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AI is the New Crypto

February 23, 2023 By Mark Leave a Comment

In the span of a few days, dating back to the initial flush of articles about ChatGPT and its ascendancy as a form of artificial intelligence, I began been receiving spam emails about how AI can change my life. These emails and the pitches they contain have no connection to my reality — or, as far as I can tell, any reality — yet they exist precisely because some small number of recipients will inevitably respond.

Contrast this glimpse of internet bottom feeders and their hapless marks with a similar push now being made in the financial markets, and I see little difference. Massive bets are being placed on various search engines and corporations, which will purportedly turn the ability of a computer to communicate with humans into fortunes similar to those promised by ventures which pushed the miracle of crypto a year ago. Which is to say I don’t have a lot of faith in either spam email or the financial markets to identify and differentiate truly meaningful revolutions from con games designed to separate suckers from their money.

Speaking of which, it’s also interesting to me that at a time of steep inflation and genuine financial pressure on individuals and their purchasing decisions, and in a context where venture capital is indeed having a much harder time raising money, there is nonetheless a great pile of free cash that is looking for the next big thing. I mean how poor and beleaguered are we if we’re all walking around with $1K smartphones that are primarily being used to figure out how to get us to fork over our diminished reserves in promise of future riches? Or is that a working definition of 21st century poverty? Too poor to invest in scams?

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Happy Copyright Notice Update Day!

January 1, 2023 By Mark Leave a Comment

Yes it’s that time of year again….

While admittedly a pedestrian clerical task, nothing demonstrates attention to detail like an up-to-date copyright notice. And I think that’s particularly important if your website offers services or is intended to demonstrate your professionalism or keen cultural relevance.

(If you have really been off the grid: it’s 2023. And no I can’t believe it either.)

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Happy Copyright Notice Update Day!

January 1, 2022 By Mark Leave a Comment

As hard as it may be to believe — or perhaps not, depending on the toll 2021 took on you and yours — it is once again that time….

While you have been holding the fabric of the universe together solely with the psychic force of your formidable will, yet another calendar year has slipped by. If you are a content creator — whether an intermittent blogger or social media mogul — take a moment to start the new year off on the right foot by updating any public copyright notices to include 2022.

While this is admittedly a pedestrian clerical task, nothing demonstrates attention to detail like an up-to-date copyright notice, and that’s particularly important if your website offers services or is intended to demonstrate your professionalism or keen cultural relevance. Because if the person or persons running a given site can’t remember to update their copyright notice, why should anyone pay attention to anything they have to say?

Don’t be the person who forgets to update their copyright date, let alone does to for multiple years, who was definitely not me unless you have the time-stamped, notarized screenshots to prove it.

Have a great year — or at least a reasonable facsimile.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Picking Up Where I Left Off

September 3, 2021 By Mark 1 Comment

Six years ago to the day the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents announced the illegitimate appointment of an unqualified and belligerent crony boob as president of the University of Iowa. At the time that appointment came as quite a shock, but as the weeks, months and years passed it became clear that the university and indeed public higher education in Iowa had been and has been fundamentally compromised by politics. While that illegitimate president finally left office three and a half months ago — and that’s a good thing — we just learned from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller that the university ignored a rape report that was filed with the Iowa City Police Department three weeks before the former president unexpectedly announced his intention to resign last October. In fact, had there not been a series of campus protests over the past few days about that reported rape, it is likely that report would never have come to light — much like similar events which took place at the university in 2018, also under the permanently blind eye of the former UI president. (Likewise, today the Gazette’s Miller also reported that after an earlier unexpected defeat, and the subsequent political packing of the council which delivered that initial rebuke, the Iowa Board of Regents just secured the right to build a massive new hospital complex in North Liberty, after intentionally falsifying the size and nature of that project to the crony-packed council which gave its foregone approval.)

Although the initial shock of that corrupt presidential appointment was disorienting, in retrospect the timing could not have been better. In the summer of 2015 I had been verging on contacting UI about an issue that might prove mutually beneficial in an academic and medical context, but given what I now know those thoughts were grossly naive. Over the intervening six years I learned what I could about UI specifically and higher-ed generally — and along the way probably met the equivalent criteria for a master’s and doctorate in one academic discipline or another — and what I learned was almost universally dispiriting. (As regular readers know, I grew up in and have lived most of my life in Iowa City, where UI is located, so I was not oblivious to the usual problems on a major college campus. But I honestly had no idea how pervasive the corruption is in the ranks of academic administration and by governing boards.)

