John Cox

Blogs · @wyome · Now · Shelf

Interesting

Vegetables to Plant in August: What to Sow for Fall Harvests

This guide outlines which vegetables to plant in August for fall harvests, including turnips, kale, beets, cilantro, bok choy, radishes, mizuna, salad greens, broccoli, and carrots. It explains the practical timing considerations for late-season planting, such as counting backward from your first frost date and adding extra days to seed packet maturity estimates to account for shorter days and slower growth. The article also covers soil preparation, seed germination in hot summer conditions, and specific variety recommendations based on the author's experience gardening in zone 6a.

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The Devil Makes Three

The Devil Makes Three is a Santa Cruz-based Americana band that blends bluegrass, country, folk, and blues, achieving their highest chart success with the 2009 album "Do Right Wrong" at #1 on the US Grass chart. Live reviews are overwhelmingly positive, praising the band's musicianship, emotional connection to their material, and high-energy performances, though one dissenting review criticized a particular show as emotionless and formulaic.

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Ahrefs—AI Marketing Platform Powered by Big Data

This is a marketing/landing page for Ahrefs, positioning it as a marketing platform beyond traditional SEO—covering search rankings, AI chatbot visibility (brand mentions/citations in tools like ChatGPT), competitive intelligence, and content optimization. It highlights new offerings like "Letaido" (an AI agent platform for automating marketing workflows) and real-time web-crawling/API products aimed at grounding AI/RAG pipelines with fresh data. Worth keeping likely as a reference for Ahrefs' expanding feature set and its pivot toward "answer engine optimization" (AEO) as AI search reshapes SEO practice.

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Social web - Wikipedia

This Wikipedia-style overview traces the "social web" from its origins in early tools like email, BBS, and Usenet through Rheingold's 1996 coining of the term, arguing that the web's underlying purpose was always social despite not being designed explicitly for that goal. It charts a three-stage evolution from static "one-way" pages to interactive, egocentric platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and surveys how social features (reviews, crowdsourcing, blogs/wikis, mobile apps) have spread even into non-social sites like Amazon and eBay, ultimately blurring lines between online interaction and real-world relationships, commerce, and dating. Worth keeping as a broad reference piece with citations for the history and mechanics of social interaction online, rather than a focused argument or single case study.

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Was Anne of Cleves the Original Catfish?

This piece debunks the popular "catfishing" myth surrounding Henry VIII's marriage to Anne of Cleves, arguing that Hans Holbein's portrait was actually an accurate, verified likeness rather than flattering deception. It traces the "Flanders mare" legend to a single unreliable 17th-century history written 140 years after the fact, and argues the real reasons Henry rejected Anne were cultural mismatch, her lack of courtly sophistication, and his own declining health—not her appearance. Worth keeping as a myth-busting corrective that also doubles as a case study in how a juicy but false anecdote outlives the historical record.

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Wildfires across Europe detonate forgotten World War bombs

Wildfires and drought sweeping Europe this summer are unearthing and detonating unexploded ordnance left from the two world wars, from Belgium's High Fens battlefields to receding rivers in Hungary and Slovakia. Drawing on interviews with historians, bomb disposal officials and researchers like Sarah Njeri and Christina Greene, the piece argues that climate change is ending Europe's "climatic luck," reactivating buried munitions once kept dormant by stable weather and forcing firefighters and civilians to confront wartime dangers decades after the fighting ended. It's a striking example of how climate change is colliding with historical conflict legacies in unexpected, physically dangerous ways.

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Webmention - Wikipedia

This W3C recommendation documents the Webmention protocol, which lets a site notify another when it links to it, enabling decentralized comment/reply threads across independent domains—essentially federated commenting without a central platform. Grown out of the IndieWebCamp movement, it deliberately simplifies earlier linkback mechanisms like Pingback by using plain HTTP form-encoded requests instead of XML-RPC, and it also handles edge cases like edited or deleted source pages. Worth keeping as a reference for implementing IndieWeb-style interlinking or understanding how it compares to Pingback, Trackback, and Refback.

