Inklings on the Internet

One of my interests is the English literary group of the 1920s to 1940s that called themselves “The Inklings”, and as a number of other people share this interest I’ve tried at various times to find ways of using the Internet to make and maintain contact with such people and share thoughts and opinions and so on.

One way of doing this is through blog posts, many bloggers announce new posts on Twitter. I also discovered a web site called paper.li that produced a digest of tweets on various topics. Some of them seem to be devoted to hash tags, and I succeeded in creating one for missiology (another interest of mine), There were several created by other people on various topics that interested me — on literature, genealogy, family history and more. There’s one for children’s literature, which some of the Inklings wrote,

But there was no such digest devoted to the #inklings hashtag.

So I thought that if I could create one for #missiology, I could create one for #inklings.

Too late. The people at paper.li had stopped doing that very useful thing. Whenever i tried to do it, they created something called “The Steve Hayes Daily”, and I already had one of those. But eventually they fiddled with it to turn it into The Inklings Daily.

The only trouble is that it doesn’t seem to work. Either people are not using the #inklings hashtag, or else when they do use it, The Inklings Daily simply isn’t picking it up. All I see on it most days is either a message that there is no content, or a couple of irrelevant photos. So as a way of following blog posts about the Inklings it has turned out to be pretty useless.

The last straw was when the owners of YahooGroups announced that they were closing that service, and there were a couple of Inklings forums there that would be affected by the closure, and so it was important to let people know, and I blogged about that. But in spite of using the #inklings #hashtag paper.li failed to pick it up in The Inklings Daily.

So I’ll give it a couple more weeks, and see if The Inklings Daily picks up this article, and any others on the Inklings, and if there’s no improvement, I’ll delete The Inklings Daily, as it will obviously be serving no purpose. I’ll rely on my blogroll for picking up who is blogging about the Inklings. And if you’d like to know more about the new Inklings forum, see Inklings Forum Revived, or go directly to Inklings on groups.io.

For what it’s worth, the main members of the Inklings were:

• Owen Barfield
• J. A. W. Bennett
• Lord David Cecil
• Nevill Coghill
• Hugo Dyson
• Adam Fox
• J. H. Grant III
• Roger Lancelyn Green
• Robert Havard
• C. S. Lewis
• Camille Smith (cousin of C.S. Lewis)
• Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s elder brother)
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Christopher Tolkien (J. R. R. Tolkien’s son)
• Charles Williams

The Moaning Meme and the Freelance Cynic

About 12 years ago I posted about The moaning meme | Notes from underground:

The Freelance Cynic complains that most memes that circulate in the blogosphere are about things that people like — your favourite book, movie, or whatever. But if you overheard conversations on the bus or in public places, they are usually complaining — about the weather, politics, other people’s habits and so on. One of the major aids to social bonding is moaning, grumbling and so on.

Someone seems to have looked at it recently, so I went to have a look at what I had written, and in the original blog post there was a link to the Freelance Cynic’s blog at FreelanceCynic.com, but when I tried to go there the blog had gone, and I was informed that the domain was for sale at $695. I assume that is US dollars, and that is R9728.47 at the current rate of exchange.Now there’s something to moan about.

Did the FreelanceCynic die and bequeath their domain name to whoever is selling it now? Or did they simply abandon their blog and drop the domain name? How much of that $695 will the actual Freelance Cynic get?

Another thing to moan about, if you feel like moaning: Communications:

Meraki Research would like to find out more about the way you communicate in this digital age. The survey will take less than 8 minutes to complete and we have kept it interesting. All answers will be kept anonymous.

If you are in South Africa and see this in February/March 2019, please follow the link and fill in the survey. After that it probably won’t work. Basically what it is about is how you prefer your spam. If you are like me, you will answer “Never” to how you prefer your SMS spam, and so participating in the survey may help to get the message through to SMS spammers.

So here’s my moaning meme for this Week. I’m not tagging anybody in it, anyone can take part.

