The Oort Blog is a new work area at the Thinkum.Space project. This blog is accompanied with the thinkum.space/news blog, which provides a venue for more general announcements and discussion about development at thinkum.space.
Blogging for Digital Media Literacy
The author is a new student of the Digital Media Literacy program from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, online. Some of the content here at the Oort Blog may correspond to individual lesson assignments in this university program. As a personal web log, this blog is not endorsed by Arizona State University or any of its affiliate institutions.
Namesake
The Oort Blog at thinkum.space was named after an astronomical feature, which the author recalls having read about in a book from the public library.
“There is what one could call “indirect observational evidence for the Oort Cloud. It has been known since 1932 (first proposed by Ernst Opik, then updated by Jan Oort in 1950) that one needs a source for long-period comets that is beyond the orbit of Pluto. This source of long-period comets, which are gravitationally-bound to our Sun, cannot be interstellar. Also, we have seen Kuiper Belts (debris orbiting at distances from 30 to 50 AU) around other stars, and as the Oort Cloud is likely a continuation of the Kuiper Belt around our Sun, these properties appear to be common remnants of the star formation process.”
– National Radio Astronomy Observatory
Hosting and Design
Thinkum.Space and the thinkum.space web logs have been published under a shared virtual private server arrangement, using WordPress Hosting (Linux) with DreamHost.
This blog uses a rudimentary theme derived from the default WordPress theme, Twenty-Twenty Two. The default theme has been updated with a small number of visual elements, using the block-based page editor for WordPress. Custom visuals for the theme were created with ApophysisAV.
Future Directions
Content for the Oort Blog has been developed within a hybrid operating system environment using FreeBSD 13.1 as a primary desktop host. Most of the content here has been edited under a Windows 10 environment within a VirtualBox machine installed in a FreeBSD desktop environment.
The first draft of blog items for the Oort Blog may generally be produced in the Windows 10 environment, beginning with Evernote for desktop (Legacy release). This approach provides for a method of WYSIWYG blog editing (i.e What you see is what you get, visually) independent of the WordPress server.
The Opera browser is used in the Windows 10 environment, generally for purposes of Web-based research. This allows for using Zotero version 7 and the Evernote Web Clipper plugin (with full PDF support, in Chrome-like browsers) along with any conventional web-based applications in the browser.
Publishing to the Oort Blog is generally managed within a Firefox browser on the FreeBSD desktop. This provides for a less resource-limited browser environment, contrasted to the Opera browser in the Windows 10 virtual machine.
Content for the main Thinkum.Space site has been edited with Notepad++ on Windows 10.
Pursuant of further usage testing on the server side, this blog may be updated for hosting under a FreeBSD server with Digital Ocean. Ideally, the blog publishing process will be adapted to use Microformats (Microformats 2) pursuant of a desktop-based editor for HTML with support for Microformats annotations (TinyMCE with WebKit and JSCore under Ruby-GNOME?)