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15 Fantastic and Free Blogging Tools When Writing Posts

A personal, curated rundown of free (or freemium) tools the writer actually uses monthly across a busy multi-blog writing schedule, grouped into editing/writing, planning, visual, and SEO categories — covering things like Hemingway and Google Docs for drafting, Capitalize My Title and a self-built US/UK spelling fixer for polish, plagiarism checkers for vetting guest posts, Trello and a self-made stale-content auditor for workflow, Canva/Photopea/unDraw for visuals, and Ubersuggest/Yoast for SEO. Worth keeping as a practical, tested toolkit list rather than a generic "best tools" roundup, since it explains why each tool earned a spot in the author's real editing workflow.

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15 Fantastic and Free Blogging Tools When Writing Posts

A curated, personally-tested roundup of free (or free-tier) blogging tools the author actually uses weekly, organised into editing/writing, planning, visual, and SEO categories — covering things like Hemingway and Google Docs for drafting, plagiarism checkers for vetting guest posts, Trello for pipeline management, Photopea/Canva/Undraw for images, and Ubersuggest/Yoast for SEO. Worth keeping as a practical, no-fluff toolkit reference rather than a theory piece, including two of the author's own side-project tools (FixSpell for US/UK spelling conversion and AuditFresh for finding stale content). It's framed around a real multi-blog workflow, so the picks are geared toward speed and volume rather than one-off perfection.

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The 67 Best Blogging Tools that Built my 6-Figure portfolio

A first-hand, category-by-category rundown of the exact paid tools and services one blogger used to build a six-figure niche-site portfolio, covering hosting/themes (Bluehost/Astra for beginners, Rocket.net/Trellis at scale), ad networks (Ezoic then Mediavine), keyword research and SEO (Ahrefs, KeywordChef, Frase), AI writing and content optimization (Koala, Zimmwriter, Originality.ai, Surfer), affiliate and email tools (Lasso, Convertbox, Beehiiv), plus content sourcing, image/compression, VA hiring, and course-hosting platforms. The value is in the specificity of "what I actually pay for and why," including candid notes on switches made (Yoast→Rankmath, AWeber→Convertkit) and a simple recommended stack progression for beginners versus 50k+ pageview sites. Worth keeping as a running reference/toolkit list rather than a one-time read, since the author says they update it as their stack changes.

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This Chocó Pambil Refuge Floats Gently in the Jungle Canopy | Moss and Fog

Minqa Atelier's Chocó Pambil Refuge is a stilted timber cabin built into the steep, biodiverse Chocó forest of Ecuador, designed to rest lightly on the hillside rather than reshape it. Local wood, glass walls that erase the line between interior and canopy, and a hand-assembled modular structure keep the footprint minimal while immersing occupants in the jungle's fog, sound, and light. It's a small case study in low-impact design as a route to genuine stillness, worth keeping as inspiration for building with a landscape rather than against it.

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The Hoodie – Alpaca Wool Hoodie Sweater – Unisex

# The Hoodie — $165.00 PAKA's Original Hoodie, the unisex best-seller that started it all — soft, breathable, and warm without bulk, designed to go from lounging at home to hiking a trail. **Highlights:** - **Material:** 65% Royal Alpaca Fiber / 35% Recycled Nylon - **Fit:** Easy, unisex fit — true to size - **Weight:** Ultra-lightweight (0.97 lb / 15.5 oz) - **Perks:** Naturally odor-resistant, thermoregulating, softer than cashmere - **Care:** Hand wash cold recommended (or delicate/cold cycle) - **Impact:** Purchase supports 300+ women artisans in Peru - **Shipping:** Free shipping on orders $150+, plus 30-day returns/exchanges Would you like me to draft product page copy, a size guide callout, or marketing bullet points based on this info?

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