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search about a garden a tree a stream an entrance now

Joshua Whiting

learner, writer, creator, librarianish person

Welcome to joshuaw.xyz, my home at the end of the internet.

My name is Joshua Whiting (he/they). I am a dad, a husband, a media specialist / librarianish person in the educational technology department of a school district, a sometimes writer, and maybe some other things.

I want to learn, write, and make more things, and I wanted a place of my own to put those things, so I created this site. This is my main venue for creative activity and publication on the internet.

You can scroll down to browse recent notes, and you can find a menu of additional features by clicking on the [ + ] sign in the top right corner of this web page.

Thanks for visiting.


Recent Updates [ RSS Feed ] []


2023.03.25

I kind of forgot how my website works. Oops.

And if anyone out there actually subscribes to this RSS, just a heads up that I am messing with it and it is about to change to be more conventially formatted…

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I kind of forgot how my website works. Oops.

And if anyone out there actually subscribes to this RSS, just a heads up that I am messing with it and it is about to change to be more conventially formatted…

Standalone post link: Forgot


2023.01.02

Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

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Here are some of the things I’m working on and thinking about now…

  • Finishing up a winter holiday break and starting the new year with this ‘now’ update. Spent a lot of nice, casual time with my family, and successfully avoided doing any work off the clock, other than glancing at my email occasionally and making a few notes and plans (see below.)

  • I’m trying my hand at digital gardening and note-making in earnest, using Obsidian as my primary tool. My new digital garden is private, but I may publish elements of it here once I get things more established.

  • Winter break work plan, which I hope I can hold to once actually back at work: also adopt a digital gardening approach at work, with a view to develop a new knowledgebase for library and technology staff, create and curate more learning resources, etc. Our websites and instructions are showing their years.

  • Developing new workflows and methods for MARC record acquisition/creation/editing and other obscure but necessary library and technology inventory tasks so as to be able to focus more energy on digital collection development and the resource creation mentioned above.

  • Trying to predict the Newbery by focusing a lot of my reading on middle grade books, especially some of the likely contenders. Goal is to predict the Newbery or at least to have a good chance of already having read the winner before it wins. Underlying, better goal is simply to find/read/recommend good books for kids.

  • Getting beyond overthinking and overreading about films and finally just going to see a bunch of movies. I’ve joined a flexible 2023 watch challenge on Letterboxd, and then I’ve created two other watch challenges for myself: the Silent Films x Public Domain Challenge 2023 and Spielberg 2023.

This page was last updated on January 3, 2023. See my prior ‘now’ updates here.


Credit for the ‘now’ page concept goes to Derek Sivers.

Standalone post link: Now (January 2, 2023)


2022.11.27

It has only been two days since I started posting on my site again and also syndicating the posts to various places, and I’m finally ready to admit:

  1. it is in fact a huge pain in the ass to use Hugo as a microblog (at least the way I have mine set up)

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It has only been two days since I started posting on my site again and also syndicating the posts to various places, and I’m finally ready to admit:

  1. it is in fact a huge pain in the ass to use Hugo as a microblog (at least the way I have mine set up)
  1. my syndications to twitter and tumblr don’t quite work like I hoped they would, and I’m not sure what the point of them is, even if I could get them working better

  2. I started obsessively looking at my old twitter account feed yesterday after being off it for a couple of years, and I think I still don’t want to re-engage with that at this point in time

My micro.blog syndication works okay, but I’m not following anyone there offficially and probably not posting stuff that will get featured in their “discover” feed. Still flirting with the idea of going all-in on micro.blog, though, because it would be easy and because whenever I look at the discover feed I learn stuff and am inspired by the people who share there. Have followed a bunch of people I’ve found there via RSS or newsletter subscriptions.

I admit I also still learned stuff from scrolling my old twitter feed yesterday, but I also saw a whole lot of garbage and got nearly sucked into several dramas and controversies that don’t actually concern or interest me. It took too much time and drained too much energy sifting for gold on twitter. I need to go through all my good twitter follows and find their blogs or what not, move the ones I like into RSS where I can avoid some of the junk.

Standalone post link: RE: Scattering


2022.11.27

Two books standing on a desk - The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander and The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat

Finished reading Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return last night, and then started on Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker. (I’m only at ~8% on Mapmaker so I’m breaking my self-imposed “only post an update if you are at least 20% of the way through the book” rule.)

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Two books standing on a desk - The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander and The Last Mapmaker by Christina Soontornvat

Finished reading Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return last night, and then started on Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker. (I’m only at ~8% on Mapmaker so I’m breaking my self-imposed “only post an update if you are at least 20% of the way through the book” rule.)

Standalone post link: ''readingthedoorofnoreturn''


2022.11.26

Finished reading Windswept by Margi Preus last night, and then started in on The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander [~35%].

Getting into an active reading mode with books of my own choosing. It has been awhile.

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Finished reading Windswept by Margi Preus last night, and then started in on The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander [~35%].

Getting into an active reading mode with books of my own choosing. It has been awhile.

Standalone post link: Reading Update - November 26, 2022


2022.11.25

It feels like the last days of social media, looting, anarchy, the scattering of peoples and the confounding of languages, so I feel like I can post again with abandon now. Posts no longer feeling chiseled in stone, but wandering snowflakes that might melt away at any moment. Or maybe just blobs of semi-melted snow.

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It feels like the last days of social media, looting, anarchy, the scattering of peoples and the confounding of languages, so I feel like I can post again with abandon now. Posts no longer feeling chiseled in stone, but wandering snowflakes that might melt away at any moment. Or maybe just blobs of semi-melted snow.

Also, my newish co-worker is motivated about sharing positive school library things and encouraged us to start posting stuff on our work social media accounts again, which helped me realize that posting things is not that big of a deal, and that I had built it up into a weirdly huge deal both professionally and personally.

So, I’m posting on my website again, and I’m setting up goofy RSS-triggered processes to syndicate those posts to micro.blog, tumblr, and ye olde twitter. These are the places I want to play around with for now, and this is the first test to see what happens with my syndication.

BOOM.

Standalone post link: scattering


2022.11.24

 - It’s not unusual to overeat on Thanksgiving, but you may end up feeling bloated, gassy and uncomfortable afterward.

Prescient analysis on the events of the coming day from the New York Times.

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 - It’s not unusual to overeat on Thanksgiving, but you may end up feeling bloated, gassy and uncomfortable afterward.

Prescient analysis on the events of the coming day from the New York Times.

It’s not unusual to overeat on Thanksgiving, but you may end up feeling bloated, gassy and uncomfortable afterward. – The New York Times - November 24, 2022

Standalone post link: bloated, gassy and uncomfortable


2022.09.11
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2022.09.10
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2022.09.05
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Copyright 2022 Joshua David Whiting. Made in Millcreek, Utah, USA. Contact me. Built with Hugo and my own WP51 theme, still a work in progress. Hosted via Github and Netlify.