This is for my fellow Yanks out there: Take care of yourselves and your loved ones this weekend.
I just want you to know I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with all of the people out there who have even more reason to be afraid come January 20th than I do (being a white man). I know how hard this must be for you, because there are people I love very close to me whoāif you pay attention to the rhetoricāare living with MAGA targets on their backs. Itās shameful. Itās appalling. Itās #politics with very few guardrails left.
And yetā¦we will get through this. We must. I keep telling that to myself every day. We have to keep going. Because the alternative isā¦unimaginable.
So I wish you all good wishes, and know that you are not alone. Millions upon millions of your fellow Americans are just as appalled as you are, and this aināt over. MAGA can believe they āwonā all they want, but the war for the soul of this nation continues, and we live to fight another day. Resist! ā
Hey San Diego, some of the lovely people in Fan Favorite are presenting next week: Navigating Fractured Realities and the Need for Clean Air (āDuring the Pandemicā is Right Now). January 21, 6:30pmā8pm at Centro Cultural de la Raza. Masks required and provided? Air purifiers? You know it! š·š
Also, check out and share the Instagram post.
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 bimsĀ¹
* six bim years (minus a day for non-leap-years)
After giving it an obvious name, āNew Calendarā, 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.
Itās 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
Ā¹ https://tantek.com/2015/228/t3/bim-definition
Ā² 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. peopleās icons or profile images from the author of a comment) and text (e.g. peopleās 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, thereās 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 chatĀ¹ is that someoneās 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
ā https://tantek.com/2025/004/t1/micro-one-onramp-open-social-web
ā š®
Glossary
HTML class name
Ā https://tantek.com/2012/353/b1/why-html-classes-css-class-selectors
IndieWeb chat
Ā https://indieweb.org/discuss
pixelate
Ā https://indieweb.org/pixelated
small pieces, loosely joined
Ā https://www.smallpieces.com/
Unicode directional formatting characters
Ā https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidirectional_text#Explicit_formatting
unicode-bidi CSS property
Ā https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/unicode-bidi Ā
References
Ā¹ 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
