rothwell.im

by Jonathan Rothwell

[LINK] Yahoo almost certain to snap up Tumblr

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The Verge:

According to The Wall Street Journal, Yahoo's board of directors has approved the company's widely-rumored acquisition of Tumblr in an all-cash deal worth $1.1 billion. Assuming the terms are accepted by Tumblr, CEO Marissa Mayer is all but certain to announce Yahoo's latest pickup — easily its largest to date in a spree of acquisitions and content deals — at a media event tomorrow in New York City.

Although I am confident that Marissa Meyer knows what she is doing, it is impossible not to draw parallels between Tumblr and GeoCities. Both have a relatively young, non-techie userbase. Both are full of GIFs, gaudy backgrounds and auto-playing music. Tumblr simply has more of a social-privilege brigade bent to it.

Jason Scott of ArchiveTeam famously said that he would not trust Yahoo with a backup of his own nutsack. Although the deal is seen as “mutually beneficial,” the road to a buyout and shutdown may well be paved with good intentions.

[LINK] Easy tables-of-contents in Octopress

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In an attempt to clean up the Doctor Who guide, I discovered Robert Reimann’s excellent post to using kramdown’s HTML converter to achieve tables of contents in Octopress. (This blog, in its current incarnation, has pretty much always used kramdown—it’s how I do footnotes.)

Ultimately, I needed around five lines of code and a little bit of fiddling with the source file to get it to work.1 It was exceptionally easy. The biggest fuss was the styling. If you’re looking to implement a table of contents in your Octopress site—or any static site that uses kramdown as its generator—this is the method you should use.

  1. A lot of the guide is still copy-and-pasted from my old site, and was raw HTML: my understanding is that kramdown will not generate header IDs, and therefore anchor tags, unless the header was in Markdown as opposed to being in pure HTML.↩

[LINK] New story (finally): Random Access

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This week’s month’s short story, like the last one, has been similarly tough. It’s also pretty grim, by my own standards.

It’s called Random Access, and tells the story of an AWOL soldier returning from the dead, some time in the not-too-distant future, to find out what really happened at a traumatic event in his past. If you could look back into your own memories, and find out conclusively what happened—or what you remember to have happened—would you?

An experiment in blog-writing

• ∞ • Audio version (What's this?)

Those of you with long memories will remember that, for a while, my old blog had a plugin installed called Odiogo. This plugin would feed the content of each post through a text-to-speech synthesiser and spat out a rudimentary ‘podcast’.

My own experiments with this service did not last too long. Each post included an embedded Odiogo player, which added significantly to the load times; furthermore, it ended up just highlighting flaws in my own writing that I chose to ignore.

The idea of providing spoken-word versions of articles is not entirely original: Wikipedia has an ongoing project to provide versions of certain articles read aloud. The rationale is simple: while blind and visually impaired readers can use screen-readers, many would prefer a human voice, with a good grasp of punctuation and speaking with an appropriate tone.

With this in mind, I’m going to attempt an experiment. From this point on—at least, probably, until I grow tired of it, and provided of course that I remember to do so—if I write any kind of long-form article, I will also record me reading it aloud and provide a link to that on the page. (You should see an “audio version” link in the header of this page.)

At present, they’re MP3 only. At present, there’s no podcast feed of any kind because it’s a crudely hacked extension to Octopress. This is genuinely nothing more than experimental.

Nevertheless, I am interested to see if people find it useful. Enforcing the idea of reading what I write aloud, in my own voice, might encourage me to keep my big mouth shut on occasion: who knows, it might even catch on!

[LINK] Microsoft rolls out two-stage authentication

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Microsoft is deploying two-step authentication for its Microsoft Account/Windows Live .NET Passport things. They (along with Apple, Twitter, and many others) should’ve done it years ago—but, as always, it’s better (much better) late than never.

We’ll verify that you have at least two pieces of security information on file (it’s always good to have a second in case you lose the first). If you have a smartphone, we’ll help you set up an authenticator app, which allows you to receive two-step verification codes even while offline (very useful on vacation and to avoid messaging fees). The next time you sign on, you’ll be prompted for a code.

Impressively, Microsoft’s implementation seems identical to Google’s: that is, it implements RFC 6238 and is therefore standards-compliant, which is more than can be said for Apple’s and Facebook’s implementations. Although two-stage authentication hasn’t been deployed to my Microsoft account yet, their Windows Phone Authenticator app works perfectly with my Google accounts with minimum fuss, and vice versa.1

I’m pleased. And it’s about damned time.

  1. Although Google doesn’t provide a specific option to link a Windows Phone with your account, you won’t run into any issues if you just lie and say it’s an Android, iPhone or BlackBerry. Both Microsoft’s and Google’s authenticators implement the same standard.↩