Site News

2025

July 2024 – I have updated the random page, inserted a microblogs page and tidied up the work pages to rely on linkedin

2024

Dec 2024 – the front page now has a diigo call to action

Jun 2024 – I inserted feedzy to read my diigo bookmarks as a subpage of the insights menu element.

2023

Sep 2023 – mingle failed when my hosting provider upgraded to Python 3. This means that insights – io and its feed alternatives no longer update. The BrexitNews feed also failed.

2021

Sep 2021 – I established a “Brexit News” mingle.It needs to be integrated into wordpress and also the rss & opml feeds need to be advertised, this is ATOM only at the moment.

Jan 2021 – Either flickr have changed their API or flash is now gone from firefox, but I need to change the flickr slide show renderings on some of the older pages and have done so on some.

2020

June 2020 – I moved the wiki to davelevy.info/wiki and advertised visualping.io as a means of subscribing. I also added the select by category widget in the footer.

May 2020 – I started to move some of the blog’s document assets from davelevy.info to my Google Drive. (This should be invisible to users.)

Apr 2020 – I installed a redirect, https://davelevy.info/youtube, now resolves as my youtube channel, I have added the youtube channel to the links at the bottom of the page and I have amended the slider so that it exposes links to the work page, the wiki, the politics category (was the whole blog), the thoughts category and the technology category.

2019

Jan 2019 – I have updated the feedly OPML file

Jan 2019 – The copyright compliance statement was amended for the purpose of clarity.

Jan 2019 – I revised the front page to add two links to my linkein blog

Jan 2019 – Amazon reorganised their site or some books to which I referenced using their site have become unavailable in some of the older articles. I have deleted the hyperlinks.

2018

Dec 2018 – I installed redirects in blog.davelevy.info and in davelevy.info to issue 301 redirects on the old blog permalinks.

Dec 2018 – I installed the ‘Random’ page which displays excerpts from seven randomly chosen posts.

Oct 2018 – I moved reference to my Paper.li site from the pages to a display widget.

Oct 2018 – I revised the front page to make a more prominent blog button

Aug 2018 – Revised the “Subscribe Widget” and edited the static page structure

May 2018 – I deleted the “thoughts” page.

Mar 2018 – I ported blogs.davelevy.info to this site and ello.davelevy.info.

2017

Nov 2017 – I corrected the links in the code section of “Insights” and added the github links.

Jun 2017 – I uploaded a copy of the EDRi white paper, a Charter of Digital Rights and linked to it in the mirrors section of the Insights page. I reinstalled the xslt engine, the ATOM feed is now working

May 2017 – I installed a ./mingle redirect statement, and add a target=”_blank” to the i/o key index list.

Apr 2017 – I deleted the SNOBS mirror, and implemented the site at davelevy.info.

Mar 2017 – I updated the Labour Rules mirror to the 2017 version. …

Wiki

Wiki

I have a personal wiki, where I post my notes and findings about Technology, I.T., Travel, computer games, gadgets and there’s a few articles about just living one’s life. There’s also some politics and economics, but not so much today. Under the technology, there’s a bunch of stuff about home I.T. and blogging, proving the rule that what bloggers most like to write about is blogging.

Comments are open, there is a social login plugin to allow you to comment using your own social network logins.

Articles on the wiki are more likely to be unfinished, often representing work in progress. There are a large number of navigation features available on the sidebar and via the sitemap , feeds and index pages. They are also accessible via  the tag cloud page.

The Wiki’s “About the Site” deals with cookies, the login feature and the site’s history.

The site was moved from it’s sub-domain to a being a branch/sub-site of davelevy.info.

Go to the new wiki.davelevy.info …

New Copyright Laws

New Copyright Laws

The EU is considering a new Copyright law, its scrutiny committee is JURI (Legal Affairs) and the JURI Rapporteur is the sole remaining Pirate Party MEP, Julia Reda. She has posted her report, on her website here, and commented on a blog article here. She has also posted it to a collaboration site. This immediate debate has shown little support for Reda, which may suggest she has it right, or that her priorities are the troll friendly jurisdictions. …

@LabourDigital

@LabourDigital

I left Manchester and travelled home on Tuesday Morning, i.e. 23rd I reckoned I could catch up on Ed’s speech and the only fringe of any interest was the @LabourDigital policy launch planned for 4:00 p.m. I checked it out on the web, but it didn’t really come to my notice as anything other than a minority interest until it was reported in the Register on Sept 28th by Andrew Orlowski, not to be confused with Aleksandr Orlovao, who seems to have picked up the territory. The @LabourDigital’s policy statement is here. It contains 82 recommendations, which they summarise with four headlines and seven additional teaser policies. …

Stack Ranking

Many company’s, particularly US owned, staff evaluation schemes are based on ranking their staff, and additionally rewarding the top 20% and firing the bottom 10%. (This idea comes from the US, probably from GE; firing people because they are not as good as someone else is illegal in the UK and much of Europe.) Basically it is not about continuous improvement, it’s based on a world view that thinks people are lazy and need fear to make them work hard. Fear of not getting a bonus, or fear of dismissal. This cynicism and hate will never build a successful firm. …

It’s austerity, stupid!

It’s austerity, stupid!

Earlier this week, Pascale Lamb, one of Labour’s MEP candidates tweeted, “It’s not immigration that causes pressure on services…..it’s austerity”, and in under 100 characters sums up what should be at the heart of Labour’s campaigns this spring and isn’t. The right wing led Commission of the European Union is the world’s ideological engine of austerity and in this country austerity economics has been adopted by the Tory led coalition as a macro-economic policy enabling the assault on standards of living and the welfare state. There are alternatives. Labour should be offering hope of a better (economic) life, not to mention a decent tolerant society. It should also be making something of the fact that it has a candidate for President of the Commission. It’s austerity which is killing jobs, and it’s the result of policy. …

Privacy is a Human Right, get over it!

Privacy is a Human Right, get over it!

The European Parliament, last Wednesday voted on a resolution coming from its Civil Liberties committee which determines the European Parliament’s response to the NSA’s democratic over reach. As Glyn Moody points out in his Techdirt article, in order to become binding, it will need to be agreed by the Council of Ministers where their votes are directed by the Governments of the EU member states. …

Backdoors

Backdoors

Earlier this week, the Guardian in conjunction with its partner publishers, New York Times and ProPublica ran an article, Revealed: how US and UK spy agencies defeat internet privacy and security. As we’ll see, the title is a bit misleading, but the agencies certainly gave it their best shot. This story builds on the initial Snowden leaks that the NSA has been using computer technology to spy on everyone using the internet in the USA. The story rapidly came to the UK where it became clear that Britain’s GCHQ was tapping the UK/USA telecom links, sharing intelligence with the USA and providing the NSA with a slightly more legal way of spying on US citizens. There is little doubt that the US & UK’s intelligence agencies have outsourced their own domestic spying which is legally restricted to each other. …

Distributing ideas

The site, “If this then that” offers trigger actions as a web service. It works with objects it calls recipes and channels.

Recipes are the “if this then that” relationship, and channels define the this and that. It has a long list of pre-canned channels and recipes, but sadly NOT an output RSS/XML channel.

I have today, just created a trigger that takes my blog feed and posts it to facebook. Obviously I need to test it. This is part of the exploration on how to rebuild my personal streams which have been damaged by Facebook, Google and Twitter’s attempts to enclose our speech into their “secret gardens”.

 …