Feelings

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So, the last few days have been feeling a lot better overall. I’m not sure how much of that is reducing my nortriptyline dose or how much is because I’ve been taking magnesium regularly. But either way, I’m just like… in less agony. My wrists still hurt most of the time, especially after I’ve been working for a few hours, and I’m still driving to work more often than I’d like, but all in all I’m feeling, I dunno, better?

I was in a pretty dark place about a week ago and now things are just feeling like how they are on average for me in general, so to me that’s a pretty big improvement.

This weekend I’m going down to Portland for IndieWeb Summit and I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully I can improve my understanding of the current ecosystem, and maybe make some contributions to it which are important to me. In particular it’ll be nice to chat with Aaron and Jamey about our respective areas of overlapping interest, and talk everyone’s ear off about Publ and what I’m trying to do with it. Maybe I can even get others to want to contribute to it! Also definitely looking forward to meeting Jacky, Darius, and everyone else I’ve interacted with in IndieWeb stuff!

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Re: RSS: There’s nothing better

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Aaron responded to my ramble:

One of the main reasons to use h-feed and h-entry is that RSS/Atom really only can represent blog posts and podcasts. For those purposes, they’re fine formats, but the reality is there are many more kinds of content on the social web today, such as replies like this one which can’t really be represented in RSS.

That’s absolutely fair! I’ve found RSS/Atom to be Good Enough for everything I’ve wanted to support in it, but in a lot of the use cases it’s definitely on the end of “Hey I have new content, come to my site to consume it properly.” I haven’t really seen any example of h-feed handling those better, though. Do you have some examples that I could look at?

What features are you finding that Microsub doesn’t support? Like most of the IndieWeb protocols, Microsub is supposed to be an evolving protocol based on the needs and implementations of people using it. I don’t expect that we will ever say “Microsub is done!” the way that some specs put a stick in the ground, since the reality is that things change and need to adapt to new use cases to remain relevant.

The main features that feel like they’re missing are organizational facets, like what we were discussing earlier today. Having some mechanism to more easily recategorize feeds, or entries within feeds, or whatever. I know that most of that probably falls on the endpoint itself and shouldn’t be part of the Microsub protocol though. It’s hard to know where to draw the line.

Another thing that feels like it’s missing is a user story. It’s just confusing to get started with. I set up various endpoints (adding a token endpoint and a microsub endpoint to my main page, which doesn’t feel like it should be necessary to use an external piece of software that has nothing to do with my site), and then when I did get things going, I found that the UX of the readers was… underwhelming, I guess. And it isn’t clear to me how much of that is on the readers and how much is on Microsub itself. It sort of feels like there’s two parts to the experience which each keep on saying that no, it’s the other part’s responsibility to do things.

Most of the UX I see emerging is based on doing something Twitter/Tweetdeck-esque and I want something more like an email inbox with folders/filters. (Thus the issues I opened earlier today, and thanks for your comments on #40 in particular!)

It’s definitely an evolving spec and I appreciate that about it, but it just feels really difficult for me to even get started with it right now because I don’t feel like the goals that the various folks implementing the tools are aligned with the goals I have in using a feed reader right now.

I do appreciate the idea of it being built in the form of building blocks with interoperability, but the way that the blocks are currently connected just feels confusing and overwhelming and doesn’t feel like it’s particularly advantageous to having a single reader-with-subscriptions.

I guess, mostly, as a user I feel lost, and as a developer I feel like it’s overly-abstracted.

I’d love to see the ability to do some sort of scriptable hook into a feed where I run my own filter that does things the way I want them. One of the things I tangentially got at in issue #40 is I’d love to have a way of registering a webhook that gets a notification when an item comes in, and then says where to put the item. Like, give me a JSON blob that gives all of the parsed semantics and let me return a disposition of which channel (or group or whatever) it should go in. And make sure it provides all the data in some easily-processed form.

That probably belongs in the configuration UI of the Microsub endpoint, though, rather than needing to be a core feature of Microsub itself. But I’m not seeing any endpoints that are trying to implement stuff like that. Not that I’ve looked very hard, though, because there’s just a huge collection of things to look at and none of them really tell me why I should look at them vs. any other endpoint implementation. And meanwhile I feel like there’s a missing link for actually being able to transport data between them. I couldn’t find any working (or documented-enough for me to use) examples of an OPML importer or exporter, for example, which made me skittish about even trying any endpoint out enough to see if it would really work for me.