And, for what it’s worth, I find SMS (“Text”) spam the most annoying.

E-mail spam can usually be removed by filters, though that is becoming more difficult now as more and more people seem to be trying to make their legitimate mail look as much like spam as possible by using HTML and especially “lazy HTML” that tries to incorporate something from a remote site into the body of a message. My e-mail reader automatically tosses those into the “Junk or Suspicious Mail” queue, and is set not to display anything on remote sites.

Newsgroup spamming can also be annoying, most of it these days seems to come via GoogleGroups, and no matter how much you report it to Google, they do little to stop it.

But SMS spam is the most annoying of the lot, because it is immediate. If you are travelling, and expecting an important message about an event you are going to, and you have to pull of the road to read it (like taking the next freeway exit), and then discover it is just some stupid ad, it really is annoying.

Web Trackers

There’s a lot of interesting and useful stuff on the web, but how do you keep track of it, and find it again when you need it?

There’s that article that someone linked to on Facebook. It looks interesting, but you don’t have time to read it all now, so you want to be able to find it later.

It was for precisely such things that the blog was invented. The word “blog” comes from “web log” — a log of web sites one has visited and wants to remember, and possibly share with others. And I have just such a blog: Simple Links. And now, after trying all sorts of other things to keep track of web sites, I’ve come back to the blog as the simplest and most reliable method.

There have been many fancy apps for keeping track of web articles, but they all eventually seem to lose functionality and die, or no longer work as they should.

One of these was the web bookmark. For a while I used one called Diigo, which was quite good, but then it got hidden behind a paywall, so was no longer an option for poor pensioners like me.

Hat-tip to Blogging for Learning: Mulling it Over | Silvia Tolisano- Langwitches Blog

Then there was Tumblr, which seemed very versatile and easy to use. It could instantly record a web site, it could aggregate blogs, it could include notes about almost anything. But then it gradually lost functionality until there was nothing left. The only thing it can be used for now is for posts to say how useless it is. And it’s useless for logging web sites visited because the pop-up linker has a button that must be clicked to save the item, but the button is invisible, hidden below the bottom of the screen.

Then along came Evernote, It would allow you to save a complete copy of the article and find it again. It was like the OneNore program that came with Microsoft Office, but more versatile. I even managed to find and buy a manual for it. Evernote was the  best of all, because you could bookmark or blog an article from the web, and the web site would close and your link would not work any more. But Evernote saved a local copy of the article so you would still have it even if the original web site closed.  But Evernote too gradually began to lose functionality. It would work if you were very rich, and could afford to buy a new computer every couple of years. But if you couldn’t, it would just stop working. So now, while I can still save articles on my laptop computer, I can no longer call them up on my desktop computer, because it will no longer sync them. And no doubt the day will come when it will stop working on my laptop too.

So it’s back to Blogger, and my Simple Links blog.

I’ve had lots of complaints about Blogger. Reduced functionality has made it more difficult to use, especially for graphics (you now have to fiddle with the HTML code in order to place pictures on the page), and so I moved two of my blogs where I wanted to use graphics, including this one, to WordPress, which had a better editor for graphics. But for the original purpose of blogging, a simple text web log, Blogger is hard to beat.

So when I see a web article I don’t have time to read now, but want to read or refer to later, I don’t book mark it. I don’t (or can’t) save it in Evernote, I go back to basics and blog it with Blogger.

 

 

The importance of blog comments

Most bloggers really appreciate comments on their blog posts — provided that they are intelligent, on topic, and not spam.

Now one blogger has been investigating this, and asking bloggers to say what their favourite comments are, and why — Why Reader Comments Are The Cat’s Pajamas | Voxate Writing & Editing:

Although time is scarce and we’re often reading other blogs between other must-do’s on our daily schedule, making the time to comment is important – both for the link it may allow you to include to your own blog or site, and to the blogger.

