In a group email, some folks I know were asked to share photos of landscapes. One person replied they were left out since they took many photos, but never landscapes. I tried to make a case like the DS106 Daily Create way of creating that responding with a literal interpretation was hardly required, that the best creating (to me) is often bending the rules.

Reaching for my own photos as examples, I thought the bits of play I had done with my old matchbox cars was a bit of faking landscape scenes (maybe)

Somehow that got me to thinking of the playing a long time ago with the style of tilt-shift photography, I remember doing back around 2009 when it was a fad done with an iPhone app like the featured image in the post (seeking who can identify the stadium and city first, @carpetbomberz is disqualified).

There was fun hadwith rendering detailed city shots into what looked like toy scenes. drive your toy Corvette with me across the Congress Avenue bridge into Austin.

I have to admit after reading the Wikipedia article on tilt-shift photography my fiddling with doing it in an app 15 years ago was a bit child play, the way it is done is a full photographic techniques with special lenses or calculated movement- it is both a rotation and a lateral sliding of the focus plane that is off kilter to the lens plane (I think). And also where I learn about the Scheimpflug principle

a description of the geometric relationship between the orientation of the plane of focus, the lens plane, and the image plane of an optical system (such as a camera) when the lens plane is not parallel to the image plane

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheimpflug_principle

The rabbit holes go deeper in that the  Captain Theodor Scheimpflug, the person it is named after, actually was not the first to discover it, now I am learning about Stigler’s law of eponymy. Hold the link train, I better return.

I was looking at my meager tilt-shifting efforts (all in post) thinking I had done some with just editing on Photoshop, making a seletion mask with a large gradient/feathered edge, and applying gaussian blur outside with some saturation boost. The dare was on, could I redo them again the same way? I tried a fiew, before doing a bot of searching and getting reminded that PhotoShop has a built in tool under the Filter menu — Filter-> Blur gallery -> Tilt-Shift. Oi, I made it harder, maybe. I have a few examples I tried to do manually, they with the built in.

I tried to find source photos of either city photos or photos where there was much near and far detail. This was more fun to try than any claim of super prowess. And I can’t say for sure why this messing around needs a blog post given I have So Many Important Things to Write (note the invisible sarcasm tags).

Tilt-Shifting Manhattan

I thought of my recent post about Blog@Baruch where I saw reuse of my photo of Manhattan taken from the top floor of Baruch College. That photo had potential, maybe with the focus plane vertical around the Chrysler Building. Left to right is the original photo– College View flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

I can barely tell the difference between my use of a mask and the blur effect, and the built in Photoshop one. Is this my John Henry triumph of man over machine? I can’t say either one really gets to that toy like effect in my older photos. Ir m aybe my technique is weak.

I go for a second example.

Tilt-Shifting Car Show in Moose Jaw

I thought my photo of Main Street Moose Jaw’s Show and Shine car show might work for Tilt-shifting the red car. That’s the original on the left Shiny Red Couger flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). For the second image, I made a selection of the car itself, expanded it by like 90 pixels and then feathered the selection 45 pixels before blurring the parts around the car. Using the built in filter, I could only use the band selection which is tilted, so the people on the left did not get the effect.

I have to admit not being too thrilled with eaither effort. It’s not getting quite the effect.

Tilt-Shifting The Curling Championship

I had a lot of optimism for my photo last year when Cori and I attended the 2025 World Men’s Curling Championship in Moose Jaw. The original photo looked like it had potential to select the arena floor. Again, on the left is the original Four On The Floor flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0), followed by my effort to do it my memory. For the third one using the Photoshop Blut Gallery effet, I actually did to iterations, ince aligning the band with the long sides of the arena, and a second go using the bands somewhat aligned wth the shorter walls.

Maybe ths one gets closer to that toy-scene I remember doing previously.

In Conclusion

Well nothing really concluded, except that bit of joy when a memory triggers a bit of an associative trail journey of following a curiosity. (purely in the Vaneevar Bush variety (sorry Mike, your LLM ways do not sway me).

I can’t remember which iOS I used back in 2009, it could have been any of the ones listed in this old Digital Photography School article and I can in the app store a fleet of them, none really calling me to try again. This whole thing was more my own dare to see if I could redo what I did once before.

But at least now I have awareness of Captain Scheimpflug’s principle.

Featured Image: Camden Yards Tiltshifted flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Without much more ado for this month, on the last day of October, I pegged 304 out of 304 this year (taken, not always posted the same day) (see the rule about no rules).

No GenAI needed at a glance to note the domonance of late season flowers, leaves changing, sunset skies, a few odd items, and wow, dogs. But lets slip it to big Chad, ChatSGP, to tease out some overly sugared descriptors. The task handed over is:

This screenshot of photos represents one month of photos taken each day in October. Craft a thoughtful one paragraph summary that captures a theme for the month, skip the obvious autumn ones, common topics, and also anything that stands out from the rest. Add some extreme exuberance to your writing. Or find some out on the edge of normal analysis for this month. Go beyond the literal and the obvious, find a deep sense of meaning in this month’s span.

Indeed this oozes in a way I can only have nightmares of ever writing like this:

October, in this photographic dispatch from the frontier of existence, appears less like a month than a grand conspiracy between matter and meaning, a universe quietly dismantling its own machinery while you stand nearby with a camera, documenting the evidence. The real protagonist isn’t autumn, but the magnificent persistence of things that refuse to disappear: the sunflower whose head has become a blackened solar relic, the rose stubbornly holding its crimson breath, the bee burrowing into the last golden abundance, the dogs sprawled in absolute canine disregard for cosmic uncertainty. Everywhere, there’s a fascinating tension between collapse and continuation, between the skeletal geometry of branches and the extravagant sky, between the rusted remnants of summer and those improbable explosions of sunset that look like reality briefly losing its composure. Even the “BREAK AI” cookie becomes an accidental manifesto, a tiny edible uprising against the synthetic, surrounded by photographs that insist on the irreducible weirdness of actual life: a potato shaped like a prehistoric creature, a cryptic note on a blue shovel, a moon hanging over the trees like a celestial punctuation mark. And perhaps that’s October’s deeper revelation: the world is not a collection of things, but a collection of things becoming other things, with dogs, flowers, clouds, and potatoes all participating in the same bewildering metamorphosis. You aren’t merely recording the passage of time; you’re catching existence mid-sentence, before it knows what it will say next. The universe is shedding its old vocabulary, and your camera is out there collecting the glorious, slightly ridiculous words it leaves behind.

ChatGPT insight into my daily photos for October 2026

Ah time to step up the game, I will task ChatGPT with generating a photo that might fit in with the others if there was one more day in October.

