Since I first began the 30-day blogging challenge the indie web movement was on my list of topics to discus. My thinking on it, and related topics, is still unsettled. I’ve read some and, well, read some more. Kevin Marks frequently appears on the Twit network and particularly on This Week in Google, and has talked about the indie web on many occasions.

Here’s a brief and early poll on where I am so far. I like the basic principle of owning all of your content. That’s the foundation of this very site, this blog. I don’t like strongly coupling my various identities across sites, not that strongly. I prefer that they be weakly coupled, if at all. I’m not that interested in discussions, engagement and feedback. At least not in the usual way they occur on the web.

Microformats comprise a clever and intriguing idea. I think there’s value in this evolved approach to (this part of) the so-called semantic web.

The microformats movement has eschewed email and gone to using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and a wiki for their communication. This hits at the communication problems that I spend a lot of my internet-thinking time on. Email seems terribly inadequate in many ways and yet insists being the best fit for many needs, particularly when Gmail is used. I agree with not using email for long messages or long documents—I’ve adopted a similar approach to communication. (For long documents and messages I email a Google document instead of a long email message).

I loathe using IRC. That in itself is worth at least one long blog post. We use it at work since I’ve been unable to stave off the push by the millennials (plus or minus) there to use IRC.

There’s a very nice “indie web in a box,” With Known, which you can even get a hosted account with. At first, that seems anti-indie-web, but it’s all very well done. The source is open and you can start on their servers then move onto your own when you wish, similar to using Wordpress.

So that’s a quick update. There should be more to come.

Indie Web Camp
Microformats
Kevin Marks
Twit.tv
Known

On 12 November 1971, exactly 43 years ago, Ray Bradbury spoke to an audience at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the eve of Mariner 9 arriving at Mars. On stage with him were Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Walter Sullivan. Bradbury read his poem, “If Only We Had Taller Been.”

Today, on 12 November 2014, the Philae spacecraft “docked” with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Youtube Video – Ray Bradbury – If Only We Had Taller Been

From the ESA web site.

Rosetta is a cornerstone mission to chase, go into orbit around, and land on a comet. It is studying the Jupiter-family comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko with a combination of remote sensing and in situ measurements. The spacecraft arrived at the comet on 6 August 2014 following a 10-year journey through the Solar System. Between August and November, the spacecraft has been orbiting the comet and gathering data to characterise the environment and the comet nucleus. On 12 November 2014, Rosetta’s lander Philae will be deployed to the surface. Philae carries a suite of instruments for imaging and sampling the comet nucleus. The Rosetta orbiter will track the comet through perihelion (August 2015), examining its behaviour before, during and after.

[SIC]: I saw a pronunciation guide for Philae that said “fee-lay.” This is wrong. The pronunciation rhymes with eye-lee, or “highly.” Whenever you see ae, it rhymes with ee as in leek. For example, Caesar. And yes, the UNIX-famous word “daemon” is pronounced precisely and exactly like demon. Other pronunciations are wrong. (Merriam-Webster, Wikipedia).

ESA Rosetta Site
Summary
Top 10 images from 10 km
EarthSky – Watch Wednesday’s comet landing live online

Image: ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

There are two key reasons that I’m overjoyed to have made the switch from Android to IOS and the iPhone.

One is the reliability of OS updates. There’s no worrying about pure-Google vs. vendor-imposed-UI and junk apps. There’s no waiting for a vendor to either roll out an update or, more likely, just force you to buy a new phone or wait for your cycle to end to get a new phone.

The IOS updates are (so far) annual, universal and hassle free. And by hassel free I’m referring to the above issues. It’s granted there have been hiccups and bugs, but usually they are resolved in a reasonable time. I try to be cautious and wait for a minor update or to before diving in. Thus, I skipped 8.0 and waited for 8.1.

The other joy is from the pictures the iPhones make. There are Android phones with better camera specs on paper, and yet, the photos are often just not up to par. My Galaxy Nexus made images that ranged from okay to terrible. When I go back and look at them now, they look even worse than I realized. I know other people disagree but I’m firmly in the camp: There’s no contest here.

So, that makes two items removed from the list of things to have to deal with.

For what it’s worth:

30 days
39 posts
10575 words

The words include the blog heading. That’s an average of 271 words per post and 1757 characters per post.

Well, It’s now day 31 and I’ve finished the 30-day challenge to blog for 30 days. The original challenge that I read didn’t include weekends but I went ahead and blogged straight through since there’s actually more time to write on the weekend than during the week.

I did manage to put a post up every day with the exception of day 23. I wrote the day 22 and 23 entries on day 22 using my Kindle HD Fire, Draft and Dropbox and didn’t actually post them until day 24. I didn’t actually do any writing on day 23. I’ll leave it to the 30-day blogging judges to decide how to count that.

