Shallow Thoughts : : 09

I is for Introvert

Social distancing is hitting some people a lot harder than others.

Of course, there are huge inequities that are making life harder for a lot of people, even if they don't know anyone infected with the coronavirus. Distancing is pointing out long-standing inequalities in living situations (how much can you distance when you live in an apartment with an elevator, and get to work on public transit?) and, above all, in internet access. Here in New Mexico, rural residents, especially on the pueblos and reservations, often can't get a decently fast internet connection at any price. I hope that this will eventually lead to a reshaping of how internet access is sold in the US; but for now, it's a disaster for students trying to finish their coursework from home, for workers trying to do their jobs remotely, and for anyone trying to fill out a census form or an application for relief.

It's a terrible problem, but that's not really what this article is about. Today I'm writing about the less tangible aspects of social distancing, and its implications for introverts and extroverts.

Read more ...

Change to the Blog: Index Page Only Shows Summaries Now

Recently, I was dealing with the RSS page for a local newspaper, and being irritated at how it had the full text of every story on the RSS page, not just the first few paragraphs like most sites do.

And then I realized that Shallow Thoughts has the same problem. In my defense, I set up this blog a long time ago (2004). And nobody complained, so I guess I just never noticed. Anyway, I think it's kind of rude to put the whole story on the index page; it's much more friendly (and the index page loads a lot faster) if there are just intros for each story, letting the reader decide whether to click through.

And then I had to figure out how to do that. PyBlosxom is semi-orphaned, but there are actually still a few developers (I submitted some fixes last year to get Shallow Thoughts working under Python 3, and they were quickly accepted) and everything still works. And the documentation is pretty good, too; it turned out I just needed to enable the "Readmore" plugin and add a couple of configuration lines.

So now the index page, both in HTML and RSS, is much shorter and should load much faster. I hope the change is welcome and doesn't cause any problems for anybody!

And now, on to today's "I" entry ...