Kind: Articles

traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body

Conferences with social media hashtags are great, because those hashtags mean that you can still glean from them even if you can’t attend. It can also be overwhelming when there’s so much goodness happening on a conference hashtag that you want to share everything you find. There’s also the problem of all the great content being generated on one social network essentially being locked into that network as long as we’re only sharing it on that network. So I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I find from various conferences as blog posts. That way everyone can take advantage of it whether they’re on a particular social network or not, and I can avoid filling up people’s timelines with reposts. I can also take the liberty of providing screenshotted text in text form so that everyone can read it.

Here are my gleanings from MozFest. MozFest was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 2010. Originally named “Drumbeat,” the festival convened a community of people dedicated to learning, freedom and the open Web. Each year MozFest centers around a particular theme, and this year’s is the health of the web as a whole, (spoiler alert: It’s not good), and how we as contributors to the web can improve it. Everyone is a contributor to the health of the web, not just the people who make the software that powers it or allows people to access it or allows people to easily create content for it. This year, MozFest consisted of nine floors of talks, workshops and exhibits. Once the speaker talks are available somewhere other than Facebook Live, I’ll share some of those as well, in separate posts.

All of the content I’m sharing is publicly available within the constraints of Twitter or Facebook. I’m sharing it in the order I read it. I’ve also transcribed any screenshots I’ve shared. I’ve shared directly from the social networks, so you have the opportunity to share on your own timelines if you want, without copying and pasting. Enjoy.

Meet this year’s Mozilla Festival speakers.

Only 20% of the world, primarily white folks, are
editing 80% of Wikipedia’s content—that’s kind of
telling. Together, we realised that most of our
collective understanding of the world is still being
written by a minority.

–SIHO BOUTERSE

What we need are companies that are
not advertising platforms, to make
browsers — the basic tech of the net.

Mishi Choudhary

Have a security policy. You can think of it like the
things you are already doing to be digitally safe.
Maybe this is where it all begins.

Matt Mitchell

Digital inequality is just as bad
as any inequality.

–Alan Knott-Craig

To be digitally safe as an organisation, you need
to think of a checklist. It is a matter of time until
something happens… This checklist saves
people. If anything happens, you know what to
do.

–Matt Mitchell

Making a healthy
Internet is not a spectator
sport

–Mark Surman

More products include software inside them to be
updated over time, but practically the support to these
products ends a lot sooner than the companies are
willing to provide a warranty for the product—which is
probably insane.

–Ugo Vallauri

“I think all of us are feeling [an] urgency….You have
instability—I have been thinking about the need for
knowledge, the need for inclusion, the need for the
power and potential of the movement.

–Ryan Merkley

The Trump Administration thinks that letting some
telecom companies treating some content more
favourably than others is a good thing. Think about
how these companies treat it already. It could not be
any worse

–Ashley Black

You’ll now detox one of the browsers you use on your computer (you’ll clean up your mobile browsers
later, on Day 5). By the end of todays detox, you should be blocking a lot more information from trackers, and this in turn should make your browser less unique – since there’s less information to form a
“fingerprint”,
The devil’s in the default “Privacy Settings”
No browser’s default privacy settings are actually private by default: most store cookies, as well as
your browsing history, webform entries and other information-which can then get shared.
But Chrome, Firefox and Safari all offer a special “Private” or “Incognito” browsing mode, set to
automatically delete your browsing history, cookies, temporary files and webform entries every
time you close the browser. Note: your bookmarks and downloads are not deleted.
Try it out:
1. Open your browser (Firefox, Chrome or Safari) and go to File -• New Private/incognito Window
(depending on the browser).
2. To set Private Browsing permanently in Firefox or Safari, go to:
Firefox: menu>Preferences>Privacy>settings for history