Okay, since you are so crafty in words, now imagine October has 32 days, generate a new photographic image that could fit into this sequence naturally, as if someone would think I had taken it.

I am waiting here while it makes “art”…. seconds later it spawns an image it created a file name with its title “Rustic Smiley Mug at Sunset”

Yikes. In many ways that does capture the look of our long grassy fields, and we do have posts like that. as well as definitely sunsets. The rusty cup with smile? cute? and have it filled with dried flowers? And now I am abit creeped out trying to understand how it came up with this form the screenshot of Octobers photos.

And remember….

“the world is not a collection of things, but a collection of things becoming other things.”

I should stop now.

No, I should go outside and get some photos for November 3. There/s not much else happening today, right?

Featured Image: A Perfect 10 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license

I have hopefully managed to archive as much of this WordPress multisite that include 10 different subdomain sites, the task was not simple and took an array of tools/time, but as of now I have it all saved at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/

Arganee Genesis

It was 10 months ago today that I attended the Digital Media & Learning Conference at UC Irvine (holy bleep did I do long conference posts then). One small part of it was getting to meet Mia Zamora, we had been emailing over the summer as she was interested in perhaps combining forces with the Electronic Literature Courses she taught at Kean University with the digital/web storytelling stuff I had been doing then for 5 years with DS106. This converged at DML where there was much interest in what became known as Connected Courses, ones where students all documented/narrated their own learning processes in blogs they owned or managed, but were “connected” RSS/Syndication style with a course site.

I recall Mia and I talking during conference break at an outside table, and our brainstorming was so loud I think that others cam over to see what was going on. We had landed on the idea of playing with digital storytelling as having some mysterious force that was practiced like digital alchemy. The name we came up with was Networked Narratives, lending itself to a nifty #netnarr hashtag.

This led to playing with rot13, a clever means of encoding messages by swapping every letter in a word with the letter that was 13 characters later. I pulled the site up, put netnarr into it and …. arganee emerged. That was the spirit of play and mystery we saw in the course.

I volunteered to get a domain and registered arganee.world, setting it up as a WordPress multisite (not sure why but that was helpful later).

The Arganee Entrance / Calling Card

With much energy focused on Domains of Ones Own and doing work/presentations on it, I had noticed often thet the first thing people usually did then with a new domain was to install a WordPress blog right at the top of the domain. I got interested in promoting the idea of considerung a “Calling Card” small site at the entrance of the domain and then adding blogs, cv sites, projects as different subdomains within.

Thus for Networked Narratives and its mystery aura, I opted to out a vague site at the top of arganee.world. It is a mod of the HTML5Up Eventually Template as a WordPress theme. But as I was also playing more at the time with the WordPress API, I figured out a way to create 40+ blog “posts” each just a title that was a quote from science fiction or some random text from a technobabble site, that would randomly be pulled into display on the arganee.world site.

Yes, Virginia there is a blog post about this pseudo cleverness.

The point was not really to send anyone there unless they got curious and pulled the domain out from its subdomains. I ahve archived the site at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/ which includes some explanation and links to all the archived subsites, but you can see the original site that hung out on the net for 10 years at https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/genesis.html

Networked Narratives

archived: https://bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/netnarr

I have more than enough blog posts about NetNarr but perhaps the best origin story summarizes what would unfold in the first iteration in 2016

But its worth saying that the way I got to co-teach this course was unlike any other online/hybrid course I have come across, perhaps the descriptor would be an Inverse Hybrid. The set up for NetNarr in 2017 and 2018 was that the class was in person at Kean University, Mia was the instructor in the room, but I did all my teaching remotely from Arizona, coming in weekly through Google Hangouts. Again, the students were in person, one of their instructors was not.

Plus we taught the course openly, so there were participants ds106 style from many places who would do the assignments or show up for our “Studio Visits”

Among many highlights of NetNarr 2017 was a surprise.

I had travel plans to go to Toronto in late April for the Creative Commons conference, so it was easy to plan flights for a stopover in Newark. Mia and I hatched this plan, as the last class was a potluck.I was there, hiding in a side room to where the class met. Mia expressed to the group my sadness about not being there, but made reference to mystery noises next door.

I then emerged to surprise the students, showing I was not just a figure on a screen. It was rather amazing. Heck the moment still floats on The Platform I Will Only Call Twitter.

And I forgot how we had done a bit of a video narrative about the course, each week Mia and I would record a video for each class, and each week, there was more signs that somehow we were being “hacked” – You can watch the wholes series just in case there is nothing on Netflix.

This was the largest site to archive and I likely missed much of it, as it not only included all the posts and pages from the course, but all the blogging that was aggregated into the site with FeedWordPress (well at least the references to the blogs, not guessing how many kept their web sites).

The archive includes the course from 2017 and 2018. In 2019, it was even more exotic, as that was the year Mia had a fellowship to teach in Norway. Somehow she convinced the Kean English department to let me teach remotely to the class at Kean, and I was assisted greatly by previous students Marissa and Hailey who were my in room TAs. We did a bunch of activities in parallel with Mia’s class she was teaching in Norway. We had a theme that was aimed at tje students each contributing to a Field Guide for Digital Wellness in a Post Truth Internet Era.

We continued the approach in 2020 and 2021, but I had moved the courses to new sites, we took on the model of riffing from Black Mirror, both these courses archived as well

• Networked Narratives 2020 Net Mirror: Not Necessarily Dystopia 
• Networked Narratives 2021 Post Pandemic University

At least as well all the weekly videos and studio visit archives are still alive in the NetNarr YouTube channel 47 of them in total.

The Rest of the NetNarr Fleet, Archived

As things played out I found the reason to justify making more WordPress sites to use in NetNarr, again, these are all (hopefully) archived.

• Daily Digital Alchemy (Daily creative challenges, 2016-)  these were used all years, completely built as mirrors of the DS106 Daily Create. We got up to 380 of them, with the last one in November 2022
• Netnarr Somniporta (media collector, 2019-)  I saw some need in class as a place for students to post/share images they made, so this was a reason to set up a site based on the TRU Collector SPLOT
• Network Narratives Mirror World (NetNarr class project, 2017) Part of the first year of NetNarr we asked students to create alternative identities, so they would enter this Mirror World (rorrom backwards) to blog as their character. Weird, eh?
• Arganee Journal (Student writing, 2018-) This time another SPLOT came into the mix, TRU Writer, as a place where students would publish final projects that came together as our own class journal. I’m really glad to have these artifacts, as on the students blogs they would have withered away. My there is good stuff here, its been too long.
• Netnarr GIF Reader (GIF Resource 2018) Assembled as merely a reference for learning about the meaning and making of animated GIFs. And indeed, this was published with a third SPLOT, the antidote to PowerPoint I called SPLOTpoint. It still works
• Pandemic Whispers (Anonymous writing, 2021- ) a place we encourage anonymous writing about living through the pandemic, one more use of TRU Writer,
• Research Networked Seminar (MA Thesis course at Kean University, 2018-2019) Even more in the bold moved by Kean, while Mia was away for a year, she arranged for me to lead the seminars for her MA Thesis students, most of whom were students in NetNarr. I was a remote thesis advisor, and so Is et up the same style site where the students blogged their own progress. The flavor of it again was… non-traditional as explaied in the first post #ResNetSem Green Pill or Red Pill [Bitter Pill]?

