Category: blogging

Information garden parties

Posted on by Liz

I asked today on Mastodon (which I approached cautiously as if it were a loaded gun) for people to share their blogs with me so I can work on building a more current feed reader. I use The Old Reader which costs money but does much of what i want with a minimum of fuss. I might throw that out and go with Planet (though must figure out which one) or moonmoon.

We need to bring back things like blogrolls, blog carnivals, and construct our own feeds. Yes I know I’m going to have to explain “blog carnivals”. Later!

I suggest we all host some little local garden parties. Not necessarily in a garden – but to “garden” our information feeds.

We can give each other recommendations – we can build some systems that don’t utterly suck!

I am very much enjoying NOT reading news, social media, reddit, or anything Fast or Scrolly. It’s good here! Try it!

Let’s encourage each other to curate our own information feeds that are noncommericalized, not being SHOVED INTO OUR EYEBALLS by an unknowable ALGORITHM, and that nurture, feed, and connect us like actual humans!

(I do love tiktok and the endless fountain of creativity there! HOWEVER.)

What do we love about blogging? It’s so personal and strange! It doesn’t have to fit into anything that is a made up “genre” motivated by money! (though it certainly can!)

Anyway, just from my one post to my very tiny mastodon account with not many followers at all, I got back some fun blogs! I favor rambling eclecticness, wit, diaries, anything people are either obsessed with or know a lot about, and noncommercial, non-categorizable approaches to blogging. You will note I already have my old fashioned blogroll over there on the oldfashioned sidebar. Here’s some more from today, lightly and irreverently annotated!

* jr conlin’s ink stained banana – entertaining short essays, tech infused but happily not lacking broader culture. Maybe my favorite of the new blogs I riffled through today

* ddurst’s blog – opinions on tech stuff, music production geekery, rock music criticism, and more

* ODonnellWeb – one of those blogs that has been many things but right now is all about birding, with lovely photos of places to go birding!

* Our Magic – Metagrrl’s blog about rpgs and building a very elaborate miniature landscape which I hope to see in person sometime! Honestly, Dinah is one of my early blogging heroes, so good and thinky, versatile, and someone who always comes up with new interests & projects. Discardia! Cocktails! Methodically walking the entire map of San Francisco! ::hearteyes::

* Long story short pier – Kip Manley’s gonzo criticism and far-ranging overthinking of just about anything and everything, everything and nothing. A good kind of blog! (Does have some ads for Kip’s books; we’ll allow it!)

* We Don’t Agree – Frank Miroslav’s very interesting essays, more a list of well thought out essays than “blog”, which I expect to be more off the cuff. Political, tech, economic analysis.

In short – I have gone full “FUCK THIS”. Seriously.

Two kinds of soup

Posted on by Liz Henry

Did some blogging for my nonprofit, GOAT, to talk about the DIY lights and safety workshop we ran with ILRCSF, and a small conference I gave a talk at, Common Tools. I also did some extra work on my 2 consulting jobs, co-working on video chat with Sumana for companionship.

Before lunch I had a walk to bring soup to yatima since I made a giant pot of chicken posole yesterday. I actually looked up whether it might be possible to rent a miniature pony to bring to her in the garret where she is isolating, because i would like for her to have all the ponies, but maybe isolation and a visiting pony and several flights of stairs don’t QUITE mix.

At lunch (which was escarole soup my mom brought me yesterday!)  I read a kids’ book, Summer of the Swans, that I picked up from a little free library along the Bernal Cut. It’s a Newbery Medal winner from 1970 that I remember looking at and rejecting when I was a kid, basically for gender reasons as the main character bugged me so much I didn’t want to read the rest. I didn’t mind super old fashioned girls’ books when I was younger, like reading Heidi, or Pollyanna, or whatever, but a vaguely modern tween girl freaking the hell out that her feet were too big and hates her nose or whatever, was a big fat no.   However, I read it while eating my soup today.

In Summer of the Swans there are two POV characters, Sara who is about to be 14, and her little brother Charlie, who is non neurotypical in some way because of a severe fever he had when he was a toddler. Their older sister is 19 but acts maybe 15 by my standards even for 1970, maybe especially for 1970. Anyway, the younger brother has mutism and some kind of developmental delay, and his sister Sara has a fairly strong bond with him and defends him against people who bully or tease him. He then wanders off in the night and the extremely thin plot of the book is basically that Sara realizes how much she loves him and finds him in the woods along with the Yukkiest Boy she totally hated who turns out to be quite nice and asks her on a date for that very evening. The end!  Yawn. Did this deserve the Newbery? It is probably notable for having Charlie be a sympathetic character and including his point of view and how he thinks and experiences the world and what he considers important, and the fact that his family respects him maybe is radical for 1970 or even today.

