Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Jan 01
TDYR 359 – My 3 Words for 2019
As I have for the past 10 years, I started off the year talking about my "3 words" for 2019 - the areas in which I intend to focus. You can read more here: https://www.danyork.com/2019/01/my-3-words-for-2019.html
Jan 01
My 3 Words for 2019
As I have now done every year since 2010 (see past years), here are three words that I aspire to be the "themes" of my activity this year.
You'll note that these are really quite similar to my 3 words for 2018 - and in truth I think 2019 is really a continuation of everything in 2018 that was left undone with the severe disruption and chaos of both: 1) uprooting our family to move to Vermont; and 2) the unwelcome guest of colon cancer. I am SO ready to put a period at the end of the sentence of 2018 … and move on to what will be hopefully better chapters within 2019!
HEALTH
Last year I said that my health needed to be a focus - and the colonoscopy was part of that… but with all that insanity, there is much still left to do. I’m sadly now almost back up to the unhealthy weight I was in 2010. The dental issues that were there a year ago continue to be with me. And now we need to find all new doctors, dentists, vision centers, etc. It’s got to be a priority - as we do only have one body. And I’d like to be around for a while!
VOICE
2018 was a year when I continued to struggle with writing consistently. It’s so easy to NOT write or produce other kinds of content because…. work responsibilities, family logistics, the time suck of social media… and… and… and… there’s a million reasons. Toward the end of the year I started to write more, but it was in part to get myself back in the regular practice of creating content.
In 2019 I’d like to not only write more, but also find a bit more of the stronger “voice” I used to have in my writing and speaking. I want to be a stronger and more vocal voice for an open Internet - and for an Internet that works for us rather than for mega-corporations, platforms and governments. My challenge is to carve out the time to do the writing and the research and to speak and more.
FRIENDSHIPS
As I wrote last year, I'm finding that I'm communicating with a large number of people, but not necessarily connecting with people on a deeper level. This has certainly been highlighted with our move to Vermont. Beyond just “connections”, I’m looking at 2019 as a time to truly spend more time with friends - and for investing the time to develop new friendships in this beautiful part of the world to which we have moved. Nurturing friendships, both new and old, does definitely take time and energy - and I intend for it to be a priority this year.
That's what I am thinking about for this year... what about you?
P.S. Another life goal for this year - I want to be able to go into a Tim Hortons in Quebec and order a meal entirely en Francais! I’ve been dabbling in learning more French over the past years, but this year I want to be able to at least go in and order a double chocolate donut, a sandwich and a tea! ;-) Particularly since we are winding up in Quebec a good bit for curling and other travel.
P.P.S. And yeah, if I’m serious about “health”, I shouldn’t be ordering double chocolate donuts, right? But hey, every once in a while is okay, right?
An audio version of this post (with more commentary) is available on SoundCloud:
Dec 10
"Hipster Ipsum" may be my new favorite Lorem Ipsum generator
I may have just found my new favorite "Lorem ipsum" text generator - HIPSTER IPSUM!
https://hipsum.co/
For the longest time, my choice when I just needed some columns to fill in with filler text[1] was Bacon Ipsum, which is always fun. The companion to that is of course Veggie Ipsum
But now I think I may indeed use "hipster ipsum". I mean... I just smile when I read through the text. :-)
P.S. I noticed in searching today that there is a WordPress plugin (of course!) called "AnyIpsum" that lets you create your own lorem impsum generator.
[1] Why do I need filler text? When I'm working on a web design, it is often helpful to have some text in the columns and text blocks so that you can see what they look like with text in them. You can of course read more about the history of "Lorem ipsum" on Wikipedia.
Dec 08
Watch: the 2018 "State of the Word" from WordCamp US
Tonight in Nashville, Matt Mullenweg delivered his "State of the Word" presentation at WordCamp US. Not being there in person, I watched the live stream. The recorded stream has about 28 minutes of various quotes that were displayed. Matt starts at shortly after the 28-minute mark:
He shows some very cool ways that Gutenberg can work. Starting at around 54 minutes, Matt moves into showing what the next phases of Gutenberg will be. In a "Phase 2" during 2019, more of the admin interface will be moved into blocks. Phase 3 (2020 at the earliest) will be about collaboration, multiuser editing and workflows. Phase 4 (later) will be about having an official multilingual interface.
