Pennsylvania
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Blog
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I said the other day that I would probably finish the Virgil Flowers books in May. I lied. I just started the last one, am reading at 175% speed, and will finish it just before 1AM tomorrow morning. I think I’ve unlocked the secret of how you guys manage to read so many books in a year. 🙂
921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 1680143 °F Mostly Cloudy
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I spent some time this afternoon converting my Facebook profile into a page so I can automatically post to it from my website. Then I jumped in the shower and, (because hot showers are excellent places for ideas), a few things occurred to me, in no particular order. First, my websites have feeds for post kinds and categories. Why this is or how this works doesn’t matter though. What does matter is that I can automatically post to any particular Facebook page with one or all of the feeds, which means I can also create a page for each category on Facebook. This means people on Facebook can consume whatever content of mine they want, and not consume the stuff they don’t want, sort of like newsletters except for Facebook, and I get to automatically post to these pages, which means I don’t have to do the work of manually copying and pasting to Facebook whenever I create content. I still haven’t figured out how I’m going to handle Twitter yet, except that I can send technical content to my business account and all the boring personal stuff to my personal account. I’ll figure out something for the stuff that may be controversial or start arguments later. I’ve sent invites to the new page to the friends on Facebook who I think are probably more interested in my personal goings on than my opinions on whatever, but just in case I’ve missed anyone I’ll also share this to my profile so that anyone who didn’t get the invite can follow it.
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The united States tax situation is, I think, worthy of having a well-known user experience design truism applied to it. To paraphrase the truism: Don’t listen to what people tell you, watch what they show you, and then proceed accordingly. Everyone wants to pay less taxes, until it comes to their favorite, (for the lack of a better term), handout: Medicare or the military or supposed border security for the red, and supposed social programs for the blue. The only people who seem to be completely honest about their positions are the libertarians and the socialists. I personally disagree for the most part with both, but I respect their consistency. I’m thinking that, for the most part, Americans treat politics like religion, and the two are almost indistinguishable at this point. Maybe we should ease up on the holy wars, because there are enough logs for all of our eyes.
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Damn it! This year’s first thunderstorm, (for Pennsylvania at least), just started, and I was going to leave the windows open so I could listen to it because thunderstorms are cool, but the rain was blowing in and soaking everything so I had to close them. I’ll open them again before bed since the heat is still on and this apartment is heated by boilers plus radiators and it gets hotter than hell in here unless the windows are open. Oh well, there will be other thunderstorms.
921 S Pugh St, State College, PA 1680167 °F Cloudy
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I’ve finally found a social reader that’s reasonably accessible and which I like, so now I’m in the midst of transferring all my RSS feeds over to Aperture in earnest. Organizing them is proving a bit of a challenge, but this is also an opportunity to clean things up a bit and decide what I want to continue reading and what I’m happy to discard. For me, RSS as opposed to social media is a much more digestable approach, or at least an approach that assists me in stopping to think about and ponder the things I read, when they require thinking and pondering. Organizing feeds into categories is a great way, for me, to put things like news or politics or whatever into a separate place where I can visit when I want to and then jump out again when it starts to feel like too many people are peeing in the pool.
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Apple is now apparently saying that its Accessibility Events feature, (you know, the one that “may reveal whether an assistive technology is active on your iPhone”), is not enabled by default. Like hell it’s not enabled by default. It sure was enabled when I installed the iOS 12.2 update last weekend on my iPhone 8+). I specifically went in to general/accessibility/VoiceOver to check, and had to turn the feature off. This note includes a screenshot of my just-updated iPhone 5S, and as sure as the sun is shining, the accessibility events feature was turned on. I have a severe allergy to BS, and Apple doesn’t get to bypass the BSometer just because it has a history of caring a lot about accessibility. Websites should be designed and developed from the beginning with accessibility in mind. The guidelines are already out there and have been out there and freely available, complete with extensive documentation so that they can be understood, for over twenty years. There’s a metric ton of freely available information from the accessibility community of practice on every aspect of those guidelines, all over the internet, for basically as long as the guidelines themselves have existed. Assistive technology tracking has been covered already by this community of practice, and we’re probably all tired of it. For Apple to lie about something as simple as whether the feature is on by default indicates at least some corporate squeamishness around implementing it in the first place, and the best thing they could do at this point is to remove it.
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Thoughts On: “Nothing Fails Like Success” by Jeffrey Zeldman
#Let’sFixThis To tell the truth, I don’t have an answer to the questions raised by Jeffrey Zeldman in Nothing Fails Like Success, but as someone who participates in the IndieWeb, and who has seen nothing but benefit from it, both personally and professionally, I have to hope that we can fix what we’ve broken. Not only that, I think we have to fix it, both because this is the only web we have, and because, really, we’re the ones who convinced the general public to use things like Twitter and Facebook and the like. We turned them onto these things, it wasn’t just marketers. I’m not suggesting that any of us should succumb to paralyzing guilt over any of this, and that includes Zuckerberg. For one thing, it’s a whole lot easier to see what’s wrong in the rear-view mirror than it is through the windshield, and for another, paralyzing built would prevent us from doing the fixing. We need to be clear-eyed when it comes to what we’re fixing, and in my opinion there’s a hell of a lot of things that need fixing.
If we have any hope of repair, I think we as designers and developers need to start with ourselves and our industry. We need to get our act together and start behaving like we’re a profession, and we need to discontinue the pervasive practice of rewarding all the wrong things. Those are just for starters, and they’re large undertakings in themselves. And once we get our own house in order, we’ll need to spend some time doing some seriously hard work convincing the genereal public that the content we convinced them to start putting in the hands of the big social media networks is in fact valuable enough to own and control. Next comes making it easier to own and control. Despite every word of criticism I’ve leveled against WordPress’s new editor, I believe Matt Mullenweg is on the right track, at least as far as the concept goes, because I believe the new editor will make it easier for the average, non-technical person to own and control their content, and at the end of the day, average non-technical people are the majority, not designers and developers.
I have to hope we can accomplish all these tasks. Otherewise, the only thing left is to burn everything to the ground. I hate to think we might be at that point. I’m still optimistic about the web, about its openness and independence, about it’s fundamental accessibility, and I’m optimistic about fixing it and making it easier for everyone to participate in the web. To that end, I hope to have at least a small part in fixing it.