The book goes right back out onto a free shelf though. I pick up a lot of free kids’ books like this, read and release them, and only a few make it to the bookshelf of honor and preservation in my house!

I am also well into, maybe nearly done with, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, which is as fluffy or flufflier than Legends and Lattes, and is basically a knockoff of it where a tough palace guard and the land’s most powerful mage run off together to a small border town where they open a combination tea shop and bookstore/lending library while solving all the local political and magical problems and being adorable lesbians mildly processing their various insecurities and anxieties. Does our city guard “deserve” love or still feel she has to “earn” it? Does our mage take reasonable care of herself or run herself into the ground? Will they get married (duh yes but maybe in book 2). What will happen about the sucky, evil-ish Queen what’s her name? There are also mildly bad “puns” which I have to put in quotes because they hardly even deserve the name.

Obviously, I enjoy this comfort read and will read as many as appear before me magically on my Kindle.

Our contractors started painting today, or maybe just taping in preparation for painting the bathroom. Luis and his son also covered the back of the house in tyvek and started getting ready to do the exterior siding in the corridor alongside the new ramp, and also on the outside of the bathroom which was water damaged and a total teardown and rebuild. They are really great, but I am so ready for this project to be done with!!

Stardew and Voyager Farm await me – I am in mid summer and pushing hard on getting those 5 gold star melons for the Community Center bundle. I will also make myself amazing tacos with the remnants of the chicken posole. The broth is now gone, so it is just shredded chicken, peppers, tomatillos etc and the maiz blanco; I have white corn street taco sized tortillas which I will fry up lightly, maybe some refried beans from a can since didn’t think to cook actual dried beans, celantro, raw red pepper. I can’t remember if I have any salsa or cheese but am not feeling motivated to go out. Plain tacos are fine!

This weekend I am planning to hang out at the Legion of Honor museum festival with my sister and our parents and maybe my friend Mikayla. I will miss Lisa’s podcast for  Aaron Swartz Day this weekend (Saturday from 2-5pm) but planning to be on her podcast early next year to talk more about GOAT.

Generous with their links

Posted on by Liz

In what may have been the heyday of independent blogging, just as it turned to eyeball grabbing ad fodder, I remember my blog being reviewed by someone who described me as “generous with her links”.

This struck me as shocking on a couple of levels.

I realized they thought of my linking out as generous because I’m referring traffic outside of my own domain; the SEO strategies of the time probably recommended that you link only to your own site, directing readers to hit more of your pages, making you look more important to paying advertisers.

Needless to say (as you can tell from my own lack of fame, fortune, and ambition) I was not “optimizing” anything. Mostly I was just flinging posts into the public void out of being a compulsive diarist and having some ideals around women’s writing being mostly private, in diaries and letters, for most of history & wondering what would happen if we all split the world open by writing about our lives as part of public discourse.

younger liz peering over sunglasses wearing a beanie hat with the blue, white, and orange Blogger logo

Monetization aside, the good angle on the generous nature of linking would be the sense of taking the time and energy to add depth, to help the reader discover interesting things, like footnotes and appendices that knit information together and expand our minds – but that isn’t what the reviewer meant.

The whole point of the web is links! Creating a meaningfully interlinked body of knowledge and text! Consider Ted Nelson! And Vannevar Bush! Bring back the thinkertoys! But also just consult your own common sense and conscience!

If I remembered where that review appeared, I’d link to it!

white woman with a wry expression wearing a tshirt that reads "no one cares about your blog"

Firefox release, diner interlude, gingerbread

Posted on by Liz

After some especially intense weeks at work (leading up to this week’s Firefox 66 release) we then had to respond to the Pwn2own exploits. It went pretty much like last year when we also released in under a day; everyone worked hard and some people worked long hours to make it happen. I’m so proud to be part of Mozilla and get to work with such smart and dedicated people.

