This is a long rant by Cat Valente – and it’s really, really good. Though I’m quoting a particularly good bit from the end, it’s worth reading the whole thing.
Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.
Because that’s what fascists can’t do. They don’t love white people or straight people or silent women or binary enforced gender or forced birth or even really money. They want those things to be the only acceptable or even visible choices, but they don’t love them. They don’t even want to think about them. They want them to be automatically considered superior and universally mandated so they don’t have to think about them—or else what do you think the fury over other people wearing masks was ever about? The need to be right without thinking about it, and never have to see anything that wakens a spark of doubt in their own choices.
Obey, do not imagine, do not differ.
That’s nothing to do with love. Love is gentle, love is kind, remember? They need the attention being terrible brings them, but they don’t love it any more than a car loves gas. Sometimes I don’t even think they love themselves. Sometimes I’m pretty sure of it. They certainly never seem happy, even when they win. Musk doesn’t seem happy at all.
Geeks, though. Us weird geeks making communities in the ether? We love. We love so stupidly hard. We try to be happy. We get enthusiastic and devote ourselves to saving whales and trees and cancelled science fiction shows and each other. The energy we make in these spaces, the energy we make when we support and uplift and encourage and excite each other is something people like Musk can never understand or experience, which is why they keep smashing the windows in to try and get it, only to find the light they hungered for is already gone. Moved on, always a little beyond their reach.
Get an RSS feed for any user by appending .rss to the end of their profile URL. For example, my profile is tenforward.social/@djwudi, so the RSS feed of my posts is tenforward.social/@djwudi.rss.
This also works for hashtag searches; handy for keeping an eye on hashtags (without worrying you’ll miss them in your feed). In my case, as our social media manager, I watch for mentions of Norwescon. Since that hashtag search URL is <your server>/tags/norwescon, the RSS feed is <your server>/tags/norwescon.rss. (I’ve also subscribed to feeds for norwescon45, nwc45, and philipkdickaward.)
The feeds-for-users tip I’ve seen going around, but I’d not seen this applied to hashtag searches, so I gave it a shot, and was happy to see it worked. Figured I’d put both in one post for those who might not have known either.
A question for macOS WordPress bloggers who use Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit: What’s your go-to mobile iOS blogging tool?
MarsEdit is a great example of a “do one thing and do it really well” piece of software, and I’ve yet to find anything equivalent for mobile blogging. I just want exactly what MarsEdit gives me: A list of my most recent posts and pages, a solid plain-text Markdown editor, and access to all the standard WordPress fields and features.
Every other editor I’ve tried either doesn’t do one or more of those things or is otherwise not quite right in some way. Ulysses was the closest and I tried it for a while, but while it’s a great editor, it doesn’t pull a list of posts and pages from the blog, just works with whatever’s local or in its own cloud sync or Dropbox or whatever, and last time I used it, had a bug where alt text wasn’t getting applied to images correctly.
(The WordPress native app drives me up the wall. I don’t want block editing. I want text and Markdown.)
Really, what I want is an iOS version of MarsEdit. But failing that: any recommendations?
While nobody specifically asked, since I have some friends who are all about the AI art and some who believe it’s something that should be avoided because of all the ethical issues, and since I’m obviously having fun playing with it with my “AImoji” project, I figured I’d at least make a nod to the elephant in the room.
There are absolutely some quite serious ethical questions around AI generated artwork. To my mind the three most serious are (not in any particular order):
Much of the material used to train the AI engines was scraped off the internet, often without any consideration of copyright, certainly without any attempt to get permission from the original creators/artists/photographers/subjects/etc., and some people have even found medical images that were only approved for private use by their doctor, but somehow ended up in the training sets. That situations like this are likely (hopefully) in the minority doesn’t absolve the companies who acquired and used the images to create their AI engines from being responsible for using these images.
As the AI engines continue to improve, it is getting more and more difficult to distinguish an AI generated image from one created by an artist. There are also a number of people and organizations who have flat-out stated that they are looking at AI generated imagery as a way to save money, because it means they now don’t have to pay actual artists to create work. Obviously, this is not a particularly good approach to take.
Because some of the engines are able to create images in the style of a particular artist, and the output quality continues to improve, there have already been instances where a living artist is being credited for creating work that was generated by an AI bot. And, of course, if you can create an image that looks like your favorite artist’s work for low or no cost…well, for a lot of people, they’ll happily settle for an AI generated “close enough” rather than an actual commissioned piece. Obviously, this is also not a particularly good approach to take.
