Static Website Updates?

Recently a friend of mine launched a website. This prompted me to dig around my own static site and see what changes needed to be made to it.

I decided to update my links page, prompted by my friend’s new site.

Other updates include:-

☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | s2z digital garden | Tumblr ☚

Chronological Feeds on Facebook?

We’ve all been there. You just spent hours scrolling through your Facebook Feed. You initially popped in to check up on some small detail, and before you know it,  you have wasted a lot of time only to realise that some of the content you are seeing is four days old.

Here’s how to set your feed to chronological on a desktop and stay afresh as of 2023.

Click your friends icon on desktop

Next navigate to the friends feed

Click your friends icon on desktop

Now your feed will be Chronological. As far as I can tell there is no way to make this setting stick so you need to go through steps every time you use Facebook.

Your feed should now be chronological.

Geekiness

I have been searching for alternatives to the big gatekeepers of the internet of late over the last 2 or 3 years. Driven mainly by Facebook’s abuses of data. I have found a number of services, applications and tools that are operating outside the walled gardens of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Some services replace platforms like Instagram, others are hybrids of Twitter and Instagram and Facebook, and others are a retro step back to the early days of the internet, where text reigned supreme. Most are run by volunteers who have the tech skills to run and organise and moderate these things.

Screengrab of my account on pixelfed
Screengrab of my account on pixelfed

These services are for instagram pixelfed.social, [free open source] Glass [glass.photo] a subscription model. Mastadon is a Facebook replacement, the platform runs “instances” I am connected to two. AusGalm.space you will need to “apply” to join and mastodon.social. Joining is simple easy and quick. [I’m hoping to merge the two soon]. And lastly discord. This is a social space where people with common interests congregate. The groups are called servers, currently I participate in several from my own specially created one for flickr users to others much more general in scope, like iPhone photography and online music listening.

A screen grab of the gemini browser showing my "site"
A screen grab of the gemini browser showing my site

Lastly a new internet protocol has been developed, this is super geeky and requires a special browser to read, I’m using Larange. It also requires access to a server that is configured to allow it to run if you want to write your own pages. The protocol is called gemini . This protocol is unlikely to ever take off the way the internet did in the mid to late 1990s, but for me this is fine. It is, I hope, going to be a space to build my writing skills. As it is text and hyperlink only protocol.  At least it’s bit more user friendly than the gopher protocol.

Here’s a description from the documentation page of the project:-

Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. You may think of Gemini as “the web, stripped right back to its essence” or as “Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little”, depending upon your perspective (the latter view is probably more accurate). Gemini may be of interest to people who are:
Opposed to the web’s ubiquitous tracking of users Tired of nagging pop-ups, obnoxious adverts, autoplaying videos and other misfeatures of the modern web Interested in low-power computing and/or low-speed networks, either by choice or necessity Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design strives to maximise its “power to weight ratio”, while keeping its weight within acceptable limits. Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a “do it yourself” computing ethos. For this last reason, Gemini is technically very familiar and conservative: it’s a protocol in the traditional client-server request-response paradigm, and is built on mature, standardised technology like URIs, MIME media types, and TLS.

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Weekend Notes?

Here’s a few web  links:-

☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr ☚

More thoughts on Blogging

Short form blogging as a form of note taking, thinking out loud, and public learning has taken off quietly in the last few years. I have spent some time recently reading about and  trying to setup my own disparate set of tools to do this as well.

It’s all a bit too technical right now. Some options I’ve considered are, Notion as a webpage, Voodoopad as a self constructed wiki, some suggest simply writing a html page and updating as I see fit, this is the least technical option for me and may yet take shape. At the moment I’m dropping most snippets of text, some pdfs and images into Apple’s notes app. From a search and retrieve perspective this is fine, however a digital garden is more than that. [See the links below for more on the ideas and approach to digital gardening.]

For now I have rejigged my WordPress blog in an attempt to better reflect this approach, adding a menu option in the main menu at the top for a links page. Also adding content to my about page that explains a bit about digtial gardens. I also moved categories to my sidebar to make the interconnections between my words/posts and other media seem more obvious.

Moving forward I will try to add as much link rich information as I can in each post. This will allow for some non-linear reading.  In the meantime my motley collection of links can be found on pinboard.in/u/:s2art, there is a social element there and it has a small annual fee attached, as well as a taxonomic tool for tags and organisation.

Here’s a list of articles that have been sitting in my open tabs in my browser for over a week now that have me thinking abot this idea of a digital garden.

☛ Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr ☚

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on


Imagine that! Google making a browser plugin that enables users to opt of their analytics program!
Here’s the link, https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout
It is available for all the main browsers.

Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr

Beijing Silvermine

Beijing Silvermine is an archive of 850 000 negatives salvaged over the last ten years from a recycling plant on the edge of Beijing. Assembled by the French collector and artist Thomas Sauvin, Beijing Silvermine offers a unique photographic portrait of the Chinese capital and the life of its inhabitants in the decade following the Cultural Revolution.

Beijing Silvermine – Thomas Sauvin from Emiland Guillerme on Vimeo.

Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr

World’s First Photography Exhibition In Space!

BJP's Exhibition in space
Screen grab of BJP’s Exhibition in space

The British Journal of Photography has launched an exhibition in space. It is a 45 minute screen based exhibition beamed from above the earth.

From their website, about the exhibition.

Drawn from Portrait of Humanity, a movement seeking to prove there is more that unites us than sets us apart, the exhibited images showcase the many faces of communities across the world, celebrating humanity in its countless variations.

While the global pandemic forces museums and galleries to remain closed, the film should remind us of our universal bonds, despite being forced apart, with vivid images slowly scrolling across a framed-screen, exhibited against the backdrop of our collective home below.

 

Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr | altfotonet

flickrriver?

Flickr river is a site that taps into the flickr api and offers some interesting feedback. It created  a randomly generated series of my “most interesting” pictures. Most interesting is generated by an algorithm. As an algorithm it has little to do with the visual quality of the images  and may draw on other aspects of my activity across the flickr website.

Flickr river has been around as long as flickr itself and over the years the developer has added interesting features.

s2art - View my most interesting photos on Flickriver

Website | Flickr | Instagram | Photography links | Twitter | Tumblr | altfotonet