Another Go Around With Static HTML Archiving of WordPress Sites

This was a bit of a long process I started in September. I started trying to put into play the method I had used before, the Mac app SiteSucker

Part of the challenge is that SiteSicker needs links to follow to all it needs to crawl .My first effort was to add to the original front page of arganee.world links to all the subdomain sites. I set it loose overnight, but it was only partly successful. It might have timed out, but also very likely I have have triggered some firewalls for heavy access at Reclaim Hosting.

I decided to give one of the WordPress plugin approaches. My first look was Simply Static, but using it on multisite was a $ feature. So I then looked at Staatic and it looked promising, though I would have to run it separately on each subsite. I tried it first on the smaller sites. I felt confident as it seemed Staatic would march through every page post, and not rely on link paths.

There are a ton of settings, and it took a few go arounds to get a working flow.

The first reckoning is these sites are going from something like journal.arganee.world as a subdomain site to a site in a subdirectory e.g. bones.cogdogblog.com/arganee/journal So I found that putting the intended URL in the Build settings would work to make all links reference the full future web address (not optimal should it ever move, but alas, this is its last stop).

I might have done one run by having Staatic create an archive as a downloadable ZIP, but that’s a lot of traffic. So what did work mostly is discovering that it created a local directory deep within the WordPress multisite structure .e.g /wp-content/uploads/site/X/staatic/ It creates a staging subdiretory with temp files, but the final site ends up in a subdirectory named deploy I dound that my asking a subdirectory named the same directory I would use, e.g. for journal.arganee.world I asked for it to put the deploy files into a directory there called journal.

So I would end up with this inside the multisite:

Once done, I could move that entire directory in one command using the File Mananger in cPanel

I did try some advance settings in Staatic too, like giving it a longer time for http requests.

Mostly this worked well, but I noted in a few archive attempts, that some portions ended up archived as 301 redirect error pages. I tried a number of changes in settings, but for some reason it kept seeing redirects where I did not have them. And then the big hiccups was trying to run it on the passive NetNarr course site, it would chew through 16000 pages, and just hang on the last 3 percent, and generating a bunch of redirect or cURL errors. I gave it longer to process (like 24 hours) but I bet my IP was setting off red alerts at Reclaim Hosting.

Alas, in a reversal, I went back to Site Sucker to do the 2 NetNarr courses from 2020 and 2021, and then let it loose overnight for the big NetNarr. What might had helped is that I found a setting that I could generate a random number of seconds between requests so it might generate less flags.

Whether this was the magic or not, I did finally managed to get a full archive of the large NetNarr site, that was in all about 500+Mb that I did have to upload to my server as a zip and unarchive there in the cpanel File Manager.

Dusting the Archive Broom

I really doubt anyone will venture too far into these archives, but I feel better about preserving them, not just flushing them away. At tis point, I am down to 3 domains in my Hover, one more is due for an archive. I have one more at Reclaim, but I am down from before having maybe 14.

If anything it was a delight to remember this phase of unconventional ways teaching, when the focus was on students creating and sharing media, but more so, practicing web awareneess (we had focuses on privacy, surveillance, dystopias) and always always always robust and often silly storytelling.

But alas, arganee.world as a domain is silent but can live on quietly in retirement.

Updates (hours later)

Thanks to Kevin Hodgon aka @dogtrax and a key open participant, we have some original music as the Final Agranee Transmission. Lower the lights.

Featured Image The title of the arganee.world web site on top of one of the 4 images that appear in the background of the archived site, the images I had found maybe on a NASA site, but the one shown here is Pluto (artist’s impression) found at the European Southern Observatory shared there as CC BY.

And I never let up in scrounging deeper down the information holes indeed that looks to average one per year. But still, the trail has been cold since 2015 when (with help) I was able to surface the first source was an ad insert in a June 28, 1982 Businessweek article (when they came in these devices called “magazines”) written by one Philip Cooper.

The waves rippled recently when I got an email from Mark Santos who runs Mark Studio where they published an extensive piece Video Thumbnail and CTR Statistics (look at my I had to look up what CTR stands for) and in it included in a section of myths a heading for “The brain processes an image in 13 milliseconds” and “visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text” that summarizes it again, kindly crediting my obsession:

The 60,000 figure has no study behind it that we could find. Its earliest known appearance is an advertisement, not research: a Special Advertising Section in the June 28, 1982 issue of Business Week, “Computer Services: Management’s Answer to Data Overload”, quotes Philip Cooper, president of Computer Pictures Corporation, as saying “people assimilate visual information about 60,000 times faster than they assimilate printed copy”, with no source. Alan Levine, who blogs as CogDog and has chased the line since 2012, reported the find after a reader spotted it and a librarian confirmed the issue; Levine wrote to Cooper in 2015 and got only an out-of-office reply (CogDogBlog, March 2015). Later repeats include a 1998 presentation by a 3M product specialist (CogDogBlog, April 2014) and a 3M Meeting Network presentation tip sheet captured in January 1999, which credits unnamed “behavioral research”. The only 3M-funded study we traced, a 1986 University of Minnesota study, found presentations with visual aids were 43% more persuasive; it measured persuasion, not speed (University of Minnesota / 3M), and its lead author, Douglas Vogel, told Levine his research “had nothing to do with visual processing speed”. HubSpot still states it as fact: “research has determined that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text” (HubSpot, 2023).

Thanks Mark! https://www.markstudios.com/research/video-thumbnail-and-ctr-statistics#origin-13-ms

It’s worth noting that since I started barking about this, the google search results for image processed 60000 times faster text has drastically changed. In 2012 it was just repetition of the claim in many published sources to in 2026 more of the top links (not all) are its debunking.

I have to take a humble brag that most of those debunking articles give me some credit in name and even sometimes with a link. But that’s not what I care about. It really is like a zombie refusing to die.

