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Switching playlists and quitting early. This has been yet another long week, and I need to disconnect from everything for probably a couple of days. I will spend some time over Facetime with two of the best people in the world, Wil and Denise, and other than that I think I’m going to stay offline as much as possible. Browser’s closed after this, email client’s closed, phone is on “Do Not Disturb”, and Twitter client on the desktop is closed. There’s a Valentine’s Day party over at the other building later today and I think I’m going to skip it because I think if I have to endure commercialized love I’ll need someone to hold my hair back while I puke. I’ve never been a huge fan of Valentine’s Day anyway and if I really want to eat candy I can get it on sale afterwords.

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First, I do not feel any empathy at all for Jeff Bezos, and my eyes are stuck in the rolled position at his sudden treatment as a hero and martyr. The man cheated on his wife, and, now that he has an opportunity to do so, is more than willing to play the victim. The only reason he now cares about anyone being blackmailed is because it’s happening to him. Otherwise, he couldn’t, and hasn’t, cared less. The National enquirer is hosted by Amazon and their money was just as green as anyone else’s, so he can stab himself in the heart with a spoon for all I care. Second, I am also not going to feel any empathy for the National Enquirer when Jeff Bezos gets done fucking them up the ass and then publicly humiliating them. Fucking with the owner of the company which hosts your web properties is a monumentally stupid decision and I am perfectly OK with NE reaping what they’ve sown. I’m just going to make sure I have plenty of popcorn ready and watch the whole thing play out.

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Today’s work playlist is: “Tired of Stupid”. Overwhelmingly metal, plus some alternative and hard rock from the 80’s, and some other stuff to leaven it. I didn’t attend last night’s virtual Homebrew Website Club because I was tired after work and was in bed by 8 or so. I am going to try to attend Indiewebcamp Online though if there’s nothing between now and then that’s virtual. I still have to look up the dates though. I am still wrestling with emotions I would rather not wrestle with, but as days pass and I reassemble the pieces with more than just figurative duct tape, this will become easier to deal with.

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Duplicating this as a separate note since I forgot that Twitter doesn’t accept RSVP posts. There’s a virtual Homebrew Website Club tonight, and I think I’m going to attend. There’s stuff that’s been on the back burner for my websites, (finishing the import of my Facebook archive, for example), and I need to occupy my free time with something. #indieweb

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Spotify is apparently gobbling up podcast platforms, and Anchor is among them. Not that Anchor was particularly open before, but it definitely won’t be open now. given the way Spotify already handles podcasts, this will likely be yet another example of a site death. So, one more time for the folks in the back: Own your content! No, seriously, own your content. It’s one thing to syndicate to Spotify from your own site, because you still have control of the files. Using it as your primary platform, however, (as you will be if you primarily upload to Anchor), is still not a good idea if you care about your content being yours, available for as long as you decide, all of that. Plus there’s a really nasty long-standing bug with Spotify which keeps your feed from being updated if you have to update your original feed for any reason, like you accidentally uploaded the wrong version of a file. So yeah, own your content, because that one’s been around for two years at least and there’s no sign of them fixing it.

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Well WordPress, it seems as though you and I have outlasted a second romantic relationship. I suppose I should be grateful that this one was just under a year while the other was twelve years, but right now it hurts to think and I’m not in the headspace to considere things like that right now. I will get there eventually, but it won’t be today. The unreturned calls and emails and texts after a year of talking nearly every day is just too much. It’s not that I’m angry. It’s worse than that. I wish I could just be angry because that would be a lot easier to take. Right now I’m just crushed.

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Dear M-Enabling Summit: seriously, why do accessibility pros have to keep passive-aggressively adding alt text to your images for you? It’s not like this is new or anything. This is, after all, 2019 and not 1995. It’s not even new by Twitter standards, and there are a metric ton of guides out there, some of them even written by accessibility pros, to show you how to use the feature. How is this not in the instructions you provide to your social media manager, assuming you have one? If you don’t, not adding it is even worse. If you can’t manage to do something as simple as adding alt text to your images, why on earth should anyone trust you to create a conference that provides valuable, accurate accessibility information?

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I should be able to charge extra for editing content on any site with Visual Composer involved. That plugin is the bane of my existence, and the sooner it completely disappears, the better. It is absolutely possible to edit VC content by hand. This is also absolutely not a skillset I should have to maintain. We have standards for a reason. It is very time-consuming and tedious, along with probably being traumatizing, for anyone to have to learn the non-standard idiosyncracies of this kind of generated markup. Friends don’t let friends use this plugin. Enemies probably shouldn’t let enemies use it either.

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I spent some time today putting a system in place to track the unbillable time I spend on contributions to free software, and when I say contribution I’m being pretty liberal about what counts as contribution: Advocacy, not just code, for example. I believe in the mission of free software, but the fact is free software isn’t without cost, and sometimes that cost can get pretty high. I’m also working out how to document my contributions in my portfolio, including the free accessibility advocacy that I do. This is going to take a little more work and some more research, but I feel it needs to be done. I need to be able to keep track of this stuff so I can limit it when necessary. Right now I’m thinking of setting the limit at ten percent of free time outside of shabbat and festivals, because those are times when no work of any kind is done, as a general rule. I’m not going to get into the exceptions around festivals because it’s a lengthy topic, but to say no work of any kind can be done on festivals would be technically inaccurate. I think ten percent is a reasonable amount of time. It’s not a ton, but it places an upper limit on the time I have available to do this kind of work. I will also document the time spent, although I haven’t decided whether I will publish a weekly or monthly or yearly report. This is going to be an interesting project.

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I’m participating in the Ultimate Blog Challenge for personal and professional reasons. The personal reasons are partly documented here, and I’ll document my professional reasons on this site.

Content creation is hard work, and I need to get back into the swing of it. I have several lengthy tutorials sitting in my drafts, and I need to finish them, and I think the only real way to get back into the swing of content creation is to practice. So I’ve decided to take up this blogging challenge so that I can do that, as well as find new content to read and absorb. There are a lot of things floating around my brain regarding business, the tech landscape, and the web development landscape specifically, and I’d like to start getting those things out of my brain and onto my website where I can flesh them out better. My plan is to not turn over all my thoughts to social media platforms and instead document them on my own site, linking to them in larger posts where appropriate, and of course changing them when appropriate. Plus this will be a really great way to share what I learn by sharing my notes on the books I’m reading, (there are several professional development as well as technical books on my anticipated reading list for 2019), as well as the articles written by others, especially experts in particular fields like accessibility. I’m looking forward to this, and I think it will be a lot of fun. If you want to sign up, I believe there’s still time left to join. No pressure or anything, but it’s a great way to start owning your own content if you haven’t started doing that already.

Until next time.

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Researching if I can add blocks in Gutenberg using the non-visual editor by typing block comments. As long as the interface is inaccessible I have no problem hacking around it if possible, I will not be cut off from the future of WordPress, temporarily or otherwise.

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Friendly public service announcement: If you store, process or transmit credit card data, you are responsible for ensuring that you are PCI compliant. Use a third-party payment processor and transmit your data securely if you don’t want end-to-end responsibility. Thank you.

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I have come to the conclusion that Matt is not going to take accessibility seriously until it affects him personally, and this is incredibly sad. Accessibility should not be the domain of those who are part of the disabled list, or those whose loved ones are part of it.

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Maybe privacy and accessibility work would be valued by employers in the WordPress space if @photomatt would do his Goddamn job and advocate for them. Walking is very painful now but I have zero problem inching across that convention center tomorrow to say that to his face. #WCUS