Side Projects – Amanda Unvarnished

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· 16 Kislev 5777 (Friday 16 December 2016) · 2 minutes to read

I think it may be time to wander back out of the Indieweb rabbit hole and climb into bed. This has been a lot of fun, and tomorrow will definitely be RTFM Friday, (actually, no it won’t, because I have some emails to respond to and work to do), because I’m missing something. I’ve gotten set up with Bridgy, but still need to figure out how to merge accounts, because I have two of them. I will re-automate social sharing when I’m more awake. I need to switch plugins because it appears that Social has finally quit working as of WordPress 4.7. I’m not complaining. Hell, I got eight years out of the thing, across I don’t know how many WordPress versions. I also need to play around with changing the webmentions endpoint for this site so that Bridgy can handle them. There are extra meta boxes and I’m pretty sure I need to change it there but will do some more digging later. Oh, and I need to find out the extent of microformats in Genesis so I can add what’s not already there to this child theme and the one on customerservant.com. I also need to fix the typo in that post. Anyway, good night WordPress, and good night Indieweb, and good night IDE.

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I Fought The Tech, And I Won!

Amanda CAARSON

· 11 Av 5776 (Monday 15 August 2016) · 2 minutes to read

Most of today has been completely unproductive. I spent the majority of it fighting with Instantbird, (which is not so instant), which I use for Slack, which we use for WordPress Core contributions and other WordPress bits like WordPress accessibility, and other sub-projects. I spent several hours getting conversations to appear and allow me to interact with them. This is text-based chat, so you’d think everything would just work. I finally got everything up and running just before the weekly WordPress accessibility meeting. So by 3PM, I was pretty much done.

And then, I decided I wanted to listen to some of the content that’s on my USB drive. My network attached storage is dead, and this serves as the backup for most of that content. I have music that’s not available on Spotify, or, if it is, it’s “digitally remastered,” (which in most cases actually means re-recorded by the original artist, except now they’re older and they’re showing their wear and tear), plus some audio dramas and books that aren’t on Audible.

Yay time to screw with Windows homegroup settings. Two different versions of Windows on two different PC’s, and the one with the big speakers connected to it is by my bed, as it should be. Well, Windows has never been great shakes at either networking or permissions, (See also: Windows PC versus Windows Vista), and so unless you have a crossover cable, that’s long enough, (I don’t), or you want to make things more complicated and use one computer as a pass-through for network traffic, (I don’t), it’s homegroup configuration time. This is usually straight layout tables all the way down, and will usually take up much more of your time than you’d like, and require several beers to get the entire job done.

So I set to work. Shared the drive properly, set the permissions, then went to access it on the PC by the bed. “Network path not found.” OK then, time to start digging. Make sure I have the homegroup password correct, (I didn’t), get all the names correct. In networking, names are very important. PC’s/devices are not like your hookups. Forget their names and you’re done. So I get all that correct, in less than an hour, and, we have content delivery.

And that’s Monday in the bag.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 28 Sivan 5775 (Monday 15 June 2015) · 1 minute to read

Figured some proper sleep and of course coffee and time off would fix this. I have code victory, nothing’s broken, and not only is it not broken, it works. Time and date now show up for my status posts, and date for aside posts, both are also not displaying the title. All of this is just what I wanted. Now I need to add support for the images, and I have to decide if I want to add a heading to the already-existing markup or just straight text with no decoration, or maybe something like another bit of HTML decoration. Will ponder that later on today and work on it this evening.

Welcome to Monday.

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Amanda CAARSON

· 20 Sivan 5775 (Sunday 7 June 2015) · 2 minutes to read

I think I may have made a promise to myself at some point that there would be no code on this blog.

Well, promise broken, because I want a place to document my side projects.

My current fascination has been with metadata.

In a nutshell, metadata is the information that gets collected when you do things like take pictures with your phone. It can be information like credit, shutter speed, or location, if you have enabled location services for your camera app on your phone.

Basically, everything you do has metadata attached these days. Photos aren’t the only information with metadata attached. Photos are just the best example I can come up with that’s not too far out there in geek world.

So, I have started playing around with displaying this metadata. What if I could take the information from photos for instants, and use it to plot a location on a map. Then display that map so the people who read this blog could then look at where I am, or where I was when I wrote a particular post at least?

So far, I think I have the location part working. If you look at this post, under the content, you should have the ability to hover over the location and see a street level view.

It’s not perfect, and it’s not exactly the way I want it, so I will continue playing around. And of course, I will document the whole thing here, complete with code examples.

Augusta, Georgia, United States