Yearly Archives: 2026

Returning to the decentralized Web

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged Internet standard.site technology on by

The original idea of the World Wide Web was decentralization of information. Anyone with an Internet connection can set up a website. Others can link to it so that people will discover it. Somehow, though, it’s lost its way. Big “social media” sites dominate it. They let you find a lot of people you know or are interested in in one place. But this advantage comes at a price. On most of these sites, the software controls which posts you see and who is recommended to you. They’re more vulnerable to government censorship than smaller, more agile sites. People complain about them but keep using them.

It’s getting worse. Some countries are banning social media access by young people. There’s talk of legally requiring people who post to these sites to disclose their identity. This will discourage the expression of dissent and intimidate people who want to discuss problems they aren’t even comfortable telling their own families about.

The solution has always been there. It’s decentralization. Blogs and forums hosted on the creators’ own machines or for a monthly fee on a server. The RSS and Atom protocols let you subscribe to most of them without handing them any information. The main problem is finding the ones you’re interested in. Some work is now being done on a set of lexicons built on the AT protocol called standard.site, which will help with discovery and identity.

A lexicon is a schema for metadata; standard.site lets you publish information about your website in a way that lets it be aggregated. If you create a record for your website, it includes at least the name and URL, and it can include things like an icon, a description, and labels. What you do with a standard.site record once you’ve made it isn’t clear to me; I assume you need to submit it to an aggregator that lets people search for sites that interest them. There could be lots of aggregators, catering to different interests. If the idea catches on, search engines might use them to improve the relevance of their results.

There are some client applications for standard.site, but I’m still looking for one that I’m comfortable with. Ironically for a discovery aid, the name makes finding information difficult; a search on “standard.site” turns up mostly irrelevant results.

If you know more or have other ideas for decentralization, let me know.

June 21 is not New Hampshire’s birthday

This entry was posted in History and tagged history Massachusetts New Hampshire on by

On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire ratified the United States Constitution. As the ninth state to ratify, it made the Constitution go into effect. This is an important anniversary. However, some idiots claim that makes it New Hampshire’s “birthday.” They seem to think that rather than the state of New Hampshire letting the Constitution take effect, the Constitution brought New Hampshire into existence.

That erases a huge amount of history. The first settlements were established along the coast and Great Bay starting in 1623. In 1635, King Charles I issued a grant of the “Province of New Hampshire.” For a while Massachusetts claimed what is now southeastern New Hampshire. Things went back and forth until William and Mary declared New Hampshire a royal colony in 1691. It was the first state to draw up its own constitution, six months before the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration lists it as one of the “free and independent states.” It was one of the parties to the Articles of Confederation.

You can choose New Hampshire’s “birthday” from several historical events. I like April 18, the date of the provincial grant. By any measure, New Hampshire existed long before the U. S. Constitution.

My setting of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

This entry was posted in Music and tagged music poetry on by

I’ve written and recorded a musical setting of Yeats’ “The Second Coming.” It’s one of the most ambitious compositions I’ve done, and it pushes my vocal abilities, but I think you’ll find it listenable. If you caught it when I first uploaded it, you might want to go back. Last week I remixed it to strengthen the vocal line a little and fix a bad note.

Yeats uses the word “gyre” in a personally specific way. It’s only loosely like Lewis Carroll’s “gyre and gimble.”

About a year ago, I posted some thoughts on the poem. I still stand by them.

Jetpack weirdness

This entry was posted in Administrative and tagged administrative jetpack on by

Jetpack just stopped working on this site. I don’t think it will affect your experience.

Jetpack is a plugin for WordPress websites that provides various services, including readership statistics. Yesterday, June 11, the statistics in my dashboard stopped working. There was a Jetpack update to install, so I accepted it, thinking it would fix the problem. Instead, Jetpack is now completely disabled for my site. A web search doesn’t find any evidence of a widespread change in Jetpack, so I don’t know why this happened.

This shouldn’t affect you, but let me know if anything looks weird or stops working.

Update: I managed to reconnect to Jetpack. Just a hiccup, I guess.

A note on Fanny Mendelssohn

This entry was posted in Music and tagged biography history music on by

Fanny Mendelssohn, also known by her married name Fanny Hensel, was a sister of the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. While she wasn’t nearly as famous as her brother, she was an excellent composer herself, and she doubtless would have been better known if 19th-century European society didn’t discourage women from professionally writing music. The website HenselPushers is devoted to publicizing her music and making it available in printed form. The site maintainer’s name isn’t given, but it’s been going for quite a while and appears reliable.

A recent article pointed out a common mistranslation of a statement by her father, Abraham Mendelssohn. Her biographer, R. Larry Todd, translated a sentence in a letter from Abraham to the 14-year-old Fanny as: “Music will perhaps become his [Felix’s] profession, whilst for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.” That sounds as if he was discouraging her from making music important in her life.

The actual quote, according to HenselPushers, is “Die Musik wird für ihn vielleicht Beruf, während sie für dich stets nur Zierde, immer Bildungsmittel, Grundbaß deines Seins und Thuns werden kann und soll.” The usual quotation has “niemals” (never) rather than “immer” (always), reversing the meaning, and omits “Bildungsmittel” (means of personal development). He recognized that the chances of her becoming a professional musician were slim at best, but he still regarded music as very important to her future.

This is just a short signal boost, so I won’t get into the reasons for the misquote, which HenselPushers thinks was an intentional alteration by her son Sebastian Hensel. I haven’t independently verified the analysis, but the translation of the German lines looks right to the best of my understanding. “Grundbaß” (spelled “Grundbass” today) means the “ground bass” or bass line of a piece of music; if it had a secondary meaning in the Mendelssohns’ time, it’s dropped out today. Abraham was using the word metaphorically.

Fanny is believed to have contributed to some of the compositions Felix published in his own name, though we’ll never know the exact extent.

Here’s a sampling of three of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words.