Speaking for myself now, one of the reasons that I write blog posts is that I have some half-baked ideas floating around, and I’m hoping that others will read them and help me to bake them. So it’s pretty discouraging when there are no comments at all. So please read this article on blog comments, and resolve to write a comment on a blog today, or at least this week.

How US Net Neutrality affects the rest of us

Those of us outside the US may have observed their debates on net neutrality, and wondered whether it would affect us.

Even if it is something confined purely to the US, however, the loss of net neutrality there will affect people all over the world. But when people speak of the loss of net neutrality, there are many ways in which it has already been lost, or rather, it is an ideal that has never been fully realised.

This article helps to explain what it means for people in the US — Someone Finally Illustrated What The Loss Of Net Neutrality Really Looks Like, And You Won’t Like It:

Net neutrality has become a volatile, high-profile news story, and with good reason: Americans are in danger of losing it. But what is net neutrality, and why is it important? Why are some lawmakers fighting so hard to make it a thing of the past?

The answer is complex, rooted in technological progress, a changing economic landscape, and a society and culture that is seeing greater class divisions than at any other time in our history. Some in our government are determined to make the internet a profit-driven product, and while this may sound understandable in a capitalist society, the dangers are very real.

Aptly illustrated by this picture:

If you live in South Africa, say, and you post some family photos on Facebook, the loss of net neutrality in the US might mean that your cousin in the US may not be able to see them, because their ISP has decided to charge more for access to Facebook.

Of course even with net neutrality your cousin in the US might not have been able to see your photos, because Facebook’s algorithm already decides who gets to see what you post, and who doesn’t get to see it.

Think of another example. An academic researcher in South Africa posts a research query in a blog, trying to verify some fact, or get reactions to a conjecture or hypothesis. With net neutrality, anyone with a web connection can see the blog and respond to the post. But without net neutrality, an ISP can decide to make that particular blogging platform only accessible to some of its subscribers who pay extra for it.

Even without legal protection of “net neutrality”, there have been all kinds of attempts to corral users into a closed system. Facebook’s Messaging app is an example. Get people to use that, and people have to join Facebook to communicate with you. Others may have attempted the same thing, but it might have backfired on them. In an earlier post, The decline and decline of tumblr | Notes from underground, I noted that tumblr had gradually reduced the functionality of their site to make it a closed world. Perhaps they did this in the hope that they, like Facebook, might be able to lock users in to their site, though the actual effect was to remove the incentive for many people to visit their site at all. To lock people in successfully, you have to be big like Facebook, not small like tumblr.

We had something similar in South Africa. A few years ago people who used MWeb as their ISP found it difficult to access certain web sites, because MWeb was trying to lock them in and steer them towards its own offerings. I don’t know if they still do that, but there was quite an outcry at the time.

Something similar was seen back in the 1990s, when dial-up BBSs were popular. Telkom, whose phone lines were being used for it, wanted to charge more for data calls to BBSs than for voice calls, but the counter argument was that Telkom was a “common carrier” — their job was to provide the connections, for which they could charge, but the content of the calls was none of their business. The “common carrier” principle is the same principle as net neutrality — an ISP charges you for the internet connection and the band width you use, but the content of your connection is none of their business.

The “common carrier” principle provided a great deal of freedom, because anyone could set up a BBS, and so BBSs were a great enhancement to free speech. It was one of the factors that helped to topple a lot of dictatorial regimes in the annus mirabilis of 1989. It was how news of the Tianamnen Square massacre in China reached the rest of the world; pro-democracy activists used a BBS conference called ASIAN_LINK to communicate with each other and the rest of the world.

So the loss of New Neutrality takes the USA another step further away from the “free world” that it once claimed to be the leader of.

 

 

 

The decline and decline of tumblr

When I joined tumblr in November 2010 it was an amazingly versatile and useful site.

Its most useful feature was as a blog aggregator.

