the file. I though I’d just make an Alfred snippet to do that, when I did so I found I’d already done that a while back!

Mind you TextMate is getting long in the tooth and the blogging bundle has not been updated for 4 years. I am running Mojave on my mac and when I finally upgrade a few OSs I suspect things will not run smoothly.

Text Mate Window Blogging

Update, made from TM, the image above looks strange in the media library. Worked in the post fine, but has a file icon rather than a thumbnail.

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Yesterday I read Alan’s post Right? or Choice? To Repair (or Joy Thereof) #DLINQDigDetox – CogDogBlog. One thing in particular caught my eye:

And yes extend broken devices to broken technology. Can’t play old flash content? Try Ruffle.

I’d not heard of Ruffle, but I though it was worth a quick try. I searched my hard drive and was delighted to find  rommy.swf.

Rommy has been reborn several times, born as a HyperCard stack in the 1990s, then a SuperCard project, arriving on the web via the Roadster plugin that ran SuperCard projects. The final incarnation was in flash (although I might have a javascript effort somewhere).

Anyway I uploaded the swf and htlm file, adding the link to the ruffle javascript library & it worked not only that it works on an iPad.

I don’t suppose it is of much use in the classroom now, back in the HyperCard days I though the idea of pupils creating mazes and then getting their partners to write instructions to go through them was a good one. I had not see it else where is such an easy to use fashion.

The featured image is a gif captured with licecap, it doesn’t make the annoying beeping that the real one does.

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The most I’ve read since starting to make notes on my reading in 2018. Covid had something to do with that.

I probably need to split up the page soon. It uses the display posts plugin to pull out the content of the posts. I stopped using the Read Post Kinds and switched to Notes to avoid the link and quote provided by the post kinds plugin.

I make pretty short notes and include the 📚 emoji to share to the micro.blog book discovery page. I am not sure about the stars, more a bit of fun than anything serious.

I’ve seen a few mentions of book recording systems recently, micro.blog is developing bookshelves(with cover art). I sometime use GoodReads, but am more interested in DIY. I got a mention from Ton, which lead to more ideas about sharing. OPML seems to be one way. I am wondering (above my pay grade) about JsonFeed and the WordPress Rest API json and if they might be useful. JsonFeed seems to be limited to the count in your RSS feed (for WordPress).

The 2021 Book list

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  • Permian Designs mixed media & photos.
  • Amanda Thomson

    My creative practice is ideas and research-led and fuses creative non-fiction; traditional and digital printmaking techniques, photography, bookmaking, video and sound and 3-dimensional work. I’m interested in how we are located (and locate ourselves) in the world, notions of space and place and ideas of belonging. A lot of my work – in art and writing – is about nature, flora and fauna, and rooted in the highlands of Scotland, where I’m at my happiest.

  • out of books

    Inspired by Boswell & Johnson’s 1773 journey to the Hebrides, Out of Books is an illustrated guide to Ken Cockburn & Alec Finlay’s modern-day interpretation. Read- ing the text in landscapes their predecessors described, they will invite people to join them at readings & guided walks. Visiting libraries, they will select books that update the themes Boswell & Johnson mused upon.

  • The Road North (2010–11) Podcast

    The Road North (2010–11) is a word-map of Scotland, composed by Alec Finlay & Ken Cockburn as they traveled through their homeland, guided by the Japanese poet Basho, whose Oku-no-Hosomichi (Narrow Road to the Deep North) is one of the masterpieces of travel literature. Ken and Alec departed Edinburgh on May 16, 2010 – the very same date that Basho and his companion Sora departed Edo in 1689. The result of their journey is a collaborative audio & visual wordmap realised as a blog, book, and audio recording, describing the landscapes they have seen and people they met. This audio accompanies a book-length poem published by Shearsman in October 2014. This recording is an abridged version of the poem, performed by Alec Finlay, Ken Cockburn, and Lila Matsumoto, with sound design by Geoff Sample

  • Poetry By Heart | KS2 Timeline
  • Jenny Mackness – Jenny Connected

    With the realisation that my years ‘are numbered’, I am keen not to waste time on things I am not interested in and to remain open to new learning opportunities; these currently lie in philosophical subjects such as epistemology, ethics and philosophical literature. I closely follow the work of Iain McGilchrist and Stephen Downes, both of whom have influenced my thinking. I have realized that at this stage of my life, art, music, the natural world and interpersonal relationships are all becoming increasingly important. This, I think, relates to what Iain McGilchrist refers to as the need for an embodied life.

  • Openverse

    Openverse is a tool that allows openly licensed and public domain works to be discovered and used by everyone.
    Openverse searches across more than 300 million images from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset. It goes beyond simple search to aggregate results across multiple public repositories into a single catalog, and facilitates reuse through features like machine-generated tags and one-click attribution.

  • Kinopio

    Spatial Thinking for New Ideas and Hard Problems

    looks like a fun interface

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A year ago yesterday I posted  2020 in a photo which was the result of a ds106 daily create. I ran my video of a year’s flickr photos through and script that averaged them and a slitscan processing process. Details on that post.

I decided to try the process with this years. I am not sure if the results are interesting or not. I did enjoy the process. This years photos stopped in October.

Here is the video again

and the results:

Here is the montage of all the pictures. I wonder if there are any other ways to play with the years set?