Reply – Amanda Unvarnished

Replied to A note from Katherine M. Moss by

Just … not again, not tomorrow … Let me have some breathe time so that I can work on more important things.

I hear you when it comes to breathe time. Things have been crazy around here with regard to work, but I’ve made it a point to keep as much of my free time to offline pursuits as possible lately, with the exception of things I find genuinely enjoyable, like helping others join the Indieweb. It’s made things a lot less stressful for me. I realize that may not be an option for you, but I really hope you get a break soon.

Replied to Face Down In Mud by

John Carson

WOW! I finally made it. After approximately 8 weeks of reding and studying 3 books on using WordPress and learning about design and development, along with plugin and theme development I’m here. This is impressively powerful stuff. Stay tuned as there will be more to come! I’m not selling out, I…

Welcome to the IndieWeb John!

Replied to

I love baseball. Thanks for posting these, including the alt text! I listen to the games using the At Bat app, and caught part of Monday’s game.

Replied to

I love baseball. Thanks for posting these, including the alt text! I listen to the games using the At Bat app, and caught part of Monday’s game.

Replied to a post by

Changeling mx

I’m glad to hear you’ve found something that will allow you to more easily get your job done. I’m not biting the Aira bullet yet, because I have some serious concerns with regard to their privacy and data protection policies which have yet to be answered, coupled with some ethical concerns, but regardless of my concerns it makes me happy to see others in our community getting things done and living their lives to the fullest.

Replied to a post by

Changeling mx

Really liking the new #SeeingAI feature that lets you explore photos. Now I have an understanding of what it means when a person is centered.

I haven’t had a chance to play with this feature of SeeingAI yet, but I can’t wait to do so. I always assumed that something or someone being centered in a photo was similar to something being centered on a page or on a screen, but I could be very wrong about that.

Replied to Chris Aldrich by

Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich)

Did something go sideways with your site at https://www.arush.io/? Something feels off and it appears most of your content has disappeared?!

@chrisaldrich no, nothing’s gone sideways with the site, but I forgot to go add the rest of the post kinds to the menu once I added the static front page. I will go do that today. I also need to finish the custom archive template since I need a decent way to search through archives. Thanks for the reminder though.

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@Chris it would definitely be nice if they’d mention any of the Indieweb alternatives in these listings. Micro.blog for example is pretty easy to set up if you’re not a technical user. Also, I think what goes without saying at this point is that most of these alternatives lack accessibility, and in some cases aren’t implementing it without a lot of pushback. See for example, Mastodon and link underlines which sparked this thread on Twitter and this quite poetic tribute to the link underline. So along with ending up in the possible same position socially if your platform is run by other people, there’s also the part where you get to decide whether or not you want to start the accessibility conversation.

Replied to ssawczyn on Micro.blog by

ssawczyn (micro.blog)

@arush Thanks for replying to this … months ago, I’m just seeing it now. I think I’m going to switch back to WordPress for blogging, still having trouble with the editor here and there’s not much support on Android. Also, the emoji tag system is cute, but not practical or flexible for me.

@ssawczyn @a11y4all If I’ve done this correctly this should reach you on micro.blog and on Twitter. I completely understand about the micro.blog editor giving you trouble. From what I understand from following some of the development conversation around it, the problems are coming from the javascript used to facilitate markdown composition, and there is talk about making that a toggleable feature until the js can be fixed so that it no longer presents accessibility issues. I could have some of this wrong and @manton may need to correct my recounting of what I’ll call an overheard conversation via interwebz. Regarding the tagmoji, I can see both sides of this. I completely understand how it’s not practical for you. I’m just now starting to play more with emoji, which is weird because I’ve had it on my phone accessibly for years now, but I’m not that familiar with the emoji keyboard and I find it difficult to find the exact emoji I’m looking for, plus I don’t know what most of them mean or even how to figure it out, so I just don’t use them that often. On the other hand, I think hashtags have become a problem, not because they can be used to organize things, but because, (in my opinion), they’ve been horribly abused, and it’s not just marketers or spammers doing it. Hell, most of the time it’s not even marketers doing it, because the good ones tend to keep up with the data on the subject and what’s useful/acceptable on each social network and based on that data will use them accordingly. It’s everyone trying their hand at marketing who manages to abuse them, and I’ve seen this most often in the assistive technology space. That last is based solely on my own experience and is not necessarily meant to be a general statement of badness, although every time I encounter a tweet that uses four or more hashtags I get cranky, and the more hashtags the crankier I get, until we reach ten (yes, that’s a real number, I’ve seen that from at least one blindness organization in the wild) and we’re at go-To-Your-Room-And-think-About-What-You’ve-Done levels of insanity and I start wishing I had the ability to ban hashtag usage altogether. The way tagmoji on micro.blog seem to be designed is, I think, slightly superior. They cover very broad categories, and there’s just enough social pressure to prevent, (at least for the time being), people from abusing the system. The broad categorization is, (I think) a deturrent against attempted gaming of the system. So it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially now that you can interact with Mastodon users via micro.blog and I believe vice versa as long as you have things appropriately set up.

Replied to a post by

Chris Aldrich

Is not even Halloween yet. What in God’s name is the Hallmark Channel doing running a countdown to Christmas movie marathon already?

Personally I’m convinced that Hallmark hates the human race. Doing anything Christmas-related this early is nauseating.