While writing validation code for an 11ty shortcode, I
discovered something odd:
if you add a shortcode with no parameter to a nunjucks
template, the engine modifies the call,
adding a parameter set to an empty string.
If you want to use
virtual templates
in an
eleventy
project, you have to use eleventy 3 or greater.
But note that the feature landed -- officially, at any
rate -- in
3.0 beta.
In other words, 3.0 alpha is not necessarily good enough,
as I learned today.
In a recent article, I explained how I categorize my
posts using
microformats vocabulary names in front matter.
In this followup, I'll demonstrate using front matter
for microformats properties.
I found scores of kale volunteer starts in the ground
near my garden plot.
And when I saw them, I recalled that last year, I had
several kale plants flower.
At the time, I let them be, harvesting the flowers to
garnish salads and other dishes.
Obviously, some of the flowers went to seed, landing
nearby.
I woke up early in the morning to a cacophony of bird calls.
These recordings were made in various parts of my neighborhood with a Zoom H4N handheld recorder.
(I don’t have a lot of experience with the recorder,
so unfortunately there’s a bit of noise here and there.)
If I had to pick one reggae artist who most deserves more
attention then (s)he has received, it would probably be
Junior Byles.
He was gifted with a beautiful voice and an ability
to convey a lot of emotion with it.
Which he did, on some deadly serious songs
like “Beat Down Babylon,” “Demonstration,” and “Fade Away.”
Even a love song like “Curly Locks” has as a subtext a
plea against discrimination.
Most of Byles's early work —
indeed, much of his finest output —
was produced by Perry, and it deserves a wider audience.
The two met in the late 1960s when they were
employed by music executive Joe Gibbs, Byles as lead
singer of the Versatiles,
Perry as Gibbs' house producer.
When Byles decided to start a solo career, in 1970,
he turned to a now independent Perry to help him.
Responding to a question about Vladimir Putin at a press
conference, Joe Biden claimed that Russia has 8 time zones.
That's ridiculous.
We have four in this country, right?
Do you know how many time zones they have?
Do not, you know...lie.
.aiff
Something I learned today:
A 5th generation ipod will sync songs in .aiff format.
It will let the user select those songs and
press the play button.
But it won’t actually play the songs.
For that, you gotta use a different format.
(I went with .m4a.)
Early in Lee Perry's career as an independent producer,
he recorded a slew of instrumentals credited to his
house band, The Upsetters.
For song titles, Perry took inspiration from
Spaghetti Westerns.
Like many reggae artists, he loved that film genre.
A quick glance at his output includes
“High Plains Drifter”
“Dig Your Grave”
“Big John Wayne”
“The Man With No Name”
“Amigo”
Let's add to that list “Return of Django,” my favorite of
the late 60s/early 70s Perry instrumentals.
I don't know much about Junior Dread outside of the two
toasting
records he made for producer Lee Perry.
One is a solid outing over a dub mix of the Heptones'
“Sufferer's Time.”
The other is “A Wah Dat,” cut on an otherwise unused rhythm
(or, if it was used elsewhere, I'm unaware).
Both are sufferer's tunes, so-called because they
express the plight of suffering people.
But “A Wah Dat” is, for me, the better of the two.
The lyrics are a first-hand account of desperation
and mounting financial trouble during the Christmas
season:
Christmas a come
And me soon get a next son
And that's no fun yuh!
No no no no no no
In 1968, reggae pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry launched his first
record label, Upset Records, with the single “People Funny Boy.”
The title might seem odd, but try this: mentally insert a comma
so that it reads “People Funny, Boy.” It's a complaint, as in
“boy, people are funny.” And who was Perry complaining about?
His former employer, Joel Gibson,
AKA Joe Gibbs.
Working for Joe Gibbs
Two years earlier, Perry had begun working for Gibbs,
ostensibly a music producer.
In reality, Gibbs was not a music producer, but an executive producer —
he financed the operation.
Perry was the music producer. He scouted talent, supervised
sessions, arranged and wrote songs, and promoted records that
appeared on Gibbs' Amalgamated and Pressure Beat labels.
In 1969, Lee Perry produced one of the first ever
deejay records,
“Rightful Ruler” by U-Roy and Peter Tosh.
And as I wrote in my list of
recommended U-Roy records,
it is a remarkable record.
First, recording a
deejay artist
on a reused rhythm track was a novel idea at the time.
Second, the rhythm track, originally used for a song called “Selassie,”
was substantially changed for U-Roy's cut.
Most early deejay records use an instrumental mix of a
record as the backing track, replacing vocals with
deejay rhymes.
For “Rightful Ruler,” Perry did much more:
Reggae and dub pioneer
Lee “Scratch” Perry passed away
in August of this year.
Perry is my single favorite musical artist.
I'd have a hard time counting the number of albums and singles I own
that feature him as a vocalist, producer, or mixer.
