Monthly Archives: March 2016
Music: Black Mountain – Mothers of the Sun
Oh, I’m sorry, did I just get some rock and roll all over you? Here’s a towel.
Ghost: Emily
I will live on in the people I love and they will live on in me.
I like all the Radiotopia podcasts, but The Heart is a special treasure. Listening to Ghost: Emily reminded me I need to share it with the people I love.
The heart is an ongoing audio art project about intimacy.
Review: The Pillars of the Earth
The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was surprised at how fast I plowed through this book. So much drama and intrigue and history, I kept sneaking in chances to read wherever I could.
In a way, this felt like science fiction – the society and the culture was so strange and different from anything I understand that I could have read this for the world alone.
Well worth the 1000 pages of your time. Like reading a Neil Stephenson epic, but with a real ending.
Orbital 0.2.1 – Secure Polyglot is out in the wild
I got a bit busy and I never did the release post for 0.2 so this is a big one with lots of features!
Translations
Orbital is now translatable using the standard WordPress API mechanisms. If you’re a translator please contact me! I’d love to work with you to translate it! You can see the sample .po and .pot files under the “languages” directory in the plugin.
Blogroll as a Widget!
I’m really excited about this! One of the reasons I had an idea for this whole thing is that I was frustrated that the blogroll widget didn’t synchronize with my feed reader. Why wouldn’t it just be a representation of what I’m actually reading? So now that’s done! You can choose to display a link to the underlying OPML for download if you like. I’d encourage you to do that because public OPML files online is a really good idea. I also put in a promo link but you can totally turn that off. I’m conflicted about putting that promo in because I’m not much of a self promoter – but I want to share this thing with more folks if possible.
Fast Feed Switcher
I don’t really like taking my fingers off the keyboard, so I really like keyboard shortcuts. I’ve added one more keyboard shortcut! Type g to bring up a window that will let you go to any feed. You should be able to start typing the name of a feed and auto narrow down to whichever feed you want, then hit enter to go to it.
Security
I’ve added essential protection against cross site scripting attacks. In case someone is actively trying to mark your feeds read or import new feeds for you, they can’t do that anymore.
Bugfixes
Some folks experience the feeds stopped updating! That’s not good behavior for a feed reader – so it’s now fixed.
Some folks experienced a problem when they had multiple users and a user with non-edit permissions was added. That should be fixed now.
If you uninstalled the plugin it didn’t clean up after itself. Now Orbital is tidier and cleans up to not leave traces.
Music: clipping.
I’m driving upstate with pals to take MAXIMUM BABY LAZER on his first snow sliding adventure. On the way back, we’re listening to this Song Exploder episode – and I was knocked flat.
https://soundcloud.com/hrishihirway/song-exploder-clipping
Give that a listen – knowing the details of how they make music (no drum beats, no “I” in the lyrics”) really put a polish on listening to them.
I check out the video and it is a great concept and execution:
So then I got the album. And was blown away by a track called Body & Blood. Do not watch where naked people will get you in trouble.
Review: The Martian
The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the most exciting potato novel I’ve ever read.
Mark Watney is an extreme potato farmer who grows potatoes under the most unimaginable circumstances. We get great insights into his yields, his daily practice and the terrible calamity that befalls his crop.
***SPOILER ALERT***
None of the potatoes make it to the end of the book.
From Jekyll to Hugo
Sometimes simpler is better.
After being away from Orbital for a bit, I started revving my engines a bit by trying a new project on the subway and hacknight. Project Munchausen is about doing some writing and exploring some ideas – so I tried to get myself away from doing too much programming on it. Since it is just writing, I wanted to avoid falling into the trap of using a big content management system like WordPress.
I started exploring with the first Static Site Generator I know of: Jekyll. Jekyll powers the Pages feature on GitHub. I got really far, but felt really constrained. It felt like Jekyll was trying to push me to turn my site into a blog, like the downhill path of Jekyll was to create a blog.
I didn’t want to create a blog – I want to make something that’s an exploration of a subject. It will change over time, so it should have an RSS feed generated, but I didn’t want to only have a timeline view of things.
I don’t know how I happened on Hugo but it seemed perfect. The templates are simple, Go is a pretty simple language to use, and the organization of the content is really easy to understand.
In Hugo, you have a directory named content. Under that directory, any other directories are Sections. Content goes in a section as a Markdown file. Templates can iterate over those sections and their contents. Easy peasy.
So far, I’ve gotten farther with Hugo in a few subway rides than I have with long sessions wrangling Jekyll. My goal is to put something up on the web in a month.
Music: The Jezabels – Come Alive & Pleasure Drive
Oh I am so excited about this new Jezabels album Synthia.
The epicness. And some fun:
These folks are so brilliant and intense and they put on a hell of a good concert.
Oh hello there
Let’s get some of the dust knocked off of this thing.
I’ve been doing a lot, but not writing much. Stalled on Orbital for a bit and hadn’t reached a publishing point on Project Munchausen.
Mainly been working on the upstate house, learning how to really raise a great kid and buried at work.
Starting to come up for air on all of those things so why not write again?