Note on this transcribed screenshot: The last bit of text at the end is too garbled for me to make out and correct, but the steps listed above are still useful. There will be an online version of the data detox kit coming soon, and as soon as that’s available I’ll link to that instead.
https://twitter.com/hennazb/status/924229826617147392


https://twitter.com/Audesome/status/924265970516090885

Inclusive Design 24 (ID24) is happening again on November 16, and I can hardly wait. If you’re not aware of what ID24 is, it’s twenty-four hours of free talks on accessibility and inclusive design. Each talk runs for about an hour, and the entire event lasts for twenty-four hours straight. I told myself I wasn’t going to stay up for twenty-four hours again at the end of the last event, but now that it’s happening again I’m seriously reconsidering that, because it’s so much fun and there’s so much stuff to learn and cool people to engage with using the hashtag on Twitter.

In anticipation of ID24 happening again, I thought I’d share my favorite web-related talks from past events. The one I’m sharing today is “Designing for Inclusion with Media Queries,” and it was given by Eric Bailey. Eric is a Boston-based user experience designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs using accessible, performant, device-agnostic technology. You can find him on Twitter as @ericwbailey and you can read more about his work at ericwbailey.design.


For me, one of the best parts of the web has always been blogs. They’re an expression of the web as it was meant to be, at least in one aspect. Open and independent. Somehow we all got sucked in by the convenience of social media, and while social media has meant that it’s sometimes easier to stay connected, we’ve traded a lot in exchange for that ease of connection, and most of it isn’t good. But more on that in another post.

What’s a blog challenge?

Put simply, a blog challenge is setting yourself a goal to write a blog post at least once a day for a certain number of days. The one I’m participating in this month is called the Ultimate Blog Challenge, and I’ll be shooting for thirty-one posts in thirty-one days. It starts today, and you still have time to join if you want to participate. Once you sign up, you’ll get an email each day with blogging tips and prompts. You can either use the prompts from the emails, or chart your own path. There’s a Facebook group you can join to share your posts and read posts from others, along with a Twitter hashtag: . If you’re participating, make sure to comment on other people’s posts. It’s a great way to build community and relationships, and it’s also part of the rules.

What if I don’t have a blog?

If you don’t have a blog yet, why not start one? It doesn’t matter what platform you use or how technical you are. If you have an old blog, why not dust it off? And you don’t have to write three hundred words every day. It’s perfectly fine to write a short post, or just share a photo with its caption. You could even use the challenge to begin to own your data, or just get a writing habbit going. Microblogs also count.

I’m not sure if there’s a point at which you can’t sign up anymore, so I’ll encourage you to give it some thought, and if you’re going to join, do it as soon as possible. Even if there’s not a closing date for sign-ups, the sooner you join, the less you’ll need to catch up. So give it some thought, and come press publish with the rest of us. It’ll be fun.

There’s a post going around web maker social media that deals with the subject of HTML and CSS being undervalued, to the point that people who only write HTML and CSS, or even people who don’t write JavaScript, have no value in this industry, and how we desperately need to change that mindset. It struc a chord, and I have some related thoughts. Well, more like a related rant, because although this attitude is one that’s being talked about as if it’s new, the truth is it’s not special to JavaScript, but more on that later.

Money quote:

When every new website on the internet has perfect, semantic, accessible HTML and exceptionally executed, accessible CSS that works on every device and browser, then you can tell me that these languages are not valuable on their own. Until then we need to stop devaluing CSS and HTML.
Mandy Michael