I’m enjoying playing with the AI art generation tools. I’m also watching the discussions around the ethical questions around how they can and should be used.
The issues above are all very real and very serious. It’s also true that AI art can be just another tool in an artist’s toolbox. I’ve seen artists who use AI art generators to play with ideas until they find inspiration, or who use parts of the generated output in their own work. I’ve seen reports of people who want to commission art use the generator to get a rough idea of what they’re looking for that they can give to an artists as a rough example or proof of concept. So there are ways to use AI art generators in, well, more-ethical ways (it’s hard to argue they’d be entirely ethical when the generators have unethical underpinnings).
So, where I stand in my use at this point:
I don’t use living artist’s names to influence the style one way or another, and have only occasionally used dead artist’s names as keywords (I’ll admit, H.R. Giger has been a favorite to play with).
I don’t feed images in, try to generate images of actual people, or use images of actual people (including myself) as source material.
One caveat: if a tool does all of its processing locally on my device, I may use my own images, including some of myself. But nothing that feeds images into the systems.
And, of course, anything I do is just for fun, and to make me, and maybe a few other people, laugh (or occasionally recoil in horror).
For a few months this past year, I used an AI-generated image of a dragon flying over a city skyline for the Norwescon website and social media banner image. This was always intended as a temporary measure to fill the gap between last year’s convention and getting art from this year’s Artist Guest of Honor, and as soon as we had confirmed art from our GOH, the AI-generated art came down. It was also chosen much earlier in the “isn’t AI art neat” period, before I’d read as much about the issues involved. As such, I won’t be using AI art for Norwescon again, and will go back to sourcing copyright-free images from NASA or other such avenues when we are in the interregnum period.
So: I understand those who see AI art as something that should be avoided. I also understand those who see it as another tool. And, honestly, I also understand those who just see a shiny new toy that they want to play with. I’m somewhere in the midst of all those points of view, and while I don’t personally see the need to avoid AI art bots entirely, I am consciously considering how I use them and what I use them for.
Reading this: basically, CO2 levels are a measure of how well a space is ventilated, and can therefore be a handy proxy for a rough idea of how likely it could be that there might be infectious particles (flu, COVID, etc.) in the air. Lower CO2 = better ventilation and less chance of any bugs in the air, Higher CO2 = worse ventilation, stale air, and higher chance of other bugs in the air. It’s not a one-to-one connection, obviously, as there are other variables, such as number of people in the area, but it can be a good way to get a rough measure of the ventilation.
So here’s how my day went (all times shifted one hour from what’s shown on the graph due to the time change).
Being able to see this change over the course of the day was fascinating.
Until about 8am, I was at the hotel. Levels stayed in the green and slowly decreased through the night, then increased into the yellow as I woke up and was active and moving around, showering, packing, etc.
8-9am, outside and on the light rail to the airport. Nice and green.
9-noon, in the airport, often in the midst of lots of people as I went through the TSA lines. Even in the large, high-ceilinged airport areas, with lots of room for air to move, levels were generally in the yellow. This is part of why crowded situations, even in large or outdoor areas, are still good places to be masked.
Noon-2pm, on the airplane. Lots of people in a fairly small, confined space. Airplanes might have “good” ventilation, but there’s only so much that can be done, and it was solidly in the red the entire time. I was okay with my KN95 through the airport, but switched to an N95 from just before boarding until after disembarking in Seattle, didn’t eat on the plane, and used a straw when drinking to minimize intake of unfiltered air.
2-3pm: Getting my baggage and taking a Lyft home. Right back into the green.
This was a handy little gadget to have with me this week. That, plus masking, plus vaccination and boosters, and I’m feeling pretty confident in my safety measures.
On this last day of the 2022 Accessing Higher Ground accessibility in higher education conference, I put together a thread about the week. Originally posted on Mastodon, this is a lightly edited version for this blog. Be warned, this isn’t short. :)
Me on my way to the first day of panels.
High-level thoughts from a first-time attendee: This is a really good conference. I haven’t seen much in the way of glitches or issues (discounting the occasional technical electronic weirdness that happens anywhere). Panel content has been well selected and planned; I’ve been able to put together a full schedule with few “this or that” conflicts. Some panelists are better than others, as always, but I haven’t seen any trainwrecks or other disasters.
