Can’t see the mould line? Can’t feel it with your finger nail? Already scraped/sanded away that area?
Don’t worry, the primer will make it impossible to not see 😐
““Primer, or “mould lines you missed-highlighter…”””
If you’re a Monocle user, you might have noticed a new feature in your UI today. If you self-host, you’ll want to update your installation to the latest version. Two nice “quality of life” features have gone live, and I’m a little excited, because I helped build one of them 😁
The biggest feature I’ve been missing in Monocle over, say, Feedly, is a “mark all read” button. I follow too many busy sources to be able to keep up with everything, so I frequently mark everything as read and carry on. It helps me not get overloaded.
Aaron had raised an issue to build the feature at some point, but I wanted it, and had a spare weekend, so figured I’d make myself useful!
In all, it was surprisingly straightforward. The Microsub spec is well documented, so I knew how it needed to work. All I had to figure out was how to fit that into how Monocle already did things, and there was already a “mark read” for single entries to work from.
The UI took the longest to build, mostly because I had to figure out the Bulma frontend framework. Rosemary had already come up with some ideas on how it should work, so the hard part had pretty much been done.
And with a little bit of testing, there it was – “Mark All Read” in Monocle. I’ve been running it in my install for a little over a week now, and I hope you’ll find it as useful as I have if you’re a heavy Monocle user.
I can’t take any credit for in the slightest for the new “Show Only Unread Entries” feature – to my knowledge, that was all Aaron. It was a nice surprise to find once I updated my local install from the master branch!
“On the latest Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Weinberg explains why it’s time for Congress to step in and make “do not track” the norm.”
This is a long, thorough, and very in-depth interview with Gabe Weinberg, covering several inter-linked topics. First is privacy, which is DuckDuckGo’s raison d’être. Near the end of this topic, there’s some talk about why some people don’t care about the privacy impact of the data collection underpinnings of the mainstream web.
One of the things a lot of people do bring up with me still, though, is, “Well, I don’t really care. I don’t have much to hide. It doesn’t matter.” I get that all the time. Like, who cares if they know if I went to Best Buy and bought a, whatever I bought. Talk to why that might be not the best way to think about it.
There’s two answers to that. One is philosophical, in that privacy is a fundamental human right, and so you don’t need to care or hide anything to exercise your rights. You wouldn’t say that for speech. Just because you have nothing to say doesn’t mean you should never have free speech. That’s kind of on the philosophical side.
On the harm side, there are some that people don’t realize. A lot of people really don’t like the creepy ads following them around. Some people seem to be fine with that. At a deeper level, there’s this thing called the filter bubble, which is that recommendation algorithms, and in particular, search results, are tailored to you, and that means that you’re not seeing what everyone else is seeing, and that actually distorts the democracy. That’s a real harm to individual people and society.
I don’t think I’ve seen the “I’ve got nothing to hide” vs right to privacy argument reframed against a “nothing to say” vs right to free speech argument. I’ve not though about it enough yet to get a feel for if it holds up under scrutiny, but at first blush it seems good.
The next topic covered after privacy is the “filter bubble” and how the idea of it has gone mainstream in the last few years:
I’ll give you an example. We’ve been talking about the filter bubble for years. In 2012, we ran a study on Google that we think influenced the 2012 election, that’s how long ago it was, but nobody … we had to speak for 10 minutes to explain what the filter bubble was back then. But after 2016, in the last two years, now we can talk about the filter bubble, just name it and people know what it is, generally. How many people know what the filter bubble is, I’m just curious?
Explain the filter bubble.
Well, it’s the idea — first of all, that percentage is very high, so I like that — but it’s the idea that for search in particular, as an example, when you search, you expect to get the results right? If you searched for gun control or abortion, you expect, we search at the same time right here, you would expect to get the same thing. But that’s actually not what we found when we did a study on Google.
Yes, there could be different search results.
Yeah, and people don’t realize that. So in addition, we found that it varies a lot by location, and so if you take that to the extreme, let’s say that voting districts are getting different results for candidates or issues, it can skew the polarization of that district very easily over time. Because people who are undecided are actually searching for these topics, and people generally click on the first link, and if you’re controlling that first link in that district, that’s what people are going to learn about.
I haven’t had time to read the entire transcript yet (it’s pretty long), but I’m going to try to digest it over a couple of sessions.
Between tags and post kinds/formats, are “categories” considered redundant when organising a blog? I have a bunch of legacy posts which have some high-level categories assigned, but the vast majority of posts end up in the default category (notes), and I can’t remember the last time I went out of my way to set the category on anything (other than this post) – because most of the time I’m quick-posting from a tool which doesn’t even have the option to set categories.
Categories seem to be very much de-emphasised these days.
But then I come back to a time before we had tags, before post types, and when categories were all we had. They were useful and helped us structure our blogs so visitors could find stuff they’d be interested in. Serious planning was sometimes put into a categorisation scheme. I think of how I would use categories to label “asides” before there was an Aside post format (or even an <aside> HTML tag), “bookmarks” before there was a Bookmark post kind. Then I wonder if they’re worth maintaining as the “lowest common denominator” of organisation and data portability. Another blogging tool might not have native support for “post kinds” – but it’s almost certainly got some sort of category system.
I’m also trying to think about this from an aspect of theming WordPress. How much space or emphasis should be placed on each of the ways of describing a particular post? Should they be listed in some contexts, but not others? Autonomie only shows the post kind in list pages, but adds in category and tags on the the post’s page. K showed only an icon for the type, and tags if they were set.
Even as I’m thinking and writing this out, I’m not sure if I’m talking myself into or out of going through and properly categorising ~1400 blog posts (850 published, the rest pending review). Do I move everything into the default bucket? Or do I create and assign a robust categorisation scheme? What would that scheme look like?
One to ponder a bit further, I think🤔