Category Archives: desiderata

Shoulds

cheerleader

A factoid that got me thinking:

Upwards of a trillion photographs will be taken in 2017, the vast majority on mobile phones (only about 10% [still 100 billion] with digital cameras); and something like 4.7 trillion photos will be “stored” by the end of 2017. Around 50 million are uploaded to Flickr (120 million “users”, many inactive) each month.

If a trillion photos are taken each year, how are we to think about the hundreds or thousands we might take? If the world has 7.5 billion people, how shall we think about being just one?

Those questions provoked this note-to-self, scribbled just before the lights went out last night:

Strive for consistency and principled engagement, and to build things that express the qualities you respect and admire. Fashion a legacy, by working to be clear about what you’re doing. Presence, engagement, candor; shun the ignoble and the invidious. Don’t succumb to pride. Practise humility and honor, don’t waste time or energy. Make things. Engage with people. Serve.

Sort of a tall order, but most of it seems entirely relevant to photography and to writing.

OMG it WORKED!

Above you can see a Page that federates my Zotero and Delicious posts and also my additions to LibraryThing, but not as yet retroactively… and there’s something odd about the chronology of items pulled from Delicious

UPDATE: I’ve removed the (rather too flaky) Delicious feed and split off the LibraryThing feed to a separate Menu item.

Something I miss

The following is suffused with my own technological cluelessness, and is mostly an effort to articulate a problem and perhaps generate steps toward a solution.

We’ve all had the experience of rug-pulled-from-beneath with software or utilities or apps, and whenever a favorite is acquired by one of the big kids (Google, Yahoo, etc.) we know it’s just a matter of time until our hearts will be broken again (Google Reader, anyone?). The one I miss most is Delicious, which produced an RSS feed that I could pipe directly to my blog, such that items I’d collected via Delicious (via a menu-bar bookmarklet) would show up as blog entries, thus logging the spoor of my wanderings. It was easy. Yahoo bought Delicious in 2005, did nothing with it, then sold it a couple of years ago. Because the browser extension was broken with the sale, I’ve scarcely used Delicious for the last couple of years, and Zotero has been my tool of choice for KFTF… but I’ve used Zotero only on my desktop machine, and haven’t (until now) explored the possibility of piping my saved items to my blog. The new beginning with WordPress might embolden me to experiment anew.

So here’s what I’d LIKE to be able to do:

  • Implement RSS delivery of bookmarked items from Delicious AND Zotero AND Evernote as blog postings, WITH whatever tagging or enfolderation I’ve provided
  • Retroactively INSERT bookmarked items into the WordPress blog archive, by date of addition (dream on…)
  • profit

I did manage to EXPORT my Delicious links as an html file…

and there’s a fetch_feed tag and/or ‘RSSin Page’ plugin that might solve the problem for Zotero

Evernote seems to have abruptly abandoned RSS (“At this point, the feature was imposing excessive load on the service relative to its use and utility, and the decision was made to remove it…”)… and this just in: “We have replaced the RSS feed with our new Reminders “Daily Digest” feature…”.

And I’d add in my LibraryThing RSS feed too, if I could figure out how.

So I know more about the issue and the possibilities than I did a couple of hours ago, and I hope for Deus ex Machina but doubt me an it will be forthcoming.