I do wish the conference had more of a social media presence. The @AHGround Twitter account linked from the AHG website hasn’t posted since 2017, and the #ahg22 hashtag I only found on their Facebook page, and it wasn’t mentioned until 10 days before the conference. Unsurprisingly, this means that there was very little hashtag use (at first I seemed to be one of the very few users other than AGH itself using the tag consistently or at all; a few more people started using it as the conference went on).
The hotel is a Hilton. My primary other hotel experience is the DoubleTree by Hilton Seattle Airport (where Norwescon is held), and I was amused that in most respects, I prefer the DoubleTree to the Hilton Denver City Center. The room is a little smaller here, and I was welcomed at check-in with a room temperature bottle of water instead of a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. But these are small and kind of picky distinctions; really, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Hilton.
Looks about like any other hotel room out there.
That said: This particular hotel has excellent ventilation. I’ve been carrying around an Aranet4 air quality monitor, and it has stayed comfortably in the green nearly the entire time; it has only gone into the low end of the yellow during one standing-room-only session in a smaller room. It did get into the yellow as it sat in my room overnight as I slept, but opening the window would bring it back into the green in just a few minutes (though at 20°-40° F outside, I didn’t do this much).
Being able to keep an eye on CO2 levels was nice, and helped make me feel comfortable with COVID-era conference travel.
As noted in an earlier Mastodon post, the weirdest thing for me has been part of switching from fan convention to professional conference: the lack of anything after about 5 p.m. I’m used to fan-run SF/F cons like Norwescon, with panels running until 9 p.m. or later, evening concerts or dances, 24-hour game spaces, and a general “we’ll sleep when this is done” schedule. Having nothing left for the day after about 5 p.m. is odd, and it feels weird not to know that I could wander out and find things going on.
For people who come with groups and/or have been doing this for a long time and have a lot of connections, I’m sure it’s easy to find colleagues to have dinner or hang out in bars or restaurants (at or outside the hotel) and chat with. But for a new solo attendee, it meant I spent a lot of evenings watching movies on my iPad in my room. (I did find a small group of other Washington-based attendees to hang with one evening, which was very appreciated.)
Impressions of Denver: Hard to say, really. It’s been pretty cold this week (20s to 30s most days), and since a lot of panels caught my eye, I didn’t take time to go exploring beyond going to the 16th street mall to find food. The little I did see in the immediate area is nice enough; maybe I’ll see more if I get to come back to AHG in the future.
Though I haven’t taken German or been to Germany in years, my brain kept labeling this a “Fußgängerzone”.
Colorado itself, I have to say, didn’t give me the greatest first impression. The trip from the airport to downtown Denver is a 40-minute light rail ride through flat, brown, high desert with lots of scrub brush, punctuated by aesthetically unpleasing industrial and commercial areas. Maybe it’s nicer in the summer, but in the winter? The SeaTac-to-Seattle light rail ride is much prettier. (My apologies to Coloradans for snarking on their state.)
Denver has mountains in the distance, they were just out the other side of the train. All I saw was flat.
My least favorite part has been the humidity, or lack thereof. Coming from the Pacific Northwest’s pretty regular 50%+ humidity, having Colorado’s humidity hovering around the 20% level has been horrible on my skin. Even with lotion, I’m itching like crazy, to the point where it’s been difficult to sleep, and my hands are so dry that the skin of my knuckles is cracking and I look like I’ve been punching walls. Whimper, whine, yes, whatever, it’s unpleasant.
But anyway! And now, brief (500-character or fewer) overviews of the sessions I attended while I’ve been here:
InDesign Accessibility (full-day pre-conference session): For a long time, I’ve had a basic impression that PDFs are crap for accessibility. Turns out that PDFs can be made quite accessible, but it takes a bit of work and the right tools, and InDesign is a powerful tool for this sort of thing. While I don’t use InDesign much, I learned a lot about PDF accessibility and how to effectively prepare documents, and many of the concepts will be translatable to other programs. Very useful.
Addendum: I’d also like to take some time to see how many of these techniques and accessibility features are also available in Affinity Publisher, since I’m a fan of Affinity’s alternatives to Adobe’s big three tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign). I have no idea how much of a priority Affinity puts on accessibility (either within their tools or the final documents), but it could be an interesting thing to poke around with.