Since I have so much of his music,
I've decided to write about songs or albums he recorded that I think
you should hear.
Readers of this website — by my best guess, all two of you! — will note that
I have twice criticized
NPR
for errors in obituary/remembrance pieces for reggae artists,
first for deejay
U-Roy
and a second time for singer
Bunny Wailer.
Well, I'm at it again. This time, the subject is my single favorite
musical artist, Lee “Scratch” Perry.
NPR's
afternoon news program
All Things Considered
aired a remembrance of
Neville Livingston, known to reggae fans as
Bunny Wailer,
who passed away
Bunny was one of the founding members of
The Wailers,
whence came his adopted last name.
He wasn't as well known as his bandmates
Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, but NPR nevertheless felt he
deserved recognition for his contributions to the group.
Yet the piece largely passed over those contributions,
making it seem like he was only a backup singer until he
went solo.
A couple of days ago, I chided
NPR's
“Here and Now”
program for choosing a less-than-stellar record to
excerpt in their
U-Roy obituary.
After hearing the piece, I compiled a short list
of U-Roy recordings from my collection that,
in my humble opionion, would have been better
examples of his work. And
certainly worth listening to even if you're not
producing an on-air tribute to the deejay
originator.
First, a note of gratitude to
NPR
for devoting (at least) two on-air segments and one
website story to
Jamaican deejay
U-Roy, who passed away
.
U-Roy got his start in the Kingston dancehall scene
in the early 1960s. At the time, sound system deejays
typically worked with just one turntable, so the
music stopped whenever they changed records. To
fill the gap, deejays chatted and rhymed, exhorting
patrons to join the dance or telling them what record
they were about to play. They began to add their
patter in the middle of songs, cleverly interacting
with the recording as if the singers and players
were with the deejay, performing live.
Then came dub music, where sound engineers created
remixes with most of the vocals removed. Dub
provided almost unlimited space to rhyme, or
toast,
over the record. It wasn't long before deejays were making
their own records, commiting their witty boasts and
rhymes to vinyl.
Lots of web software is configured to create and serve
web files/pages with an .html extension/suffix.
That includes
11ty,
which by default creates an index.html for each
content template. It includes
Browsersync
— the hot-reload server invoked when you run
npx @11ty/eleventy --serve — which
determines the Content-Type response header based
on the output file's extension. And it includes
Apache HTTP server, which,
like Browsersync, uses the extension to map a file
to a Content-Type header.
And yet, even if your software defaults to .html, it
is not mandatory for the web.
There is no requirement that certain characters be
attached to your web page
urls.
In this article,
I'll explain how to make
clean urls
with Apache, Browsersync, and 11ty.
This is a rough sketch for a
food menu
microformat
that I first suggested on the
microformats
irc channel
in late .
Following that suggestion, I added several ideas to a
newly created wiki page devoted to
menu
brainstorming.
I then decided to try out some of those ideas by
marking up web pages with food menus, which meant I had
to come with names for the root menu and its properties.
The proposal in this article is a result of that effort.
CSS-Tricks has an article about
duplicate titles and id attributes in svg.
The article discusses the problems that might arise when
an author is relying on title elements and id
attributes for
ARIA
accessibility. But there's another, more fundamental
problem if you insert
svg
code directly in an html document and end up with
with duplicate id attributes. A problem that could
bork how the browser renders the svg.
If you publish an article in more than place —
for example on your website and on a community blog
‐ you may want to inform readers and search engines
about the other copy. One way to do that is by adding a
rel=syndicationlink element in the article's head.
Another is with the u-syndication property from the
microformats h-entry
vocabulary.
Suppose you publish an article in more than place —
for example on
medium
and on your own website. If you want to alert
readers about the other copy, you can do so with a
rel=syndicationlink element.
Here's how you can add syndication links to your pages using
11ty and
nunjucks.
I use
11ty
to publish
articles
like this one, but I also want to be able publish status
updates, sort of like my own Twitter feed. Like a Twitter
feed, I want each update to include a date and time when I
wrote it.
Unlike a twitter feed, I don't want each post
to have a permanent url. Instead, I want to show the most
recent updates on my
home page,
and I want to bump off the oldest status update every
time I add a new one.
This article explains how I did it.
Ever heard Gil Scott-Heron's spoken word piece about Gerald Ford's
pardon of Richard Nixon?
It's called "We Beg Your Pardon America (Pardon Our Analysis)"
(from the album The First Minute of a New Day).
Here's an excerpt:
We beg your pardon, America. We beg your pardon because the
pardon you gave this time was not yours to give.
The current
microformats include pattern
offers two methods — using <object> or <a> — to include in a microformat
element parts of a document that are outside of that microformats element's
DOM tree. Both patterns have problems, and have not been widely adopted.
Also, the include pattern has not been updated for
microformats 2.