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Learning and Consolidation

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there

As I followed two or more courses on the topic there was quite a bit of repetition. Another word for repetition is consolidation. By studying the same topics, taught by different people I consolidated my knowledge. I filled in the knowledge gaps and eventually I began to understand how the code works, even if I can’t write it from scratch yet.

The aim isn’t necessarily to be able to write a web app from scratch. The aim is to understand how all the elements work individually, as well as how they work together in an app.

Today for example in the Let’s Learn Laravel course I followed the lesson on form validation, with mention of Bcrypt and Node.js. This feels good, because I see how frameworks help to save time. For years I was happy to use WordPress as a user, because it works well as a blog and CMS. Now I have studied enough to build my own, although my greatest concern is safety. I want to migrate the static part of my website to Laravel, but I want to do so when I feel confident that it will not be hacked. I also want to do this without destroying the rest of the site in the process.

That’s where the current course comes in. I need help in understanding the process and the steps for setting up a project in Laravel, taking advantage of the tasks that it does for me. When the effort is ready I will deploy it to a web server and see how well it works.

One of the reasons to follow courses, even if they are filled with plenty of repetition, is to learn about concepts. I knew about include but I didn’t know about layout. By understanding layout you can prepare a template, where the elements that change are individual pages, and the layout does the rest, to keep the entire site looking the same. This will become my “portfolio”.

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More Experimenting with ClassicPress
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More Experimenting with ClassicPress

Byrichard

Although I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve I have been experimenting with ClassicPress and the Fediverse, but rather than do it from my main blog I have decided to experiment within a subdomain and so far I have achieved much. I see that activitypub and webfinger can be installed on ClassicPress.

I checked that a webfinger was created and displayed correctly but this took trial and error. The biggest error is that to create a webfinger that is valid you must come from an https hyperlink. If it is not secure you get a “socket not secure error”. I found a solution, by creating classicpress.main-vision.com for the sake of testing.

In so doing I achieved two things. The first is that I found a way to experiment with ClassicPress without destroying my website but at the same time I found a way to experiment with other things too. By a similar setup I could get Wordpress and webfingers, where a few accounts are possible, rather than just one.

The Stumbling Block

I have hit a wall. I created the ClassicPress instance. The webfinger works when I test it and the account is visible on the Fediverse. The problem, at the moment, is that posts do not appear in Fediverse timelines. I don’t know why that is yet. I also noticed that if I follow from mastodon instances, I can, but from Firefish I can’t. It’s not meant to work, so my experimentation is out of curiousity.

The Next Step

The next step will be to create a subdomain and experiment with a wordpress blog. I expect this to work flawlessly, but what I really want to see, is whether I can get the webfinger to work so that it displays several users for a single instance. If I succeed then I will have demonstrated that Wordpress can be a full-fledged Fediverse instance.

Any french speaker in Switzerland knows this frustration.

Byrichard

Any french speaker knows this frustration. You see that a new service is available to Switzerland, drop by the site and everything is in German. Google latitude is in German and hundreds of other sites too. The most recent site to suffer from this curse is Nokia music, recently made available in Switzerland.

It would seem that those in charge of marketing in Switzerland believe that people in Switzerland only speak German. French speakers exist too, and so do the Italian speakers. As web content creators maybe it’s time for you to offer us the services in French so that we may use them.

Will companies providing services in Switzerland ever realise we’re not all German speakers? That remains to be seen. Nokia music, you’ve lost my interest.

100 Move Day Goals reached

100 Move Day Goals reached

Byrichard

I have 100 move day goals reached. The difficulty of this goal depends on how high you set the bar. If you set the bar at two hundred calories a day then the goal is easy to achieve. If you set the goal at 500 or 600 calories then the achievement is slightly more interesting. 


An easy goal to reach, one days with the move goal achieved.


I would have reached it sooner if the screen on the apple watch had not broken and if I had not had a few sub-goal days over the last three or more months. I set the goal high enough that I would need to walk for more than two hours a day to reach it. On the bike I reach it within 40 to 50 minutes. 


I still haven’t had a perfect month. To have a perfect month I would have had to burn 550 calories every day for a month. I’d tease myself by saying that I set the goal to high but I reach it almost every day. It’s fun to set it high enough for it to be a challenge. It would be cheating if I set it lower. 


Despite its simplicity these goals and medals are having a positive impact on my fitness habits. Sometimes I reach the goal by sitting very little. On days when I go for long hikes or cycle I double or triple the move goal so I exceed the requirements of this badge. 


On other days I burn less than 200 calories over the day and I rely on the evening Zwift session to get myself over the daily goal. This habit is great. Earlier this week the CDC issued a statement that people should do any form of exercise for two and a half hours a day. They even removed the requirement for it to be in ten minute or more sessions. I exceeded this requirement by five and a half hours a week over the last four weeks. 


Monthly challenge


In August the monthly challenge was to double the move goal eight times. In Octobre the challenge was to do 27 workouts in a month. In November the challenge is to move 189 kilometres. If I put the road tyre back on the rear wheel of my bike then this is an easy challenge to reach. My bike rides range between 20-50km a ride. If virtual bike rides count then I would have achieved this goal days ago. As things are we’re half way through the month and I have just 80km. 

Prompt Engineering and chatGPT

Prompt Engineering and chatGPT

Byrichard

If you follow chatGPT and AI courses you will often come across the term “Prompt Engineering”. Prompt Engineering is the art and science of writing instructions so that AI understands what you would like to do. With time and practice you can be as specific as you like. You can fine tune your request until you get precisely what you are looking for. 


The Limit of chatGPT. 


