Leo Laporte

I thought I'd stick this discovery here in the hopes that others would find it useful. I love Mozilla's Thunderbird email client. It does everything I want it to, including PGP/GPG via Enigmail, Calendering via Lightning, and Google contacts and Tasks via the Provider for Google Calendar extension. 

But I just couldn't get it to get all my folders to sync on Mint GNU/Linux. Only the top level INBOX would download. 

Turns out a "smart" engineer at Fastmail changed the auto-configure IMAP SSL port from 993 to 992 to get Thunderbird to work better with some non-compliant email programs, including Apple's Mail. I had tried every possible solution including subscribing to specific folders and renaming the root folder until I found this post:

Alternate Namespace in IMAP

It's a clever hack that makes Fastmail work better for Apple, Windows, and Blackberry users but it confuses the heck out of compliant client users who allow Fastmail to auto-configure settings.

Changing SSL port 992 to 993 fixes the problem.

It's okay to use the autoconfig - it works fine otherwise - but if you're not getting all your mail try switching ports. 993 is standard, 992 is a hack for some non-compliant clients. 

<script data-mute="true" data-social="true" class="mkEmbedPlayer" data-cover="http://www.leoville.net/file/f88555e558729b567f626649d5010910" data-type="bigsquare" data-username="leolaporte" src="http://meerkatapp.co/widgets/embed.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

I'm writing this in the lovely Quill Editor by indieweb all-star Aaron Parecki. Kevin Marks posed the question in a tweet (I'm just including it to see how Quill handles the Twitter embed code):

We should debate this on TWiG next week. See also http://t.co/g1hbmE9C7O @leolaporte @ginatrapani https://t.co/aT6CJqUOIC

— Kevin Marks (@kevinmarks) May 13, 2015

Nice job, Quill!

Kevin points to his post on Known: Does UI affect writing style? I don't know about that, but it sure is nice to have a good WYSIWYG editor like Quill available for those who want it.

As for myself, I don't mind writing in half English, half HTML - I'm just used to it - and I don't think it makes much difference to the quality of my writing or style. But maybe that's because I'm not a writer. Jeff Jarvis might, indeed, prefer it. Anything that gets him using a POSSE system (where his posts lives on his site and syndicate elsewhere) is good in my book. It really bugs me that he puts some of his best writing on someone else's platform. Even if that's what he's done his whole life!

I also have to put in a plug for Aaron's OwnYourGram which I'm using to automatically copy all my Instagram posts here. (Ben Werdmuller says Instagram integration is a high priority for Known but without a publish API they're stuck).

Indieweb is, indeed, a wonderful thing. (And, by the way, it is a lot more fun to write posts in an elegant editor like Quill). 

Kevin Marks says we can have nice things, like the Quill editor! 

http://twitter.com/kevinmarks/status/598419823006121984

I've been playing around with the Known CMS since its authors, Ben Werdmuller and Erin Jo Richey, appeared on TWiG six months ago. I've run my own self-hosted version for a few months, but I've decided to support WithKnown by buying a Pro membership ($100/year - and worth it) and moving leoville.net to their servers.

Known supports the POSSE philosophy: post on your site, syndicate elsewhere (those Indieweb folks love their acronyms). That means Known makes it easy for me to post to a site I own (here) and cross post to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Soundcloud, and more. And with strong support for web standards like pubsubhubbub, microformats, brid.gy, web hooks, and the like, I know this will be a useful and fun place for me to make my home on the web.

Withknown also makes it very easy to export my data for use elsewhere. In fact, that's how I moved my stuff from my server to here. I'm not worried about the future of my content. And I was getting tired of maintaining my own server and software. 

I plan to use this site like a tumblelog. In other words, disposable stuff I want to keep. I hope you'll enjoy poking around here. Leave a comment if you have a mind to. 

Here's a lovely bit of Bach courtesy of SoundCiteJS and Withknown Pro.