Dave Winer is doing some work involving blogrolls. His recent posts inspired me to resurrect the blogroll on this site. It’s back in the sidebar and driven from my reading list via a simple OPML to HTML script and a bit of copy and paste action.

There hasn’t been a blogroll here since 2006–when the site changed from Movable Type to WordPress. At the time, I said “I’m not sure if I think blogrolls are all that useful anymore.” That statement came from the brief time when the blogroll served as the primary navigation to the sites I followed. This was a tedious way to keep up with more than a handful of sites. Fortunately, it didn’t take long to discover RSS and start using a news reader (I think NetNewswire was my first one). Newsreaders are wonderful and I, for one, am happy RSS isn’t dead.

I missed the 20th anniversary of this site by a couple days (it was on the 7th). Ten years ago, I marked the occasion by listing the most popular posts.

  1. Homebrew Yaesu FT-857D Soundcard Cable
  2. Bose 901 Equalizer Repair
  3. A Dashing Dashboard with Raspberry Pi
  4. PSK31 with an FT-857D and a Mac
  5. More PSK31
  6. NYC to Montreal and Back (in Four Parts)
  7. Motorcycle Parking at NYC Muni-Meters
  8. Pomodoro Timer
  9. Temperature Logging with Twine and ThingSpeak
  10. DIY Air Variable Capacitor

The only post that appears on both lists is about the motorcycle trip to Montreal. I’m always surprised with the number of people interested in making a soundcard cable or repair a Bose 901 EQ. By the way, PDF schematic diagram for that EQ is not represented on this list, but is probably viewed more than any of these other pages.

A couple weeks ago, I downloaded all of my Flickr data. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I’d do with all of it. Today, I uploaded everything to this WordPress site with the help of some Python scripts I created. The scripts are available on Github, if that’s your sort of thing: flickr-wp-upload.

I won’t go into the details here, but I will leave you with my final thought from my worklog on the project:

My justification: 2,001 photos were uploaded (with meta data), 31 albums were created and 150 comments ported over. At a conservative 3 minutes per manual upload, it would have taken about 12.5 working days for me to upload this stuff. Let alone assembling the albums, and the comments would have been lost. Plus, I learned a few things along the way (e.g. how to rotate images with Python).

Only one of the albums has been posted here, the rest will come shortly.

In the meantime, I leave you with the first picture I ever posted to Flickr, apparently. This was taken from my office window on January 20, 2015. And, no, not all of the pictures are this crappy.

42nd & 8th

I’ve been following the IndieWeb movement for a while now. I won’t get into all of the reasons why right now, but I agree with and want to support what they are doing. While I was very curious, I hadn’t done anything. Dave Slusher’s in-depth post on his experience, This Blog Has a POSSE, helped push me over the edge–partially due to the Andre the Giant reference.

Today, I spent some time configuring this site so that it can participate in the IndieWeb ecosystem. This means that publishing to silos such as Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook is easier. More interestingly, likes, comments and such made on those silos should make it back to this site–that’s the idea anyway. This is the inaugural post, so we’ll see how things go.

Here’s the short story of what I did (a more detailed write-up is in the offing):

These resources were very helpful in getting things set up:

This is the first post I’m making with these new components in place. After I see how well things are or are not working, I’ll write a more detailed follow-up.

test

This site has been compromised a couple times this year, so I’ve taken a few steps to prevent it from happening in the future:

  • Moved to a different host. Server security probably had little to do with this latest problem, but I’ve been looking for a reason to move to what I thought would be a faster host for a while. So, I’m back on Pair Networks, where this site was hosted for many years.
  • Fresh installations of everything since many files had been compromised.
  • Limited the number of WordPress plugins being used. One of the problems I had in the past was due to a vulnerability in a plugin. While I keep the plugins up to date, the fewer the better.

If you’re interested in securing your WordPress installation, this Hardening WordPress article is a good start.

For now, the site is rocking a default theme. I’ve been wanting to redesign the site anyway, so I don’t want to spend time reapplying tweaks to a theme I’m going to stop using anyway.

If you notice any strangeness, or broken things, please let me know.