Using NVDA to check PDFs for Accessibility (full-day pre-conference session): Another really useful day. While I’ve known about screen readers as a concept for some time, I’ve just started experimenting with NVDA over the past year, and as a sighted user who doesn’t depend on it, it can be an overwhelming experience. This day gave me a ton of info on tips for using NVDA (including the all-important “shut up for a moment” command), and I’m going to be much more comfortable with it now.
Keynote: Oh, also: The keynote speaker, Elsa Sjunneson, was excellent, speaking about her experiences as a Deafblind person, student, parent, and author. Her statement that “disability is a multiverse” resonated with a lot of people. Plus, it was a treat to see her speak here, as I know of her from her paneling at Norwescon and her Hugo nominations and wins.
Elsa and her interpreter during her keynote speech.
Publishing and EPUB 101: An introduction to EPUBs and an overview of some of the better creation tools. I’ve experimented a bit with creating EPUBs here and there in the past, and am familiar enough with the basics that this one was slightly below my knowledge level, but it still gave me some good tips on methods and tools for preparing documents to be output as accessible EPUB files for distribution.
Math and STEM: Since I’m going to be training STEAM faculty on what they need to know to make their courses accessible, which can have some extra considerations to be aware of, this seemed like an obvious choice. It ended up being basically a demonstration of TextHelp’s Equatio equation editing product, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as Equatio does do a lot of neat stuff and our campus already has access to it, so I did learn a lot from the session, even with the single-product focus.
Retire the PDF: An intentionally hyperbolic title, this was a call to consider EPUBs as an alternative to PDFs when distributing documents. As long as you’re not absolutely wedded to the visual layout and presentation of a document, EPUBs do have a lot of advantages over PDFs by giving the end user more control over the display (fonts, sizes, reflow to varying screen sizes, etc.) and better screen reader compatibility (especially when compared to poorly constructed PDFs).
Educational Alt Text: A particularly good session on how to think about writing alt text for images, with an emphasis on doing so for an educational context. Thinking about not simply describing the contents of an image, but creating alt text that conveys the meaning and what information the reader needs to get from the image separate from how the image appears, and how to craft effective alt text and (when technologically possible) long descriptions with more information about the image.
Going Further with EPUB: This session got deeper into the innards of EPUBs, looking at how they’re constructed (essentially self-contained XHTML websites), examining a few different tools for creating, editing, checking, and validating EPUBs for full accessibility. Again, much of the basic info I knew, but the collection of tools and verification options will be very handy to have.
Accessible Math Roadmap: Presenting an in-progress reference document on the state of accessible math and the various tools out there for creating and interacting with equations in accessible formats. As noted above, this is an area I’m trying to learn the basics of as quickly as possible, so I’ll be digging into the reference document itself in more detail in the coming days as I continue preparing to help train faculty on how they can do all this for their classes.
Trending Tech Tools: This is apparently the latest in a recurring series of presentations at this conference, going over major developments in accessible technology over the past year, recent updates to a number of widely used tools, and a peek at things coming down the line in the coming months. Particularly for someone new to the field, this was a nice way to get a snapshot of where things stand and what to be aware of.
Advanced VPAT Techniques: Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) are a way for vendors to declare how accessible their products are (or aren’t); this session discussed how best to approach talking with vendors about their VPATs, particular things to look for, and ways to guide discussions with vendors to get more precise information about issues that may be noted when reviewing the VPATs during the pre-selection product investigation and review phase.
Accessible Videos: Covered what needs to be done to make videos accessible, for both the videos themselves (using high-contrast text within the videos, including correct captions, transcripts, and audio description tracks) and the video players themselves, which need to be accessible and allow full access to all features for all users (which most players, including YouTube’s, aren’t very good at doing). Got some good pointers on automated-caption correction workflows and tools as well.
Integrating Tech in Communication: Through no fault of the presenters, this ended up being the least directly useful to me, as while it was about ways to use tech to communicate with students, it was presented by people on a Microsoft-focused campus, and was essentially a rundown of many of the features built into Microsoft’s applications and how they’re using them on their campus. Not bad info at all, just not as useful for me as it obviously was for others in attendance.
So that wraps up my week at Accessing Higher Ground! It was well worth coming, and I’m very glad I was able to come. If I only get to go to one conference next year, it will probably be the big AHEAD conference (along with ATHEN, one of the two parent organizations for AHG), as they’ll be in Portland, but if we have the resources to send me to two conferences, I definitely hope to come back to AHG again. Thanks to the organizers and all the presenters and attendees for such a good conference week!