And then around the 1:12:00 mark, he mentions a fantastic statistic that over 57% of WordPress sites were using HTTPS (i.e. TLS):
Matt goes on with much more information about the WordPress community, more developements - and then finally concludes "The State of The Word" at around the 1:21:00 mark and moves into questions... of which there was about another 45 minutes of long discussions and questions.
Dec 07
Initial Thoughts on WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg
Yesterday (Dec 6, 2018) was TheBigDay when WordPress 5.0 with the Gutenberg block-based editor landed in all of our WordPress sites for upgrade. Some of the places to learn more about the launch include:
- WordPress 5.0 launch announcement (with videos)
- WordPress 5.0 Field Guide
- Gutenberg information
- Twenty Nineteen theme info
Changing the core editor over to Gutenberg was a massive effort over the past two years - and the launch this week was both an amazing accomplishment... and a very divisive event within the WordPress community.
I was very much hoping to be down in Nashville for WordCamp US this weekend, where parts of the community will be gathering. I expect it will be quite a passionate weekend! (Unfortunately some family medical issues kept me closer to home.)
I *really* like Gutenberg...
My initial reaction was... I really LIKE Gutenberg!
Now, I've been playing with it for much of the last year, and the more I work with it, the more I like it.
It really DOES enable more beautiful and powerful publishing with great ease.
I'm looking forward to doing even MORE with it and learning how far we can go with using Gutenberg.
... but it needs to work! :-(
However, after the upgrade to WordPress 5.0, the Gutenberg editor didn't work on all my sites. For several of my sites, I had NO PROBLEM after the update. It "just worked." I was immediately able to go in and start editing with Gutenberg.
But on a couple of other sites, when I went in to edit an existing page or post - or to create a new one - I made all my changes and pressed the "Update" or "Publish" button and...
"Updating failed" in a big red bar across the top of the screen!
Amusingly to me, some searching on the web brought me back to a Github issue I had opened back in August 2017.
All I had to do to "fix" the issue was this:
- Go to Settings -> Permalinks, and change it from "Month and name" to "Day and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Change it from "Day and name" back to "Month and name" and press "Save changes". I received the message "Permalink structure updated."
- Switch back to the tab where I was editing the post and had the error message. Pressed "Update" and.. ta da... the updating worked perfectly fine.
I had to do this on two different WordPress sites (both running on the same WordPress multisite server). Strangely, other sites on the multisite server were fine.
While the fix was easy, it concerns me that I had to do this and that I didn't really do anything. But somehow my act of changing the Permalink Settings did SOMETHING internally to make things work.
That concerns me.
Now, someone in that ticket or elsewhere suggested that this particular issue was NOT a Gutenberg issue, but rather an issue with the REST API, which Gutenberg uses.
Regardless, my point was that I couldn't use the editor to make changes on my site.
And beyond my own issue, I see many other Gutenberg issues piling up on Github. Now, yes, these may be initial launch pains for launching such a massive change.
But I do hope the team of developers can fix these in the 5.0.1 release that I'm sure will come quickly.
I really DO like the Gutenberg editor - and I look forward to seeing all we collectively can do with it!
P.S. This post was NOT written using Gutenberg because this Disruptive Conversations site is sadly still over on TypePad. I look forward to migrating it some day so that I can use Gutenberg!
Dec 06
Video I Found Useful: "Getting start with Docker"
Da ich in den letzten ein oder zwei Monaten mehr über Docker und Container erforschte, habe ich viele Videos auf YouTube gesehen. Eines der “Intro to Docker”, die mir sehr gut gefallen hat, war dieses von Brad Traversy:
Was ich nützlich fand, war, wie er das sehr praktische Beispiel der Einrichtung einer kleinen Website mit nginx verwendet. Sehr guter Anwendungsfall, einschließlich der Verwendung von Volumina, um Inhalte zu haben, die zwischen Containern wiederverwendet werden können. Er diskutiert auch, wie man DockerHub nutzt, um Ihr Containerbild anderen Systemen zugänglich zu machen.