I’d love to see a concept of nested channels, too. So I can have a channel for all art stuff, and subcategories for drawings vs. photography or whatever. Or being able to have subchannels for each of the separate comics I follow, all grouped together under “comics,” which would handle the use case of wanting to do an archive binge on a single series vs. wanting to catch up on what’s new in the last day. Even with a flat channel structure it’d be nice to be able to just, like, focus on one feed sometimes, without having to always focus on only that feed. And then having something where I can see all my subscription content, but not the “follow” content, per the distinction I raised the other day, so just having a “show all” view isn’t quite what I’m looking for.

Also it took me a while to understand what’s meant by the channel order; I was looking for a means of giving the sort order of the items within a channel (oldest-first, newest-first, latest-arriving first) rather than just how to organize one’s sidebar in their reader. Which also feels like it’s tied to a specific UX concept, rather than something intended as a building-block for a more general reader experience.

At this point I feel like I’m talking in circles or something. I’m looking forward to trying to get on the same page this coming weekend. :)

RSS: there’s nothing better

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David Yates wrote a great defense of RSS which I completely agree with. To summarize the salient points:

  • RSS is open
  • RSS works
  • RSS is very well-supported by a lot of things
  • RSS is a suitable name as shorthand for “RSS/Atom” because the name “Atom” is overloaded and basically anything that supports Atom also supports RSS and vice-versa

(Note that there’s one inaccuracy in that since that article was written, Twitter has moved over to algorithmic manipulation of the timeline. This can currently be disabled but who knows how long that’ll last?)

Most IndieWeb folks are also really gung-ho about mf2 and h-feed, and while I don’t see any reason not to support it (and it certainly does have some advantages in terms of it being easier to integrate into a system that isn’t feed-aware or convenient to set up multiple templates), I’ve run into plenty of pitfalls when it comes to actually adding mf2 markup to my own site (for example, having to deal with ambiguities with nesting stuff and dealing with below-the-fold content, not to mention a lot of confusion over things like p-summary vs. e-content), and so far there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to doing so since everything that supports h-feed also supports RSS/Atom, as far as I’m aware.

For me the only obvious advantage to h-feed is that you can add it to one-size-fits-none templating systems like Tumblr where you don’t have any control over the provided RSS feed, but in those situations there’s not really a lot more added flexibility you’re going to get by adding h-feed markup anyway. I guess it also makes sense if you’re hand-authoring your static site, but that just means it becomes even easier to get things catastrophically wrong.

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Keeping it personal

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I just read this great essay by Matthias Ott. It does a great job of summarizing the state of affairs of blogging and social media, and how we can try to escape the current orbit to get back to where the web was meant to be.

I especially like the bit about “Don’t do it like me. Do it like you.” Because that is exactly why I’ve been building Publ the way I have; I have specific goals in mind for how I manage, maintain, and organize my site, and these goals are very different than what other existing blogging and site-management software has in mind. The fact that I post so many different kinds of content and that they need different organizational structures to make sense makes this a somewhat unique problem. I’d like to think that Publ is a very general piece of web-publishing software, but it’s probably so general because I have such specific needs. Which makes for an interesting paradox, I suppose.

I guess what I’m saying is that I want to see more types of web-based publishing where the schema and layout fit the content, not the other way around. But it also needs to be able to interoperate with other stuff, while still making sense from a producer-consumer UX perspective.

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Stuff, and things

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Last night I had another mini-spiral, brought on by making a joke in someone’s chat that didn’t land at all well. Which set off a cascade of bad intrusive thoughts. But I’m over it now.

I did decide from that to cut down on the spaces I’m chatting in. I’m spread too thin and need to focus my attentions on the things that are important to me, rather than the things that simply take up time.

Today the Dove Self-Esteem Project posted another Steven Universe short, this one about social media, and it reminded me that I’m long-overdue for cleaning up my Twitter follows. Given that I have, um, rather a lot, it’ll take me a while to KonMarie my way through them, but I think it’ll be worth it.

This also comes back to a lot of what I’m dissatisfied with in social media and modern communication these days. Everything’s about instantaneous updates and push notifications and micro-posts and conversations and so on. It’s a big reason why I’m not a fan of ActivityPub. It’s also the part of the IndieWeb focus that I’m less thrilled about (granted, IndieWeb is about a lot of things, and it’s not like I have to participate in every part to still make a meaningful impact). I keep saying how someday I’ll get around to writing a blog entry about impedance mismatches between what I like about blogging and the ActivityPub/Webmention/etc. world. This isn’t that entry.

Anyway, this is the… third? I think? day of my nortriptyline reduction. Which is to say I’m still at 30mg. My doctor agrees that we should try something else. Gabapentin will probably be the next thing I try, since it’s something that a lot of my spoonie friends have said works well for them (with caveats). I probably won’t be starting on that until August, though; it’ll take me a few more weeks to taper off nortriptyline, and then I’ll be doing Song Fight! in Madison (and hopefully not being in complete agony between the travel and the playing guitar all weekend). Meanwhile I think the magnesium might be helping as well.

