From Myanmar News To Daily Brews

I read an article from Taipei Times in the 20th February 2021 edition of The Week. It’s entitled ‘A coup with China’s fingerprints all over it’ and I am reproducing it here by way of introduction

China’s response to the recent military coup in Myanmar has been “conspicuously muted”, says the Taipei Times. While the rest of the world rushed to condemn the takeover, Beijing simply declared that it had “noted” the event, which its state news agency characterised as a “major Cabinet reshuffle”. Is this because China covertly orchestrated the coup itself, or at least gave the generals its blessing? Some analysts believe so.

Beijing has long had close ties to Burmese military leaders, and in recent years it has extended billions of dollars in high-interest loans to Myanmar as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. In practice, this initiative often amounts to a form of “debt-trap diplomacy” allowing Beijing to snap up strategic assets from defaulting nations. The signs are that Myanmar’s civilian government had been trying to extricate itself from its over-reliance on Chinese loans, and was being “heavily courted by Japan and India, with New Delhi even donating the Burmese navy a submarine last year”.

Given the potential threat this posed to China’s strategic investments in Myanmar, it seems all too likely that Beijing “stepped in to protect its interests”.

Taiwan has every reason to see ‘the hand of mainland China’ everywhere, but the scenario is credible. So with that in mind, when I saw photos of Myanmar protests come up in my Twitter stream this morning, I looked at the source, which is FrontierMyanmar, and from their ‘story’ page I found their former chief reporter, Mratt Kyaw Thu, and followed him on Twitter.

Meanwhile, FrontierMyanmar has a subscription page run by, as they state, Pico. So I went to look at Pico. It offers memberships and subscriptions and a way to ‘collect signups and payments in one seamless experience’. And it’s ‘$0/mo until you grow past 500 contacts’.

I followed the sign-up process to see how it is integrated into a website bearing in mind the myriad of different platforms running memberships and subscriptions. I found a dedicated guide for WordPress and other CMSs.

On their front page there is a link to an article in TechCrunch. Strangely there is no mention of Pico there but there is a mention of Morning Brew. I went looking and found a site that offers:

Get the daily email that makes reading the news actually enjoyable. Stay informed and entertained, for free.

It has the most pared down homepage ever. Like Google, but everyone knows Google and who is behind it and what it is about. But Morning Brew? I added ~/about to the URL and that came up with a 404 but it did have links to pages with actual information on them.

Meanwhile there is also The Morning Brew, which is a blog by a software developer with links to what is going on in tech, that I’ve bookmarked.

FrontierMyanmar.net
TryPico.com
MorningBrew.com
TheMorningBrew.net

Play With A Temporary Self-Hosted WordPress Web Site

Do you want to play with a self-hosted WordPress web site but don’t know how to set it up? Well TasteWP are offering something interesting.

You choose a user name and click a couple of buttons and two seconds later (actually a lot, lot quicker than that) you have a new web site.

You can add plugins, mess around with any themes you get from the WordPress dot Org repository, and generally have fun exploring it knowing it is going to expire in a couple of days. Then you can start another one.

I came across TasteWP in a tweet from Ross Wintle, a WordPress and Laravel developer. 

Spin Up A Landing Page With No Code

 Product Hunt relies on its contributors and makers to keep it up to date with what new in tech. Just a couple of days ago it featured several website applications and I took a look at Dorik.

Its core feature is that you can make a landing page with it. I gave the free version of Dorik a whirl (why do I keep writing DORK?) and made a landing page.

With the free version that landing page is hosted on a sub-domain of Dorik rather than on a domain I could choose.

If you want to go for the paid service ($36/year or $60/year for even more options) then you can connect it to your own domain(s) and if you want you can include a contact form and a subscription form. The paid version is also hosted on Dorik and comes with a free SSL/TLS certificate.

So it is very handy for spinning up a landing page to get the word out about something or other.

You may ask why I am mentioning Dorik at all? After all, WordPress or Blogger can do all this.

Well, it’s because Dorik is a no-code landing page builder. I mean – no code at all – just move stuff around on the page and take advantage of the in-built design elements.

Dorik isn’t the only builder app in the Product Hunt limelight. I could list more of them, but go take a look at them on the Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards. I’d recommend being quick if you are interested because I don’t know how long that particular Product Hunt page will remain up.

