Lo! A philomath's field notes & yearnings
Andando pola terra, descubrín
paisaxes coma bosques, densos de humidade,
desertos dourados, sen fin,
e montes e vales ondulantes.
Os meus ollos enriqueceron.
Mais sobre todo, descubrín
as xentes desta terra,
os seus sorrisos e as súas esperanzas,
e que temos máis cousas en común
e que debemos romper as que nos dividen.
Happy Día das Letras Galegas! Poet, writer, and translator Xela Arias will be honored. Since I’m (currently) a non-Galician speaking galegophile and this blog is in English, here’s a section of her poem A de Quen Comprende translated courtesy of Canadian poet and translator Erín Moure.
The 17th of May brings a new personality and figure for us to get to know. I hope next year, with a better understanding for Galician, I can dive more into the original writings of both Xela and next year’s homage.
That of the one who realizes is no
glad word.
That of the one who transmits is
terminology, useful.
If every day its blast
does not detonate stupidity into shatters
what use are intelligence and feeling.
They made you immaculate. You were needed.
They make you inmaculate. You initiate the long trail.
Look how they crop you,
throttle to the last your right to detonate.
Nothing new, immaculate Rosalía.
It’s how women are always shut into the construction
of others,
you realize:
your own weapon turned against you.
That of the one who realizes is no glad word.
Yesterday, I recorded a great conversation that I’ve been looking forward to and wanted to share how I use a phone and tablet to record the podcast.
After finally working up the courage to record and edit my voice in conversation with others, I think anyone can start a podcast with very little equipment. Fancy microphones, expensive mixers, etc. are not really necessary and in fact many people are just using their phones and a platform like Anchor.
I knew I didn’t want to buy extraneous and bulky equipment. I wanted minimal and portable, like the two devices I use. Even more so because I’d like to do in-person recording sessions in the future, like my episode with Hudy.
The only investment I made was in Røde’s SC6-L Mobile Interview Kit. I’ve mentioned it before but it’s pretty fantastic if you have an iPhone with a Lightning port.
The kit comes consists of a small dongle and two lapel microphones. I haven’t used it yet, but I also bought one mic extension cable. This will probably come in handy for socially distant conversations.
The dongle has three audio jacks; two for the microphones and one for headphones. By using Røde’s Reporter app, I can also split the two mics into different channels and monitor the audio with headphones. This means when I import the audio into Ferrite on my iPad, I can edit the channels separately.
For my last two sessions, I’ve recorded remotely in my downstairs room. I haven’t needed to fiddle with acoustics at all, and my audio (despite my elongated pauses, ummm’s, and pronunciations) sounds pretty good to me.
But this means I’ve had to rely on my guests to record their end. There are ways around this. I didn’t have good luck using a Discord voice channel, and the chat bot Craig + Ennuicastr for a first test run. But when I can get this set up properly, it will simplify things greatly for other remote participants.
Theoretically, I’ll be able to invite guests into a private Discord (which could be web-based and without downloading an app) and they can use some earbuds and talk like a normal phone call.
On my end, I use my phone with the dongle to record my audio and take a FaceTime or Zoom call on my tablet. I use one AirPod connected to the iPad/call and one wired headphone plugged into the dongle to monitor my side’s audio.
One thing I didn’t think I would enjoy so much was the actual audio editing process. But Ferrite by Wooji Juice makes things pretty intuitive with a combination of touch or a stylus like the Pencil and keyboard shortcuts. There are many resources out there for people interested in editing on a tablet (or a phone) using Ferrite.
While I’m not sure my method of hosting and posting will be sustainable if and when listenership increases, right now I upload the compressed .mp3 files into my WordPress media library and use Blubrry’s plugin and Category Podcasting option. I only want iTunes to scrape the Podcasts category for the RSS feed while ignoring everything else on Among the Stones. If you have a dedicated site to for your podcast, you wouldn’t need this particular capability and any other podcasting plugin would work.
I used Graphic to make some quick artwork.
That’s it! I’ll be editing yesterday’s conversation tomorrow and hopefully getting it out on Monday.
I love using GeneratePress (Premium + GenerateBlocks) for WordPress projects. I’m still relatively new to everything but after using Divi, I’m blown away by how versatile developer Tom Usborne’s products can be in replacing traditional page builders. It also works surprisingly well on an iPad. With the block editor gaining more traction, the future of WordPress development seems different to me. My ship for learning tons of code and hand building custom web pages has sailed. It never docked. But that’s okay. The people I build for are friends and small business owners and GeneratePress will get the job done perfectly.
But I’m keeping Among the Stones in Sami Keijonen’s theme Simppeli, for a long time probably. Like the name suggests, it’s simple and I love the bold headings, typefaces, and lack of a dropdown menu. It’s not for everyone, but it is for me.
In early iterations of Among the Stones, I tinkered much more than I wrote, usually without much knowledge on how to do it. So I would switch from Raam Dev’s Independent Publisher (a very good blog theme) to a thousand others, searching in vain for that desired look. Then switch back, change some things, become restless again, then go hunting on GitHub and WordPress’s themes directory once more. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I hated it.
Lately, I’ve tried to focus on writing more. I’ve used the space to journal, to link and comment on things around the internet, and to share photos and some ideas.