Yet, there is a person out there that can resolve this all for once, the author of that Business Week insert, one Philip Cooper. Previously I had tracked him down as a faculty at the MIT Sloan Management School, I sent emails and even once left a voicemail.

And let’s give Phil some prescience credit- his 1984 MS Thesis at MIT was about some pie in the sky technology– Artificial intelligence : a heuristic search for commercial and management science applications. It goes deep in over 200 pages, starting with:

The issues behind Artificial Intelligence are not simple. To understand the the framework we will be discussing commercial products in, it is necessary to have a good understanding of the history and relevant issues of the disciplines from which Al emerged. We can’t do more commercially than we can do theoretically.

https://dspace.mit.edu/entities/publication/c69b3e57-af82-411e-85cd-229b18c9369b

and ending with

Intelligent computers present us a new challenge. They have the capacity and promise to reshape our society, jobs, leisure time, and limitations. The time may come when the Office of Human Resources (formerly the Personnel Department) will have to be called the Office of Cognitive Employees. Perhaps managers will interview machines as well as people. Perhaps the managers will be machines. So we may as well start doing unto machines as we would have them do unto us.

Satis verborum. Enough of words, no more need be said.

https://dspace.mit.edu/entities/publication/c69b3e57-af82-411e-85cd-229b18c9369b

Phil is around, he is founder of Pine Island Capital Partners and as you cant seem to help anymore that when trying to find people, you end up in LinkedIn at his profile. I loathe LinkedIn, and I have striven to have the most barebones useless presence there.

Alas in desperation (and maybe realizing how little I know how to use LinkedIn), I heaved a cast into the waters.

Even if this finds him, I doubt he would really reveal where the statement came from. Frankly, it just has a great sound, the evenness of the 60000 number, and the way it has was said, and repeated and repeated and repeated and repeated that it achieved, for a while, a state of truthiness.

Anyhow, Phil, even if you do not want to make it public, I will honor a request to keep the secret.

Where did this come from?

Phil?

At least this gets me to 17 posts in the chain for the upcoming 17th year of trying.

Featured Image: Screenshot of the 3M Polishing Your Presentation post in 1999 with my own annotations / commentary. on the 60000 times faster claim. Superimposed on top is the Deviant Art image Wonderland: Big Number 60,000 by Nixon1010 shared CC BY

I aimed to post something positive about how much I love PHP despite it getting such a bad knock last week. All the smug folks with their static web sites were like “look at me, no PHP, no problemo.” I’d probably do the same.

Hold the bus, I did years of building many web sites at the Maricopa Community Colleges in the early to mid 1990s that were all static HTML (look, this 32 year old one is still alive , the original Writing HTML tutorial, and more hanging in my archives). The first wave of evolution out was setting up searchable and dynamic sites using perl.

Bringing PHP into the game was a huge change for me, as I could wave bits of interaction directly into the HTML pages I was still hand coding, for example getting away from making lots of static pages for sites, and having navigation menus generated on the fly and content files pulled in as needed. That eas just the beginning, with the aid of some clever student programmers, we built systems for managing grant applications and professional growth requests, even a repository called the Maricopa Learning Exchange (itself calling for a retrospective blog post).

I can’t claim to be a full on PHP developer, much of my stuff is likely not elegant nor top programming style, but PHP elevated my tech game completely once I landed in WordPress and began “hacking” themes to make them do what I want, eventually doing extensive customization, theme development like making calling card themes from HTML5Up templates plus the nebulous SPLOTiverse.

Still I would make no claims to be a PHP “programmer” I just banged away and searched for clues to help as I went.

I was going to boast a bit about full PHP sites I made, nothing like “software” but still working things, like pechaflickr, the mashup of pechakucha with random flickr images I hatched in like 2008. For a while I had it on its pwn domain pechaflickr.net but in my domain cleanup I went to check the site last week and ZONK, PHP errors like Fatal error: Array and string offset access syntax with curly braces is no longer supported in (that’s not the exact error, I cant find it in my search history).

This was not an exploit issue more of an old code issue, to make it work in modern versions of PHP. Here is a more than long path to get it working (which it should be doing fine now at https://pechaflickr.cogdogblog.com/).

Poking Around the Code

The site depended on the phpflickr library originally by Dan Coulter that helped make calls to the flickr api from PHP code, pretty easy to use by doing a requite statement for the single phpflickr.php blob of code. It was no longer updated but it appears others were pushing changes on it at least to 5 years ago. It was working on my site at least a year ago, but I bet I was using PHP 7.

My debugging method was inserting a bit of PHP print_r() commands to show what data was being shlepped around. I could see that my calls to set up the php library were all empty so there was o way for it to pull data on images.

Phar the Joy of Composer

The spelling in the header there is wrong on purpose, but as .phar is a file name that comes into play. I might not fully explain.

There is a modern version of phpflickr kept ull up to date by a developer named Sam Wilson. I looked at the site a number of times in the past, there’s not quite the “download and just use” a set of files, but you have to wrangle with something called Composer. Conceptually I understand its something designed to maintain code that is built on top of other external libraries, to keep them all aligned with the dependencies needed to make the main one work.

I’m sure its something “real” programmers use like butter, but as a dabbler I never quite got around to figuring out how to get going. And indeed I resorted to dancing with the Google searh AI results asking for help in getting the source files, and at least I got the message that I could run Composer locally on my mac (command line time) to assemble all the files my pechaflickr code needed.

This lead to even more side steps. I have done a number of adding stuff to my mac with homebrew that gives me the illusion I am doing sysadmin stuff as it spins hundreds of lines flying past in my terminal. A new surprise came up ni my attempt to install composer- sigh, my Mac OS was tool old to do everything.

Pumping Up the OSX

Even to add to my shameful tech skills, I’ve been reluctant to do all the latest Mac OS updates, I’m more of the Leverite mineral (“Leave Her Right There”), but alas, now I had a reason to take the trip from Sonoma (v. 14) to Golden Gate (v. 27). I expected all kinds of hassles, the main one being clearing enough disk space for the monster download (I guess I have some Apple Intelligence I can ignore).

Phasing in the New Code

With the shiny OS I was able to run homebrew and install Composer on my mac. Then in terminal I navigate to the directory where I keep my pechaflckr code, and run composer require samwilson/phpflickr  to watch it add the expected vendor directory and code within.