That said, what a dispiriting six years it has been across the board. The state of Iowa slipped into cultural collapse and is now controlled by arch conservatives and fundamentalists — who, without irony — helped put a degenerate con artist in the White House, then conspired to overthrow American democracy in service of their delusions. Throw in the COVID-19 pandemic and Iowa’s determination to expose as many young children as possible to the virus, even though vaccine approval is on the horizon for kids between five and twelve years of age, plus the ravages of global warming, and a conniving abdication of responsibility by the United States Supreme Court in support of Texas’s subjugation of women, and gosh-golly what’s next?

In that context it has been interesting watching my mind slowly disengage over the past three and a half months from the singular pursuit of tracking events at the University of Iowa. Not that there still isn’t plenty to read, as attested to above, but I no longer feel an obligation to jot it all down and make sure I have the supporting documents and videos, because the narrative arc I was following finally did come to a close. (I’m sure there will be future revelations about the illegitimate president’s tenure, but for now UI is just another bummer in the news.)

What that mental space has given me is a chance to go back and look at old draft posts I was working on in 2015, as well as catch up on clerical and administrative chores I either dropped at the time or subsequently neglected over that six-year span. And as you might imagine, it feels good to be thinking about something other than failed human beings, and to be reconnecting with the positive pursuits I was focused on lo those many years ago. So…where was I?

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Email Subscription Conundrum Update

July 30, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

Faced recently with the choice between yet more proofreading and advancing my feeble knowledge, I spent the better part of a whole day digging into the Feedburner issues mentioned in the previous post. The good news is that I learned a lot. The bad news is that none of what I learned has solved the problem, or is likely to do so.

As was to be expected, Feedburner is now toying with me by sending emails to at least some of the addresses in its subscription list. I can confirm that because I registered a couple of test-addresses, and a few days later a message got through on one account notifying me of a recent post. Unfortunately, that same message did not arrive at two other accounts, so I now have to figure out if the issue is with Feedburner itself (impossible to determine) or with the site hosting those addresses (possible but not likely given their disinterest).

As for fixing potential issues with Feedburner, in fits and starts I managed to work through all of the steps that I later found helpfully enumerated here. If you’re having Feedburner issues yourself, that’s where I’d start. (None of that troubleshooting did anything for me.)

On the subject of whether I’m using Feedburner for my RSS feed, by chance I stumbled across confirmation (now lost) that the only thing Feedburner does with regard to feeds is give you visibility to stats associated with their use. And as far as I can tell, it even does a miserable job of that. Then again I am terminally naive about how to exploit the data habits of people who come to Ditchwalk, so I’m probably missing something. In any case, Feedburner seems to be non-essential for feeds unless you’re an analytics junkie.

The ENews Extended plugin, which was closely associated with StudioPress/Genesis themes for several years, now seems to be deprecated, moribund and — while still working — non-viable if you want to use a solution derived from Cpanel or your own ISP/mail package. I asked a couple of people if they’d ever even seen that plugin configured to use something like Mailman, and they said they had not.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

The Email Subscription Conundrum

July 24, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

For at least six years I’ve been using Feedburner to send a single email to registered subscribers after each new post is published. A few weeks ago Feedburner stopped working for reasons I cannot ascertain. I’ve tried everything possible to get it to work, but even though all systems appear go the emails are not being sent.

I know this is not a new complaint, and that Google (which owns Feedburner) has allowed the site/service to languish. It is, technologically, adrift, and has been for a long time. I used it because it works, it no longer works, so it’s time to do something else.

One complicating factor is that Feedbuner handles both emails subscriptions and RSS feeds, and I think I’ve been using Feedburner for both. I say ‘I think’ because no matter how much I learn about RSS feeds I’m never quite sure what they are. They seem to be a kind of parallel channel to my published site — like a radio version, or maybe a telex or telegraph. If you don’t want to click on my site you can point your browser or feed-reader to the Ditchwalk feed and get my content that way.