It would automatically collect posts from my other blogs and make linked summaries of them. That meant that all I needed to put in e-mail sig and the like was “Follow me on tumblr” and friends could check to see if any of my blog posts looked interesting enough to read in full.

It did even more — it would post announcements of things on Facebook, Twitter etc.

And that was not all. It was a blog in its own right.

It could capture links to web pages, or quotations from them and save them for future reference or for sharing with others.

In addition to all this, tumblr had a feature that let you post to it by e-mail. That was useful for times when you ran out of bandwidth at the end of the month, and web access slowed to a crawl. You could still post to tumblr, even if only to let your friends know that you couldn’t do much else on the Internet.

So tumblr promised to become a kind of centre of the web, a kind of exchange that everything else passed through. It could become a central reference point to which you could refer all your friends.

But then it gradually began to lose functionality.

It stopped posting on Facebook and Twitter.

It stopped aggregating other blogs.

And finally the feature of quoting and linking web pages stopped working. The feature was still there, but it no longer worked. As soon as there was text in the quotation window, the “Post” button disappeared below the bottom of the screen and there was no way you could click on it.

Now, however, it isn’t even there any more. So I now use another blog, Simple Links, for that function. It doesn’t work as well as tumblr did, but its better than nothing at all.

And the last time I tried to post to my tumblr account by e-mail it said “Mail not delivered”.

With all this loss of functionality, there was less and less reason to visit tumblr, or to invite other people to visit it.

But the last straw came when tumblr told me it was time to change my password.

It said I should wait for a link that would be sent by e-mail. I waited, carefully copied the link and pasted it into my web browser, and the response was:

There’s nothing here.
Whatever you were looking for doesn’t currently exist at this address.
Unless you were looking for this error page, in which case: Congrats! You
totally found it.”

On trying again, I got another message:

Sorry, this isn’t a valid password-reset link. You’ll need to request a
new link from Tumblr.

Eventually I managed to contact Support, and they gave me another link that eventually let me enter a new password.

It responded “Password is too short”

I typed a longer one. “Password is too short”

I typed the longest Enlish word I could think of (Antidisestablishmentarianism) with a couple of non-alphanumeric characters tossed in. “Password is too short”

I give up. Having lost all functionality, tumblr is entirely dysfunctional.

tumblr is boiled cabbage

You know about boiled cabbage?

It’s a joke.

Only on tumblr it’s no joke. It’s deadly serious.

I wonder if anyone is still using tumblr.

What happened to WordPress’s Form Response?

A few years ago WordPress added a useful form response feature — you could add a response form to the end of a post, people would fill in the information, and the information would be sent in an e-mail. It saved them the hassle of having to compose an e-mail message to the blogger on whose blog the form appeared.

It was very useful for people who did not want to respond in a public comment, but wanted to discuss the matter in the blog post further.

I found it easy to import the responses into a database without retyping (which brings dangers of typos).

Then WordPress began adding HTML to the responses.

That was a bit of a hassle, because I’d have to save it, and strip out the HTML before it could be used.

Now they seem to have farmed this out to something called POWr, which is completely unusable.

I just don’t have the time or the inclination to jump through all the hoops they want me to jump through.

They don’t send the information in an e-mail. They send a link to a web page that is so full of lazy HTML and other unreadable spammy stuff  that it invariably gets tossed into my spam queue.

If I happen to notice it when I’m bulk deleting my spam, what I see is this:

How do you prefer to communicate?
——————————————————————————–
E-mail
——————————————————————————–
View Form Responses

This is your 2nd submission this month. Your plan allows for 25 submissions every month.
Click here to upgrade your account and receive more submissions.

Have you tried the new POWr Chat?

I must have deleted lots of them without noticing, because the subject line “How do you prefer to communicated?” gives no indication at all that this as a form response from WordPress. And then again, if I do happen to notice it when I’m bulk-deleting my spam, I find I have to click on a link to a web site so I have to wait for a browser to load up and then they want me to sign into a web page, which means looking up in another program to find if I have a user name and password for that particular site.

