Friday, July 31, 2020

For another instance,

... I  learned some interesting things about the late President Lee Teng-hui from this Twitter thread by Prof. James Lin of the University of Washington. I haven't been looking at Twitter for a while (trying to maintain my sanity), but had to "stop by" when I learned of Lee's death today (actually yesterday).

Anyway, LTH, RIP.

Saturday, July 18, 2020

We gotta get out of this place...

Watching the news. Even though Taiwan is an island, I feel more trapped in the US than I ever felt when I lived there.

Probably not an original observation, but the US right now is the biggest island in the world, and it's floating away from all of the others...

Thursday, July 16, 2020

For instance,

I found out about this webinar today about two hours after it ended, along with this "Advocacy Call to Challenge Institutionalized Xenophobia against International Students" (in response to the ICE rule about online classes that has already been rescinded) and this anonymous survey for international students (that will close at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow), all via the NEXTGEN Twitter feed, which I came to via Sharon Yam's Twitter feed, which I came to via this tweet by Bad China Takes, which had been retweeted by ... well, I lost the thread at this point.

This example points out two contradictory points:
  1. I would need a Twitter account (or the aforementioned RSS thingy) to keep up with all of this info (and be able to sign petitions and join webinars on time).
  2. I can manage to go down the Twitter rabbit hole just fine without a Twitter account, and this is really something I should avoid, anyway.
So I guess I'll stick with the status quo for now.

Plus the webinar was only open to CCCC members, and I let my membership lapse about 5 years ago. 

Twitter conundrum

I've had two Twitter accounts in the past that I used for a while and then deleted; I've had one account that I never finished setting up because I  wouldn't give them my phone number. I skim some people's Twitter feeds to keep up on some of the goings-on about Taiwan-related research and other things of interest, but I'm afraid to set up yet another account because I know how I get when I join a social network, and I just don't need that right now. But on the other hand, the number of Twitter feeds that I am interested in following keeps growing, and I don't know what else to do. I suppose I could bookmark all the feeds I'm interested in, but that doesn't seem very efficient.

I might look into figuring out how to set up RSS feeds for Twitter. Maybe I can add them to my Feedly app and see them that way.

(A little while later) Hmmm... Looks like you need to get Feedly Pro+ to be able to integrate Twitter. Have to decide if I want to pay $8.25 a month for that.

OK, I've decided that I don't.

There's also something called "FetchRSS" that will allow Twitter. But the free version deletes unused feeds after 7 days of  inactivity and updates feeds only once every 24 hours.

This article suggests a few options, but it seems most of them don't work anymore.

I suppose I can try the free version of FetchRSS if I can keep myself down to 5 feeds and 5 articles in a feed. Except that the whole reason for doing this was that I am interested in more and more feeds...

Oh how I miss Google Reader!!

[Update: I'm trying to use Blogger's "Blogs I'm following" function to see if that will work. It seems I can at least catalog the Twitter feeds I'm interested--sort of like bookmarking them. Which means I'm back to where I started....]