Sein anschließendes Video über den Einsatz von Docker Compose war ebenfalls nützlich.
Dec 06
Video I Found Useful: “Getting Started with Docker”
As I’ve been exploring more about Docker and containers over the past month or two, I’ve been watching MANY videos on YouTube. One of the “intro to Docker” ones that I quite liked was this one from Brad Traversy:
What I found useful was how he used the very practical example of setting up a small website using nginx. Very good use case, including the use of volumes to have content that can be re-used between containers. He also discusses how to use DockerHub to make your container image available to other systems.
His subsequent video about using Docker Compose was also useful.
Dec 05
Have we given up on personal blogging? (In favor of social media)
Have we given up on personal blogging? Are we instead doing that all writing in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and similar services?
Is the personal blog dead? [1]
I had lunch this week with a friend who, like me, has been online since long before this thing we now call the “Internet” came into being. We were having one of those “back in the old days” conversations where we talking about the discipline that came from programming in assembly language, the challenges of early computing and networks, how the programmers these days no longer need to understand how things really work, how they write bloated code, etc., etc.
Along the way we talked about the changing nature of the Internet and the growing consolidation / centralization of so many key services. We talked about how so many people no longer host their own web servers (both she and I do (for some of my sites), but talked about the issues with that and how attractive it is to look at hosting options)… about how many people no longer run their own mail servers (I don’t, but she does)… and how people have just generally given up running their own services because the hosted services are just so incredibly convenient and useful. And somewhere in there she just tossed in a comment along the lines of:
“… and then we’ve given up on blogging in favor of Facebook…"
It was just a throwaway comment in the midst of a longer discussion that went on into the rise of CDNs, overlay caching networks, cloud computing and more. (It was a great conversation!)
But that comment stuck with me… and as it rolled around inside of my brain, I sadly had to conclude that for the most part[1]...
… she’s right.
My Own Example
I look even at my own writing. Despite my post in September about “Returning to POSSE - Writing on my own site, THEN on Facebook, Twitter, etc.”, the truth of the matter is that I haven’t been writing on my own sites.
If you take a look at my danyork.me aggregator site, you’ll see that I’ve been writing for the past week, but if you go back beyond that, or use the little calendar on the right sidebar to look at past months, you’ll see there is very little activity. And what there is of my writing is most often on the Internet Society websites, rather than my various personal blogs.
For example, when I wrote on my Disruptive Telephony site on Monday, it was my first post there since March 2017 - that is 21 MONTHS!
Some of my other sites are worse.
Now, you could argue in my case that this just a matter of changing priorities. I don’t work as much with voice-over-IP or messaging, and so NOT writing on Disruptive Telephony makes sense. The site chronicled by activities in the VoIP world when I was active there. Now maybe it’s time to just park it and leave it alone. I could make similar cases for why I haven’t written on other sites.
And this may just be the consequence of my choice many years ago to spread my writing across multiple topic-focused sites, instead of just writing about a wide variety of topics on a single site such as danyork.com.
And it may be that it’s just me with everything else going on in my life over the past year.
The Directory Dilemma, Again
Or maybe not.
My lunch companion mentioned the challenge of finding where companies have their main information. Are their hours of operation most accurate on their website? Or on their Facebook page?
And the same is true of personal blogs and sites.
How do I find where people are writing?
Back in the early days of blogging (mid-2000s), of course, many of us used RSS readers and got our feeds from sites that way. We found new feeds from references, from searches, from different directories. But while I’m still one of those dwindling number of people who use a RSS reader, the vast majority of people do not.
How do you find writing? Well, usually through mentions in social media. It’s the “syndication” part of POSSE.
But if you are using social media to distribute and promote your writing… it’s not a huge step to simply just write in the social media platform because it’s so easy and distribution is automatic. I know people who have moved all their writing to LinkedIn, for instance. Or people who are writing long threads in Twitter now that the site supports longer tweets and threading.
It’s another version of the Directory Dilemma - it’s easy to find content within those nice hosted walled gardens.