In case you were wondering, we have a long, long way to go before we get to the point where every single website meets the qualifications I quoted above. We’re not even close. Wanna know why? Crappy HTML, and crappy CSS. That is pretty much what this whole accessibility thing comes down to, at the most basic level. People who use assistive technology can’t use ninety percent of the web because crappy HTML and crappy CSS. You have trouble using your phone to browse the web when it’s sunny out on your back porch because crappy CSS. If you pay me to audit your WordPress theme or plugin, the overwhelming majority of the issues I’m going to flag have to do with the way your PHP and JS are creating HTML and you’re using crappy CSS. Wanna use ARIA for your controls? Guess what it does. Extend HTML. And this isn’t a JavaScript-specific thing. They’re far from the first to be of the opinion that HTML and CSS aren’t important or are less valuable than the latest fad. This idea is almost as old as the web itself. PHP shares this attitude in some quarters. So did every other community building something that was supposed to be the be-all-end-all of creating things on the web. I’d even venture to say that this attitude was prevalent for a very long time in the WordPress space, and the further you get from the inner circle of the WordPress community, (the one percent, if you will), the more prevalent this attitude is. But HTML and CSS are critical to how the entire web works, and unless you learn them to underpin your JS and your PHP or whatever other web technology comes along in the future, we will continue to have a broken web, and it’s only a matter of time before you, personally, have to deal with the consequences in a way that you can’t change by simply changing your surroundings. Seriously, don’t wait till it gets to that point. Learn HTML and CSS properly so that we all have a web to use no matter what the circumstances. Learn HTML and CSS properly so you can build page builders with graphical user interfaces that anyone can use to build things for the web that work for everyone. Don’t shift onto the shoulders of your users the task of playing whack-a-mole to find accessibility problems and then making the extra effort to report them to you in the most diplomatic way possible, because that takes a metric ton of energy and emotional labor, and every single person with a disability should not have to be an accessibility advocate. Don’t continue to foster a situation where there are entire platforms where you can’t build or use a website while using assistive technology, only to then be possibly told that if you want to be able to do so, you might have to vote on it as a feature, and hope you can get enough people together to convince some CEO somewhere that this thing that is part and parcel of how the web was intended to work that he’s now considering an enhancement is something he really should fix on his platform. It’s not enough for only some platforms to be accessible. Every single one of them should be, by default, and getting there requires that anyone who calls themselves a web developer learn HTML and CSS, even if that means you have to stop what you’re doing with the latest sexy thing on the web so you can go back and learn them.

I could probably boil all of this down to “Don’t be a jerk.” But “Learn HTML and CSS” is the one thing that the accessibility community has been saying for years and years and years and years, and if we were to turn this into a drinking game, (every time you have to correct some developer’s HTML or CSS, take a drink), we’d all be dead from alcohol poisoning. And it’s incredibly disheartening to ponder where we might be if everyone who ever built anything for the web had learned its foundational technologies properly. So, go learn HTML and CSS deeply, and quit devaluing these technologies by your words and actions.

If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you’re probably familiar with Twitter threads. They show up in your timeline because either someone quotes or retweets someone else’s threaded tweet, or, if you’re lucky, you see all the tweets in the right order because (a) someone takes the time to thread them properly by sending one tweet, and then replying to the original tweet with the rest, and (b) you either follow the threader, or their account is public and you have it on a list, so you see the tweets as they come in. If you’re on Facebook or some other social network, and one of your friends wants you to see the thread, they’ll share one of the tweets from the thread in the hope that you’ll click on it and read it. But Twitter threads are not good for all sorts of reasons, and because I feel rather strongly about the subject, I decided to write a ranticle about it.

Why do people thread in the first place?

People thread on Twitter because Twitter’s 140-character limit is almost never enough when you really need to get something off your chest. Also, Twitter, (including third-party applications), has an incredibly simple posting interface without a lot of distraction involved. The fact that you can use a third-party app on your phone which may have an even simpler posting interface, through which you can fire off tweets at the drop of a hat, makes it even better. When you add up a 140-character limit, plus a really simple posting interface, it’s easy to see why Twitter threads have become as popular as they are.

Still, I would like to discourage you from Twitter threading. In the strongest possible terms.

