{ "version": "https:\/\/jsonfeed.org\/version\/1.1", "title": "Ilya Birman’s Blog: posts tagged Aegea", "_rss_description": "Ilya Birman’s blog on design, cities, music, and life", "_rss_language": "en", "_itunes_email": "ilyabirman@ilyabirman.net", "_itunes_categories_xml": "<\/itunes:category>\r\n<\/itunes:category>\r\n\r\n", "_itunes_image": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/userpic\/userpic-square@2x.jpg?1573933764", "_itunes_explicit": "no", "home_page_url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/tags\/aegea\/", "feed_url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/tags\/aegea\/json\/", "icon": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/userpic\/userpic@2x.jpg?1573933764", "authors": [ { "name": "Ilya Birman", "url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/", "avatar": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/userpic\/userpic@2x.jpg?1573933764" } ], "items": [ { "id": "341", "url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/all\/how-to-trim-text-the-right-way\/", "title": "How to trim text the right way", "content_html": "

Recently, I wrote about Facebook’s crappy handling of long posts<\/a>: it’s trims the text randomly and loses your reading position when expanded. So how should it be done? Let’s deal with the trimming first.<\/p>\n

Trimming text in a random place is disrespectful to the author and the text, and is a further proof that Facebook doesn’t care what you write. It’s also an example of deep technology dependence: it’s easier for a machine to trim to a certain number of characters, and so it does.<\/p>\n

There could be an aesthetic rationale behind trimming text, i.e. to make it fit into a certain design element. Of course this is also disrespectful to the author and the text, but at least the motives are humanistic. However trimming after a fixed number of characters is not even this: the physical size of lines of equal character length is usually variable: compare “iii” and “WWW”. Even in my Facebook example, a few more words would fit in the same box:<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

Sometimes trimming randomly not only ruins the meaning of the text, but changes its to something indecent:<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

So, if you can’t do without trimming, you have to trim carefully. How does Aegea do it?<\/p>\n

The character limit is considered a rough guideline, not an exact value. If you need to fit in 140 characters, and the text is 143 characters long, then Aegea just won’t touch it. If the text is noticeably over the limit, then Aegea will divide it into sentences and try to take as many full sentences as it can fit. Here, for example, is the snippet of this post:<\/p>\n

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However, if the result is too short (or no whole sentence fits at all), Aegea will look for other signs of safe trim positions: semicolons, dashes, commas, brackets. Only if none of these are present will it trim at a word boundary. And only if there are no word boundaries, will it trim by the number of characters. The absence of word boundaries is a sure sign that the author themselves didn’t care about the meaning, so it’s fine if neither does Aegea.<\/p>\n

In general, Aegea will try to make it as close to the desired length as possible, but so that the meaning does not suffer.<\/p>\n

If I can code this, what would stop Facebook from doing it? I think it’s that it hadn’t even crossed anyone’s mind. Why would Facebook even care about doing anything well? What a nonsense. There is no such metric.<\/p>\n", "summary": "Recently, I wrote about Facebook’s crappy handling of long posts: it’s trims the text randomly and loses your reading position when expanded", "date_published": "2022-10-25T12:50:10+03:00", "date_modified": "2022-10-25T12:49:26+03:00", "tags": [ "Aegea", "being human", "interface", "text" ], "image": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/fb-see-more-3@2x.jpg", "_date_published_rfc2822": "Tue, 25 Oct 2022 12:50:10 +0300", "_rss_guid_is_permalink": "false", "_rss_guid": "341", "_rss_enclosures": [], "_e2_data": { "is_favourite": true, "links_required": [], "og_images": [ "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/fb-see-more-3@2x.jpg", "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/liz-truss-anal@2x.jpg", "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/aegea-snippet-of-this-en@2x.jpg" ] } }, { "id": "335", "url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/all\/mini-updates-to-likely-2-7-2-and-aegea-v3877\/", "title": "Mini updates to Likely (2.7.2) and Aegea (v3877)", "content_html": "

A small update to Likely<\/a> has been released with a CSS fix, as well as a new update to Aegea<\/a> with this new version of Likely.<\/p>\n", "summary": "A small update to Likely has been released with a CSS fix, as well as a new update to Aegea with this new version of Likely", "date_published": "2022-10-06T20:13:50+03:00", "date_modified": "2022-10-06T20:13:42+03:00", "tags": [ "Aegea", "Likely" ], "_date_published_rfc2822": "Thu, 06 Oct 2022 20:13:50 +0300", "_rss_guid_is_permalink": "false", "_rss_guid": "335", "_rss_enclosures": [], "_e2_data": { "is_favourite": false, "links_required": [], "og_images": [] } }, { "id": "334", "url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/all\/full-list-of-aegea-features\/", "title": "Full list of Aegea features", "content_html": "

The website of my blogging engine, Aegea, has been updated with the Features<\/a> page, where all features are listed. It’s a long list, check it out:<\/p>\n

\n\n\"\"\n<\/a><\/div>\n

Try Aegea, it’s amazing.<\/p>\n", "summary": "The website of my blogging engine, Aegea, has been updated with the Features page, where all features are listed", "date_published": "2022-10-05T22:18:04+03:00", "date_modified": "2022-10-05T22:47:16+03:00", "tags": [ "Aegea" ], "image": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/aegea-features-page-en@2x.jpg", "_date_published_rfc2822": "Wed, 05 Oct 2022 22:18:04 +0300", "_rss_guid_is_permalink": "false", "_rss_guid": "334", "_rss_enclosures": [], "_e2_data": { "is_favourite": false, "links_required": [], "og_images": [ "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/pictures\/aegea-features-page-en@2x.jpg" ] } }, { "id": "300", "url": "https:\/\/ilyabirman.net\/meanwhile\/all\/aegea-2-7\/", "title": "Aegea 2.7 released", "content_html": "

\n\n\"Aegea\n<\/a><\/div>\n

Aegea 2.7<\/a> has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.<\/p>\n

What’s new<\/h2>\n

There are several new design themes, which look like this:<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

All new themes are based on the existing theme Plain, but redefine some CSS variables:<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

Above is the code of the theme “Douglas”, which looks like this:<\/p>\n

\n\"\"\n<\/div>\n

You can now easily preview the themes from Settings. There is a link that opens a special contrived page<\/a>, which includes all sorts of blog elements to test. This makes building themes much easier as you can preview your CSS in one place instead of wandering around the blog looking for elements to check.<\/p>\n

The editor now supports these Google Docs keyboard shortcuts, thanks to Igor Adamenko:<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n
⌘B<\/td>\n bold<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘I<\/td>\n italic<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘K<\/td>\n hyperlink<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘⌥1<\/td>\n heading<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘⌥2<\/td>\n subheading<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘⌥0<\/td>\n usual paragraph<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘]<\/td>\n indent<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
⌘[<\/td>\n outdent<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

There are also multiple improvements to the features related to social networking, comments, search, RSS and JSON feed, uploading of images and audio.<\/p>\n

About Aegea<\/h2>\n

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).<\/p>\n

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.<\/p>\n

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:<\/p>\n