Running Servers Takes Work
And let’s be honest - running your own personal website can be a bit of a pain. If you use a self-hosted content management system (CMS) such as WordPress (as I do), you find yourself pretty much constantly needing to apply updates. Updates to the core… updates to the plugins… updates to the theme. And then of course possibly updates to the underlying operating system if you are running the CMS in a virtual machine.
And then if you want to set up TLS certificates to support HTTPS, that can be a whole adventure! And if you mess it up, your sites are offline.
It’s enough to make you say… "<expletive> it, I’ll just go write on Medium!” … or hosted WordPress.com … or… to just write inside of Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn.
After all... I just want to write!
Every minute I spend doing system admin or applying plugin updates is a minute I could be doing more writing.
Add in that all of those social sites have very easy-to-use mobile applications. It makes it so easy to just start writing inside those pretty walled gardens.
In contrast, many of the blogging and website hosting services have a less-than-stellar mobile UX. WordPress does a nice job with its mobile apps... but others? Not so much.
So is personal blogging dead?
Wellllll... no. There will always be some of will write on their own sites.
And I'd like to hope not for the larger independence of the Web. I'd like to hope many people will continue to embrace the “POSSE“ content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement:
Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere
I am going to continue to try.
But I also understand why some give up on it. The sweet convenience, ease-of-use and simplicity of the social networking platforms is extremely seductive. And they encourage consumption of content (because that helps get them the ad eyeballs they need to get paid) - and finding the balance of consumption and creation is hard!
What about you, dear reader? Have you given up
[1] Realizing that there will always be outliers in terms of very active personal blogs - and people who just choose to write on their own - but are personal blogs no longer of interest for the vast majority of people?
Photo: an image I took in the Woodlawn Cemetary in Keene, NH
Dec 04
WordPress 5.0 now targeted to launch on…. Thursday! (Dec 6)
The news out of Matt Mullenweg last night was...
THURSDAY!
That day, December 6 (2018), is the next target release date for WordPress 5.0.
If you have been paying attention to WordPress, or listening to any of my reports into the For Immediate Release (FIR) podcast over the last, say, year or so, you would know that WordPress 5.0 is a huge departure from all previous WordPress releases. The big change is the replacement of the default text editor with the new "Gutenberg" block-based editor.
Personally, I'm rather excited about the change. I've been using Gutenberg on a number of my sites and really like how much you can do with it.
But... reaction within the WordPress community and ecosystem has been decidedly mixed.
We'll see if it happens! But if you are a WordPress site operator, get ready! 5.0 is coming soon!
Photo by Raphael Schaller on Unsplash
Dec 03
The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-Info
October 31, 2018, was a special day for me. Not because it was Halloween, but because after 10 years a small little document I co-authored about the "P-Charge-Info" header for SIP-based Voice-over-IP (VoIP) was published as informational RFC 8496. You can see it at either:
Ultimately, all this document does is register the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Header Field of "P-Charge-Info" within the "SIP Parameters" registry maintained by IANA at:
But the story of getting that registration to happen is a long one!
In the beginning...
The short version is this. Back in around 2007 or so, I was working for Voxeo and we were using the "P-Charge-Info" header in our large SIP-based application server to pass along billing information. Essentially, when someone made a call on our system, we wanted to pass a billing identifier that was often different from the source phone number (i.e. "CallerID"). This quote from RFC 8496 was pretty much Voxeo's use case:
As another example, a hosted telephony provider or hosted voice application provider may have a large SIP network with customers distributed over a very large geographic area using local market PSTN numbers but with only a very few actual PSTN interconnection points.
The customers may all have local phone numbers yet outgoing calls are actually routed across a SIP network and out specific PSTN gateways or across specific SIP connections to other SIP service providers. The hosted provider may want to pass a billing identifier to its SIP service providers either for the purpose of simplicity in billing or to obtain better rates from the SIP service providers.
While we at Voxeo were already using P-Charge-Info extensively, we wanted to use the P-Charge-Info header with more SIP service providers, and needed some form of documentation for how to use the header. We also were concerned about the profileration of more P-headers and wanted to register "P-Charge-Info" with IANA so that more people might find and use that header rather than inventing their own. (We were happy with P-Charge-Info and didn't want to have to support more SIP headers related to charging identifiers.)