What’s never clear to me is what Feedburner is actually doing to make that feed happen, because I think it’s actually doing nothing. Rather, it takes my feed — which WordPress creates — and then redirects it, or repurposes it, or maybe even reporpoises it, or something. Which means not only that Feedburner isn’t doing anything for me in terms of email subscriptions, it’s doing nothing for me in terms of RSS. Or at least nothing I need to care about if the rest of Feedburner’s functionality is on the fritz.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com

Graphics and Interactive Storytelling

April 30, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

In the mid-nineties I became fascinated by the storytelling potential of interactive entertainment. My interest peaked in the early aughts, during what I now think of as the second great wave of interactive storytelling mania. While the potential of interactive storytelling seems obvious to everyone, the mechanisms — the actual techniques — by which interactive stories might be told are complex and at times counterintuitive.

After finding my way into the interactive industry and meeting with some professional success, I was asked in 2000 to write an article for SIGGRAPH’s Computer Graphics magazine about the future of interactive storytelling. While great effort was being put into replicating techniques from passive mediums, including, particularly, film, it seemed to me that such an imitative approach had everything exactly backwards.

Recently, while conducting periodic maintenance on my computer and sprucing up Ditchwalk, I ran across that article, which for some reason I had never gotten around to adding to the Docs page on this site. That omission now stands corrected.

The title of the article is Graphics — the Language of Interactive Storytelling. Coming from someone who primarily made a living with words that may seem odd, but it and the accompanying text goes to the heart of the interactive storytelling problem, and why so little progress has been made. In fact, the only thing that’s changed is that we no longer worry about having enough processing power to do what we want — yet today’s enviably high hardware ceiling is still rarely used to facilitate aspects of interaction that might truly drive emotional involvement.

Fifteen years on, during the fourth great wave of interactive storytelling mania now taking place in the industry, little has changed. Another generation of eager developers is grappling with the same questions, reaching the same inherently limiting conclusions, attempting to once again adapt non-interactive techniques from passive mediums, and confusing the revelation of pre-designed outcomes with choices that determine outcomes.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Interactive Tagged With: interactive storytelling

Link Rot Postmortem

April 15, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Ugh. So here’s what I learned while banishing broken links…

* Broken Link Checker isn’t completely intuitive, but as of this date it’s current and supported. If you have a question you may not get the answer you’re looking for, but you’ll get an answer, and you’ll profit from it.

* Over the past year the BLC plugin reported (via email) in fits and starts for reasons I did not understand. In reading up and poking around, however, I discovered a ‘server load’ setting which seems to act like a throttle. If you set it very low — meaning lower than the reported server load — you effectively idle BLC until the server load drops. Or at least I think that’s what happens. In any case, when I raised the number above the reported load, BLC sprang into action, so if you’re not getting activity when you expect it I would check that setting. (Also, if you’re on shared hosting, consider changing that setting at night when the server load is low. BLC may run much faster.)

* When you’re working on each individual broken link, going slowly and searching for missing pages on the web can be surprisingly fruitful. I fixed quite a few dead links where the missing page’s URL had been altered without a redirect. Once located, copying and pasting the current active link in place of the broken link solved the problem.

* I initially decided to deal with a minimum of twenty-five links each day, but the first day was tough. As it turned out, however, much of the struggle was due to the fact that I had no process or workflow to follow, so what I was really fighting was the learning curve, not the task. On the second day I probably fixed or killed fifty or so links, then the following day I finished off the remaining sixty or so, meaning it took me three days to get through my backlog. (If you’re in the weeds like I was, or worse, just make link-fixing a chore that you come back to again and again until it’s done.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: blogs, links

Link Rot

April 12, 2015 By Mark 1 Comment

Whatever my favorite blog post title used to be, it is now a distant second to this one.

So what is link rot? It’s decay that happens to a linked document over time as links become unresponsive. You add links to pages on other sites, some of those pages disappear or are moved, and suddenly your links don’t work any more.

On a case-by-case basis it’s a nuisance. Over time, and over an entire website, it’s a horror. Across an entire discipline, like law, it’s potentially crippling. Speaking of which….

