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The Site Has Migrated

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Although it is absurd i decided to migrate the blog from https://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/ to https://blog.main-vision.com/. It is absurd because the website has been at the same URL since 2004 or so, and to move it is to lose years of hyperlinks. At the same time the updated URL should be preferred by search engines.

The Blog Is In The Fediverse

It is also part of the fediverse now, which means that every post can be followed by people natively on the fediverse, rather tha via RSS, Jetpack and more. In theory this should make the site more visible. It will take a little time for search engines to update their links but when they do things will be back to normal.

WordPress Doesn’t Like To Be In Two Places At Once

WordPress doesn’t like to be in two places at once, which is why I was forced to ship or get off the pot. I might have modified one word to make it more family friendly. The point is that plugins hate when they find that they are at two URLs. You fix the blog in one place, and the second place will break the place you just fixed. The result is that you’re forced to choose one, or the other. WordPress is fine in being in two or three places, but plugins hate being in limbo.

Discontinuing the Hugo Version

Although I really like playing with Hugo, the static website generator I dislike how slow it is to update a website with so many pages and hyperlinks. Generating the site takes a short amount of time, but updating the website online takes ages, and because of this it has become unsustainable to continue the experiment. When I find a more efficient way of updating just the pages that have changed, on the server, I can revert to playing with Hugo.

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Of Casio and Smart Watches

Byrichard

Over the last five and a half years I have tracked every walk that I have been on, and I have tracked about five and a half million steps per year. That’s a lot of steps and a lot of going around in clrcles. Going around in clrcles makes tracking walks with smart watches/gps watches less interesting. That’s probably why I have been distracted by Casio watches.


I haven’t been distracted by the 300-600 CHF watches. I’ve been distracted by the 30-50CHF ones. The simple watches that people of my age wore as children. These are simple, easy to use watches that have batteries that are meant to last for 10 years between battery changes. Compare that to one day for the Apple Watch and 30 days for Suunto and Garmin watches.


There is something cosier about a watch that doesn’t speak with the world, a watch that tells the time, has an alarm or five, one or two time zones, and that familiar beep beep, that is turned off, but could exist, should we want it back.


With this watch you get 10 years of battery life, an alarm clock and you know the time of day. It fits under your shirt sleeve with ease, and you can forget you’re wearing it until you need to know what time with it. For six CHF more you can get this one, with world time, and a timer. Timers are most useful when you’re cooking, to know when to do the next step.


The pandemic affects us in strange ways. I didn’t expect to rekindle my interest in simple casio watches but for some reason the pandemic has. For three years, over this pandemic I have walked in circles, and my interest in that data has waned, so simple watches have re-awoken simpler desires for simpler watches.


Don’t be mistaken though. These are simple, limited watches and I want them to do more, but conversely I like the idea of wearing a watch for as long as I want, without having to recharge it. It doesn’t nag me, unless I tell it to wake me up, or to tell me that 20 minutes have elapsed.

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Twitter IRL

Byrichard

Last night I went to the London twitter meetup and enjoyed the event. I’m used to going out and hearing people talk about music and other things but here is a community that was talking about technology and internet-based activities. Sizemore and Trusted Places organised the event which took place at the Ishtar restaurant.


As a result of my taking my camera with me I was put in charge of covering the event whilst Jess interviewed people about how and why they use twitter. We got some interesting responses from those who use it heavily, less frequently, or have just heard about it. All of this footage is now digitised and should be worked on tomorrow afternoon. Once the footage is edited it may appear on Geek entertainment TV as a four or five-minute piece.


What I liked about this event is that its people are interested in and active in new media activities. As I spoke to Loud Mouth Man he told me of his show called the Old Grey video test. It’s an interesting program where a group of people with webcams in a number of locations talk to each other via video chat. What makes this particularly interesting is the fact that they’re switching from one camera and one person to another camera and another person. It means that you can watch the speakers as they address the issues they have decided to cover for that specific episode.  As of yet I’ve only watched one episode but I will definitely watch the second one very soon.


I also spoke to Walid of Trustedplaces and he told me about how they were moving to video reviews as mentioned in their blog. Here is one example of the work they’re doing.


Pictures of the event can be found here and here.