Some posts were long, some were medium length, some had pictures and links, some were only a link, a couple were basically just “re-tweets.”

Reflecting on the experience I’m amazed at how short 30 days is. It doesn’t seem like there are 30+ posts and it felt like a much shorter time. But then, 30 days, months, years do seem to go by super-fast lately.

I enjoyed the freedom of not hesitating to write the short, tweet-length posts and then working on the longer ones when I had something to say. I didn’t work hard to find pictures to add but only used them when I felt they were appropriate or needed. Just writing words was okay and that freedom made it fun and doable.

The thing I liked the least about the experience was the quality of my writing which I think is considerably decreased from what it used to be. I could have put more effort into better writing but I was just getting some words down. In essense, I was publishing maybe the second draft of what I wrote, but not a “final draft.” That was the most dissatisfying part. I got into the habit of writing but maybe not writing well or at least better. Maybe that will be the next challenge I take on, to write at least as well as I think I used to.

Another result of all of this blogging was a better work flow. I fixed my process by smoothing out lot of friction in the steps I take to post. I wrote a fully-automated script so I can locally publish the blog (I actually do proof read entries there, spell check and see how they look), and then push the update to public on Github with a single command. I fixed emacs to automatically go into text mode and made some changes on Github to make pushing easier.

One of the lessons other bloggers shared as they were doing this process was the appropriateness of the mid-length post. That means it’s okay to write more than a tweet but less than a long essay. That’s part of the life-blood of journaling. Sometimes you just pen a brief entry but that’s enough to stake out that day. Being able to go beyond 140 characters is a chief advantage that puts blogging above tweeting while keeping the ability to write as little as desired.

I’ve come to enjoy writing in Markdown even more. It’s simple to use and, in the end, I have a completely readable and portable collection of text files that aren’t tied to a particular platform or site. I can take this site anywhere now.

One down side is that I’m running up against the performance of Octopress. At this very point it takes 35 seconds of wall clock time to generate the site. That’s not bad but it seems like a long wait in computer “waiting for a command to finish” time. I think I need to look into breaking off the archives into a separate site or section so they are generated independently. Most of the archive, all of it really, is static at this point and shouldn’t need to be regenerated for every post. However, there would be some tricks in blending it in to the main site, e.g., so that search covers the whole site including archives. It might be as simple as a different repo on Github and posting it as a separate site with a different name but the exact same look and feel. There’s more research, thinking and maybe experimenting to do here.

So what next? I’m not going to focus on making sure I post something every day. I think I’ll keep blogging more than I was for a while. I’m definitely going to take advantage of the freedom to blog anyway way I wish, long or short, elaborate or trivially simple. I’m going to read more blogs by other folks that have taken up the challenge and try to benefit from their lessons learned.

When I started the 30 days, I brainstormed a nice long list of post ideas in just a few minuts. After managing to cover a lot of them and adding ideas through the month, amazingly, the list doesn’t seem any shorter. There’s still a lot to write about!

Day 30

Today I upgraded to IOS 8.1 with no trouble and it’s working well so far.

I am one of those users who doesn’t have the 5-GB or so of space on my iPhone to do an over-the-air upgrade. In spite of that, you can do an upgrade without needing the space if you connect your iPhone to your Mac (or Windows?) running iTunes and use iTunes to do the upgrade. It does the downloading and expansion of files on your desktop machine then installs the upgrade over the USB cable.

The upgrade/install went without any trouble and it took almost exactly 36 minutes it predicted.

I’ve not used it too much. So far, all the apps look and work the same as in IOS 7.

Day 29.1

Matt Cutts also has taken on the 30-day blogging challenge. He’s doing it for the month of November.

30 day challenge: writing every day

Day 29

I finally did something I’ve meant to do for a while. I configured emacs to automatically use text-mode and auto-fill-mode for Markdown files. Markdown files end in either .markdown or .md in my experience so far. These blog posts are written in Markdown.

Since text-mode and auto-fill-mode weren’t automatic, I had to execute them manually using M-x (that’s the ESC key followed by “x” in emacs) everytime I opened one of those files, e.g., to write a blog post.

Adding the following lines to my .emacs file in the home directory fixed this.

;;; Add markdown files to text-mode.
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.markdown\\'" . text-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.md\\'" . text-mode))

;;; Make auto-fill-mode the default for text-mode.
(add-hook 'text-mode-hook 'turn-on-auto-fill)

Day 28

A final thought, but the most important one.

Now I’ll tell you the most important secret about telescopes and observing, the thing that’s more important than the aperture, more important than how sturdy the mounting is, and more important than portability.