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

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A little housekeeping today, via my On This Day page. Three title added and an archive.org link added to a broken link.

There are 10 posts found on this site published on September 7

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Listened to Episode 85: WordPress in Education – WordPress News on the WordPress Briefing.

This episode covers some suggested uses of WordPress in Education. I was please to hear it was not concentrating on tertiary education. The host Josepha Haden Chomphosy (Executive Director of the WordPress project!) gave some good reasons for using WordPress in schools. She also talked about the learning resources in WordPress. I am certainly starting to link to and embed these more in the help for Glow Blogs.

The show notes point to the Uganda Website Projects Competition 2024 – Problem Solving with WordPress. I feel a little bit jealous. I wonder if something of the sort could be done in Scotland?

I, obviously, believe the blogs & WordPress have a lot of offer education. There are three main components of Glow, Google Workspaces, MS 365 & Glow Blogs. Google & MS have a lot of onboarding and help aimed at schools. I wonder if a project of this sort could exemplify the use of WordPress.

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Motage of 199 photos taken over summer 2024. Very little details, mostly green colours

I started this two weeks ago when I went back to school. So past time for a summer recap:

As usual I took some photos, and I’ve strung them together, pummelvision fashion.

I updated the script a bit to fade the audio and added a gentler audio choice.

reading

  1. The Last Voice You Hear 11/08/2024 tagged: Mick Herron, ★★★
  2. The Lost Wife 08/08/2024 tagged: Susanna Moore, ★★★★
  3. Hide and Seek 03/08/2024 tagged: Ian Rankin, ★★★
  4. Chain-Gang All-Stars 29/07/2024 tagged: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, ★★★
  5. The Secret Hours 27/07/2024 tagged: Mick Herron, ★★★★
  6. The Sun Walks Down by Fiona Mcfarlane 24/07/2024 tagged: Fiona Mcfarlane, ★★★★★
  7. Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen 18/07/2024 tagged: Michelle Gallen, ★★★★
  8. Long Island by Colm Tóibín 15/07/2024 tagged: Colm Tóibín, ★★★★★
  9. The Drowning Pool 07/07/2024 tagged: Ross Macdonald, ★★★★
  10. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín 06/07/2024 tagged: Colm Tóibín, ★★★★★
  11. The Slain Birds 03/07/2024 tagged: Michael Longley, ★★★★
  12. To the Dogs 02/07/2024 tagged: Louise Welsh, ★★★★
  13. Clear by Carys Davie 30/06/2024 tagged: Carys Davies, ★★★★★
  14. Bad Actors by Mick Herron 30/06/2024 tagged: Mick Herron, ★★★★

Noted

I’ve continued trying to write one note a day on ‘something natural’ and recording each months notes.

Under The Weather

This summer has certainly not been good on the weather front, the tail end of a bug which seemed to take a long time to go away also slowed me down for most of July. Although I walked around a fair bit very locally (Kilpatrick Hills, Cochno etc). I didn’t add much to the walk list. I still managed to see a few new things (at least to photograph).

Glow Blogs

I continued working one day a week on Glow Blogs. There was a release (Glow Blogs Update 14 Aug 2024), just after the schools returned. I spent a fair bit of time writing and updating the various sites that comprise the help system. Checking things out and spending a lot more time in the Block Editor. Lots more to come on that front. I feel the use of blogs in teaching has decreased a bit but I believe they can still be useful in lots of different ways.

Online Fun

I’ve continued to use my blog (syndicated to mastodon & Bluesky via micro.blog) instead of X. I noticed a fresh flush of twitter educators coming through to Bluesky after Musk’s support for the extreme right in the UK.

I did a few The DS106 Daily Creates, but less than usual, my favourites were #tdc4584 &
TDC 5491.

I dodged away at a personal Flickr search page, Search Flickr – Results by Month, as I like comparing things I’ve seen throughout the year organised by month. I’ve already something similar for this blog.

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Bookmarked Configuring Audacity – nocmig.

A fresh installation of Audacity isn’t optimised for scanning nocmig recordings, but with some simple tweaks it can be ready on demand. 

This is interesting. I’ve been dabbling in bird song with Merlin recently. I didn’t know you could use Audacity to see audio as a Spectrogram. This post shows how.

I’ve only just head of nocmig.

The nocturnal equivalent of visible migration watching, and typically employs sound recording equipment to capture the flight calls of migrating birds. 

nocmig – Recording nocturnal bird migration

Which looks/sounds interesting. Could be a bit of a rabbit hole: Guest blog: A DIY low-budget NocMig parabolic microphone, Although I don’t think my diy skills are up to this.

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Likes Blog Gardening by Jamie Thingelstad.

It makes me happy to make these small fixes. I bet it is like a gardener that pulls some weeds in their garden. My website will be some part of my legacy, and this small daily task makes that legacy a little bit better all the time.

I’ve be doing something similar with a lot less rigour since I added my on this day page. Some great ideas here for improving my process.

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Bookmarked Adding a delay to the end of an animated gif by Robin.

gifsicle -U original.gif "#0--2" -d200 "#-1" -O2 > with-delay.gif

This is useful, I am making quite a lot of gifs for Glow Blogs help at the moment. Current workflow: export from screenflow as a mp4, Gif Brewery to create a gif and then this to add a bit of a delay and reduce file size. There is a nice explanation of the parameters.