Threading might be great if you’re the one posting the content. I use the word “might” because whether it’s great for you or not is debatable. But if you’re trying to read it, that’s an entirely different story. For one thing, it takes a lot of time and effort to scroll back through tweets, and that’s assuming you’ve stumbled on the original tweet that started the thread. If not, you’re stuck in the hell that is Twitter’s user experience trying to scroll back through tweets. If someone quotes a tweet in your thread, the thread is now broken, which makes the effort needed to put into reading an entire thread much more involved. It means that you might have to spend more time in Twitter’s horrible user experience hellscape trying to find out where the thread begins because someone quoted in the middle of a thread. Second, since Twitter threads are by their nature chunks of ideas, it’s realy difficult to cite a thread in such a way that keeps all the comments in context. Since tweets are now making up a large part of what gets reported by news outlets of all stripes, that means this has become more important, both for those reporting the news and for those reading it.

Next, there’s the problem of linking to this content. Since each tweet has it’s own link, and that link is based on a user ID, linking to all the pieces of content that make up a thread is somewhat like collecting individual rice grains once you’ve dropped the bag of rice. Not easy. And depending on how many tweets are in the thread, (I’ve seen threads of over 300 of them), a metric ton of work.

Then, there’s the part about how the content you create is yours and not some corporation’s. There are a lot of good ideas floating around Twitter, (and other social networks for that matter), but as long as that content is being posted on Twitter and nowhere else, you don’t own that content. If Twitter decides to change its link structure, that content may be lost.

This is important for people, but it’s also important for businesses. Posting your content on Twitter in the form of a thread, (or really, on any social network), instead of your website means you no longer own that content. It’s like going and setting up a stall at the local flee market and calling it your office. You’ve invested time in creating that content, you should own it. It should have a permanent link that won’t change unless you want it to, and which anyone can link to. Then, you can syndicate that content to Twitter, or Facebook, or anywhere else you like, and even if someone isn’t on any of those networks, (believe it or not, there are people who don’t use social media, and have no desire to start using it), can read and benefit from your content.

But what if I’ve already threaded on Twitter?

Fortunately, there are some tools you can use to collect all the parts of your thread and turn them in to blog post for later linking and enjoyment. Spooler is an excellent choice for converting Twitter threads into blog posts. You can start with the last tweet in a thread, and it will also grab any videos and images you’ve posted to Twitter that are part of the thread. If you find that you’re live-tweeting a talk or something similar, Noter Live is a great option which will, (once you’re done tweeting), allow you to copy all your tweets from the event into one post, along with including the speaker’s Twitter handle if they have one. If it’s the feedback you’re after, you can always enable webmention on your site. Popular web platforms like WordPress and Drupal have plugins to do this, and you can use a service like Bridgy to syndicate your content to the social networks, and then pull in reactions and responses to your own site so you have them all in one place, coupled with the content you created.

While I’m pretty certain this one post isn’t going to stop you from threading tweets, I hope that you’ll consider the people who are reading the content you’re creating, and instead of creating a thread that’s not even enjoyable to read on Twitter, you’ll at least consider turning it into a blog post afterwords.

Starting on June 30, 2017, att.net customers will no longer be able to log in to their Yahoo and Tumblr accounts through email addresses with the following domains: att.net, ameritech.net, bellsouth.net, flash.net, nvbell.net, pacbell.net, prodigy.net, sbcglobal.net, snet.net, swbell.net, and wans.net.
If you’re affected, all you need to do to ensure continued access to your Tumblr account is to update your registered email address to something other than one of these addresses mentioned above.

Source: Tumblr’s Helpdesk

The help article then goes on to tell people how to update their registered email address. Neither self-hosted WordPress, (or even WordPress.com), care what email address someone uses to log in, once that email address is associated with an account. And you can definitely create Tumblr-style sites with either platform. If you use self-hosted WordPress, you have even more options for adding features to your site thanks to plugins. There’s at least one plugin that will import all your Tumblr posts into your WordPress site, keeping them intact.

This really wasn’t a necessary move on the part of Tumblr. There’s no technical reason why someone’s email host should matter. A lot of these people have probably had these email addresses for a very long time, and to ask them to go get another one from somewhere like Gmail just so they can log into and use your service is wrong on every level.