Overall the night was well received by the people who participated and I’m already looking forward to the next one in the near future I hope. I’ll work on getting the video ready as soon as possible so that you may hear for yourselves what people had to say.

Adobe and Digital Rights Managment.

Byrichard

Digital rights managment is a sore point for a lot of users. Anyone with more than one laptop dislikes how their playlists can’t be synchronised across more than one machine without a little ingenuity. Adobe offers DRM content control for DRM

Media control of content is provided by the Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server, which sets user access limits – even after a file is downloaded. Adobe’s server integrates with Adobe AIR, which allows putting applications on a device and could challenge both Sun Java and Microsoft for user interaction on multiple platforms.

I hope that what this means is a greater flexibility for the distribution and sharing of media content once the content is bought. Does this mean that as new companies and devices are used that we will find new devices being supported. Does it mean that individuals with full software licenses will be able to select restrictions of the content the content producers are generating rather than both Microsoft and Apple?

This is related to the discussion about iDRM  that I followed a few months ago in London. It will be interesting to see how this changes the rules

Being European and Paying for Facebook and Instagram
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Being European and Paying for Facebook and Instagram

Byrichard

For those of us living in Europe we now have the option of paying for Facebook and Instagram, not to see ads. In theory this is fantastic and we should be jumping on the opportunity.


I don’t feel that way. I had plenty of conversations, with uni friends, colleagues and more, until Zynga brought Farmville. When Farmville spammed our timelines and killed all conversations the value of Facebook as social network was destroyed because instead of conversing and networking we were taking care of virtual farms. We went from spending time with friends to wasting our online time. Our social bonds degraded and Facebook went from being social to being lonely.


I would have been tempted to pay for Instagram, before it was bought by Facebook. Before instagram was bought by Facebook it was a network of friends sharing photos of things they saw, did, ate, or experienced. After Facebook it became a network of influencer spam and adverts, with posts by friends becoming invisible. It became a network of strangers, rather than the network of friends it had been before then.


We might pay not to see adverts but influencer garbage is so ingrained into timelines that there is no way that I would pay to use a network, that, instead of being social, is utilitarian. When I was trolled two or three times on Facebook, during lock down, and it deeply affected my mental health, I dumped Facebook and eventually Instagram too, to keep my mental health sustainable.


Social Media and Utilitarianism


One of the worst things about social media, since 2007 or so, is that it has become utilitarian, rather than social. Instead of people being part of a forum to have pleasant conversations it has become a place for people to use others. Influencers are there to exploit the gullible. Brands are forcing us to see tweets that have no value. Facebook forces to see posts and photos by random strangers that are “influencers”. This isn’t social. This is clickbait, as with YouTube.


I have a pro Flickr account, and I am paying for my Mastodon instance, but I seriously question whether to delete it. I am tired of the utilitarianism that I see, on Mastodon, which is why I deleted almost all the Fediverse instance accounts I have had so far.


## A Reason for Web Forums to Come Back


If we have to pay for all social media sites soon, then it gives us a good reason to revive web forums and related projects. For a long time the unique selling point of social media is that it was cheap, dynamic, and affordable/free. Now that it’s no longer cheap and affordable it provides us with a reason to setup niche websites for those of us with specific interests that are not covered by social media.


And Finally


Twitter wants us to pay 140 CHF per year. Facebook wants us to pay 120 or more per year. That’s 260 CHF per year for two social networks that spent so much effort forcing irrelevant content on to us that their social networks are worthless. It would have been worth paying a decade ago. Paying now is a waste of money. I won’t pay 20-30 CHF a month for social networks that make me feel lonelier than if I was not using them.


In the long run “Social media” is going to become very expensive if we have to pay to use all these sites.

2 Comments

  1. @admin-richard If you have access to the .htaccess file on your website, you could add redirects for the old URLs so that they don't break. Would help search engines find your new blog pages & still reward any old backlinks. A few lines like this:Redirect 301 /richard/blog/my-lovehate-relationship-with-twitter-turns-ten/ https://blog.main-vision.com/my-lovehate-relationship-with-twitter-turns-ten/You could probably do it all in a couple of RewriteEngine / RewriteRule lines in htaccess too.

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