Category: Publishing

Bookmarked a tweet (Twitter)
It’s starting to feel too late on the West coast of the US to start something right now, but my mind is buzzing. I’ll see if I can come up with something IndieWebby/Domain of One’s Owny overnight to post tomorrow. 

In the meanwhile, I’m curious what Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and others might whip up while I’m sleeping?

Thoughts on Wikity for WordPress

I spun up a new instance of Wikity today at http://wikity.chrisaldrich.net/ to test it out for potential use as a personal online wiki. My goal was also to test out how it may or may not work with IndieWeb-based WordPress pieces too.

Below are my initial thoughts and problems.

The /home/ page has a lot of errors and warnings. (Never a good sign.)

It took me a few minutes to figure out where the Wik-it! bookmarklet button was hiding. Ideally it would have been in the start card that described how the bookmarklet would work (in addition to its original spot).

The Wikity theme seems to have some issues when using for http vs. https.

  • Less seems to work out of the box with https
  • The main card for entering “Name of Concept or Data” didn’t work at all under https. It only showed the title and wouldn’t save. Switching to http seemed to fix it and show the editor bar.

I’ve tried copying over from Aaron Davis‘ Wikity instance, but the cardbox seems to fail on my end.

  • Nothing seemed to work at all when I had my site as https. In fact, it redirected to a URL that seemed like it wanted to run update.php for some bizarre reason.
  • On http I at least get a card saying that the process failed.
    • Not sure what may be causing this.
    • Doesn’t seem to matter how many cards it is.
    • Perhaps it’s the fact that Aaron’s site is https? I notice that his checkbox export functionality duplicates his entire URL including the https:// within the export box which seems to automatically prepend http://
    • Copying to my own wiki seems to vaguely work using http, but failed on https.

Multiple * in the markdown editor functionality within WordPress doesn’t seem to format the way I’d expect.

Sadly, the original Wikity.cc site is down, but the theme still includes a link to it front and center on my website.

The home screen quick new card has some wonky CSS that off centers it.

Toggling full screen editing mode in new cards from the home screen makes them too big and obscures the UI making things unusable.

The primary multi-card home display doesn’t work well with markup the way the individual posts do.

The custom theme seems to be hiding some of the IndieWeb pieces. It may also be hampering the issuance of webmention as I tried sending one to myself and it only showed up as a pingback. It didn’t feel worth the effort to give the system a full IndieWeb test drive beyond this.

Doing this set up as a theme and leveraging posts seems like a very odd choice. From my reading, Mike Caulfield was relatively new to WordPress development when he made this. Even if he was an intermediate developer, he should be proud of his effort, including his attention to some minute bits of UI that others wouldn’t have considered. To make this a more ubiquitous solution, it may have been a better choice to create it as a plugin, do a custom post type for wiki cards and create a separate section of the database for them instead of trying to leverage posts. This way it could have been installed on any pre-existing WordPress install and the user could choose their own favorite theme and still have a wiki built into it. In this incarnation it’s really only meant to be installed on a fresh stand-alone site.

I only used the Classic Editor and didn’t even open up the Gutenberg box of worms in any of my tests.

Summary

The Wikity theme hasn’t been maintained in four years and it looks like it’s going to take quite a bit of work (or a complete refactoring) to make it operate the way I’d want it to. Given the general conceptualization it may make much more sense to try to find a better maintained solution for a wiki.

The overarching idea of what he was trying to accomplish, particularly within the education space and the OER space, was awesome. I would love nothing more than to have wiki-like functionality built into my personal WordPress website, particularly if I could have different presentations for the two sides but still maintain public/private versions of pieces and still have site-wide tagging and search. Having the ability to port data from site to site is a particularly awesome idea.

Is anyone actively still using it? I’d love to hear others’ thoughts about problems/issues they’ve seen. Is it still working for you as expected? Is it worth upgrading the broken bits? Is it worth refactoring into a standalone plugin?

Replied to a thread by Andy MatuschakAndy Matuschak (Twitter)
This thread makes me wonder when the Hypothes.is team will be allowed to build a layer onto e-reader platforms? Another great idea might be for e-readers and note taking tools to have built-in micropub clients so I can use them to publish to my website or other platforms.
Watched Joel Dueck: Pollen, Textpattern, and Websites as books by Jared Pereira from YouTube

Joel walks us through his 20+ year strong personal website, and digs into his frustrations with past versions, and how he's building the latest edition to generate both a website and a book.

  • 0:00 — History/existing Textpattern site
  • 35:00 — Tour of new site
  • 58:00 — Use of Racket / Pollen to wield godlike powers
  • 1:15:00 — Dual web/printed-book publishing: Pollen, LaTeX, Quad, etc.
THIRTEEN

Imagine webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.

Bookmarked Great Expectations (Serapis Classics) (7switch.com)
An ebook published using TiddlyWiki
An interesting example of a book published using TiddlyWiki as an ebook platform. It also enables highlighting and annotations to boot! I’m curious how well it works with Hypothes.is given their anchoring schemes?

IndieWeb idea for the extension of ThreadReaderApp

I’d love it if ThreadReaderApp had the ability to authenticate into my personal website and publish a copy of my own tweetstorms into my blog using Micropub. 

This would be a great way to leverage their existing infrastructure and to allow people to put their own Tweetstorms onto their blog and solve the perennial “Why didn’t you just blog about this” commentary. 

Replied to a thread by Carter Rabasa and Boris Mann (Twitter)

Another great option is Kevin Marks‘ NoterLive which lets you Tweetstorm away and cut/paste (PESOS) the stream to your website (with appropriate mark up when done). Other ideas at: https://indieweb.org/tweetstorm

Read Zocurelia - Inspiring Learners to Read and Discuss by Axel DürkopAxel Dürkop (axel-duerkop.de)
With Zocurelia you can increase the fun of reading online literature together. The browser tool shows the activity of a reading community directly in the context of the texts being read and discussed. This way learners can be motivated to participate and join the discussion - hopefully hypothetically. In this article I will explain my motivation, ideas and decisions that led to the development of Zocurelia.

For those interested in online reading groups, journal clubs, OER, open education, marginal syllabus, etc., Axel Dürkop has created quite a lovely little tool that mixes Zotero with Hypothes.is.

Using his online version (though the code is open source and it looks like I could pretty quickly host my own), it only took me a few minutes to mock up a collaborative space using an Econ Extra Credit group I’d tried to encourage. This could be quite cool, particularly if they continued the series past the first recommended textbook.

I could easily see folks like Remi Kalir using this as part of their marginal syllabus project and allowing students to recommend texts/articles for class and aggregating discussions around them.

First of all, I wanted to learn more about how to inspire learners to read. And this means for me as an educator to create a technical and social environment that is welcoming and easy to participate in. ❧

Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:01PM

I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating. ❧

I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:03PM

Read Manifold Version 4.0 Overview | Building Manifold (blog.manifoldapp.org)
The Manifold team is delighted to announce the release of Manifold version 4.0. The hallmark features for this release are the addition of reading groups, which allow readers to annotate texts publicly, privately, or anonymously, and standalone mode, which allows creators to set up projects that appear without the library. We’ve also made notable strides in improving Manifold’s accessibility and are now publishing docker images to Docker Hub.