Between the release on Tuesday and the security-driven release on Thurs/Fri I spent a bunch of time going over and summarizing the various problems & uncertainties. It is very interesting to try and judge importance, impact, and “risk” in a software release. On the one hand you are offering a lot of improvements and fixes but you will inevitably also break something else for some other population of users. Is it an overall improvement for most users? Is some particular population (that may not be a majority) impacted by a new problem? All users of a particular site will crash with the new version, but with the old version, everyone editing a document with a Korean keyboard can’t use their backspace key. The different issues don’t cancel each other out, but still have to be compared and weighed. You start out reading bug and crash reports, and end up pondering epistemology and trying to steer a course in decision making through rocky waters — the geography of operating systems, hardware, web sites, and standards where nothing ever stands still. In the end the pattern seems to remain the same: cautiously release, pause and fix the worst new problems as best we can, then go full throttle. It will never be rock solid, like how you’d have to be releasing software for NASA, though, amazingly, that seems to be what people expect.

By the way, my boots came out great! I stripped off the glaze and brown dye with acetone, dyed them with Angelus red and wine-red and a bit of black, mink-oiled them, put on a Resolene sealant coat, then a coat of neutral polish. Now, I can look down at my boots and think YAY! RED! rather than seeing a sort of yucky ochre.

red boots

Ended my work day early (after pulling long hours for a while) and headed out to my sister’s house for the afternoon. BART continues to entertain me. I had a nice look at Oakland 19th street station and its beautiful deep varigated blue tiling. At first I thought they were bricks, but they’re actually thick tiles laid over a wire mesh. I may make this station the “Water” artifact puzzle for the game in honor of the lovely tiles. (Originally that was going to be Lake Merritt, but it needs to be a station on the Red line.)

Realized on the way that I hadn’t had lunch and barely had breakfast – I stopped at Mama’s Royal Cafe & had a biscuit sandwich and endless cups of decaf. The waiter spotted me playing Ingress and turned out to be a long time player on my same team (the Resistance or blue team)! I tried to work on my game a bit, but didn’t get far, too fried to really think things through. This is a great cafe — relaxing, gorgeous, cozy, good food.

At Laura’s I helped my nephew make gingerbread for his school bake sale (5 cakes’ worth so we mixed it all up in a huge pot.) I then ate like half a pan of gingerbread (for dinner I guess). Laura and I worked on our wordpress sites – I needed to change the theme of mine and she was just setting up a new one. Also, a couple of years ago I migrated in some way that broke all my images from past posts. That is now fixed! Huzzah! I also ended up minorly hacking this new theme to force it not to do post excerpts, which I fucking hate. Just let me scroll forever and read other people’s long posts! But no… the fashion is so heavily for showing excerpts and making people click a zillion times and load new pages. Bah. I don’t CARE if you’re on your phone – you can scroll! It’s been a long time since I even looked at php but, reassuringly, it all came back to me.

gingerbread mixing

It was my son’s 19th birthday on Friday as well and he had a final and then was heading off to a weekend camping LARP with his dad. I’ll see him next week! But, I have to admit I went and looked at pics of him from babyhood on in a sentimental way. He’s so grown up and wonderful, and I’m so so proud of him.

milo-hashtag-sweater

Playing catch-up and tweaking small habits

Posted on by Liz

Coming back to work after 6 weeks leave – Here is my plan.

* Bugzilla needinfo: A few people were still trying to talk to me while I was out so, doing that first.
* Deal with email: inbox ~2000, anything older than a week, I will archive it in large batches by filtering and then read whatever is leftover and seems important.
* Study the calendar and absorb where we are in the current release cycle
* Read meeting notes: my team meetings, product cross-functional, recent channel meetings
* Read the post-mortem notes for the 62 release, and the subsequent dot releases, though that may depress me (I got sick in the last stages of this (“my”) release)
* Figure out what I should be doing next, probably that means prep for Firefox 65 if I’ll be the release owner for that, and I believe for ESR 60.4.0 (that goes along with the 64 release)
* I can always peck away at some new regression triage

That’s plenty for the next day or so.

Meanwhile during my recovery from surgery I have been trying to change or add small daily habits. Another list!

