Having long been frustrated by unnecessary unevenness and other quirks of the Gregorian calendar, I designed and wrote up a more ordered, mathematically simpler, and more continuously consistent calendar.
Building up from the atomic calendar unit of a 'day':
* five day weeks
* six week (30 day) months
* two month (60 day) + a sync day bims¹
* six bim years (minus a day for non-leap-years)
After giving it an obvious name, “New Calendar”, and somehow getting a short speakable .org domain (newcal.org), I wrote code to do all the calendar computations and conversions.
The simpler calendar computations made me realize I had invented something that would help solve a completely different problem I was working on: an efficient date-based storage format for my new blog.
It‘s rare that an invention, or reinvention of something inelegant, actually serves a useful purpose. This was one of those rare exceptions.
I also taught myself and have kept practicing the use of ISO 8601 Ordinal dates for my own personal calendaring, which literally gave me a new perspective of time. A much smoother and more linear progression of time across the duration of a year.
Previously: https://tantek.com/2019/015/t1/10-years-ago-today-new-calendar
¹ https://tantek.com/2015/228/t3/bim-definition
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates
Thinking about the bad user experience around this emergency alert I got last night:
Emergency alert: Extreme
ENDANGERED MISSING ADVISORY. Details at https://bit.ly/EMA0022025
I was a bit suspicious, especially in light of the recent inaccurate evacuation alerts that went to all 10 million residents of Los Angeles County. A bit.ly link for an official government alert, really?
I used the bit.ly preview tool to see where the link would go before clicking (add a + after the bit.ly link). It showed the destination was the @CHPAlerts Twitter account, so it was legitimate after all.
I get that Twitter is still a good way to get out emergency alerts and you want links that pop up on phones to be short, but it would probably be better if they used a short link on ca.gov so it looks official.
As a social web building block, #Webmention was designed to work with various other building blocks. Small pieces, loosely joined. Every year developers find new ways to work with Webmention, and new subtleties when combined with other building blocks.
The primary uses of Webmention, peer-to-peer comments, likes, and other responses across web sites, have long presented an interesting challenge with the incorporation and display of external content originally from one site (the Webmention sender), on another site (the Webmention receiver).
There are multiple considerations to keep in mind when displaying such external content.
Two examples of external content are images (e.g. people’s icons or profile images from the author of a comment) and text (e.g. people’s names or the text of their comments).
For external images, rather than displaying them in full fidelity, you may want to compress them into a smaller resolution for how your site displays the profile images of comment authors.
If you accept Webmentions from arbitrary sources, there’s no telling what might show up in author images. You may want to pixelate images from unknown or novel sources into say 3x3 pixel grids of color (or grayscale) averages to make them uniquely identifiable while blurring any undesirable graphics beyond recognition.
For external text, one thing we discovered in recent IndieWeb chat¹ is that someone’s comment (or in this case their name) can contain Unicode directional formatting characters, e.g. for displaying an Arabic or Hebrew name right-to-left. Text with such formatting characters can errantly impact the direction of adjacent text.
