John's World Wide Wall Display

Victoria Park, drizzle them brightened, a couple of white butterflies over the flower beds. Went to investigate. Among the bright flowers were a few thistles. A couple of bees working over the thistles ignoring the other flowers. One butterfly came off a thistle too. Not sure which type of white.

Read: Land by Maggie O'Farrell ★★★★ 📚 A skein of marsh birds passes over his head, their cries a dissonant plucking on untuned instruments. Liam tilts his head, tracking their progress as they veer and bank over the green inclines and fields, towards the cragged cliffs that fall off into the pounding sea: a sole geometric shape moving among grand and yielding irregularities. How radiant, how lovely is the land and yet how empty. It is as if he has passed through a rent into another realm where…

#SilentSunday

Out to Greenside this morning, warm, close and sometimes sunny. Butterflies: Green-veined Whites, several spotted woods, peacocks, small tortoiseshells & painted ladies on thistles. I rather like this odd view of a painted lady. few more photos on flickr. My Butterflies by month continues to grow.

Likes Please let me interact with your blog post! by Michael Harley. I love my RSS reader. It’s the first thing I reach for when I’m “catching up.” As I’m reading through my list of feed items, I often come across blog posts that do not give me any way to interact with the post!

Read: The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout ★★★ 📚 As he steered the sailboat back to his wharf, it came to him how he had once, when he was a kid, said to his father, "I'm going to have a boat one day," and his father had smiled and said, "No, Artie, you're not ever going to have a boat." This did not hurt Artie to remember. Rather melancholic novel. Older teacher Artie, goes through things in a Strout-ian way. Some rather dramatic twists, turns & happenings. Sadder than I expected,…

#bloomstrolling for #bloomscrolling in Glen Douglas yesterday. Lots of sparkles on the ground. #flora.

The other day I was complimented, albeit in a jokey way, on the neat organisation of a word document I had produced. I said nothing, I don’t have a working copy of word on my computer. I do have access, via glow, to the online version but I dislike browser based apps of this sort. I have never been a big fan or power user of word anyway. My docx was not created with word but with TextMate, written in markdown. & converted with pandoc. It occurred to me that it is a lot simpler to make a…

Read: The End of Everything by M John Harrison ★★★★ 📚 'Summer. I stood in a long shallow chalk valley half a mile from the sea, listening to the sound of the waves – the sound waves! – amplified by acoustic lensing conditions in the absolutely still air, and came to the inescapable conclusion: the iGhetti are only a mirage. We wait for them to reveal them-selves, forgetting what has revealed itself daily since they came. They did not arrive from the astral plane: they arrived by reconfiguring…

Read: The Captains and the Kings by Jennifer Johnston ★★★★ 📚 Taking Clare by the hand, he had begun to run. Now he realized that, in all their years together, he had given her nothing, only a child that he had not allowed her to enjoy. She had slowly died of starvation. In her whole life with him only her garden had been an act of defiance against his indifference. He was suddenly shaken by anger. Not against himself but against Clare that she had denied her own right to existence. He turned…

Read: Vigil by George Saunders ★★★ 📚 Ghosts gather round a dying oil billionaire, trying both to make him understand the damage and ease his passage. The deceased are almost comic characters, a couple reminding me of the two old guys in the muppets.

I’ve been using various IndieWeb ideas here for a fairly long time now, this is a great summary. It was a movement with concrete ideas, protocols and an active community! As I read through their wiki, I understood their position and the intelligence of their proposals more and more. Such was my enthusiasm that I decided to follow their advice and adopt the protocols that made sense for my site. After finishing the tests and adjustments, I can confirm that the experience has been very positive:…

Insects, from a walk round Ardmore point yesterday.

An interesting post from Matt Mullenweg: Builders are the site shapers, webmasters, the agencies, the companies, the content managers that think in a more page-first rather than post-first way. Tagging? Blogroll? Date-based permalinks? Who needs them. Give me custom fields, rich templates, a site editor, to craft beautiful sturdy pages that will stand the test of time. A store with a catalog of items where what changes is the inventory and ratings, not the content. The Builders right now…

I’ve managed to make a small AppleScript that gets the selection from Safari & a link and posts it to RSS.chat. I already had a script that copied the selection and put it and a link on the clipboard ready to paste into a blog post. I’d also tried out posting to RSS.chat with bash from TextMate. Putting the two together was fine until I selected anything complex. Converting that into a blockquote with a citation gave me lots of errors when I passed it to the shell. Finally I asked Claude. This…

A lot of white butterflies (mostly green-veined, large & small) out & about on Friday. Some flightily red admirals too. Later, beside the track an excited green-veined white butterfly fluttering amount the leaves. Underneath a leaf a small white hanging upside down. Misplaced affection?

