A school in Iceland shows us what a smartphone ban looks like

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A school in Iceland shows us what a smartphone ban looks like

22 October 2024

There has been a ban on the use of smartphones at a school in Iceland since 2019. No prizes for guessing what the result was.

A phone ban has been in place at Öldutún School since the beginning of 2019, and according to the principal, it has worked well. The school’s atmosphere and culture have changed for the better, and there is more peace in the classroom.

Hardly surprising. Students are able to bring their phones with them, but in the normal course of events, they must not be used during school hours. Smartphones weren’t around when I was at school, and for that I am thankful… it seemed like there was plenty else to worry as it was.

Automattic, makers of WordPress, and development discipline

21 October 2024

Dave Winer, writing at Scripting News:

One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing — they don’t break users. The code I wrote to run against WordPress in the 00s still runs today. To me as a developer this speaks very loudly. It means it’s safe to develop here. It means there’s discipline in their development organization.

The on-going dispute between Automattic and WP Engine, the lawsuits and counter lawsuits, and staff departures, has me, as a long term WordPress user, a tad nervous. I could surely migrate to another publishing platform if it came to the crunch, and WordPress, somehow, ceased to exist. But would whatever I moved to have the same long-term development consistency and stability?

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blogs, technology, trends

Book buyers go indie as they skip social media, algorithms

18 October 2024

Sarah Manavis, writing for The Guardian:

A survey commissioned by the Booksellers Association ahead of Bookshop Day tomorrow has found that gen Z and millennials are more likely to buy a book based on a bookseller’s recommendation — in person, in a bookshop — than older age groups: 49% and 56% respectively, compared with 37% of gen X and 31% of baby boomers.

Younger book buyers, Generation Z and Millennials, would rather a bookseller recommend a title to buy, than rely on a social media influencer, or ideas served up by an algorithm. I don’t think I’ve ever taken up an influencer’s novel suggestion (the few times I see such things), because it strikes me as being paid advertising (of course it’s a great read), and not a bona fide recommendation.

And in other good news: reports of the death of browsing in bookshops for hours on end, also seems to be much exaggerated.

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books, bookshops, trends

One personal website is enough for me

15 October 2024

I’m not sure disassociated always rates as a personal website, with its informational content style. But it’s owned personally by me, and I personally write the content, so on that basis it’s a personal website. A lot of what I post are my thoughts on the many and various things happening online and in the world, so much of what appears here is my personal perspective.

I think I’ve said it a few times before, writing diary-like posts here seems pointless. I’m not sure what interest the ins and outs of my day-to-day life would be to anyone else. But writing diary-like posts is the precise definition of a personal website for some people. I’ve always seen the web as self-publishing platform: a platform to publish whatever you want. So if that’s informational content, or diary-like posts, that’s all fine.

A website whether you consider it personal or otherwise, is yours to do with as you please. Within reason. In that context, one personal website has always been enough for me. But a post by Kev Quirk, about bloggers who have multiple personal websites and blogs, has struck a chord with a few of the people whose RSS feeds I read. For some of us, it seems, one personal website is not enough.

Well, this is the web, and that’s an individual’s call to make. But to my mind, even two personal websites is one too many. Why, I wonder, do some bloggers feel the need to split their web presence? Maybe it’s a throwback to the idea supposedly propagated by Google that we should only be publishing niche blogs? That is, blogs focussed — mainly — on a single topic. In addition to being useful for readers looking for information on a particular subject, niche blogs enjoyed better SERPs placement, or something. Or so the story went.

Mind you, I’m not even sure Google actually said that. Maybe the notion was simply picked up by the people who blogged about blogging, and ended up being bandied ceaselessly around the blogosphere. A lot of my traffic comes in through Google, so clearly they’ve never been bothered by my non-niche blogging style.

But when it comes to having multiple blogs, it’s possible some bloggers want to separate different types of content, or feel not everything they write is suited to a particular blog. That I get, because I post a bit of what I call off-topic content to social media. Back in the day that was Twitter, which made for a great “side-dish” to a blogger’s main website. I don’t use Twitter/X anymore, but still post the same sort of content to the socials I have today, albeit at a greatly reduced rate.

Not everyone wants to post content on social media though. In that case then, I can see the point of something like Micro.blog. I don’t know a whole lot about the platform, but it seems similar to the likes of Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky: it’s basically for micro-blogging. But even with something like Micro.blog, you still come back to the problem of content ownership, and the concern such platforms, like the social media channels, could close-down just like that.

It’s probably not likely to happen, especially to the established platforms, but it could be a problem if it did. That’s what I like about a single website. Even if my website host closed down overnight, I have the database and other content (e.g. photos) backed-up (in one place, well, more), and ready to potentially transfer elsewhere. Very little, hopefully, would be lost. Trying to recover years’ worth of posts from a closed social media channel might be another matter.

The blogging CMS I use lets me — if I chose — hide selected categories from the main feed/stream (or at least there is a way to make that happen because I did it before), in addition to serving up a separate RSS feed for each post category. If using social media becomes untenable, for whatever reason, in the future, I could always setup a separate off-topic content stream that would only be visible on certain parts of this website.

That seems to me to be the way to go. Everything on your own, single, self-hosted, website. And all in the true spirit of IndieWeb, or whatever you like to call it.