From the wisdom of my inquiries in Google search, all I should need to do is swap out my code where I included the old phpFlickr library and create a new object (passing it the value I store in FLICKRKEY

	require_once("phpFlickr.php");
	$f = new phpFlickr(FLICKRKEY);

for

	require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
	$apikey = FLICKRKEY;
	$f = new \Samwilson\PhpFlickr\PhpFlickr($apikey);	

Well, no errors, but also my requests for a flickr search

$found = $f->photos_search( array("tags"=>$tag, 
     "sort" => $sortof[rand(0,6)],  
     "per_page" => $cnt, 
      "safe_search" => 1, 
      "extras" => 'url_z', 
      "is_commons" => $commons_only ));

return ($found['photos']);

	

Still me debugging spitting out the variables where where I tried to use $found was null-ville. More digging. As it turns out, the function photos_search() in the old flickr library was a bit of a wrapper for the actual flickr api call. Next try:

$found = $f->request('flickr.photos.search', 
     ["tags"=>$tag, 
      "sort" => $sortof[rand(0,6)],  
      "per_page" => $cnt, 
      "safe_search" => 1, 
      "extras" => 'url_z', 
      "is_commons" => $commons_only ]);

return ($found['photos']);

Was not working in my script, but in looking at an example variable dump for what was returned, I could see that the array info I was hoping for was actually inside the array photos another sub array called… photo so what eventually worked was

$found = $f->request('flickr.photos.search', 
     ["tags"=>$tag, 
      "sort" => $sortof[rand(0,6)],  
      "per_page" => $cnt, 
      "safe_search" => 1, 
      "extras" => 'url_z', 
      "is_commons" => $commons_only ]);

return($found['photos']['photo'] );

Play Now?

All of this is likely way too much boring detail. If it wasn’t for my interest to make a statement about PHP, then I might not have known pechaflickr was broken! But give it a play and explore it in Heather mode where you have to guess the tag or even do a round only with public domain photos from the flickr commons.

Featured Image: Composite screenshots of pechaflickr site with error screen when it was not working.

If you know where to put them (the bookmarks bar usually below your browser’s url display), drag the link below to your bookmarks. Next, in a new window, go to any site you visit regularly or perhaps the article you just recently red. Something a few clicks back in the browser history

Ideally when clicked it should take you to the first record in the Internet Archive for the domain of the page in view. Why does the world need this? I dunno, I’m resting here on the couch.

Long Live the 500 Year Old Web

I got to reading a nice little write up at Long Live the Web and frankly a sweet celebration of the web, flying in the face of its ongoing dumpster fire toxic bin of poop that it can feel like. I certainly champion its words, but it was down a bit towards the end my eyebrow was raised:

Håkon Wium Lie often says that the web will last 500 years and has used Gutenberg’s printing press as a point of reference. And that CSS written today may still be readable in 500 years. These are bold predictions for such a young technology, but I too think it’s possible.

https://longlivetheweb.org/

That link for 500 years is in the middle of a 2018 presentation mostly about CSS – go there first and right arrow to the next slide(s) for what looks like early CERN photos. I’d like to believe there is a bulletin board next to the first web server reading World Wide Web, you click we do the rest!.

Sure you can eye roll at 500 years, but I did some math to see one of my earliest web pages, from 1994, still available on the web has 468 orbits to go.

Well yes, I have archived that tiny folder of HTML file and some GIF images from its oroginal server location to my own, and at some point I pointed some URLs that were live then to the internet archive.

But I got thinking, maybe there is an easier way to find the first appearance of a URL in the machine other than running to through the search.

Monkeying With URLs

I have long lost a reference, but I always recall a talk Jon Udell did in the late 200s when Gardner Campbell had him out to Virginia Tech. It was something about thinking of URLs as not just jumps to web sites but looking at ones returned from search and other database systems as tools to manipulate (by “reading” the parameter name and value stuff that are stuck on the end of them). It’s something I do so reflexively I don’t even think about it,

But related, is what I shared in that post I sure you read about how you could do a trick with any URL for a web based recipe to rinse it of all its non recipe cruft simply by prefixing the URL with https://cooked.wiki/

I had memories that you could do that was well for using the Internet archive, like if you take any random URL you happen to be viewing, maybe it is https://cogdogblog.com and if you prefix it with https://web.archive.org/web/*/ its a shortcut to find all of that links records in the archive – try it https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://cogdogblog.com. That’s just a quick wat to do a web archive search for a URL.

Going Directly to the First In Archive

I thought there was an existing the answer, so here I try to let Google Brilliant AI help, and as it often does, its wrong. Badly.

So I know from previous links I had already done, the University of Berkley early web concept of the web as a “subway” that was once at. http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/subway/subway.html has many versions in the wayback machine like https://web.archive.org/web/19990427190551/http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/subway/subway.html

Note that strong of numbers in the middle 19990427190551, that one may think is the random kind of database IDs you find in URLs, but I have a sense that its actually a date and time stamp. You might guess that its April 27, 1999 at some time (hey that’s my birthday). So you might guess you could get to early versions by say changing the first digit to 1997 (it seems to land on the closest day, June 6 1997.

So now in a wild guess mode, I wonder… what if you just put a 0 in place of all the digits or https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/subway/subway.html

Boom there it is! The first in the archive for that URL. Try it now, go to any URL in your browser, and insert in front of it https://web.archive.org/web/0/ that should automatically transport you to that web sites first record in the archive.

Neat? Does it have any use? Maybe.

Bookmarklet It Baby

I have a huge love and regular use for browser bookmarklets, just a line of JavaScript as a web address that can do something from a page in view. I use one of my fleet almost every day, be it my Flickr CC Attribution Helper or the one I use to search my blog for a selected piece of text or ….

I actually had one that does the trick of speed searching (the * trick in the URL) that prefixes the current tab/window URL with the stuff to bring its record up in the wayback machine

javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/*/'+window.location.href

And I could have just gotten what I was after changing the * to a 0. But I thought more useful than finding a specific URL was the first record of the domain hosting a site, which I was able to do in the bookmarklet above with:

javascript:location.href='http://web.archive.org/web/0/'+window.location.origin;

Noting thing window.location.href for this post give you this post URL while window.location.origin returns https://cogdogblog.com/

Here’s some fun ones, let’s see the waybsck debut for

• Some crazy web search thing
• I’d Like to Watch Videos but it requires Flash
• Who would ever want to resd news on the web?
• Let’s give away courses for free
• Get movies sent to you on CDs in the mail

So What?

I dont know, but when I start mucking arond with URLs and make them do something unexpected and possibly useful, then its time well spent. I leave it for the 1 non AI bot reader to tell me what yo replace the 0 with to get the most recently archived page for any URL.

Featured Image: (and yes what follows comes from a bookmarklet) 2021/365/298 Which Came First? flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

I still do them fairly regularly and also try to pop a few into the mix (you can too). I have to give a big tail wagging hat tip to Kevin Hodgson aka @dogtrax who is not only one of like the 4 remaining participants, but who has been keeping October going with a series of TDCs supporting Write Out 2026.

