Write-up: TYPO London 2011 (Thursday)

Places

From 20-22 October, London was host to the TYPO 2011 conference. The conference started sixteen years ago in Berlin, continuing without interruption since. London holds the distinction as the first event held outside of Germany. The format: three days of talks with appearances by more than forty speakers. The schedule is quite ambitious. Talks begin in the early morning and continue well into the evening: there is no filler and the expectation of quality is high. Erik Spiekermann (always direct, brutally honest, wonderfully hilarious) and Adrian Shaughnessy acted as the glue of the conference, holding the space between speakers in place.

The theme of the conference is perhaps best summarised by a point Dale Herigstad made in the very first talk, later expanded upon by Tim Fendley. Spaces become places when they contain meaning; places gain definition with name. The speakers, organisers and audience members all arrived from a great many places, and the work and conversation shared amongst them reaches even further.

While I currently design and develop for the web, my background is in print. I formally studied as a Graphic Designer, schooled in the principles of the Bauhaus and Swiss design. Towards the latter half of university, I experienced the autumn years of post-modernism in design — a divergence that encouraged experimentation and insisted on questioning legibility — an experience that certainly influenced my understanding of design as much as formal modernism. The speakers who volunteered their time for this conference came from a genuine mix of design and art backgrounds. Design conferences of this scale are quite rare, and I feel quite fortunate to have had the opportunity to see the work of so many of my peers and heroes, to view the work as presented.

The quality and tempo of the conference was perhaps set by the first day of talks, a series to kick off the weekend in great anticipation.

Immigration and settlement in the United Kingdom

On 9 June 2011, Immigration Minister Damian Green set out a proposal to abolish the link between temporary migration and permanent settlement in the United Kingdom. Specifically, the Home Office intends to reclassify visas as temporary and permanent for workers outside of the EEA. Most current work/study visas would fall under temporary; reserving permanent settlement for a select few immigrants entering with employee-sponsored and ancestry-based qualifications. The proposed changes are the latest in successively more restrictive measures to immigration policy in the United Kingdom.

Leave to remain

Currently, the United Kingdom grants a migrant working or studying a specific period of “leave to remain”, during which they are entitled to claim temporary residency. At the end of this time, a person may choose to renew their visa or switch to a more appropriate route — for example, a student or spouse seeking entitlement to work. After five years of continued residency, immigrants may then apply for “indefinite leave to remain” (ILR), provided they continue to meet the necessary skill requirements. While ILR is still a step removed from citizenship, it does grant permanent settlement in the UK and full access to state services. The aforementioned consultation seeks to define, at the onset of a visa application, which visas are temporary. Workers on temporary visas will not have the option to apply for ILR.

The previous, Labour government introduced the current tiered working visa system in 2008. It is now all but extinct. The Home Office, in the waning years of Gordon Brown, made incremental restrictions to tiered visas by increasing the skill requirements of incoming workers. Following the election of the Liberal Democrat / Conservative coalition, the government has systematically dismantled the visa system. The highest privileged working visa — the Tier 1 Highly Skilled Migrant — closed on 6 April 2011. Tier 4, the student visa, was significantly altered the same month in parallel to closing of the Tier 1 Post-study working visa.

The Home Office states that 84,000 migrants from outside the European Economic Area were granted indefinite leave to remain in 2010 via employment routes, a 17% increase from totals in 1997 (a year apparently relevant as it was the start of the three-term Labour government). Oft quoted reasons for reducing migration include the additional strain on services and loss of skilled jobs.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has made it clear that the United Kingdom intends to block the flow of immigrants from outside the EEA to as few people as legally possible.

Labor

We want the brightest and best workers to come to the UK, make a strong contribution to our economy while they are here, and then return home.

Damian Green

The Home Department addresses immigrants as “workers”. The underlying rationale is that visa holders have come to the UK to advance their work and careers. This is fair reasoning. However, the assumption that people are here only to work is deeply flawed. Green ignores the strong cultural and social ties that immigrants inevitably form. Adopted homes, however fleeting, still bind. Expecting immigrants to arrive, work for a bit then neatly pack their bags disregards the life that work is bundled within. Five years can be a lifetime of experience and learning; of friendship, of love, of cultural embrace.

The proposal makes no care for these links to community; coldly rational, it either denies the existence of friendship and possibility outside of work or expects the swift burning of bridges. Damian Green’s words amplifies an understanding that people are resources: temporary bodies to fill temporary roles.

Contribution

In striking contrast, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, is pushing an initiative to reform immigration in the United States, acknowledging the essential role of immigrants in America’s economic and cultural growth. Bloomberg proposes more temporary and permanent working visas for highly skilled migrants, new entrepreneur visas and expanded green cards.

We will not remain a global superpower if we continue to close our doors to people who want to come here to work hard, start businesses, and pursue the American dream. The American dream cannot survive if we keep telling the dreamers to go elsewhere.

Michael Bloomberg

His initiative is a stark difference to the policies of the coalition government in the United Kingdom, and indeed to opinion in many parts of the United States. Yet his honesty and openness hits at a truth that many have been content to ignore. The immigration debate so often focuses on illegal persons that it rarely recognizes the economic and intellectual boon that stems from legal paths of migration. Globalization has allowed business and innovation to flourish, yet our borders are being closed to a generation of makers and thinkers.

Choice

The proposal, if passed, will come into effect in 2014. It is unclear whether immigrants already in the United Kingdom would be affected by the changes. The Home Office is keeping an open consultation until 9 September.

I did not move to the United Kingdom with the intent to settle permanently. The prospect of permanent settlement, however, is incentive for me to stay.

