DEV Community: Paul Barker

A quick bash/zsh tip

Paul Barker — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 07:15:04 +0000

! is a valid character in an alias. I use it to mark aliases which run under sudo, for example on my Debian box I have:

alias e!="sudo ${EDITOR}"
alias a!="sudo apt"
alias s!="sudo systemctl"
alias in!="sudo apt install"

... and a few others.

Syndication

Paul Barker — Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Cory Doctorow, I've been thinking about the IndieWeb idea of POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) and how to extend the reach of my blog posts. So I'm trying something new and syndicating blog posts to dev.to.

dev.to makes this quite nice with native support a "canonical URL" for posts originally published elsewhere. It's also pretty easy to repost existing content to since it supports Markdown (my posts are written in reStructuredText for my website but can be easily converted to Markdown using pandoc) and future posts can be automatically shared to dev.to via an RSS feed.

Existing posts on dev.to is variable in quality, and there are multiple posts criticising the platform for low-quality blogspam, but I don't think that's a reason to avoid posting to the platform (as long as it's not the exclusive home to your posts). My goal here is to extend the reach of my writing, not to gain some sort of prestige-by-association from the sites where I syndicate my posts, so the presence of blogspam on dev.to doesn't put me off from sharing my posts there. And blogspam is sadly a fact of life on any platform that's easy to post to.

It's also worth noting that I've considered and rejected syndicating my posts to Medium due to their monetisation & obnoxious popups, and SubStack due to their problematic hosting of TERFs.

So, assuming I don't find any reason to cancel this experiment, you'll be able to read my writing at dev.to/pbarker as well as on Mastodon and on my website.

Using a non-commercial Creative Commons license

Paul Barker — Mon, 10 Apr 2023 14:34:15 +0000

At the start of 2023 I had a bit of a re-think on how I should license the writing and photographs which I publish to the internet.

There are well established benefits for allowing free commercial use of free and open source software. But I don't see that the same benefits exist for allowing free commercial re-use of stories, articles, photos, music, painting, etc. These things typically have one primary author or group of authors and it's rare to get significant free contributions (or even want significant contributions) from companies that want to use your work.

In open source software, we have a mixed history of companies exploiting the commons and companies contributing back to the commons. For more "artistic" works, the history seems to be exclusively of companies exploiting the commons.

For these reasons, I'm now allowing only non-commercial use of my photography and writing by default. In particular, I'm using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC-BY-NC 4.0) license.

I'm open to selling commercial re-use licenses for my photos and articles if any company does express interest. I'm also open to contributing content to existing projects under other licenses which do allow commercial use where there is a clear benefit to the commons.

For software projects, I'll continue to use and recommend open source licenses. My preference is for the Apache 2.0 license for source code and the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0) license for documentation.