Fortunately there is a CSS property, 'unicode-bidi', that can be used to directionally isolate such external text. Thus when you embed text that was parsed from a received Webmention, possibly with formatting characters, you have to wrap it in an HTML element (a span will do if you have not already wrapped it) with that CSS property. E.g.:
<span style="unicode-bidi: isolate;">parsed text here</span>
Though even better would be use of a generic HTML class name indicating the semantic:
<span class="external-text">parsed text here</span>
and then a CSS rule in your style sheet to add that property (and any others you want for external text)
.external-text { unicode-bidi: isolate; }
Previously: https://tantek.com/2023/012/t1/six-years-webmention-w3c
This is post 7 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #socialWeb #openSocialWeb
← https://tantek.com/2025/004/t1/micro-one-onramp-open-social-web
→ 🔮
Glossary
HTML class name
https://tantek.com/2012/353/b1/why-html-classes-css-class-selectors
IndieWeb chat
https://indieweb.org/discuss
pixelate
https://indieweb.org/pixelated
small pieces, loosely joined
https://www.smallpieces.com/
Unicode directional formatting characters
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_text#Explicit_formatting
unicode-bidi CSS property
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-bidi
References
¹ https://chat.indieweb.org/dev/2025-01-05#t1736092889120900
Today I:
- found a buyer for all the Hue lights I decommissioned
- worked on the slides for the OAuth meeting on Monday
- updated IndieLogin.com and dependencies to work with PHP 8.2
- fixed the paper jam in Lily's printer
* Lawrence Lessig’s https://lessig.tumblr.com/post/56888930628/on-the-emptiness-in-the-concept-of-neutrality
* Ben Werdmüller’s https://werd.io/2025/building-an-open-web-that-protects-us-from-harm
Two points of connection:
1. Neutrality in ethical or policy matters is insufficient, empty, and cowardly. Especially when you know better, neutrality in action is not ethical, it is negligent and wrong, like a lie of omission.
“Allyship demands more than neutrality — it demands action.” — @werd.io (@ben@werd.social)
“… there are obviously plenty of contexts in which to be ‘neutral’ is simply to be wrong. ” @lessig.org (@lessig.tumblr.com @lessig@mastodon.world @lessig)
2. Building community for collective action is required for resilient resistance
Aaron helped inspire and drive numerous acts of resistance against foes better funded and connected, many acts which succeeded to some degree or completely such as preventing the passage of SOPA.¹
Similarly he built community for collective action, such as co-founding the Progressive Change Campaign Committee and the Demand Progress political advocacy group² which remain active to this day.
One of the best ways to honor Aaron’s memory is to build on the good examples he set that succeeded and continue to succeed.
The only neutrality that Aaron supported was net neutrality, prioritizing those that use the internet over those that build & serve it, a priority of constituencies strongly aligned with the W3C’s official Ethical Web Principles.³
If you too reject neutrality and instead embrace allyship & action, some of those actions will require resisting the status quo with the intent of changing it.
If resistance with the goal of actual change is your primary objective (rather than recognition), build community to bring about that change, resist collectively not alone, both in the near term, and sustainably into the future.
Still miss you Aaron.
Previously:
* https://tantek.com/2024/013/t1/remembering-aaronsw-eleven-years (links to prior posts)
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Opposition_to_the_Stop_Online_Piracy_Act_(SOPA)
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Progressive_Change_Campaign_Committee
³ https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/#noharm
Okay this GDQ joke speedrun of a TI-83 game is sending me.
What fits your definition of a pillow during eternal Caturday?
Recent events online have been truly sucky, but as always the one shining light has been the #openweb (and by extension, the #fediverse—run by independent operators of course).
Virtually everything I hate, hate about the modern Internet has less to do with the design and featureset of the Web technically-speaking and much more to do with the fact that increasingly people are only accessing a mere handful of domain names as filtered through a mere handful of apps. I’ll go a step further: even while online spaces dominated by Big Tech slide further into hellscape territory, it’s never been easier for plucky individuals to build amazing experiences for the Web. The capabilities of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a plethora of cheap/free hosting options are so incredible today, my brain would have melted 10 years ago—certainly 20 years ago—if I’d been shown this kind of raw power.
And therein lies the disconnect…never before has The Indie Web been such a glorious platform for building anything you might dream of and sharing it with anyone you like, yet never before has The Corporate Web been so awful and damaging to the body politic.
I wish I knew how to deal with this cognitive dissonance, and how to convey to mere mortals out there that The Indie Web is alive and kicking and that The Corporate Web doesn’t have to define their experience of being online. This seems to be the challenge of 2025, and not a single day goes by when I don’t think deeply about this problem. It’s mentally and emotionally taxing—but again, I’m grateful to know there are others out there in the same boat. We’ve got our work cut out for us, that’s for sure!