I have lived in this country for two years and already have a sincere appreciation for my work experience, my friends, the culture, this city. I understand how difficult it could be in one year to leave all of that behind. The same decision three years on is a choice I would hope to earn: a choice I believe all legal immigrants deserve.

Custom WordPress RSS feeds and Feedburner

A great deal of web content is accessible through syndication feeds. RSS, the de facto standard, is often the singular path to publishings of an author’s blog. Despite rumblings of its demise, RSS remains an essential method of news consumption. As such, a feed should strive to provide the clearest, cleanest presentation of content possible outside of the feed’s source website.

I recently introduced a second stream of content to this site, Snapshots of web content that I find inspiring or informative. The format for presentation of this stream is still under debate, but the current solution mixes the posts into my normal blog stream. When it came to delivering this content to an RSS client, I wanted to ensure that readers weren’t forced to click through to this site first to view the linked content. Additionally, the posts categorized as snapshots should be differentiated in the feed.

Subscriptions for this site, like many others, are tracked through Feedburner. My goal was to create a custom RSS feed to accommodate a different type of content post which would overwrite the default WordPress feed, then track the custom feed with Feedburner.

This requires three steps.

WordPress

Automation

With the release of version 3.0, WordPress has supported a small but very helpful function for handling the output of RSS feeds. Previously, all links had to be added manually in the header section of the theme templates. The new function automates the entire process; on an index page it will create a feed for all posts and a feed for all comments; on an individual post, the two global feeds with the addition of a comments feed relevant to the current post. To enable automation, first remove all existing RSS links from the theme header. The function will not work otherwise. Then, add the following to functions.php:

add_theme_support( 'automatic-feed-links' );

If your theme requires backwards compatibility with WordPress before 3.0, have a look at Jeremy Clark‘s solution.

Building a custom feed

The WordPress documentation has a list of recommended methods for creating custom RSS feeds. I chose to build my feed as a custom theme template, based on notes from Zack Katz.

Set a function to load your custom PHP template.
The name of my custom feed template is, quite originally, feed.php and located at the root of my active theme. All mentions of honeycomb are unique, required values. Change the name to something appropriate to your site. Honeycomb is in reference to the name of my theme.

function honeycomb_rss() {
	load_template( TEMPLATEPATH . '/feed.php');
}
add_action('do_feed_honeycomb', 'honeycomb_rss', 10, 1);

Katz’s tutorial also provides a function to manage custom permalinks so that links to /?feed=rss will work as well as /feed/rss/ for custom feeds.

function custom_feed_rewrite($wp_rewrite) {
	$feed_rules = array(
		'feed/(.+)' => 'index.php?feed=' . $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1),
		'(.+).xml' => 'index.php?feed='. $wp_rewrite->preg_index(1)
		);
	$wp_rewrite->rules = $feed_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
}
add_filter('generate_rewrite_rules', 'custom_feed_rewrite');

Resaving your existing permalink settings in WordPress->Settings->Permalinks will activate the new rules.

Create a custom feed template
In the function above, the custom feed template is located at /feed.php (eg wp-content/themes/honeycomb/feed.php). Create a new file with your chose template name at this location, and drop the entirety of /wp-includes/feed-rss2.php inside.

This is your custom feed, and will reflect any changes made to the custom template.

The default WordPress posts feed is located at https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/feed/ (alternatively, https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/?feed=rss2). The custom feed noted above is accessible at https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/feed/honeycomb/ and https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/?feed=honeycomb.

Feedburner

The next step is to update Feedburner with the custom address. Select “Edit Feed Details…” from any of the analytics tabs at Feedburner to edit the feed configuration. As we are replacing the default WordPress feed with our custom file, the source that Feedburner looks to for analysis must be changed. In the settings pane, I replaced Original feed https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/feed/ with https://www.withoutnations.com/writing/feed/honeycomb/ (the path to the custom feed).

Apache

With the custom feed defined and the Feedburner source set, the last remaining task is to tell WordPress to forward your main feed path to Feedburner, where it can be properly tracked and managed. There are a number of WordPress plugins that can help with this: FD Feedburner and Primary Feedburner are actively maintained by their developers. Google still provides an older version of Feedsmith as well.

The basic function of all of the plugins is to set an Apache rewrite rule that redirects your feed URL to Feedburner. It’s a convenient service if access to your site’s server environment is restricted or you are uncomfortable editing server-side files. However, if this isn’t a worry, I suggest setting the rewrite rule yourself in .htaccess. It’s straightforward, dependable and does not rely on third-party plugins which are prone to compatibility issues and bugs.

In a not-so-recent article, Jeff Starr at Perishable Press provides a few simple and efficient .htacess rules to achieve WordPress to Feedburner redirects. His suggestions include both post and comment feed redirects. Have a look through his article if this is something your site requires; I was only interested in creating one single custom post feed and setting it to redirect and hence left WordPress to manage the comment feeds.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC] 
RewriteRule ^feed/$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/withoutnations [L,NC,R=302]

Requests for /feed/ will redirect to Feedburner at http://feeds.feedburner.com/withoutnations. This rule reroutes the main feed but leaves /feed/honeycomb accessible to Feedburner.

If your site is using custom permalinks, it is essential to place the Feedburner rewrite rule above the WordPress permalink rewrites, otherwise WordPress ignores the redirect. Typically, permalink rules will look something like:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

The simplest way to test if the feed is working is to check the feed URL in a browser: /feed/ should immediately redirect to the Feedburner account address (eg http://feeds.feedburner.com/withoutnations).

The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.

The Spam Factory’s Dirty Secret, Ted Genoways

On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs’ brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket.

Sad as Hell, Alice Gregory

I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent.

Mark Mitchell