It’s been a while since I did a “making of” post for a TDC, today is a good day to blog.

Today for Daily Create 5397 the task was to make a haikomic or a haiku in the form of a 3 panel comic. I went for the easy reach to use photos but I decided to try illustrating one of the old haikus still findable out there on the web. Here’s what I made:

So yes I found a collection of Thirteen Haikus by Yosa Buson (poet and painter, 1716 to 1784) from the Upaya Zen Center. Many of course lend themselves to ullustrating with my own photos (as I do tend to take a few outdoor photos) and the one about melting snow felt… right.

初雪や消ればぞ又草の露
hatsuyuki ya kiyureba zo mata kusa no tsuyu

Haiku by Yosa Buson

It lists the literal translation

The first snow falls
then it melts
into dew on the grass

and then I am guessing a version put into English 5-7-5 hiaku form by one Leon M. Zolbrod

It’s the first snowfall —
When it melts again we’ll see
Dewdrops on the grass.

Leon M. Zolbrod, Reluctant Genius: The Life and Work of Buson, a Japanese Master of Haiku and Painting—Second Installment, Modern Haiku 23:3 (fall 1992)

Well that works, speaking to me on the cycles of nature, that snow melts and nurtures grass (maybe us?) and how we can be a aprt of it, by observing. Or just being present.

I was able in some quick flickr searches to find 3 photos that worked to illustrated, pretty literally (yes thats the easy route)

Over Yonder flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Thar Be Green Grass flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

Rain as Precious Gifts flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

The image was assembled in PhotoShop. I know how out of fashion I am not to ask some LLM to maken an image, but I find doing it by hand much more reflexive and enjoyable. I took the comic template shared in the dasily create, deleted the text, and then simply used the wand selection tool to choose each frame to make as a mask after each photo was uploaded. I found a scrript font for the text, using the layer styles to add a stroke of black and a semi-transparent puter glow, and then added the title text (the Japanese version of the haiku).

It was maybe 25 minutes over breakfast to do.

I gotta say the very ongoing presence and web beat of the DS106 Daily Create, whether it so low on the visibility in the noise of social media, is a refuge, a place of peace, freedom. You can step in any day.

Here’s a bit of history for those who just wander in here (I’m thinking of those LLM spam comment bots who so cleverly glibwrite two sentences referencing my content before injecting an unwanted URL, I will both wave hello and raise a middle finger at you).

Make art every day (you can) Art on.

Featured Image: A combination of Yosa Buson’s haiku I used today and the template for the haikomic, licensed Do Whatever The F*** You Want With It.

Yet I have these encounters, which may be edge cases or that Mike Caulfield if he ever would speak to me again (I get it, you don’t want non flattering comments, Mike) could pick apart.

But still, I see some cracks in the assumptions built upon mega systems relying solely on statistical conclusions, ingoring lived experiences. Perhaps these are just irrelevant. But I think about this a lot. And this is what ends up taking me down curious holes of distraction, keeping me from doing emails and other “tasks” I Should Be Doing.

I saw a reference to a recommended photo editing software called aphera. I scroll down at the sample photos (which are great). Sure I recognize the bridge. but right away, my own experiences take me to that third image.

That third photo I know for sure is in Arizona. The Saguaro cacti are a give away, but that hill shape too is familiar for the Sonoran desert anywhere slightly north pf Phoenix down to the border. The aperha image just shows me a larger view of the photo, no info about it (who took it? where is it?).

My curiosity wont stop, so I try the reverse image search or what ever AI has glommed on as Google lens. It readily asserts on identifying the vehicle, and its pretty savvy (I think I have no experience), with its confident declaration (which comes from ??)

The image shows a white SUV (a Lexus GX 470 or Toyota 4Runner) outfitted for desert camping with a yellow Go Fast Campers (GFC) Superlite rooftop tent deployed, parked next to a campsite table and fire ring in an arid, cactus-studded landscape. [1, 2]

Google AI telling me whats in the photo.

The “references” just find other examples of this camper. But let’s do some chatting, eh? I ask the damn thing “Where in Arizona is this located?” And of course it has a certain answer:

How does it “know” this? What is this drawn from? What is its “thinking” Who knows?

But I try to untangle. If it “knows” this is the Twin Peaks Campground at Organ Pipe National Monument, I can go check it out. And yes, maybe the third photo in is a maybe match for the mountain background. But it’s the photos of the campground tables and firepits, plus how all the sites have concrete pads from the image gallery that clicks the “maybe this is not right?”

It goes back to the second reference from the determination of where this was, a reditt post for First Big Trip for 2026 from someone who camped at Organ Pipe with a similar kind of camper.

So it finds a similar style photo with a location at Twin Peaks Campground. But look at the style of the table and the grill, and compare again to the original photo from the aperha site:

I have camped mant places in Arizona but never at the Twin Peaks Campground, but I can tell by comparison that more rugged camp spot, with a different style table and fire pit does not match the style at this campground.

When I download the file from the apera site, the file name is a maybe clue – gallery_overland_camp.jpg which then in a search leads me to Camp Overland in Patagonia, AZ and in the photos there I see the kind of camp spots that better match this photo.

I have not really proven it for sure, but I find the GenAI inference to be extremely weak, basing its answer to “where is this” to finding a similar style camper and then asserting the location is the same.

This. Is. The. House. Of. Squishy. Logic. Y’all. Are. Counting. On.

Not me. I will draw upon my own experiences and inferences, no more right, but I will bot make conclusions from spurious statistical correlations.

Featured Image: Slide6 flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) I have little memory what this image was meant to be, it’s part of a series of flickr “slides” from a 2007 talk in Perth on Virtual Worlds: Promise and Perils so quaint in hindsight!

As right now I am making zucchini pancakes without any kind of recipe nor measusing ingredients, loosely based on how my mom described making potato latkes, I’m blogging in my head (well the idea has been simmering there as the title). My lessons are (maybe as I have not written it), recipes are helpful guides, but need not always be followed to the letter; why buy pre-packaged mixes when you can use stuff on the shelf, cooking is experimental, and it’s a metaphor I have rolled out often. But what there is more- stick around to the end for a most amazing web site for dealing with recipes. You will not be disappointed.

I just say that I rather enjoy putting something on our plates that I was able to do from stuff in the kitchen, just poured from a box or warmed from a frozen packaged. Cooking is doing, and I like the doing. It’s also a bit meditative in the process.

Me Cooking?