TL;DR: Avoiding Mastodon because you’ve heard it’s problematic makes as much sense as avoiding the internet because you’ve heard it’s problematic.
So.
Back in the antediluvian times before the Internet existed — you know, when great beasts like dinosaurs and, um…mastodons…roamed the earth — there were these things called Bulletin Board Systems, or BBSs.
Each BBS was a single computer sitting in someone’s house, connected to a telephone line (the physical kind that came out of the wall). BBS users could use a modem (generally a little box with blinky lights that screamed at you when you started using it, but the really neat but slow early ones you’d actually place an telephone handset into) to place a telephone call from their computer to the BBS computer to see who had posted messages since the last time they called in, respond to those messages if they wanted, and upload or download tiny, low-resolution, 256-color .bmp images, often of impolite subject matter.
The really fancy BBS systems could connect to two or three phone lines at a single time, so that more than one user could log in at the same time. This would let them type back and forth at each other, much like a modern chat session, only they’d have to actually use real words, because this was also before emoji were invented.
Each BBS tended to have its own particular culture and rules. Some BBSs were regional for an area; others might have a Star Trek theme, or a Star Wars theme, or a Dr. Who theme. I think that was it, because those were the only approved geek interests at the time. People with particular interests would join BBSs that supported those interests, so they could have conversations with other people that shared those interests.
Eventually, BBS systems gained the ability to dial into each other and exchange messages. Suddenly conversations could involve not just the users on an individual BBS, but also users on other BBSs. Once a day or so, one BBS would call another one, send a bunch of replies to discussions that had been posted in the past day over, and receive a bunch of replies to discussions.
Of course, even when one Star Trek BBS was talking to another Star Trek BBS, they might not have exactly the same rules. Subjects that were fine one one server might be anathema on the other. Maybe a user who had gotten into a fight with someone on one server had started using another one, but now those two servers were talking to each other. Basically, people are people, and as every good Depecehe Mode listener knows, that doesn’t always work out.
But still, people generally like to meet and talk to other people about things they enjoy (not to mention exchange tiny, low-resolution, 256-color .bmp images of impolite subject matter), and so these differences were dealt with, and different servers found ways to get along. Or, if there were simply too many differences to overcome, the servers would simply stop calling each other to exchange messages.
Basically, we all either figured out how to get along, or if there was a known problem server, we just stopped dealing with it.
But we didn’t say that, “Oh, I heard BBSs were a problem, so I don’t do that.”
Well, okay, sure, I’m sure there were people who had that attitude. But the rest of us knew that you didn’t have to throw the BBS out with the bathwater (there’s a risk of electrical shock when doing that anyway) — all you had to do was ignore the BBS that was the problem, not ignore BBSs altogether.
Fast forward a few decades.
Now every computer talks to every other computer. Some of those computers host discussions from a number of different people. Some of those groups of people are perfectly pleasant, reasonable people, whose only concerns are ensuring that everyone they know has a lifetime supply of puppies, kittens, and rainbows. Some of those groups of people are…otherwise interested.
They all exist on the same internet, but they’re on different systems, using different software, much of which doesn’t easily talk to the other kinds of systems and software out there. So when you run across a part of the internet that has all the appeal of free diving into depths of the New York City sewer system, the easiest solution is to simply not explore that part of the internet. (And hopefully, you escape before attracting their notice, so they don’t follow you wherever you go.)
So we (most of us, at least) don’t avoid the entire internet because we know that there are some parts of it that are not places you’d want to wander through late ate night (or, sometimes, even in the broad light of day).
One of Twitter’s major problems is that it is a monolithic system: If you’re on Twitter, you’re in the same system as every other Twitter user. And because Twitter had dodgy and poorly enforced protocols and methods for protecting its users, there was no good way to say, “I don’t want to deal with this unpleasant group of Twitter users”. Everyone’s in the same room at the same party, and there’s no real way to escape short of leaving the party entirely, even if that means having to abandon all the partygoers that you like to get away from the partygoers with the funny little mustaches who are being jerks.
