I've recently purchased MacSparky's OmniFocus Field Guide, so that I can master the tool. It's my hope that the tool will allow me to structure my day. I loose track of what is important sometimes and things have a tendency to get lost either through being too busy or just straight procrastination.
When I look back at my life, the times that I'm the best is when I have a structured system. I've got a brain and I can come up with ideas, but it's pointless if I can't remember what commitments that I've made or where I'm going with them.
The more that I dive into the quest of having my own spot on the internet, the more that I find that I have things that I want to do with it. Which means more research, experiments and late nights.
Currently, I'm on a mission to get webmentions and pingback working on my site. It's been pretty slow going because I want to incorporate it into my current blogging workflow. A workflow that is currently not flowing at all1.
Anyway, I thought I'd focus on making some changes so that I can make it fit better with all the new stuff that is coming out for the indieweb.
Setting up sign in
The first thing to do is make some changes to my template to allow for sign up according to the web directions
I thought the easiest ways of doing this was to use github2 or twitter3. I pushed the github login near the top of the page so that it would look for it first.
Unfortunately, I still need to test it and get it in front of other people to use. I'm going to lay the foundation down and do some research so that I can get ping backs to work properly.
More meta data
From my reading of indieweb.org, I see that it doesn't use the OpenGraph and Schema.org that I put in the theme.
I'm hesitant to add these new tags because it lowers the validation scores, but I hope that it will help with accessibility and just make the site work better for those who want to find it.
Conclusion
I've got a lot of things on my mind and places where I can make the site move forward. I hope that those who read this feel inspired and have some input on how to make the template better.
I've got three places that I can sit down and make a blog post. My iPhone, my iMac, and my laptop. Currently, my favorite is my laptop but I don't take it everywhere or use it as much. My mind is having trouble just feeling comfortable writing recently. Add the complication of where the files should be saved and how to update previous posts and I start feeling like throwing my hands up. ↩
Which was just bought by Microsoft a couple month ago. I don't know if it's the new Microsoft which is pro open source. ↩
A lot of information on the main page of mastodon.cloud.
I joined mastodon.cloud last night because of all the drama with Twitter the in the last couple of years. I haven't been personally attacked by bots or nazi, but I don't believe that I should have to worry about something like that.
Although, I'm hesitant to join yet another social media platform when I can barely keep up with the ones that I'm in now (facebook, micro.blog, slack, and reddit), I thought it would be ok to at the very least reserve my name in case I do decide to use it.
Twitter is a broken plate that held so much potential.
Recently, there was a post in the mac power users forums about how twitter was broken with the following:
So, with the recent changes by Twitter and their impacts, does anyone think there’s a real alternative that power users will embrace? If it’s an opportunity to move to something, then who is creating the option that will take us into the next decade of microblogging?
I made a mistake of replying to a sub posting that had the following and not the main post by a user named dotty.
I don’t have an answer for you, but I will chime in. I live in Colorado and have come to rely on Twitter for fire and evacuation updates. It is by far the fastest way to get emergency updates. I have an “emergency” group that shows push notifications. All other notifications are turned off if they’re not in that group. Now that push notifications are not allowed on either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, is there another alternative?
I admit I was a little too flippant with my response. Two anxious to really think about my response before posting.
I think that this might be a good thing. Although we won’t get push notifications, the applications will still work.
If anything, this might help those who might have become to the constant notifications.
/Devil’s Advocate
This was a missed opportunity and got a response.
@mandaris , I explained I only used Twitter notifications for emergency notifications about fire and evacuations. I don’t understand how this is a “good thing” for me not to receive this information as quickly as possible. Am I misunderstanding your post? I know you signed it “devil’s advocate,” but seriously??? I sincerely doubt Twitter was trying to do us a favor by restricting their API — It sounds like it was a money decision.
I agree that some are much too attached to their phone and notifications going off every few minutes can be distracting, but that really isn’t the point of this post. There are legitimate reasons someone would want timely push notifications. There was an armed escaped convict in my neighborhood recently and the sheriffs dept put out a twitter notification to stay indoors until the person was apprehended… and then another notification giving the “all clear.” How is it a “good thing” not to receive these types of alerts if you choose to? After, I received a call from my neighbor to check in on me because there was a “reverse 911” that went to her land line and she was concerned I wouldn’t know because I don’t have a land line.
The point of my post is to figure out an alternative now that Twitter has made this decision, not to weigh the merits of notifications from Twitter. After a summer from hell with wildfires raging all around me, these notifications were a blessing. If there were no notifications, all was well, but if my home, or the home of loved ones needed evacuated from fire (or now flash flood) it was a “good thing” indeed to be alerted ASAP. It literally saved lives.
All I want to know now is if I can set up something similar or if I can still receive these notifications another way. If I can still get them and they will be delayed 1-2 minutes that is fine. I only want the notification if it is truly from my emergency list on twitter, and I can’t find a setting for this anywhere with Twitter’s own app. Am I missing something?