Tonight I did practice a bunch of my Song Fight! material and actually managed to play for a decent amount of time without suddenly finding myself in agony. Which was a nice surprise. So I’m feeling a lot more confident in being able to play a full set in a month. And meanwhile I’m still doodling around with music for games and stuff. So maybe this is a good sign of things to come.

I guess I’m feeling cautiously optimistic for now. Which is better than how I felt two days ago, I tell you what.

Improvement

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So last night I kind of hit rock bottom, in that I was incredibly depressed and ruminating about every single mistake I’d made in life and so on. I had a good cry and went to bed at 10 PM (and didn’t use my CPAP because my nose was all stuffy), and then the next morning woke up at 6 AM, still feeling kinda like crap, and I stayed in bed until 7:30. But when I got up I felt better, and I ended up going to the grocery store at like 8 or so and bought stuff for making a decent breakfast for once.

Today was basically a self-care day, and I think between having reduced my nortriptyline dose, having gotten a full 8 hours' sleep, not having used CPAP, and having been taking magnesium supplements, well, at least one of those things helped out. And today I was… well, not pain-free, but lower pain than I’d felt in a while. This afternoon I ended up taking a brief walk and managed to go a lot further than usual, too, although it was still only like a mile total. But I didn’t feel completely worn out by it.

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Nortriptyline etc.

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Early on when I started using nortriptyline I seemed to be having some results but I also admitted it might be a placebo. Over the last four months since then it’s become more and more clear to me that it isn’t actually helping me with anything at all.

It’s supposed to make me sleep better but my sleep is just as restless and terrible as ever.

It’s supposed to help me downregulate my pain but if anything my pain response has only gotten more severe.

I’m also dizzy and tired all the time, and have pretty much constant headaches.

I thought maybe it was time to increase my dose, so I did a bit over a week ago. And the last week has been even worse than it was before I started on nortriptyline to begin with.

So, it’s clearly not working for me, so I’ve started to taper off of it. Probably really bad timing for it what with IndieWeb Summit next weekend and then a week of visiting family immediately after, but I’ll still be on a dose of it during that (I’ll probably step down by 10mg/week).

It’s frustrating that this hasn’t worked out, and I was really hoping to have something that works for me by August but hopefully I’ll figure something out.

Over the last few days I’ve also started taking magnesium supplements again; I remember it helping me somewhat with anxiety a few years ago, and there’s considerable research which shows that it’s actually fairly promising for some. And between reducing my nortriptyline dose and starting back on magnesium, I’m feeling somewhat better today, at least, although that could very well be placebo effect combined with the fact I did basically nothing yesterday.

I want to be able to get back into doing the stuff I love doing. I miss making comics and being able to play music and even being able to be even vaguely functional at work. I’m determined to find something that will let me get my life back.

Thirds

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Kitt wrote an entry about splitting a pastry in thirds, which has a few different solutions. I hashed out what I thought was a correct solution in the comments but I’d actually made a pretty big mistake that came from me not actually drawing a diagram. So here’s a version with diagrams.

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Support networking

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I’m in the midst of a really bad fibro flareup lately, and am burning through my sick days at work pretty quickly. It’s frustrating and I need a way out, and something else that I can do as sustainable income.

I’m in a bunch of differently-intersectional support circles, and I’ve noticed the following:

Disability circles: Doesn’t understand the impact of my disability on my profession (because they don’t understand what my profession entails)

Technology circles: Doesn’t understand the impact of my disability on my profession (because they don’t understand what my disability entails)

The thin segment of disability+technology together: Doesn’t have any answers either, just sympathy and relatable experiences with not knowing what the hell to do

I keep asking in technology circles to see if anyone knows other jobs that would use my brain without needing to use my body and I keep on having to grow the list longer and longer with preemptions. No, I can’t go into management; I’m not good at coordinating other peoples' moving parts and it’s not what satisfies me as an engineer, and the brain fog from the pain makes this not a thing I’m likely to be able to get good at. No, I can’t go into teaching or training; that has even more requirements and rigidity in terms of my scheduling and I cannot do anything that requires that I be available at precise times on specific days.

I ask in disability circles, and there’s another, different list; no, I can’t use voice recognition software to program (not while there’s shared open-plan workspaces or I’m working in languages which aren’t suited to it – and I usually don’t have a choice of language). I still can’t go into management; it’s a completely different set of skills and not a natural progression. I already have a good ergonomic setup, both at home and at work. And employers don’t look too kindly on me smoking weed all day.

And in the intersectional circle, the only response I ever get is: “I have no idea, let me know if you figure something out.”

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