Scattering
• Mark Taylor
I emerged from the hollow of the tree into a land I had long imagined. I saw at once it was all wrong: the mile-high cliffs, the million golden birds. I had known nothing of the scale of the world while I was in it. This place I had
A nice overview of European alternatives for online services when you want to host your own website or app. Think hosting, analytics, email services, and payment systems.
Good morning. Today is Memorial Day in the United States. We remember all the men and women who gave their lives to keep our country safe and a bastion of liberty for the world. Don't give up on us yet. We are still willing to sacrifice for a good cause.
Speaking of memorials, do you remember UserLand Frontier and all the cool stuff we developed with it? Like Manila, Radio, XML-RPC, RSS, OPML, adding so many cool open features to the web. When people asked how we did all that, I said great tools. That was Frontier. Jake Savin, one of the 1990s UserLanders, is continuing the project to get it running on today's hardware and for today's web. He's documenting it on his blog. I can't wait to use it. Watching him go through the process has been eye-opening. He's basically retracing all the steps it took to create it as done by four or five people over quite a few years, a long time ago. But when it's running and I don't doubt that he will get it running, it'll be fascinating to see if I remembered it correctly. If you remember Frontier fondly, I suggest you subscribe to his feed in your favorite RSS feed reader.
The article highlights the benefits and challenges of South Africans earning foreign income while working remotely for international firms. It details legal employment structures, tax obligations, financial management, and the necessity to establish personal safety nets for medical and retirement needs. The potential for career advancement and global networking is emphasized.
Scattering
• Mark Taylor
Doreen printed an A4 sign for the cigarette bin: "Do not use, Birds Nesting". It was kind, and it was an excuse to use the laminator. Next year they were back again. Doreen thought she recognised one of last year's chicks, now laying. She persuaded management
My weekly blog post. Links this week include a catalog of named colors and their origin stories, a list of search engines with their own indexes and a link to a book that's part graphic novel, part art work and one piece in a larger collective of work that reimagines Indigenous life and culture in a postcolonial world where space exploration has reduced the earth's population. I talk a bit about the upcoming surgery. There's another fresh helping of links in Link Lagniappe. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
Odd Soapbox
• Unknown
I asked ChatGPT for a list of FeedLand features that are new or distinctive. "FeedLand combines RSS, OPML, public curation, subscribable reading lists, rivers, categories, and realtime WebSocket updates in a way that is unusual among feed readers and points toward a web-native social network."
People who believe in the web, stop dissing RSS, it’s an important part of our future.
Alexa has a terrible habit, when I ask for a song from the Echo on my desktop, it ends each song with a helpful message. There's a live version of this song, do you want to hear it. You have a message waiting, can I play it for you. I can't get it to stop. I have a bunch of them scattered around the house, and this is the only one that does it. I'm writing here, I asked for a song that fit in with my writing. Stop making me thinkg about your marketing messages. Where did you get the idea you can do this. A paying customer.