I’ve updated my rss chat server on my Raspberry Pi: John’s Pi chat. A new feature is adding a menu of commands to the menubar. I followed the instructions. Just for fun I decided to edit the example in drummer rather than locally. This lead to a mistake where I used the link button to add a link 🔗, rather than a url attribute, with the suitcase button . Anyway easy to fix. I made the outline public and used that in the config. Using Drummer for the first time in a long while reminded me of the…

Just updated wordpress-rss-chat after a couple of fixes.

Talking a short walk along the Kelvin between Kelvin Bridge & The Botanics while my wife was in the dentist. These sunlit leaves above the path pulled in this speckled wood. Another flew over some sparkling water through light & shade. A happy moment.

Read The Devils Footprints by John Burnside ★★★★☆ I am unsure how much to ‘believe’ of the main character’s narrative. He claims a childhood murder and the insanity of running away from his wife and life with a 14 year old girl who he thinks might be his daughter. The nasty side of a Scottish small town. Queasy, uncomfortable & involving with lovely prose. Like the visit from the angel, or that moment of terror before cock-crow, a flicker of light revealed how, mostly, we are creatures of…

♥ RSS – A directory of people who love RSS Put the badge on your homepage and submit your URL. Once we’ve checked the link back and found your feed, you’re on the list — and in an OPML subscription list any reader can subscribe to in one action ♥ RSS

Now posting to my new rss.chat account with the same email address as my blog admin. Just a quick late night test. Hopefully any replies there will come back here as comments. Using the new WordPress to rss.chat plugin.

I just installed the wordpress-rss-chat plugin. Linked it to my test rsschat site. This post should appear there and any comments returned here.

rss chat is now simper to set up so I gave it a wee go on local host. So far I’ve just run it from my downloads folder. The instructions worked but I am a node-no-nothing so I tripped a couple of times. First I didn’t npm install so nothing worked. I tried to set up SMTP using SendGrid, but I lost the will to live half way through. Got an API key but Message failed: 550 The from address does not match a verified Sender Identity. Mail cannot be sent until this error is resolved. Visit…

Read: Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen ★★★ 📚 Viva who works for corrupt philanthropists & her Eccentric millionaire partner take on said philanthropists, corrupt politicians & MAGA activists to stupid for the proud boys. Heavy satire, fun but feels a bit forced.

Read: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan ★★★★ 📚 Say, forever. What is it about time that confounds us? We spend it. We save it. We while it away. We waste it. We kill it. We complain about not having enough of it, or about having too much of it on our hands. We regret what we've done with it. We give it away. We want it back. We say "time and again" when something is bothering us and "it's time" when something is supposed to end. Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life…

Read: Misinterpretion by Ledis Xhoga ★★★ 📚 An Albanian interpreter gets into a lot of communication difficulties. Set in New York & Albania Constantly surprising narrative as the narrator bounces from one complex situation to another.

Just saw the notice about the rss.chat example inboundRss for wordpress . I must say I hadn’t thought about going that way. I had wondered about POSSE from WordPress to rss chat. Currently micro.blog does a great job of posting items from my feed to mastodon and bluesky. I’ve also used FeedWordPress to pull rss feeds from one place to another. Where inboundRSS differs is that it runs in a browser served from somewhere. The notes suggest it could site on a server or be served via node locally. I…

I’ve been following the development of rss.chat on Dave Winer’s Scripting.com for a while. Dave set up a limited example at chat.rss and now an open one at https://demo.rss.chat which I joined. There dosen’t seem to be a promise that this particular server will stay up, but it offers the chance to try and explore. rss.chat is a social network: Every user has an RSS feed with all their posts. The whole community has an RSS feed. There is an OPML file that lists all the users. You can subscribe…

Read Heartwood by Amity Gaige ★★★★☆ Gripping search for a missing hiker on the Appalachian trail. Told from three points of view, the lost, the searcher and a seemingly disconnected elderly lady in a retirement complex. An enjoyable read.