One way to make sense of the change in the way we live online is to consider how the language we use to talk about our digital selves has evolved. Take terms like cybercitizen and netizen, which each play on the metaphor that the Internet is a structured city or community. According to Google Ngrams, these words found their greatest use in the heydey of Geocities and have been in decline ever since. This happened as we began clicking friend buttons instead of writing in the guestbooks of neighborly strangers. It happened as we traded in our HTML editors for the sleek blue layouts and pre-set photo sizes of Facebook. In other words, we stopped being frontiersmen and started being consumers, conceding the role of maker in our Wild West to corporations. And build they did.
In short, we gave up our netizenship.
Month: November 2013
$1,000 Bitcoin: what people are saying
Monitor your WordPress site’s uptime with Jetpack Monitor
The latest version of Jetpack for WordPress plugin – which packs together several most used plugins and makes sure they all work nicely together – brings in a new one: Jetpack Monitor. Here is a straight forward description from the plugin site:
Jetpack Monitor will keep tabs on your site, and alert you the moment that downtime is detected.
Once activated, one of our servers will start checking your site every five minutes. If it looks like something’s gone awry, we’ll fire off an email notification to the WordPress.com account that Jetpack is connected under.
I think this is brilliant. Every single WordPress site owner I know has at least once looked around for a simple monitoring service that would let him know when the site goes down. There are a few of those around, but all of them are a bit of a hassle to setup – you’ll need to know the terminology and at least have an idea about systems monitoring. With Jetpack Monitor all that is not needed anymore. Simply click the ‘Activate‘ button in the Jetpack settings and you are all done. Beautiful!
Reportr – Your life’s personal dashboard
Reportr – Your life’s personal dashboard
Reportr is a complete application which works like a dashboard for tracking events in your life (using a very simple API). With a simple interface, it helps you track and display your online activity (with trackers for Facebook, Twitter, GitHub, …) or your real-life activity (with hardware trackers or applications like Runkeeper).
The project is entirely open source and you can host your own Reportr instance on your own server or Heroku.
Local copy of the Wikipedia
Slashdot tells that there is a way to have a local copy of Wikipedia on your computer:
Want your own copy of English Wikipedia with images? Got 100 GB of disk space? Then open-source app XOWA may be of interest to you. The project released torrents yesterday for the 2013-11-04 version of English Wikipedia. There’s 100 GB of sqlite databases containing 13.9 million pages, and 3.7 million images — readable from any Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X system.
It is, of course, a frozen in time version of Wikipedia – without any further updates or edits, but it might be quite handy for those places where Internet is not common or stable. Another use for this would be as a source of data for parsing tools or linguistic analysis, etc – working with local copy is much faster than fetching it page by page from the online.