It’s just not worth it.

If I could, I’d remove all the “Form Response” thingies from all my blog posts, as they are now useless, but that would be extremely time-consuming and difficult.

So if you see a response form at the end of any of my blog posts, please don’t be tempted to use it. Just send me an e-mail instead.

Why do people provide something simple and useful, and then replace it with something complex and useless?

 

Akismet and persistent spammer

For the last few days someone calling itself MichaelDes or MichaelDus has been desperately trying to post spam comments on one of my blogs, and I’ve been getting notifications of each attempt.

Normally such things are just marked as spam without any notification, so I’m wondering why the Akismet spam checker isn’t handling these in the normal way. Any other bloggers having problems with spam comments from MichaelDes?

I’ve set my mail reader to automatically delete the notifications, but I still have to go to the blog and mark the comments in the moderation queue as spam.

Abandoned Blogs and Internet vandalism

This morning I spent several hours going through the blogroll of my other blog, Khanya, removing dead and broken links. It was sad to see how many blogs had been abandoned or closed.

I knew that some of them had not had new posts for a while, but had kept them in the hope that one day the owner might take up blogging again.

Vandalised library books

But saddest of all were the ones that had been deleted or made “private”.

The problem with that is that all sorts of people make links to blog posts they find interesting. Deleting the blog, or making it inaccessible, is a bit like going to a library and snipping out a whole lot of the footnotes and bibliographical references in a lot of books. It’s a kind of vandalism. It’s actually worse, because it in effect removes the footnote from every copy of that book in the whole world, and indeed from every other book in which that book has been cited.

So even if you abandon your blog, and no longer want to write any more, try not to delete it. Of course if it is a “hosted blog” (something self-styled blog fundis recommend, but is generally a bad idea) you might no longer want to go on paying for the hosting, or you may die and your heirs may not want to go on paying. And of course a free hosting site may go belly-up, like Yahoo abandoning Geocities. Fortunately some others came to the rescue for that, though of course lots of the original links were still broken.

One of the broken links I found offered me the domain name for $1575. Imagine paying that for a “premium” domain name like “orthodoxywithapurpose.com”! I wonder how much they paid for it originally before abandoning it?

But it’s all a form of Internet entropy, and makes me wonder what will happen when there are more broken links than working links on the Internet.

 

 

 

 

Medium and Niume — what are they?

For some time now I’ve been hearing about web sites called Medium and Niume, and I’ve been urged to join them. The trouble is, I don’t know what they are, or what they are for.

Today I saw an article that gave at least some information about Medium — ‘The Internet Is Broken’: @ev Is Trying to Salvage It – The New York Times:

Medium was supposed to be developing its business around advertising, which would have paid for writers like Ms. Norman and made the site viable. Then it abruptly pivoted in January and laid off a third of the staff, or about 45 people. Advertising was suddenly no longer the solution but the villain.

“Ad-driven systems can only reward attention,” Mr. Williams says. “They can’t reward the right answer. Consumer-paid systems can. They can reward value. The inevitable solution: People will have to pay for quality content.”

But it doesn’t look good.

I went to the Medium site to find out more, but the main menu was unreadable — designed by web designers who firmly believe that illegibility provides an enhanced “user experience”. Holding a magnifying glass up to the screen enabled me to read enough of the low-contrast text to see that there was no “About” page that would tell you about the site and what its purpose was and how it worked. The NY Times article gives some hints at the thinking behind it, but doesn’t actually tell you what “it” is.

Niume is even worse. You have to join it before you can even see if there is an about page and decide whether you want to join it or not. How’s that for buying a pig in a poke? Whatever advantages it might have, that’s enough to put me off right there.

So my question is: Can anyone who has actually used either or both these sites tell us something about what they are and what they are for, and, if they are blog hosting sites, how they compare with other such sites like WordPress or Blogger?