“As an AI language model, my responses are generated based on a mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available data. These sources may contain publicly available information up until my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. It’s important to note that I do not have direct knowledge of specific data gathering practices or the individual sources used to train me.”

chatGPT


The limit of chatGPT is that it goes up to September 2021. This means that code solutions for specific apps, like a css style sheet for calckey.social won’t work. You need to ask questions about CSS and adapt the resulting code to work with Calckey or other newer code. 


Writing Tic Tac Toe and Hangman


Last night I asked chatGPT to write Tic Tac Toe, Hangman and a ToDo app in C++, php and java. The results were variably successful but this shows the power of chatGPT. In theory you could browse to github or other website and just cut and paste the code. The result is similar, but with one key difference. 


With chatGPT you can ask “create a simple nav bar that changes colour on mouse over using UL and LI tags and it will generate that code for you. 


“please create a simple nav menu using html ul and li elements and style it with css so that text is highlighted on mouseover”.


html and css code for a nav bar
html and css code for a nav bar


The point is that chatGPT can write entire apps, if you engineer the right prompt, but it can also generate snippets of code for you with a specific result in mind, as in the example above. 


Show something in a table


When you ask chatGPT for a table of things to do in barefoot shoes
When you ask chatGPT for a table of things to do in barefoot shoes


Show something in an HTML table


When you ask chatGPT for a table of things to do in barefoot shoes in html
When you ask chatGPT for a table of things to do in barefoot shoes in html


As you see chatGPT understands the instruction, provides me with a result which I can then tweak to match my desired outcome. Instead of spending ten to fifteen minutes writing and formatting the table with this data, I can get chatGPT to do it for me. 


In What is Generative AI Pinar Seyhan Demirdag said of AI that “AI does the work and humans focuses on the vision, the idea and the purpose.” In other words AI is an assistant. The more you study prompt engineeering, and the better you get at getting the desired outcome, the more useful and valuable AI, and your skills in using AI become. 


And Finally, For Now


AI behaves like a person. The more clearly and concisely your instructions are, the more the output will reflect your desired outcome. AI is constantly learning from Big Data. Our task is to learn how to give instuctions, prompt engineering, as it’s called within the industry, so that AI provides the results we require, saving both time, and to some degree, learning. I have just scraped the surface. I want to learn more. 

Post On Your Own Site and Syndicate Everywhere Applied

Post On Your Own Site and Syndicate Everywhere Applied

Byrichard

Until the pandemic I used Facebook (FB), Twitter(TW) and Instagram(IG) daily. As pandemic solitude took its toll on me I dumped Facebook, and then I dumped Instagram. I started blogging again, and I continued to use Twitter for another two years, before finally dumping Twitter too.


For years I was a daily user of FB, TW and IG but as life became more solitary, and as trolling became more common, so it made sense to dump the social networks that made me suffer from Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO). When life was normal, and social, it made sense to be where all the normal people with normal lives were. It’s as my life derailed from the standard model life that you see in series, films and FB and IG that I needed to break away. I dumped the social media sites for the open web.


I came across the concept of [POSSE this morning. “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”](https://indieweb.org/POSSE). That is what I have been doing with the ActiveHub plugin for WordPress. I have written several posts about how I like to post on my blog, and see it appear across the Fediverse, natively.


In [this article](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon) the concept is discussed as being ten years old but it’s older than that. Think back to Geocities, AncientSites and other free personal website opportunities. Before social media became popular everyone had their own web page, or web pages, as well as a guest book and possibly even a web forum and more. With time people moved towards the place where everyone had gathered.


Imagine, you’re a uni student, surrounded by people, and everyone is part of Facebook. In such an environment it makes sense for individuals to join the site where everyone else is, and to forget their personal blogs. The Social network, or Social Graph, as utilitiarian people called it became centralised.


The paradox is that whilst our network became more concentrated around TW, IG, FB and other sites so the conversations between friends and social networks shrank, in favour of influencers and other sources of social media noise pollution.


I left IG because it stopped being a place to share nice photos from my daily life, and for IRL friends to enjoy them, and a place where I wasted time looking at content by strangers. That’s where the POSSE concept comes back in.


For years people said “I don’t blog because no one will follow the link from Twitter” but now things have changed. If I share photos and blog posts from my blog to the fediverse they are part of the fediverse. They are native to the platform. When people want to “read more” they click and the rest of the text appears. Instead of navigating to a new tab, you just unroll the blog post and read.


In the [Verge Posse article](https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon) they discuss posting to a dozen different social networks, but in my opinion this misses the strength of the fediverse. As WordPress, Firefish and other networks connect to Mastodon, and as BlueSky and other apps develop their own system, so it becomes possible to aggregate everything together, without having to create a post per system.


The interest lies in combining BlueSky with ActivityPub, and other upcoming solutions. When all of them have interfaces that make them compatible with each other, so the need to post to six websites is reduced to the need to post to a single site, and for it to propagate everywhere.


Back in the day we had blog rings. For years now WordPress has had a form of syndication through Jetpack and WordPress.com. Although I see very few mentions of it, WordPress is already closely syndicated and integrated, to create a community of communities, that use WordPress, whether Self-hosted or shared to share blog posts, and everything that blogs cover.


With FB, IG and TW we forgot about personal websites because we could share photos, events and conversations in a simple to use, centralised location. With TW, IG and FB losing their moral compass so the age of decentralisation is back, except that although we might be writing for a website that has a single user, we are syndicated everywhere, thanks to ActivityPub and other solutions.


These days I spend more focused time writing blog posts than I do using social media. I prefer to invest my time in projects, rather than looking for superficial conversations on microblogging platforms like Twitter.

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