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Senior Web Engineer. Open web / music. Remote DJ. Tall Dutch guy. #3million

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svandragt

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On Settled Status

So ehm... when a person requires the NHS emergency services post Brexit, how do the staff know that a person is an EU citizen that might requires an online settled status check (which in turn requires a passport, identity card or biometric residency card) and not a UK citizen which doesn't need to (and can't) be checked? If we exclude all measures that are discriminatory?

So either all UK citizens also take their passport with them going forward as well; or this is going to end in discrimination for people  including, but not limited to, those with an accent, "look foreign", UK citizens that've lived or studied abroad (affecting their speech), people speaking another language, or any other identifying marks or clothing.

As not all UK citizens have passports however,  the NHS cannot use the Home Office provided website  to rule out they're an EU citizen. That's just as well as the website doesn't work for UK nationals, it would only tell them they don't have settled status.

As a result this makes the process essentially voluntary for people who self identify as an EU citizen and want to be discriminated against.

Hey where are you from? London. You don't sound British? I was born in England but studied in Amsterdam.

The process isn't fit for purpose.

 

What is the meaning of a site's Last Updated property?

When running a WordPress multisite, in the site directory each site has a Last Updated property. I previously incorrectly assumed this reflected  when the site's metadata changed, for example the site's attributes. However, archiving and deactivating a site does not change the Last Updated value, so what does it do in WordPress 5.2.1?

As usual the best place to look is the WordPress codebase. It turns out that, on a multisite, this value is updated whenever a post is updated or deleted. It reflects the last content update, not the site's metadata.

By inspecting the html and looking up the property name, we find that the function that updates this is called wpmu_update_blogs_date and there is an action hook wpmu_blog_updated that receives the site_id variable. This function can be called whenever we want to update the value. It isn't used anywhere else.

If we're looking to update this date whenever the site's status changes, then via the same process it appears that he actions to hook into site attribute updates are in wp_maybe_transition_site_statuses_on_update so one could write a quick mu-plugin that updates the Last Updated property whenever these fire.

 

Recognising Ogg Vorbis streams in WinAmp

I'm working on a side project where I am broadcasting an OGG Vorbis stream using Icecast. Google Chrome played the stream, and so did VLC, but WinAmp was unable to. It connected to the stream with an HTTP 200 status but could not interpret it.

As it turns out WinAmp requires the mount point to have a file extension for it to detect the stream correctly, so updating the mount point to stream.ogg instead of stream in the icecast configuration did the job.

 

Microblogging with WordPress and Twitter

Manton Reece has been having very interesting discussions about microblogging and content ownership recently. He's working on an unannounced project in this area and I've been following his progress.

A few days ago he wrote a post about Microblogging with Wordpress in which he describes most of the process of writing your status updates on your own blog first. As I had to adapt his process for it to work with my configuration of WordPress and as I am using Twitter instead of App.net I thought it would be useful to detail how I went about, based on Manton's write-up.

Requirements

  • A theme that supports post-formats.
  • an IFTTT and Twitter account.
  • A self-hosted WordPress installation, hosted using Apache.
  • (optionally) the DoNote app from IFTTT for your mobile device.

Step 1: Link a status updates feed to Twitter

In order to post only the status updates to twitter, we have to identify them in both WordPress and for IFTTT.

Create a dedicated category

In Wordpress, if you do not have a category for status updates, create a Snippets category (with the slug snippets). Note the category ID. In addition, create a new category called ifttt-status if you plan to post to Wordpresss from your mobile device later, as I did (this is a workaround to allow WordPress to convert from this category to the status post format).

Setup the RSS feed endpoints

With the category ID, we can now create a new feed by editing the .htaccess file in your WordPress installation directory, see my gist comment on manton's configuration. I had redirection issues with Manton's original setup so I amended it. What we do here is create two endpoints, one for posts without status updates (rss.xml); and one for only status updates (snippets.xml). We then point any requests to /feed (the default WordPress endpoint) to the first endpoint.

Update (26 June): I updated the gist comment after identifying issues in initial configuration. Please reread the gist if you had problems using the initial configuration.

Post new status updates to Twitter

Now create a new recipe that is triggered from the snippets RSS feed, with the action to post a tweet with the tweet text EntryContent.

You can now blog from WordPress to twitter (just leave the title empty).

Step 2: Post status updates from your mobile device

I'm using DoNote to post to IFTTT which then posts to WordPress.

Setup WordPress

Login to your WordPress blog and in the users section create a ifttt user with the role of Author (this allows the user to create posts).

Install the "IFTTT Post Formats & Post Types" plugin, it will convert posts with the ifttt-status category to the status post-format. It will also hide the ifttt-status category from showing up in your template for example.

Link DoNote to WordPress using IFTTT

Back in IFTTT, In the My Recipe's DoNote section, create a new recipe for WordPress (you might get asked to provide the WordPress username and password you created for this purpose) with the action to create a post with the following values:

  • Title: (leave empty)
  • Body: NoteText
  • Categories: Snippets,ifttt-status
  • Tags: (leave empty)
  • Post status: Publish immediately

You are not limited to using DoNote if there is a trigger for your service, and you are not limited to usin IFTTT at all if there are WordPress plugins for your status update service and WordPress support for your writing app, but these will require similar configuration as detailed in this post.

Hope this helps!

 

Tweet: So tempted to start a bbc news truth correction ac...

So tempted to start a bbc news truth correction account, but don’t think it’s good for my health. Wish there was more choice than it and sky

 

Tweet: Feedback for @BBCNews reporters: EU is not Brussel...

Feedback for @BBCNews reporters: EU is not Brussels and Berlin, it’s just as much London. Stop pretending we’re not in it.

 

Tweet: Tried to login to @LastPass and login to twitter i...

Tried to login to @LastPass and login to twitter in a tab. After 4 minutes still waiting on login submission. Wifi! My iPhone 4 is too slow

 

 

Tweet: Surely there is a tumblr for that?

Surely there is a tumblr for that?

 

Tweet: Dear ios dev team can you please make a badges cen...

Dear ios dev team can you please make a badges center so I don’t have to see these nagging red numbers all over my serene ios home screen?

 

Tweet: My Hide Trackbacks #wordpress plugin is now compat...

My Hide Trackbacks plugin is now compatible with version 4.1 (wordpress.org/plugins/hide-t…) Keep referrers, stop spam comments.

 

Tweet: Started a huffduffer feed (https://t.co/wax0BHeF2D...

Started a huffduffer feed (huffduffer.com/svandragt) to listen to audio files on the move using my podcast client.

 

Tweet: Are there any razor blades (single blades) that m...

Are there any razor blades (single blades) that meet @LeapingBunny cruelty free standards? Not been able to find any! :(

 

 

Tweet: 2014 for me was about the failure to have a honest...

2014 for me was about the failure to have a honest debate about . Today's recap on @BBCNews keeps adding spin / lies

 

Tweet: Python or poetry: pip install fabricfab deploysi...

Python or poetry: pip install fabric
fab deploy
sip lemonade

 

 

Tweet: #powershell tip: $ContentsWithLinebreaks = (Get-Co...

tip: $ContentsWithLinebreaks = (Get-Content $FilePath) -join "`n"

 

Tweet: Trying to figure out how to download all my past t...

Trying to figure out how to download all my past tweets using Twitter Tools for

 

Tweet: Made some layout changes ...

Made some layout changes to vandragt.com (refresh), any comments?