* I have integrated doing 3-5 minutes of gentle tai chi a few times a day (first thing in the morning, mid-morning, and before lunch are the most important).
* Writing and drawing around 15 minutes each, even if not particularly inspired, I have to stop whatever else I’m doing and give it a try. Sometimes I end up going further or having good ideas!
* Making sure to go outside and lie in the sun, while we still have sunny patches on the front porch and on our back patio. Sun hour is currently around 9:45 to 11 in the front. By late October we won’t have any more direct sun, not until March. So I had better take advantage while it’s still here (And also, it structures my day nicely — important, as Coleridge says, to organize the hours and give them a soul.)
* Posting more here, in my more private journal, or writing in my notebook rather than just on Facebook, which has become an ingrained bad habit.
* I moved Twitter off the front page of my phone and replaced it with Duolingo and Feedly, so now when I have the impulse to zone out reading Twitter (and rage-tweeting about politics) I instead either read some actual blogs that I like, or do some poking away at Duolingo. (Spanish and French). I also still look over Hacker News which usually has something worth reading, if only so that I can laugh at n-gate afterwards
* Sending snail mail. When I realized I’d be in bed for weeks, I asked for postcards from people, and got around 100 cards! It was very cheering. I’m still answering that batch of cards.

Here’s a little sharpie marker illustration of a black cat from one of my drawing sessions!
drawing of a black cat

Getting back on the horse

Posted on by Liz

Not heroin but blogging more rather than leaning on Facebook and Slack for all my casual writing, diary, and conversation online. Never mind maneuvers, blog straight at em. The other thing stopping me is a totally mundane task to twiddle the theme of this blog and restore all the images which were lost in a previous theme change early in 2017. Somehow, there is never time!

I started off the holiday break at the end of 2017 working over my vacation. Then spent a few days speed-publishing part of my book backlog to ebook formats, starting with very tiny poetry books from 2000 to about 2005, firing up my most recent press/imprint, Burn This Press. There are more coming – both more tiny books and bigger books and anthologies that didn’t have a wide distribution and never made it to a digital format.

Many other ambitions like traveling for a vacation, or visiting every museum in the San Francisco Bay Area, were shelved for when I feel more mobile and have less pressure at work. I still did some fun things in December though!

Among them, 2 christmases: Fakemas which we hold before the actual holiday, since both kids tend to go on trips to or with other family for Dec. 25. And then actual Christmas with my sister’s family.

Here’s a cute picture of Milo home from university and putting ornaments on our tiny, tiny tree — against a background of bookshelves! It’s on a small end table that’s a solid, heavy tree stump carved and painted to look like a pile of giant books.

putting ornaments on the tree

What we'll do

Posted on by Liz

One thing that was starting to dawn on me: we would see a wave of women speaking up, more than ever, which would change things in ways we couldn’t predict. The heartfelt stories suddenly popping up on “Pantsuit Nation” felt like early blogging days over again but expanded further out to a new group. Stories of past abuse or injustice, large or small incidents as women thought about their lives, their mothers and grandmothers and daughters. Despite the ways the political status quo supports already privileged white women I started to feel that a little bit more of a cultural shift was about to happen in this country with Clinton’s election. I really love diaries and the history of women’s writing. In this context for me it is touching and sad to see how difficult it is for women even now to participate in public intellectual life. So often the pattern is that women of color blaze the trail and fall hard under attack while a lot of white women professionalize up and get a dribble of token jobs.

My hope is that we will fight harder against that process and women will keep on writing and being outspoken – not in the way it might have unfolded, but as a point of resistance and awakening under whatever is about to happen (which I dread.)

Even the most privileged women don’t manage to tell their stories or truth in public (or mobilize and organize, which is what comes next) maybe in some cases because they have a fair amount to lose and are invested in the status quo. Beyond that personal investment and co-optatation we should also be aware that culture and politics can change quickly. We can’t know what aspects of our life will condemn us in the future (for example, being a landlord in some political climates has meant heavy political oppression for generations.) Early blogging or any frank public writing leaves us even more vulnerable on a political level than we might fear in our personal lives or from being trolled online.

Also I thought that Samantha Bee thing about Clinton’s life clamping down on herself and trying to mold herself into what was required by The Patriarchy was the most depressing thing ever and I felt glad I have at least some remnant of punk rock in my soul. Man that was awful. Nope nope nope. She took a pragmatic road but what a road to hell. Glad I am not a politician right now.

