My name is Terence(/ˈtɛɹəns) Eden(ˈiːdən/). Modern HTML allows the user to use <ruby> to annotate text. This is usually used for furigana - which allows pronunciation to be placed above words. For example: "シン・ゴジラ (Shin Godzilla)" shows you how to pronounce both words if you are unfamiliar with kanji. The text can be any language or use any characters. In Japanese, it is quite often used to show phonetic pronunciation using hiragana. Because English is a composite language, it isn't always …
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Mastodon - the distributed social network - has two interesting challenges when it comes to how users share links. I'd like to discuss those issues and suggest a possible way forward. When you click on a link on my website which takes you to another website, your browser sends a Referer. This says to the other site "Hey, I came here using a link on shkspr.mobi". This is useful because it lets a site owner know who is linking to them. I love seeing which weird and wonderful sites have linked …
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Facebook Meta - like many other tech titans - has institutional Shiny Object Syndrome. It goes something like this: Launch a product to great fanfare Spend a few years hyping it as ✨the future✨ Stop answering emails and pull requests If you're lucky, announce that the product is abandoned but, more likely, just forget about it. Open Graph Protocol (OGP) is one of those products. The value-proposition is simple. It's hard for computers to pick out the main headline, image, and other data …
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As regular readers will know, I love adding Semantic things to my blog. The standard WordPress comments HTML isn't very semantic - so I thought I'd change that. Here's some code which you can add to your blog's theme - an an explanation of how it works. The aim is to end up with some HTML which looks like this (edited for brevity): <li itemscope itemtype="https://schema.org/Comment" itemid="#246827"> <article> <time…
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Inspired by John Hoare at the Dirty Feed blog - I've asked the British Library to assign my blog an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN). An ISSN is an 8-digit code used to identify newspapers, journals, magazines and periodicals of all kinds and on all media–print and electronic. Why? Shut up. OK. It turns out that lots of people cite my blog in academic papers - so I wanted to make it slightly easier for scholars of the future to use metadata to trace my vast influence on Human …
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Here's a quick one-liner to reduce the precision of location stored in a photo's EXIF metadata: exiftool -c "%.2f" -TagsFromFile @ -GPSLatitude -GPSLongitude photo.jpg (Thanks to the EXIFtool Forum for their help.) Why is this useful? Modern phones automatically attach a GPS location to every photo you take. GPS resolution is around 10 metres. When you share your photos, you're often sharing your precise location. I wanted to upload some photos to the Wikimedia Commons of an interesting…
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This is a real "scratch my own itch" post. I want to add Schema.org semantic metadata to the book reviews I write on my blog. This will enable "rich snippets" in search engines. There are loads of WordPress plugins which do this. But where's the fun in that?! So here's how I quickly built it into my open source blog theme. Screen options First, let's add some screen options to the WordPress editor screen. This is what it will look like when done: This is how to add a custom metabox to…
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I'm trying to create some ridiculously tiny audio files. The sort where every single byte matters. I've encoded a small sample. But the opusenc tool automatically adds metadata - even if you don't specify any. Using the amazing Mutagen Python library I was able to completely strip out all the metadata! import mutagen mutagen.File("example.opus").delete() It edits the file immediately - so be careful! But what is it actually doing? I wanted to understand a bit more - so let's go…
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For many years, my email footer said "Sent via my Casio cPhone" - my attempt to poke fun at the users who hadn't updated their iPhone's default email signature. This leads to an interesting question: Marc Blank-Settle @bbcmarc on Threads@MarcSettleIs there an easy way to see what device an email is sent from? If I type the attached on an email on my PC, can the truth be shown easily? pic.x.com/i8impwkxlo❤️ 1💬 3🔁 014:44 - Wed 26 October 2016 Because 2016 is maximum news, I'm sure there are som…
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