Blogging
- Began with free version, ca. 2007; was an improvement over Blogger (by then owned by Google).
- Ads become too obtrusive, so paid to remove them.
- Began using site not only to blog, but also as a professional signboard.
- Eventually upgraded to business plan to meet customization needs (add plugins).
Blog categories again: One overarching theme seems to be justice, although I haven’t made it explicit. Maybe it’s time to change that. Merely adding the word as a category won’t work, but perhaps I could start by reflecting on the theme and how it manifests in a number of past posts.
I’ve been tweaking the blog’s categories again, and not all posts are caught up with the changes. This happens with living documents like the weblog or the digital garden.
I’ve eliminated a lot of categories that I’d rather keep as tags, if my host Micro.blog had tags. While I wait to see if that ever changes, I need to reduce the number of categories still further. I had let their number grow because of the lack of tags, but it’s time to rein them in a bit.
The historyofknowledge.net domain is no longer live. Use historyofknowledge.hypotheses.org instead.
I’m in the process of checking and changing links on this site that point to the old domain. I’m also removing Twitter links still lurking in my markup.
This informative piece takes you through the author’s discovery process when he was shown an email copyright threat: “Beware of Copyright Infringement Link Insertion Scams” by Adam Engst, TidBITS, November 13, 2024.
I noticed the GHI’s History of Knowledge blog was crashing this week. Apparently they solved the problem but had to disable the display of the blog’s categories. 🫤 Automattic, you disappoint me. I hope the GHI comes up with a workable, long-term fix soon.
Here’s a Git repository that gathers information about LLMs and offers some ways to deal with them. The only tool I know how to use is the robot.txt file, which depends on voluntary cooperation. Speaking of, the repository contains an interesting table of bot metrics, which is gathering information about the behavior of these things. For more, follow the link to the repository owner’s blog post on Cory Dransfeldt.
Shared Notes: Why Move from Wordpress.com to Micro.blog?
My history with WordPress.com
What Can We Do about LLMs on Our Independent Websites?
The following post appeared in my Mastodon timeline this morning:
As of today, MacStories is disallowing all known AI crawlers, including ChatGPT and Applebot. If you want to read our site, you should use a web browser or RSS.
✌️
Federico Viticci, June 13, 2023
This pronouncement could, indeed, is being made by countless others who run independent websites. Questions and anxiety abound, but we are nowhere close to fashioning responses adequate to the current moment. A visceral sense of violation, of wrong, is hitting many of us, who have long since had enough of Silicon Valley, Madison Avenue, and all the rest treating the traces we leave online as a natural resource to extract value from. Yesterday, the above-quoted observer on Mastodon reported, “I was grossed out when I read that Applebot scraped ‘the open web’ to train their AI model…”
Shared Notes: Digital Gardens
New post format: notes written only for myself, but perhaps of interest to others. Will file under a new shared notes category for now, while also using the blog's other relevant categories.
I ran into the term “digital gardens” on the 🦣 profile of @[email protected], which I looked up because of a repost by @[email protected] of a piece on the latter’s search functionality. RDK’s whole website, Just Text, has a quirky feel that reminds me of some Micro.blog-hosted blogs. These have extra pages about stuff that matters to them, lists, photos, a Tweet archive, other collections of related content.
Comments Back On (Tentatively)
I activated a second feature on my Micro.blog-hosted site that I had turned off years ago while still on WordPress: Comments. They had become more trouble than they were worth, and there was always the once useful bird site, where real conversations could transpire. But those were different times.
In a moment of optimism, I have chosen to believe that the sign-in requirement with Mastodon, BluSky, or Micro.blog will reduce potential friction for me because I’ve encountered a lot less of it on these federating platforms. But time will tell. Right now, I can unmark a problematic comment so it doesn’t appear, but only after the comment is initially posted. (The developer behind Micro.blog is considering making prior-approval an option.) I also have the usual mute, block, and report options.
Next step: seeing what happens—and what I might still need to do—if I get any responses from other sites via webmention. I’m definitely enjoying what the IndieWeb community makes possible, but I wish its tools and documentation were more accessible to non-programming folk. I can deal with modern HTML and CSS, but that’s as far as it goes.
New Blog
My latest editorial project: Migrant Knowledge, a blog with Andrea Westermann and Swen Steinberg for the German Historical Institute Washington.
Blogging before Conferencing
Blogging
…The iterative practice of regular blogging has its own set of joys. For me, writing begets writing. The blog doesn’t distract from my formal academic or scholarly work. It feeds it. It becomes a form of discipline, like doing sit-ups every morning, a practice I long ago abandoned. My abdominal muscles are flabby, but when I sit down to write, whatever the context, I feel strong.
– David Perry, “3 Rules of Academic Blogging," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 11, 2015].