This is just to say that this can be a point of resistance. Maybe that is comforting – kind of like, well, So what. Keep on being out there if that’s a way you want to risk yourself. It can be small and personal but it has a real world effect. Maybe the women who began to open up in that “private” Facebook group will find ways to keep on doing something like that. I respect the ways that people find to keep themselves and their families safe. But it’s also important that we keep speaking up as much as possible. For myself I’m thinking that I stand by my own years of public writing and always will. Everyone please blog harder and poet harder, if that’s what you do.

Shorter posts with more worklogs and book reviews

Posted on by Liz

While I love to go on at length and be thorough sometimes it’s been stopping me from recording interesting stuff lately. I’ll be at a conference and take great notes, which years ago I would have posted unedited. Now I tend to procrastinate posting about something “until I can do justice to it” which often results in “never”. Have I posted about Kiwicon? NO! Argh. Fuck that, I need to just post.

So I’m resolving to write more frequently about smaller topics. They may not turn into comprehensive book reviews but at least there will be something here.

mozilla roof

At work I am organizing a Bugzilla bug day and preparing to go to Toronto next week for a community building work week.

Not-at-work, lots of people are rumbling about wanting another feminist hackers meeting and a hackability wheelchair/access device hack day. I have Noisebridge stuff going on and AdaCamp is coming up in June. I forgot to actually sign up for WisCon panels but in theory am going to WisCon. There is a lot of “event to-do list” stuff here!

Notable books I read in the last few days: The Brontës Went to Woolworth’s by Rachel Ferguson, which was fantastic; The Diary of Elizabeth Pepys by Dale Spender, which I adored but which was very depressing as you can imagine if you have read Pepys; and Japanese Inn (my boring-book for bedtime) by Oliver Statler, which functioned perfectly as a boring-book and which was good but very colonialish and patronizing in the way you might expect from a book from 1960 and which if you are not trying to fall asleep at night would just make you wonder why you are bothering and realize it would be better to read some actual work of Japanese history or a primary source by one of the people referred to. Though I did enjoy reading Isabella Bird’s travels.

I am feeling more energy lately and less pain, which I attribute to my 2 months of Enbrel injections and perhaps also Tramadol, which is great as an occasional painkiller.

Here is a photo of the fabulous glistening Minecraft block cake I made for Milo’s 13th birthday party (which was at the musee mecanique again)

Minecraft cake

There really need to be square cupcake pans (well, cubical) Maybe there already are! Then it would be easy to make little Minecraft block cakes and frost them all different colors and build a hilarious structure which could be easily (if stickily) disassembled.

What would you like to hear from me at BlogHer?

Posted on by Liz

At every annual BlogHer conference I’ve given one (or several) talks and workshops. I’ve always gotten a lot of great feedback from my workshop sessions on coding and debugging, blog security and privacy, and other technical how-tos, as well as talking about politics, women’s history, feminism and identity, and how our writing online ties into the letters and diaries and activism from women in the past. Last year I spoke about what it’s like to be a small blogger who suddenly is on the crest of the wave of breaking news and talking with mainstream media. I also try to approach tech support for our bloggers and community as part of my personal feminist activism: tech support as empowerment!

Since I work for BlogHer full time, I’m on call as a speaker to fill in anywhere the organizers need me to, so I could end up anywhere. Still, I like to propose my own panels! I’m considering “A Server of Her Own” or “Feminist Hackers” . . .

If you’re thinking of coming to BlogHer ’12 in NYC next , what would you like me to speak about or teach? Any particular subjects or panels you’ve seen me run before, that you’d like to see happen again? Or, if you’re thinking of coming to speak, what kind of panel or workshop would you like to run *with* me?

me, skye, and tempest

Not that it’s all about me!

If you’re thinking about coming to BlogHer or putting in an idea or a talk proposal… read on!

BlogHer is an extremely friendly and open conference. 80% of our speakers each year are new speakers at the conference! It started with 300 women in San Jose years ago, and now I think our numbers at the annual conference are closer to 4000. Yes! Four thousand blogging women! (And sundry.) The parties are great — the people are the best thing though. Some people are nerdy, some are more writerly, some personal, some blogging on particular subjects, some very commercially oriented and many not at all. As with all the best conferences the sessions are good but the hallway and lobby conversations that happen informally are even better.

Read through Polly’s (very helpful) Call for Ideas, and Jes’s How to Become a Speaker at BlogHer! And if you have any questions for me personally about the conference, feel free to ask in comments or email me at liz@blogher.com.