Very thoughtful, I took the time to write a small response that I hope doesn't erupt into a huge flame war and to appease anyone else who might come across it at a later date.
First, I’m happy that the twitter service has helped you and those you care about. Those are all very good use cases and we can all see why Jack Dorsey would state that twitter would drive to be a daily utility.
But that is the thing, something like that should be a utility that our phones should be able to tap into. For example, I live in California and we have something called an Amber Alert. You get alerts without the need for an account. You can get alerts on your phone, billboards and radio.
As a society, we should be making sure that services such as this are expanded to handle use cases as you have described them.
Now, as far as the question of how to use the twitter app to get you what you want. I don’t know if they have a “vip” notification group on the roadmap. I would hope that they discover it needs to be there since they wrote:
We’re committed to understanding why people hire 3rd party clients over our own apps.
Probably not my greatest moment on the internet but I'm hoping that I communicated my thoughts well. And just in case, I had sent a private message stating that and Doty responded that
Well, I purchased the update for ScreeFlow 8 based off of my fear of missing out on new features and the dream that I'll one day make something with it.
I'm trying to change my habits with my computer and thought that I would focus on making things instead.
So, here is the first video that I've made in a very long time. I hope that they get better with practice.
I woke up from a dream this morning feeling conflicted and sad. The dream was about being offered a job working at Apple making tutorial videos and applications for others. It was my dream job and -although I had doubts about my ability- I wanted to pursue it.
The drawback is that I'd have to leave my relatively secure position working for the state. I spent the rest of the dream worrying about how I should approach the subject and cleaning up my local neighborhood.
Thinking about what my next actions are going to be.
I'm about to do a review of what needs to be done this week and I'm hesitant to start. Although I've been getting better at making sure that things get done, the sheer amount of "stuff" can feel overwhelming if I look at all of it at once.
I think that is why I find myself drawn to OmniFocus and GTD in general. It give me a tool that allows me to trust that what I'm not doing is correct.
But back to the matter at hand, what should my next project be?
Moving the site generation to another server
Currently, I have a iMac at home that generates the site and then scp the files to a server. The only times that I have had an issue is when I had to shut down dropbox running on the machine because it was being a resource hog.
My plan is to move all of my posts to a repository and then having a cron job running on the server to do an update every hour to update the repository and then the website.
Previously, I had written about how I found a solution to my compulsion to make sure that the headers on my blog were on the write2 level here.
As with so many other things in life, there was an easier1 solution that was built into python-markdown.
When I had first explored this issue, I had looked at the HeaderID it was marked as being deprecated and to be used for adding anchors for headings. I didn't read the whole thing because it didn't seem it would fit my needs. I continued on and found my current solution.
But, the thought that there could be a better way kept on nagging me even though I was happy3 with how my site turned out.
The first thing that I found was that the extension allows me to set the base for headers fairly easily by setting a property in my pelicanconfig.py.
# Markdown optionsMARKDOWN={'extension_configs':{'markdown.extensions.codehilite':{'css_class':'highlight'},'markdown.extensions.extra':{},'markdown.extensions.meta':{},'markdown.extensions.toc':{'baselevel':'3','title':'Table of Contents'},},'output_format':'html5',}
This eliminates the need for the additional plugin and as an added bonus allows me to have a table of contents for those really long posts that I never write.
Table of Pain
There are only a couple mild things that I don't really enjoy about this new solution.
Div-ided we stand on syntax
I'd love if this wasn't in a div and used either a nav or aside tag for accessibility and my own personal comfort.
Also, the number of li and ul tags can be hard to read if you want to read the raw html.
Titles for table of contents is in a span tag. I find that kind of ironic.
Seriously, just nitpicky at this point.
Making it look nice
This part is just me going back to trying to figure out how to make it look nice in the browser. I imagine that it won't take long, but there are going to be a couple of ugly iterations.
Easier being defined as having less dependencies. ↩
I'm in the bedroom upstairs. It's kind of like an office because it has a desk and no one to bother me at the moment. It gives me a second to think about what I'm going to do next in life.
I usually take some time to go through my list of projects in OmniFocus or read through my emails. Throughout the years, I find myself using the default mail client that comes with macOS.
I think that it is because the first time that I really enjoyed working with email was in college which is when I started using macOS.
Of course, I have a couple posts about how I used web clients but I find that I use my laptop when I really want to clean up what's in my inbox.
I've been part of a slack group where I contribute on a regular basis and some of the members have really gone the extra mile to share some of their experiences with the rest of us.
It feels amazing to be part of a group that is brave enough to do this and trusts us to that degree.
I'm feeling pretty inspired to write more as well.
There are only a couple mild things that I don't really enjoy about this new solution.