Sure, through grad school and into adulthood (yes in that order), I managed to do spaghetti, grill things, basic stuff. My first year as a rad student at ASU, I was amongs a number of other students who did not have the funds to travel home for thanksgiving. I got it in my head to invite any others for a dinner in my studio apartment, share as one did in 1987 by taking an announcement on the bulletin board. It dawned on me– I had no idea how to even bake a turkey! I called my mom on the phone who gave me the steps, which even now amount to (1) buy a turkey; (2) toss on seasoning; (3) place in oven.

Much of cooking is almost as simple as (1) Heat Food (2) Add Spice.

My “cooking” while living in grad school was likely a lot of canned soup, grilled cheese, spaghetti from a jar, and of yes, tossing a bunch of stuff in ramen noodles, hot dogs were my beef.

But it was really after the breakup of my first marriage that I found myself desiring to make meals. I still have a paper folder of recipes friends and family shared on paper, or sent by ermail that i printed out, or I found online.

The hand written one on the right middle is my sister Harriet’s always reliable pizza dough recipe. She quite impressed me in 2009 when I flew out to the Caribbean to spend a week on the 42 foot sailboat she and her husband Skip wintered on– one night she made her own dough for pizza cooked on a barbecue grill hanging on the back of the boat! She gave me a hand written copy of her recipe and that original paper is in my folder. And I cant count how many times I have made dough from scratch.

On a later visit to me in Strawberry, she also showed me how easy it is to do an apple pie using the Pillsbury Basic Apple Pie recipe, another successful run I lose count how many pies I have made. For quite some time I bought the pre-made pie shells, but realized later that making it from scratch was super easy with a Home Made Pie Crust recipe I found online.

I did much” cooking” on the barbecue grill, but took on baking ham, some noodle casseroles, and always some kind of spaghetti. Oh yes, a legndary story on one of my mom’s visits when I cooked spaghetti and added some canned sauce. She remarked that the sauce was a little “weird.” I agreed. On checking the sauce jar I discovered I had cooked spaghetti salsa! I actually tweeted it and got endless ribbing from David Jakes.

Skip Prepackaged Stuff

Chili has always been a staple. For long I did iy ther way I remember Mom doing it, brown some ground beef, pour in a can of tomato sauce, and a few more cans of beans… and then top off with a pack of the staple McCormick seasoning mix. At some point in the store, I am reading the ingredients on the packet and the brain goes THUNK. It’s just seasoning I have in my cupboard. Why am I paying more money for a bag of seasoning (and preservatives), Surely (yes Shirley) there is on the internet a recipe to make your own.

That’s the mix in the featured image for this post.

Does the Precision Always Matter?

I’m sure many people are meticulous to follow a recipe like its the law. I do think measuring matters a bit mor efor baking so for proper amounts of yeast. But when I’m working in the kitchen invariably end up finding all those 1/2 and 1/4 teaspoon measuring tediuos so when I make my chile seasoning I just dump/estimate. Like do the people who publish recipes really try every permutation of ingredient amounts, holding all constant except one in a series of controlled experiments? Hah. I frankly enjoy the cooking by tossing stuff in- that’s like my main approach to say soup.

All the recipes that call for something like one clove of garlic I eye roll. I always put much extra garlic in.

Experimentation is More Fun than Rule Following

The fun part of cooking (at least for me) is things you can improvise with. Given my sister’s dough recipe, what goes on top of the pizza is pretty much whatever I can find in the fridge. And I have a few things I make just from memory. My mom long ago gave me over the phone how she makes potato latkes (potato pancakes), more or less shredded (and squeezed) potatoes, some amount of egg (1? 2?), flour (how much/little?), bread crumbs, and some seasoning. I just toss stuff into a bowl (also works for zucchini).

And experiments can fail. I have certainly over seasoned some meats. Or made some rather bland dishes. There was the squash soup I thought would be “interesting” with some jalapeño in it (too hot to eat).

Oh yeah then there are some little additions I use and have no idea if they really make a difference, but I trust the person who suggested them. For my apple pies, I remember my grandmother’s suggestion to put a few pats of butter atop the filling before you put the top on. My mom, who volunteered making meals for her synagogue, always said the secret to her tuna salad was putting in a bit of sour cream with the mayonnaise (how much? shrug, see experimentation). My friend in Arizona, Barb, who cooked at a place in Pine called The Randall House (no longer there but the wen site I made for here is?) told me a secret to her French Toast was a bit of orange juice in the batter.

One time when Cori and I were staying in a rented cabin, I took stuff to make chili but forgot the seasonings, all I had was a little backpack seasoning mix I had carried around for years. It worked great.

Would I know scientifically if these really make a difference? I have forgotten them a few times, but the food still tastes good. But I enjoy honoring the advice from friends and family.

Milking the Metaphor

I am hardly the first to use cooking as a metaphor, and the peak of that experience was the H5P Kitchen project I did with/for BCcampus from around 2020-2022. I an’t remember the exact specification I got when Clint Lalonde invited me to run a community building effort in BC around using H5P in Pressbooks… oh wait I do have information on my opwn site. This was supporting an H5P OER Development project also related to their work on Open Homework Systems (all the links I cannot find anymore after the redesign of their web site).

But I went full bore with the cooking metaphors as an approach for tinkering and creating with H5P.

Kitchens are a common feature of all homes and often are gathering spaces for conversations. The foods we prepare there are immersed in cultural and familial tradition. It does not matter if you warm frozen dishes in a microwave or create everything from scratch, it is still cooking.

While we have the formulas of recipes, there is no absolute best one out there. Cooking is also creative when we experiment and vary from recipes or just “wing it.” We rely on tools, gadgets, yet the act is very hands-on tactile. And while cooking can get messy, we can always clean it up afterward.

We see the work on these projects having many of these elements- we have appliances like our H5P and Pressbooks platforms as well as other media tools, we try different recipes/methods, and we also apply what we know from our own tradition of teaching. These kitchens are the places the activities being created to augment the experience learners have with open textbook content.

https://kitchen.opened.ca/about/

Around the same time, in a general conversation with my good ffiend Gardner Campbell he talked about the book Salt Fat Acid Heat that boiled cooking down to those four elements. This so fit!

A well-written and thoroughly tested recipe might tell you how to produce the dish in question, but it won’t teach you anything about how to cook, not really. Truth be told, recipes are infantilizing: Just do exactly what I say, they say, but don’t ask questions or worry your little head about why. They insist on fidelity and faith, but do nothing to earn or explain it. Think how much more we learn —and retain!— when a teacher doesn’t just enumerate the step-by-step instructions but explains the principles behind them. 

Armed with reasons, we no longer have to cling to a recipe like a lifeboat; now we can strike out on our own and begin to improvise. Even though it contains plenty of excellent recipes, this is a book concerned foremost with principles.