ProRata: an AI chatbot that pays for the knowledge it disseminates

14 October 2024

ProRata is an AI chatbot that pays the content producers whose work is used to format answers to questions put to it. Yes, you read that correctly. The technology is being backed by American investor and entrepreneur Bill Gross, writes Fred Vogelstein, for Crazy Stupid Tech:

But it will do something none of the others do: Pay content providers for being the sources of those answers. He’s got written commitments from nearly two dozen top publishers to access their entire archives plus enough verbal — soon to be written — agreements to more than double that number. Meta’s LLM will parse each question. And ProRata will then use its access to this giant archive of publishers to generate answers. He’s launching it in Beta to 10,000 users some time in the next month.

This is the all-knowing chatbot we’ve been waiting for. One that pays those who contribute to it’s… knowledge. Without scaping and taking from others, without their knowledge or permission, or even offering a cent in return, behaviour some other chatbots are guilty of.

WordPress.org users required to denounce WP Engine affiliation

11 October 2024

Samantha Cole, writing at 404 Media:

The checkbox on the login page for WordPress.org asks users to confirm, “I am not affiliated with WP Engine in any way, financially or otherwise.” Users who don’t check that box can’t log in or register a new account. As of Tuesday, that checkbox didn’t exist.

Automattic upping the ante in the on-going stouch with website hosting company WP Engine. I didn’t see this message when I logged into my WordPress (WP) account, Thursday afternoon AEDT. Maybe the roll-out is gradual, or (more fancifully) WP knows I host disassociated elsewhere.

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blogs, technology, trends

So long, thanks for all the blog posts: Microsoft cans WordPad

10 October 2024

Microsoft is doing away with their old basic, but useful, word processor, WordPad, which has been bundled with Windows Operating Systems for nearly thirty-years. It will not be a feature at all in Windows 11. Yet another reason to migrate away from Windows all together, perhaps?

Before switching to Word, I used to draft all my blog posts in WordPad. Now I use Writer. I did, still do, prep all the text and HTML tags when writing up a blog post, then copy and paste the lot into WordPress. When I migrated to WordPress in 2007, I used WordPad (heh, WP) to set out all the old blog posts from the old static, manually coded HTML webpages, onto an upload template. I later imported the template in the then new database on the WordPress install. So, WP to WP. The whole process took months, and I still look through the file today, which I’ve kept in an archive folder.

I expect the end game, on Microsoft’s part, is to push everyone onto Word. For a subscription.

Oxford comma users: people may think AI does your writing

9 October 2024

Frequent use of the Oxford comma, also referred to as the serial comma, is — apparently — a tell-tale sign a written work was composed using an AI chatbot. The repeat use of the punctuation mark is among seven indicators researchers at Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, identified after studying AI generated articles and essays.

As a life-long adherent of the Oxford comma — read enough of the content here, and you’ll notice them — this alarms me. AI doesn’t write a word here, every Oxford comma instance you see in my copy, was placed by me. On the up side, at least ChatGPT has the good taste to use the Oxford comma in the first place.

Jeffrey Zeldman: I stayed, and declined an Automattic severance

8 October 2024

New York City based web designer, standards advocate, founder of A List Apart, and many other things, Jeffrey Zeldman:

I stayed because I believe in the work we do. I believe in the open web and owning your own content. I’ve devoted nearly three decades of work to this cause, and when I chose to move in-house, I knew there was only one house that would suit me. In nearly six years at Automattic, I’ve been able to do work that mattered to me and helped others, and I know that the best is yet to come.

I didn’t know Zeldman worked at Automattic, but I used to read his website/blog every day when I worked as a web designer.

Without getting involved in the WordPress/WP Engine imbroglio, the Automattic severance package seemed quite generous, given it catered for employees who disagreed with the company’s stance. It seems to me dissenting employees anywhere else would simply be shown the door.

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blogs, technology, trends, web design

All IndieWeb participants need to be vocal, not just developers

5 October 2024

Evan Sheehan, writing at The Darth Mall:

I think Jeremy Keith is right, that all that really matters is having your own website. However big or small, however you make it, whatever you choose to put on it. I just don’t think that this is what the IndieWeb is actually focused on. The IndieWeb feels like it’s something by developers, for developers, because it focuses so much on implementing certain features.

My take here, is that it’s the people developing and implementing the microformats, the webmentions, what have you (sorry, a lot of this stuff is over my head), who seem to be the most vocal in the conversation. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but you’d be forgiven for sometimes thinking IndieWeb was the exclusive domain of developers. But I’m not having a go at developers here, because, you know, if there were no developers, there’d be no web/internet.

Instead, the discussion needs more input from others in the IndieWeb community. The creatives, the writers, the artists, the photographers. The other people doing their thing on the non-corporate web. There are already such people doing that, but more need to weigh in. The topic brings to mind something American author Edgar Allen-Poe once wrote:

Shadows of Shadows passing… It is now 1831… and as always, I am absorbed with a delicate thought. It is how poetry has indefinite sensations to which end, music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry. Music without the idea is simply music. Without music or an intriguing idea, color becomes pallour, man becomes carcass, home becomes catacomb, and the dead are but for a moment motionless.

It’s all very deep. But the point is that different ideas complement each other. IndieWeb, the web, needs the technical infrastructure, but then alongside that, there needs to be something else. An idea, a thought, content. Something to engage with.

It’s my roundabout way of saying IndieWeb isn’t just for the technical people, it’s for anyone who wants to be involved. And in this case, the more the merrier. Let’s hear it then, from the other IndieWeb participants.

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