The New York Times
The screen struggle is real. I'm trying to find this line with my kids and with myself and this article is more fuel for the less-is-more fire.
onfocus
The New York Times
Quartz
It's interesting to see which subjects are covered in this list of new online courses. I signed up for a free course about podcasting from an Australian university. [via mefi]
The Atlantic
Alan Taylor at In Focus (no relation) focuses on photographs taken in and around libraries.
YouTube
Very nice Sandwich Video about voting featuring Demi Adejuyigbe! Of course if you live in the pacific northwest like me you could have already voted by now thanks to mail in ballots.
c2bk Infrastructure Report
Infrastructure updates to this blog continue apaceish:
And for fun here are the services I use for this site:
I still feel more couch than blogK at this point, but ticking off items that have been on my to-do list since the early part of this century feels good.
1 Proper pronunciation?
2 The hovering businessman emoji's ska roots.
- HTTPS1 on at all times
- Emoji everywhere
- Friendlier URLs for posts with slugs
- CSS now SASS-y
- Super modern git and CDN deploy process with a bash script
- Cutting edge access reports with analog
- Most recent CodeMirror for textarea while composing posts
- Deferred loading of video embeds
- Bug fixes and performance improvements
And for fun here are the services I use for this site:
- Hover for domain registry 2
- DigitalOcean for the virtual server
- AWS CloudFront for hosting images, scripts, and stylesheets
- ZoneEdit for DNS
I still feel more couch than blogK at this point, but ticking off items that have been on my to-do list since the early part of this century feels good.
1 Proper pronunciation?
2 The hovering businessman emoji's ska roots.
c2bK: Comment Emojification
As part of my Couch to BlogK program (c2bK), I'm making some infrastructure improvements around here. This blog uses some home-rolled PHP, a handful of Perl scripts for snagging photos from other services, and love. I figured suffering the slings and arrows of a public commenting system would help me stay on task, but my old commenting system felt a bit dated. I knew there was only one thing that could bring my weblog comments into the Slack millennium: emoji.
I don't have research to back it up, but I'm fairly certain that kids these days don't even use text. They share pictures and write elaborate encoded messages with a set of pictograms that communicate with more verve than the stolid word. Who am I to fight against a tide of verve?
Once the decision was made, I thought it was just a matter of making sure my database was using a character set that could handle emojis and I'd be off to the races. Iñtërnâtiônàližætiøn is a solved problem! UTF-8 has solved everything! Well...
Using emoji on your phone is easy. Using emoji on your desktop is not as easy. And even though I'm bringing this website up-to-date for the kids who might not even know what a desktop is, I'd like our elders to be able to participate in the fun. Building my own emoji-selection contraption felt like a tall order, but I google stumbled on wdt-emoji-bundle by Nedim Arabacı which did most of the heavy lifting for me. He was inspired by the Slack emoji picker which translates emoji into a colon-delimited short name that can mingle easily with text.
That led me to Slack's own Cal Handerson's project emoji-data that is the rosetta stone of emoji. You see, different device manufacturers use different codepoints to represent the same glyph. So even if you're storing the incoming emoji characters correctly, not everyone would be able to see, for example, Down-Pointing Red Triangle on the other end. emoji-data does the work of saying that Android's arrow is here, Apple's arrow is there, and you don't need to just give up on people being able to emoji together.
(This doesn't even touch on the problem of different visual implementations across different emoji sets.)
Instead of storing the universal emoji characters, I opted to store the short name as plain text and then do a bit of translating on the other end. Another of Cal Henderson's projects, php-emoji made it easy for me to write some quick translation functions and then I really was off to the races! (No, I don't have emoji implemented for posts yet.)
Long story short: emojis are hard, this hand-coded blog now has a comment system with a Slack style emoji menu, support for emoji short code text, and a bridge to interface with the Snapchat generation thanks to folks like Cal and Nedim sharing some of their work in public.
And all of that means I'm on my way to blogK.
I don't have research to back it up, but I'm fairly certain that kids these days don't even use text. They share pictures and write elaborate encoded messages with a set of pictograms that communicate with more verve than the stolid word. Who am I to fight against a tide of verve?
Once the decision was made, I thought it was just a matter of making sure my database was using a character set that could handle emojis and I'd be off to the races. Iñtërnâtiônàližætiøn is a solved problem! UTF-8 has solved everything! Well...
Using emoji on your phone is easy. Using emoji on your desktop is not as easy. And even though I'm bringing this website up-to-date for the kids who might not even know what a desktop is, I'd like our elders to be able to participate in the fun. Building my own emoji-selection contraption felt like a tall order, but I google stumbled on wdt-emoji-bundle by Nedim Arabacı which did most of the heavy lifting for me. He was inspired by the Slack emoji picker which translates emoji into a colon-delimited short name that can mingle easily with text.
That led me to Slack's own Cal Handerson's project emoji-data that is the rosetta stone of emoji. You see, different device manufacturers use different codepoints to represent the same glyph. So even if you're storing the incoming emoji characters correctly, not everyone would be able to see, for example, Down-Pointing Red Triangle on the other end. emoji-data does the work of saying that Android's arrow is here, Apple's arrow is there, and you don't need to just give up on people being able to emoji together.
(This doesn't even touch on the problem of different visual implementations across different emoji sets.)
Instead of storing the universal emoji characters, I opted to store the short name as plain text and then do a bit of translating on the other end. Another of Cal Henderson's projects, php-emoji made it easy for me to write some quick translation functions and then I really was off to the races! (No, I don't have emoji implemented for posts yet.)
Long story short: emojis are hard, this hand-coded blog now has a comment system with a Slack style emoji menu, support for emoji short code text, and a bridge to interface with the Snapchat generation thanks to folks like Cal and Nedim sharing some of their work in public.
And all of that means I'm on my way to blogK.
hello world!
I've had my head down writing for the past few days weeks. I'm afraid posts will be thin here while I'm concentrating my writing energy elsewhere. I also haven't left the house in weeks days, so there aren't any new pictures.
I figure, what's worse than a post about not posting? Not posting.
I figure, what's worse than a post about not posting? Not posting.
onfocus.com is six
onfocus.com turned six sometime last week. Adding thoughts and photos to this space has been a part of my life for a long time. I don't see an end in sight.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, here's a look at what this site has looked like over the years—
Thanks to the Internet Archive, here's a look at what this site has looked like over the years—
Hello again
Server moved. New DNS settings propagating. It's good to be back online.
onfocus server offline
This site is going to be down for a few days while the server physically moves closer to home. This site should be back up on Wednesday, October 27th. I set up a temporary blog*spot blog in case I *really* need to blog during this time: onfocus II.
RSS Feeds Moved
Just to cause trouble, I moved all of the RSS feeds at this site to new locations. So if you're reading this post through an RSS reader, this may be the last post you get. ok, I didn't just do it to cause trouble. I'm trying to squeeze all of the performance I can out of the server, so I'm rearranging things to be more efficient. I'm trying to do more page-generating rather than dynamic-serving, and I'd like the feeds to have cool URIs. I'll set up redirects for all of the old feeds, but I'm not sure how feed readers normally handle HTTP redirects.
Here's a list of the feeds available at their new locations—
onfocus weblog
Here's a list of the feeds available at their new locations—
onfocus weblog
- Full Posts (with HTML)
- Post Excerpts (no HTML)
- Photolog