From Michael Pollan’s forward to https://www.saltfatacidheat.com/

I even tried to stretch that to Four Elements of Open Homework Practice Problems. The metaphor played out in the series of webinars (I recall I did the videos from my kitchen) with guest chefs including the top chef at the time, and projects ending as books on the recipe shelf. I pulled the taffy out of the metaphor for a series of online workshops.e.g.

which included sections related to dealing with the array of H5P tools like You Don’t Start Cooking By Reaching into the Utensil Drawer.

I may have overdone the metaphor, but it was so fun to do that. Heck I even took it with me to OEGlobal as an attempt at an asynchronous series of activities I labeled as the H5P Food Truck.

The Mess of Online Recipes and… the Magical Cooked.Wiki

If you have tromped through all my wafflings (get it) you made it to the real thing I want to share here. All along I relief much on recipes I found on the web. You know the thing about those recipes- you have to wade through a long scroll of storytelling and pop up ads and videos from the chef, to actually get to the receipt itself (even if there is a “skip to recipe” link its still a lot of crap to go through.

As an example, here is one I use often for garlic cheese biscuits, my daughter Jessy Lee shared with me. It checks of my two boxes of (1) easy to do / small number of ingredients; and (2) good results. But when you go to the recipe, again, there is all the effort to actually find it.

Compare that to my version. Same recipe, but with none of the cruft.

This is the result of the Amazing Amazing site Cooked.wiki

See how amazing it is, take any online recipe, let’s say for pumpkin pie https://preppykitchen.com/pumpkin-pie-2/ It’s not the worst example. Now when you have that in your browser bar, just insert in front of the URL https://cooked/wiki/ or see what happens https://cooked.wiki/https://preppykitchen.com/pumpkin-pie-2/

Dod you say “Woah”?

It extracts everything from the web recipe into the same format, structured format of ingredients on the left, steps on the right. And you can use this for free. If you create a login, you can save all the recipes you run through it (my collection) which can also be shared (if you clicked any links for my recipes above you will be there). Another neat feature is that once saved in your account, you can edit or add to a recipe, so you can keep the details you may have previously annotated on a card or a printed recipe. You can also add photos of your own versions made.

Cooked.wiki (techncally not really a wiki) is described “Founded in 2022, Cooked was the first to use AI to turn cluttered websites into clean, accessible instructions. We have been featured worldwide as one of the most innovative cooking tools.” It’s the project of one person Eduardo Gonçalves a developer from Lisbon.

I am huge fan of web tools that you can call into action simply be pre-pending a URL in front of another one (like putting https://archive.ph in front pf a payalled URL to jump the wall) – to me it is a simple idea of the web as one of Jon Udell’s descriptions of an innovation toolkit- you can do something simply by manipulating a URL.

I love Cooked.Wiki so much I have been a paying supporter, you get a few more nifty features as a patron. One that I tried is uploaded a photo of a handwritten or printed recipe and Cooked.Wiki can do its conversion magic. Here is a recipe one of Cori’s students gave her written out by hand on a card (it has a side 2)

And see how Cooked.wiki puts it into the regular format https://cooked.wiki/saved/178ee141-da1f-4403-9f84-ecaea4feacc4

I’ve not tried the other features like having recipes read to you by an AI voice. but its interesting if you want to have a family member just describe a recipe by voice, Cooked.Wiki can construct it into the recipe format.

To me. the elegance and usefulness of Cooked.Wiki is the best of the web.

You are welcome.

Now go cook something, willya?

Featured Image: Don’t Buy Packets of Preservatives flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Get the Chili Season recipe from Cooked.Wiki

So I came across this post — er newsletter thing by a Matthew Guay titles “What we lost when we lost comments – Comments require commitment, but they’re worth it.” And I land in agreement with the call to come back to our blog homes, to stop spending all day harking at the social media malls.

You can have a blog without comments, it’ll just be a bit of a lonelier place. You can have a newsletter without comments and with replies, it just won’t turn into an organic, reader-led community. Comments in both instances let you turn your writing into the glue that brings people together, and keeps them around long after they showed up. Who knows, they might enjoy talking to each other enough that you fade into the background, as your writing morphs into something that takes on a life of its own, and the community together grows into something you could have never imagined?

Maybe not, but it’s impossible to know without pulling the conversations back into your own space.

https://buttondown.com/blog/why-enable-comments

But hold the bus Matthew, who lost comments around here? I’ve had them on and keep them on since I started in 2003, despite wading through the spam. I don’t agree with his assertion that the problem was the WordPress platforms inability to handle being slashdotted- cmon the scourage of comment spam is squarely laid at the Google feet, for their creating the monetary incentive to get links inserted into web sites.

And I am seeing now the effects of LLMs now in the toolbelt of comment spammers, who are now hitting me daily with “comments” that are definitely generated from my blog posts, but with the tell tale link that has no relevance at all. Often the email address is “support@someaicrapvventure.com

But I am weird in that I rather get some joy out of weeding out the spam roaches, and taking note of how much better they are getting but still bearing the smell of spam. I know that’s not for everyone, and most people will just closed down the comment box. I do not criticize you if you were forced to but up the steel wall. I just feel sad.

Yet.

When I get to the end of an interesting post and have something to say, I feel sad when what I find at the bottom is…. a closed door. Alas.

So the annoyance problem of comments, which I do not pretend of huge, led folks to turn off, and push their links to social media. The problem there is now the conversations are severed from the content. But even worse, as I now randomly peer into the mega mall that LinkedIn now is especially for the educator community, is that many have forsaken their own homes and pour their writing into the mall.

It’s sickening to see people who’s blogs I relished reading with most recent post dates slipping back and back in time, who regularly are giving it all away at the LinkedIn outlet mall.

There’s a genuine gift to the fewer comments that I see here, still here, still happening

And also, I am cheered to know that decades later that Lachance the comment blogger is still at his craft, and that we had a conversation in the comment space of someone else’s blog.

So as long as I run this thing, despite the stream of sludge that flows in via comments, I am pledged to blocking the crap and keeping the front porch open here, feel free to drop by and leave a note. Because the real comments are worth much muc more then their weight in Like counts.

Indeed true to his word in 2006 Jeff Atwood’s stance is mine too A Blog Without Comments Is Not a Blog. Drop by the porch and tell me how stupid I am or wrong and call me out. That’s what th eporch is for, it’s here at my blog home, and I will gladly visit your porch too.

If you even have one.

Featured Image: I can’t even remember how these dogs got on my old porch in Styrawberry, I think I was dogsitting, or some where neighbor dogs. That’s how porches work. Three Dogs and a Porch flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)