busybee fluffy rambles Notes

Fluffy, I’m curious if you have time to do us all the kindness to deliver a 15-20 minute keynote on the topic of your choosing for the upcoming IndieWebCamp East 2020 on Saturday, November 14, 2020 some time between 10 and 11 am Eastern? Given the online nature of the camp it will take place via Zoom to an international audience and, as usual, will be recorded for posterity.

Oh, wow, thank you for the invitation, but I’ll have to decline, as the timing doesn’t really work for me, between traveling that week and also being in Pacific time.

I could possibly record something in advance instead, if that’s okay, although I’m spread a bit thin right now and I don’t think I could commit to that either.

Manuel Matuzović shares a thought-provoking experiment: the sample page accompanying his article “Accessible to some” has been optimized for screenreader software only, making it a hellish experience for users using the visual interface with a mouse.

The example website would be a clever illustration, except that it doesn’t actually work with VoiceOver on macOS (on Safari it just reads the visible text, and while Firefox does a bit better it stops after reading the first chunk of text and doesn’t proceed), nor with the built-in screen reader in macOS Safari.

Using aria labels to override the text is a poor approach to making plain text documents screen-readable; a better approach would have been to do all of the obnoxious stuff purely through CSS, which would also allow this page to work in, say, lynx | say or the like.

The internet always highlights the first place winners, the billionaires, the award-winning artists, the best-selling authors, the largest philanthropists, the extraordinary. Their stories are ones of success, of inspiration. They show us what is possible, and push us to achieve more.

But I don’t feel inspired when I see extraordinary. I feel disappointed, jealous. My constant exposure to these amazing stories of success has normalized the extraordinary. I started comparing myself to these “normal” extraordinary people, and wondered why I was not them. This disappointment would incite me to take action, but after a few days of hard work, I would just quit. Quitting was easier; it helped me avoid thinking about the extraordinary and the negative dark clouds that I had shrouded it with.

A good essay on the need to escape the mental trap of comparing yourself to others.

I’ll have to make some food tickets to hand to my cats or something.

Anyone worth over a billion dollars after 2020 will have failed the only moral test that mattered in their lives. They must dismantle themselves, each other, and the violent power structures that protect them. The plutocracy can have all the good intentions in the world, but it is unable to exist without draining the resources and smothering the efforts that could sustain justice in that world.

I searched Webmention implementations on GitHub and found Max Stoiber’s impl. It fetches a simple count of webmentions, and then paginated full text responses. I figured I should try adapting that.

Ah, I hadn’t seen this particular clientside implementation before. Cool to see someone building something with React. Also that gives me some ideas for things I could add to webmention.js, namely doing a paginated series of async queries instead of just setting the page size to be really large.

(Not that I’ve ever seen any blog post ever have enough mentions for this to make a difference, but we’ll get there someday!)