Weekly Assemblage for 2024 Week 03

Weekly Whaaa…?

Sound of the Week

Drip, drip, drip, drip, drip… That’s thankfully not the sound of the tap or our kitchen sink, but instead the snow melting everywhere in Boise this weekend. I measured at least 8 inches / 20.3 centimeters on the ground, and that was after an overnight rain that probably helped compact some of it. This is a lot of snow for Boise… the second most on the ground I can remember in all our years here!

Viewing and Reading

This week we watched the end of Star Trek: Voyager and, a few days later, started into Star Trek: Enterprise. We’re also mixing in Derry Girls and Star Trek: Prodigy, re-watching the episodes we’ve already seen to get back up to the portions that are new to us.

Now that our “Viewing Alpha”¹ has gone beyond what initially aired before Constance Penley wrote NASA/Trek (publisher site), I think I might finally read my copy, too.

Otherwise, I’ve really been enjoying Maurice Lee’s Overwhelmed.

Lightly-Annotated Linkapalooza

• In Incrementally correct personal websites, Brian Lovin discusses both the idea of “iterating toward something more truthful, accurate, usable, or interesting” and how he applies that to his own site.
• In Let a website be a worry stone., Ethan Marcotte writes about his site in a way that sounds quite familiar to me.
• Color Safe (GitHub) lets you quickly choose lovely and accessible color palettes based on the WCAG Guidelines for color contrast ratios.
• On his How to Canvas site Dr. Sean Nufer provides many tutorials and workable code templates for the Canvas learning management system.
• In Exploring AI Pedagogy, maintained by the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI, instructors share their teaching reflections related to generative “AI.”

TWI(R)L

This week I (re)learned about…

• The ELIZA effect, which seems mighty relevant to how people attribute cognition, emotion, or interiority to so-called “artificial intelligence” software.
• The ARIA Authoring Practices Guide, which explains both patterns and practices to make more accessible web experiences.
• “influenza” etymology, including “influenza di stelle” or “influence of the stars.”

Site Refinements of the Week

• I modified the backlinks plugin so that double-bracket (wikilink-style) links will work for blog posts, not just notes.
• I added the “Bonus Info” section to all the blog posts, which is where these backlinks will show up. You can also link to any page revisions or take a gander at the page source, too.
• I added aria-label="Breadcrumbs and aria-current="page" to my breadcrumbs include, as suggested by the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide.
• I’m also refining the structure of these “weekly assemblage” notes to be a little more skimmable, and less likely to lead me toward bundling up a bunch of things that might better be published as smaller, separate posts.
• I updated the CSS a bit.

1. For those not yet of the Trek persuasion, this is a reference to Memory Alpha, a fan wiki whose name refers to Memory Alpha, effectively an archival “memory planet.” ↩