Mastodon, however, isn’t monolithic. It’s not a single system. This is where you start hearing the words “decentralized” and “federated” and your eyes glaze over, but all that means is, just like the BBSs of ye olden days, it’s a bunch of individual servers that can to talk to each other. The biggest difference is that where in the BBS days, BBS owners had to find each other and set up the connections intentionally (opt-in), Mastodon’s default is for servers to talk to each other unless they choose not to (opt-out).
Some servers are puppies and kittens and rainbows, some aren’t. But when the owner of the Mastodon server puppieskittensrainbows.social realizes that the users from newyorkcitysewer.social keep harassing people, causing problems, and being generally unpleasant, they can just decide not to talk to that server anymore. Poof! Problem solved, no more sewer rats skittering around biting people.
So, is Mastodon a problem? No more than BBSs are a problem, or the Internet is a problem. Individual Mastodon instances may be, but they can be dealt with.
And, of course, nobody can spend $44 billion to run Mastodon into the ground in two weeks.
Leave Twitter or stay*?
If you’re leaving, where are you going?
My response:
For myself, I’ll likely keep my account active (deleting an account doesn’t remove it from being followed, and means that username is up for grabs, which means a bad actor/spammer could grab it and start showing up in the feeds of anyone who was still following that username), but I may start scaling back my usage (even more than I already have). There are still a lot of people on there that I value following, but if the ratio starts to change, so it goes.
My personal preference (at least in an ideal world) is for my own personal website. I own it, I can put what I want on it, and I’ve had a blog running there for more than 20 years now. How frequently I post to it varies depending on how much I’m sucked into Facebook or Twitter at any given time, but I’ve never let it totally die off, and maybe this will (once again) be impetus to start babbling there again.
Of course, the down side to personal blogs is that for “most people”, they’re not as visible — you have to either go to them, or have some form of RSS newsreader set up, which isn’t difficult, but if you don’t know about that as an option, it doesn’t do any good — because they’re not being algorithmically pushed into people’s faces, so you get fewer readers. And without “like” buttons or similar functionality (which I’ve not bothered to figure out how to do on mine), if the readers you do have don’t comment, then you don’t have the gratification of feedback. I’m well aware that this is one of the things that keeps sucking me back to Facebook: I can post the same thing here and on my blog, and I have no idea if anyone ever sees my blog, but here I’ll get reactions and comments.
I also have accounts on both Mastodon and Cohost, and will every so often check back in to see what’s going on there. As always, if more people I know use those more often, I’m more likely to participate more often.
I sincerely believe that learning, growing, examining, and often changing beliefs is an integral part of being a responsible human being. My personal journey socially and politically has been ever leftwards, and there are many posts in the archives that I would not write the same way today, if at all.
Things I know exist in my archives that I would not write today:
General mockery of Britney Spears for no real reason other than being a pop queen. (Which, honestly, she’s very good at.)
Very suburban-white-background “I listen to all kinds of music except country and rap” sentiments. Lots of at-the-time unexamined racism and classism in those statements, plus they were never really all that true (classic country and “acceptable” rap were always part of my listening habits).
Probably a fair amount of other statements with then-unexamined ableism, classism, racism, sexism, homophobic, or transphobic aspects or roots.
I’m sure there is a lot more; those are just the ones that pop into my head because I’ve come across them at one point or another recently while digging into my archives.
I’ve always considered myself to be open-minded and politically liberal, and while that’s true, the older I get, the more I have realized how many ingrained societal biases still exist within that basic framework. Working through those biases, recognizing them, and endeavoring to change them is an ongoing process, and one I hope I never give up on. It’s not always comfortable; it is always necessary.
I’ve been working for the past few days on constructing a Shortcut to use for quickly sending a link and block of text to whatever blogging software I’m using on whichever device I’m on at the moment. As of today, I’ve hit a point where it does everything I wanted it to when I started playing, so I’m designating this an official “version one” release (for posterity’s sake, I suppose I can refer to the prior two versions as the alpha and beta releases).
The Shortcut is now cross-platform, with many thanks to Jason Snell for giving me exactly the final pieces I needed.
Selecting some text on a webpage and then using the Share Sheet on iOS or the Services menu on macOS will grab the webpage link and the selected text, convert it to Markdown format, convert any relative URLs in the selected text to absolute URLs, and then place the final text into a new Ulysses sheet on iOS or MarsEdit post on macOS, all ready for any final edits before publishing to your blog.
If this shortcut might be of use to you, either as-is or with some modifications for your particular needs, download, tweak if necessary, use, and (hopefully) enjoy!