Now, and especially after seeing a nice blog redesign, I have a list of changes I want to make to the design of Among the Stones, all within a child theme of Simppeli.
Here’s the thing though. I’m trying to prioritize offline time after my classes, so some of this might get done, and others might not. I’ve sat down to finish up a shortcut or dive into a problem only to be pleasantly pulled away by a walk in the woods, or one of the unread books sitting on my nightstand. Most of these unfinished tasks are small tweaks, such as highlighting the tagline of the blog to break up the black and white. I also added a vertical line of the same faint yellow #fff9c0 to block quotes to better differentiate quotes. So here they are, to be done or not.
Really the only thing I must figure out quickly is securing the blog with SSL. My knowledge of the backend is admittedly pretty shaky. I found my first host, Media Temple, through Mike Rockwell’s Initial Charge. I’ve since switched to a Digital Ocean droplet and this means the command line. I go to make a password on the droplet and it fails. Every time I’ve sat down to figure it out, my eyes glaze over and my short attention span (or undiagnosed ADHD) forces me to get up and go outside or read something about autochthonous forests or the history of emissaries.
Automatic dark mode on iOS13 is something special. I have it set to sunset to sunrise. Most of the apps I use have a dark mode that defaults to the system now. And the web can also take advantage of @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark. I have a snippet that I’ve pieced together but it’s incomplete.
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
body {
background-color: #333333;
color: white;}
p {color: white}
a:link {color:#ffffff;}
a:visited {color:#ffffff;}
a:hover {color:#ffffff;}
a:active {color:#ffffff}
h1 {color:#ffffff;}
h2 {color:#ffffff;}
h3 {color:#ffffff;}
h4 {color:#ffffff;}
li {color:#ffffff;}
tr {color:#ffffff;}
#respond #commentform textarea {
background-color: #404040;}
#respond #commentform .text,
#respond #commentform textarea {
color: #ffffff !important;}
}
}
The metadata below the post and the typeface color with highlights don’t switch, so I haven’t implemented it yet. Until then, the white background at midnight is a little jarring.
It’s proverbial low-hanging fruit but the search bar that appears in About and Archives is rounded, where every other text field is square. I want to change this to make it more consistent.
Simppeli doesn’t come with a great archive, so I’ve used short codes for recent posts and months with a search bar. I’d like to include post dates after recent posts’ titles, a smaller month and year view like kottke.org: use years and months in a line, include most-used tags with the number of posts next to them in a simple comma-separated list. I’m not a fan of tag clouds with each larger or smaller tags.
Alongside some aesthetic changes, I’d like to take advantage of more automation so I don’t have to fiddle inside the dashboard after publishing. I have not fully harnessed the power and time-saving capabilities of Shortcuts in my writing workflow. I have a ton of things to figure out to make more customized Publish to WordPress shortcut for markdown editors like iA Writer, my text editor of choice on iOS/iPadOS. I think most of this requires regular expressions, again, something akin to hieroglyphics.
iA Writer is also a very simple text editor app. With its main competitors, Ulysses and Drafts, moving to subscription price, iA Writer has intentionally stayed one price. I think I paid 4.99 USD for it in 2016 or 2017, but now it is 29.99. Only you can decide if it is worth it, but the amount of updates and ease of use suggests it might be for writers looking for just a blank page.
It utilizes iOS’s Files so you can see and move around your text files (not so with the two aforementioned apps). For organization, you can use Folders and hashtags. Hashtags are also used for titles H1-H6 in markdown. For instance, this section has three hashtags ###, a space, then the title Hashtags. To use iA Writer’s organizational hashtags, leave out the space. They will appear on the Library view at the bottom in alphabetical order. When you preview a filed with the keyboard shortcut ⌘+R, these do not appear.
What I’d like to do is add a few actions in Shortcuts to recognize these organizational hashtags (probably located at the bottom of a page) and use them as tags to be included in WordPress’s publish action, without them appearing in the finished post at the bottom of the page inside the body.
I like highlighting physical books and PDFs. I also like the look of them in posts to draw attention more than bold type. iA Writer recently added == as a way to bracket and highlight text inside the app rather than using HTML <mark> and </mark>. Unfortunately, WordPress does not recognize this. I need a few actions to find these, replace the beginning equals signs with the first HTML tag and the ending equals signs with the second.
If I use photos in posts, I run a shortcut that resizes and compresses it, uploads it to WordPress, and gives me a markdown URL, such as . Theoretically captions go in the brackets, like any text that will turn into a link. While WordPress recognizes links, it does not render properly for captions. This means I have to go in to each publisher post, add the media manually and use HTML if I want to link to an image source that isn’t mine in the captions text box in the media library. It takes time and can be cumbersome from a phone or tablet, which is where I write.
I try to avoid footnotes, but for some posts, they could be helpful but I haven’t found a WordPress plugin or other solution that correctly emulates how markdown and iA Writer adds footnotes, which is simply [^text here] that automatically numbers them down at the bottom of a list. If you have any suggestions, let me know.
This one’s a bit meta and nerdy, but maybe I’ll find some solutions to these from someone reading this. The next post will be about Galician elections coming up on 12 July.