Reading, Writing and The New Phone
I'm five days into using my S24+ as my daily driver and it's largely fantastic. It's clear how many small things I had come to accept with the Duo 2, and eye opening to realize those things aren't requirements for my daily life anymore.
I also have come to realize I just generally like the process of moving into a new technology device, whether computer, or phone. Looking for new apps, re-examining what I've had installed, etc. I almost didn't transfer apps and such over from the Duo 2 to the new phone at all, but relented out of laziness and not wanting to have to constantly check which app I had been using on the old phone.
I am also re-set upping (I know, that's not a real phrase, but I choose it regardless,) my online reading ecosystem on the new phone. This entails a few things:
- Re-enabling my Wallabag app to pull from my selfhosted instance for my "read it later" reading
- Re-enabling an RSS reader, currently it is Readrop, which is an app which syncs with my FreshRSS instance, though I am reconsidering if I should instead have a mobile-only solution (more on that later.)
- Setting up for posting here from my phone.
Wallabag is the easiest of these to set up. Readrop was nearly as simple, though I forgot FreshRSS required an api specific password and so I kept trying it with the traditional password. Oops.
I have not yet cracked #3 in a satisfying way other than opening the editor for the blog in the phone's browser. Which is fine, but I really need to solve for a way to add my blog's api to the Share menu in Android. I've tried it a few ways through Tasker, but haven't managed it reliably yet. I'll get it eventually.
And before anyone comes with app recommendations. For things like this, I heavily value self-hosting and FOSS apps, over subscription or heavy marketing apps. Though I will always listen to recommendations.
As to the above note regarding my RSS reader, the core issue is that my RSS feeds are currently curated for "maximilism." I am a heavy consumer and as such I have many feeds which share overlaps, which is fine when I'm churning through them on the desktop, but for phone reading I don't want to churn through a lot of these.
The easiest solution is to curate for my phone differently, but doing that would then make my desktop reading potentially worse as it would potentially still contain items I have processed on my phone since they would be pulling from different sources.
We'll see. I need to think on a solution more.
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Microfeatures in Blogs
Came across this delightful blog entry which shares some items that Daniel, the author, enjoys seeing implemented on other blogs. For ease of reading, I'll reproduce the list here, but do go read Daniel's post:
- Aside links in larger articles
- Tables of Contents (also calling out displaying page progress)
- Linkable Headings
- Multipost Grouping
- Dialogue blocks
- Code blocks crediting origins/sources
- Markers for external link
- RSS Feeds
- Links to other sites/blogs
I loved the list and have already made some notes for Glowbug (my own blog's engine) implementation. Their inclusion of "Markers for external links" also made me happy given this blog's already implementation of showing linked domains, et al.
I already have an idea for an on-page progress bar. My idea is to add the ability to seen previously seen on the progress bar. Specifically if scroll down a page, and then back up, it should keep the furthest you've scrolled visible and just change that color so signify it isn't currently seen. I don't have time to hack on it this morning, though I might try to get it done tonight before I fly out tomorrow.
Multipost Grouping is something I technically have implemented on the back-end, but haven't really used, and also isn't quite the implementation the author was referring to. My implemention was a thing I called 'chapters' and comes from an old idea I had years ago for a life-blog which let me write entries into chronological "chapters" to capture eras in my life. This concept came about when I was younger in my 20s I think, when my life was somewhat more likely to change. The reality is I also don't tend (at least, currently) to write posts which are grouped in any way other than tags.
I am definitely going to add capabilities for Dialogues to my blog. I don't regularly need them, but agree having them would make the blog better.
My daily automated post potentially includes links to other blogs if they are posts I add to my Wallabag to read later. I like the concept, and the idea I've come up with is a "starred reading" functionality for the blog, where it is posts I've read recently on other blogs and want to recommend in an ongoing fashion. I've added it to my backlog, we'll see if I implement it or not.
"The Ambiguity of Exoplanet Biosignatures"
The search for life on planets beyond our Solar System is too often depicted as a binary process. One day, so the thinking goes, we'll be able to directly image an Earth-mass exoplanet whose atmosphere we can then analyze for biosignatures. Then we'll know if there is life there or not. If only the situation were that simple! As Alex Tolley explains in his latest essay, we're far more likely to run into results that are so ambiguous that the question of life will take decades to resolve. Read on as Alex delves into the intricacies of life detection in the absence of instruments on a planetary surface.
"Arborglyphs"
I went through a period where I was rather obsessed with the Basque culture and language. This was started initially by the novel "Shibumi" by Trevanian. The main character assassin makes a point of the Basque culture and it being so unique, and that set me to also delving into it.
In any case, I found this article about the markings on aspen trees from Basque settlers in the American West very interesting.
Quick and easy implementation
Okay, hammered out the progress scroll in thirty minutes. Took some fiddling with the CSS to get right, but it should now be visible to all visitors to the site.
Edit 8:52pm
Also, thanks to Daniel whom I linked earlier, he flagged that the CSS for mobile viewing wasn't working. It'd been so long since I set this layout up, I assume I just hadn't set it up at all. Looking at the code I spotted that it was set, but it was set for a size smaller than most phone screens these days. So it's fixed now.
Automated Archives for June, 24th 2024
This post was automatically generated
Wallabag Additions
These are articles that which I saved today so that I may read them later. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
- Why Is Everyone on Steroids Now?
- What being a rural election official is like - High Country News
- Study shows walking can be a powerful remedy for back pain
- The Sentimentality of Evil
Chess For the Day
Record: 1-0-1
Net Elo Change: -1
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- 1 year ago (8 posts)