More than a year ago now I found a couple of dead links in an old post, which made me realize I had no way to find such links on a proactive basis. After using a few web-based spiders to search my site and report on dead links, and finding them wanting, I came across a WordPress plugin called — appropriately — Broken Link Checker.

Installing and running BLC was easy, but the results were frightening. At the time I had over 150 reported broken links, although on closer inspection some of those proved to be links that timed out. Still, 150+ bad links was plenty, yet when I earnestly set about trying to solve the problem I realized I didn’t know how.

Yes, I could see that a link pointed to a page that was no longer available, but how to note that in context so the reader would understand? Worse, what if a whole paragraph was written around the presumption of a link?

Just knowing about the problem has allowed me to be a little smarter about writing link text. For example, in the paragraph above, where I mentioned law, the article I linked to is on Gigaom.com, which went belly-up only a few weeks back. At some point that link will probably be reported dead because the content on Gigaom will no longer be available, but that sentence will still be intelligible without it. It won’t be substantiated, but it will still make sense.

Maddeningly, however, as simple as the problem seems — fix dead links — in practice it has repeatedly proved insurmountable. I psych myself up, I dig into BLC, I fix one or two broken links — usually the easiest ones — then flop back, mentally exhausted.

Searching for sage advice on the interweb reveals fraught awareness of the problem, but few good solutions I can put into practice. Or solutions that are overkill. (Oops — that sentence won’t make much sense when that link dies.)

Since I first installed BLC days have turned into weeks, weeks into months, months into a year, and…well, here I am. Still with 150+ dead links reported.

So it’s time to do something about the problem. I don’t know what that’s going to be, and I suspect it’s going to be a fight all the way, but I’ve got a little time now and nothing better to do. And believe me, I tried to find something better to do.

They say the first step in solving a problem is admitting you have a problem. I have a problem. I have link rot.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com Tagged With: blogs, links

Site Seeing: Jane Friedman

April 2, 2015 By Mark 2 Comments

First things first. Because nothing is ever easy in life, there are (at least) two Jane Friedman’s in the publishing world. One Jane is the CEO of Open Road. This post concerns the other Jane, who is the CEO of herself, and formidably so.

Back about five or six years ago, when the self-publishing craze blew up and all the hand-wringing inside publishing turned into shrieking and wailing in the streets, one of the people I ran across on the interweb was Jane Friedman, then at Writer’s Digest. While ably fulfilling her contractual duties Jane struck me as someone who didn’t just have a job, but genuinely enjoyed — and more importantly, was interested in — her line of work. When she later departed WD I was glad to see her hang out her own shingle and keep moving with the times, because I thought she had a lot to offer both new and veteran writers who were struggling to understand the rapidly shifting publiscape.

Flash forward half a decade and I just ran across the most recent iteration of Jane’s site, and I think you should stop by yourself. I don’t know Jane personally and I can’t vouch for her in any professional context, but one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that there’s a lot to be said for people who stick with their interests no matter what else might be happening. In a world — and particularly a disingenuous online universe — where everyone is always racing off to the next shiny object or embracing the latest transactional fad (or fraud), I think it’s worth paying attention to people who seem immune to such influences.

Jane’s blog is here, and if you’re interested in publishing, self-publishing, and how authors are transitioning between and navigating the two, you won’t be disappointed. Having been in a cave since 2010 I’m happy to have years of back posts to read through, and I’ve already found one or two that were genuinely informative.

Too, not only does Jane post regularly, but she maintains a presence on her site, which is also quite rare given the usual online advice about branding, social networking and becoming a micro-celebrity. For example, not only do I agree with just about everything she had to say in this recent post — yet another rarity, albeit largely because I’m a crank — but one of the few concerns I did have was mentioned in the comments, to which Jane herself replied. The only point I might add is to make your website mobile-responsive, as Jane’s site already is. Not only are most people using smartphones these days, meaning they’re looking at your content in a very small window, but in a few weeks Google is going to start factoring mobile-responsive web design into its page rankings.

(Don’t have a mobile-responsive site? Don’t panic. Anyone searching for your name or the title of one of your books will still have little or no trouble finding you on the first page of search hits. It’s just something to keep in mind when you’re putting up a site or doing a refresh.)

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Ditchwalk.com, Publishing Tagged With: jane friedman, site seeing

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