By the way, have you noticed how these kind of graphics are everywhere now? This example is one of Mike Oliver’s designs in the Generate Press site library.

Nagorno-Karabakh

BBC News

Heavy fighting has erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, with both civilians and combatants killed.

Accusing Azerbaijan of air and artillery attacks, Armenia reported downing helicopters and destroying tanks, and declared martial law.

Azerbaijan said it had begun a counter-offensive in response to shelling.

The region is internationally recognised as part of Azerbaijan but controlled by ethnic Armenians.

They broke away in the dying years of the Soviet Union. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan were part of the communist state, which sought to suppress ethnic and religious differences.

Amid the clashes, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said he was confident of regaining control over the breakaway region.

Martial law has also been declared in some regions of Azerbaijan.

Nagorno-Karabakh, also known as Artsakh, is a landlocked region in the South Caucasus, within the mountainous range of Karabakh, lying between Lower Karabakh and Zangezur, and covering the southeastern range of the Lesser Caucasus mountains.

The major cities of the region are Stepanakert, which serves as the capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, and Shusha, which lies partially in ruins.

Petroleum industry in Azerbaijan

The petroleum industry in Azerbaijan produced about 873,260 barrels (138,837 m3) of oil per day and 29 billion cubic meters of gas per year as of 2013. Azerbaijan is one of the birthplaces of the oil industry. Its history is linked to the fortunes of petroleum. It is poised to become an important oil and gas producer once again.

In April 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, Baku supported anagreement between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and other non-OPEC oil-producing countries to cut production in an effort to stabilise the oil market. Under the new agreement Azerbaijan would be expected to reduce its output by 164,000 barrels per day for the next two months. During this period, Azerbaijan would keep average daily crude oil production at a level not exceeding 554,000 barrels and the country would have to maintain daily oil production at the level of 587,000 barrels during the July-December period and 620,000 barrels between January 2021 and April 2022

Section 'France' in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum / Wikipedia On Marshal Pétain

As part of the armistice agreement France signed with Germany on June 22, France was divided into occupied and unoccupied zones. Germany occupied northern France and all of France's Atlantic coastline down to the border with Spain. 

A new French government was established in Vichy in the unoccupied southern part of the country. The Vichy government declared neutrality, but it was committed by the armistice provisions to cooperation with Germany.

Vichy administrators promulgated antisemitic legislation, “Aryanized” Jewish property, interned thousands, and periodically rounded up thousands of foreign and French Jews to transport to transit camps and, later, usually to Auschwitz, where most were murdered.

After the German invasion of France in 1940, Marshal Pétain became the head of the Government.

After The War

At the end of Pétain's trial, which took place from 23 July to 15 August 1945 and was held under the auspices of provisional government headed by De Gaulle, he was convicted on all charges.

The jury sentenced him to death by a one-vote majority. Due to his advanced age, the Court asked that the sentence not be carried out. De Gaulle, who was President of the Provisional Government of the French Republic at the end of the war, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment due to Pétain's age and his military contributions in World War I. After his conviction, the Court stripped Pétain of all military ranks and honours save for the one distinction of Marshal of France.

A Point Of View

People bang on about benefit culture, all that. There are piss-takers, no one doubts that but I know plenty of people on benefits who work hard, it’s just they don't get paid enough to cover the basics.

Now you can say “Get off your arse & get a better job." All right, say everyone does that. Whose gonna actually do the shitty jobs then? If you're working 40 hours a week and can't cover the bills, that ain't your fault. It's the fault of the slags paying you. So if you have to claim benefits then claim ‘em & don't feel bad about it. It's not you that is actually getting the benefit anyway, it's your employer. They pay you shit all & expect the State to pick up the tab.

Quote seen on Twitter

Atrributed to Danny Dyer

Bye Bye Custom Domain

 The world moves on, and I have other fish to fry. And some to not fry at all but to leave in their nascent state. Short story short, I did not renew the custom domain for this blog. And in order for this blog to show properly and to stop it trying to redirect to the domain that I no longer owned, I ....

I, what? How do I do it? I googled for how to do it and eventually found that I was just a short step away from doing it when I first guessed how to do it. And the way to do it is to go to settings / publishing / custom domain and click on that and you will then see an option to un-direct.