So I began the process of submitting an Internet Draft way back in February 2008 documenting P-Charge-Info and requesting its addition to the IANA registry.
Almost immediately Tolga Asveren, then at Sonus Networks, contacted me to let me know they were using P-Charge-Info in the SIP equipment they were selling. He had some great suggestions, supplied some additional text, and was interested in working on the document with me. So I published a -01 draft 3 days after the first draft, and Tolga and I began our 10-year journey through the process of getting this document published.
Square pegs in round holes - slamming ISDN info into a SIP header
Along the way, others approached us from traditional PSTN telecom companies indicating that they were interested in using P-Charge-Info as a way of passing the "ISUP Charge Number" that was part of ISDN signaling. Though it was not something that either Tolga or I worked directly with, we were okay adding this in, and so two new parameters got added:
- Numbering Plan Indicator (NPI)
- Nature of Address (NOA)
... along with a substantial amount of new text.
A 2011 version of the document can show what this was all about.
Lost in limbo
Meanwhile, the document had gotten caught up in the need to wait while RFC 3427 was replaced by RFC 5727, which defined the whole SIP Header Field registration process.
And then I wound up leaving Voxeo to join the Internet Society (my current employer). And so my attention was no longer focused on VoIP and so this draft was truly a "back burner" kind of thing that I just worked on in random moments.
And unfortunately, it turned out that slamming legacy PSTN signalling into a SIP header caused a whole number of challenges, both with getting agreement - and also with some of the internal IETF processes. It turned out that to do this registration, we were going to have to do some other registrations - and more.
I also published a version that changed some of the parameters values in a way that was not backwards-compatible, which caused some friction.
By 2015, both Tolga and I were ready to ... just... let... it... die...
Returning from the dead - and returning to the SIP roots
And then in early 2017, Henning Schulzrinne and Richard Shockey contacted me to let us know that the US FCC was interested in the status of P-Charge-Info. The FCC had some billing issues between carriers where the carriers were in some cases already using P-Charge-Info, but the carriers really wanted an actual RFC versus an expired draft. There was also some potential interest in having the header around as one of many different tools in the FCC's efforts to combat robo-calling / spam phone calls.
So Tolga and I worked with Henning and the IETF area directors to come up with a plan to resuscitate the document. In doing so, we stripped out all the legacy PSTN signaling. Specifically we removed the NPI and NOA parameters, and all the mentions of the ISUP Charge Number.
We returned it to the simplicity of the original document way back in 2008.
The original goal had been to simply document existing usage of the P-Charge-Info header, as it was being used by various SIP providers and vendors. We returned it to that root.
Success!
After a number of further drafts, an expert review by Adam Roach, and more feedback from Area Director Ben Campbell, the draft finally entered the RFC Editor queue by way of the Independent Series Editor (ISE). Many thanks are due to Ben to sponsoring the draft. He, Jean Mahoney, and Adam were all critical in helping get it across the finish line. Thanks, too, to Henning and Richard who provided the spark for us to revive the document.
It would not have happened, either, if Tolga had not taken the lead over the past year in making edits, answering all the questions from people, proposing solutions and continually asking how to move the draft forward. I may have been the one editing the XML and submitting the new draft versions, but he was the one driving the text revisions.
It's great to see the document finally published as Informational RFC 8496. Looking back on the journey, there were:
- 16 revisions of draft-york-sipping-p-charge-info (2008-2012)
- 6 revisions of draft-york-dispatch-p-charge-info (2012-2015)
- 9 revisions of draft-york-p-charge-info (2017-2018)
Now, granted, some of those were a simple "update to keep the document from being 'expired'", but still it was all a great amount of work.
I learned a HUGE amount along the way. When the journey began in 2008, I didn't really understand much about IETF processes. Now I do - and now understand how we could have done this quite differently along the way.
Thanks to everyone who provided feedback and support over the years.
P-Charge-Info is finally registered in that IANA registry! :-)
