Reply to Something the NIH can learn from NASA

Replied to Something the NIH can learn from NASA by Lior Pachter (& Comments by Donald Forsdyke)Lior Pachter (& Comments by Donald Forsdyke) (Bits of DNA)
Pubmed Commons provides a forum, independent of a journal, where comments on articles in that journal can be posted. Why not air your displeasure there? The article is easily found (see PMID: 27467019) and, so far, there are no comments.
I’m hoping that one day (in the very near future) that scientific journals and other science communications on the web will support the W3C’s Webmention candidate specification so that when commentators [like Lior, in this case, above] post something about an article on their site, that the full comment is sent to the original article to appear there automatically. This means that one needn’t go to the site directly to comment (and if the comment isn’t approved, then at least it still lives somewhere searchable on the web).

Some journals already count tweets, and blog mentions (generally for PR reasons) but typically don’t allow access to finding them on the web to see if they indicate positive or negative sentiment or to further the scientific conversation.

I’ve also run into cases in which scientific journals who are “moderating” comments, won’t approve reasoned thought, but will simultaneously allow (pre-approved?) accounts to flame every comment that is approved [example on Sciencemag.org: http://boffosocko.com/2016/04/29/some-thoughts-on-academic-publishing/ — see also comments there], so having the original comment live elsewhere may be useful and/or necessary depending on whether the publisher is a good or bad actor, or potentially just lazy.

I’ve also seen people use commenting layers like hypothes.is or genius.com to add commentary directly on journals, but these layers are often hidden to most. The community certainly needs a more robust commenting interface. I would hope that a decentralized version using web standards like Webmentions might be a worthwhile and robust solution.

Jacob Reitzin presents: “Bootstrapping Technology and Great User Experience” | Innovate Pasadena

Innovate Pasadena presents Jacob Reitzin on: “Bootstrapping Technology and Great User Experience” at Cross Campus, Old Town Pasadena, 87 N Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91103 on :

Jacob gave a nice and humanizing presentation on some of the philosophy behind his startup. Though he didn’t get very deep into the topic indicated by the title of his talk, he was very engaging in exactly the manner you’d expect that a dude with a truck could be.

A lady doesn’t discuss her age or her budget

Paula Wagner (1946– ), producer
on finance in the entertainment industry
in Paula Wagner Turns to Producing on Broadway in The New York Times on 11/4/12

 

I now proudly own all of the data from my Tumbr posts on my own domain. #Indieweb #ownyourdata #PESOS

I now proudly own all of the data from my Tumbr posts on my own domain. #Indieweb #ownyourdata #PESOS

A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow

This morning while breezing through my Woodwind feed reader, I ran across a post by Rick Mendes with the hashtags and which put me down a temporary rabbit hole of thought about reading-related post types on the internet.

I’m obviously a huge fan of reading and have accounts on GoodReads, Amazon, Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and literally dozens of other services that support or assist the reading endeavor. (My affliction got so bad I started my own publishing company last year.)

READ LATER is an indication on (or relating to) a website that one wants to save the URL to come back and read the content at a future time.

I started a page on the IndieWeb wiki to define read later where I began writing some philosophical thoughts. I decided it would be better to post them on my own site instead and simply link back to them. As a member of the Indieweb my general goal over time is to preferentially quit using these web silos (many of which are listed on the referenced page) and, instead, post my reading related work and progress here on my own site. Naturally, the question becomes, how does one do this in a simple and usable manner with pretty and reasonable UX/UI for both myself and others?

Current Use

Currently I primarily use a Pocket bookmarklet to save things (mostly newspaper articles, magazine pieces, blog posts) for reading later and/or the like/favorite functionality in Twitter in combination with an IFTTT recipe to save the URL in the tweet to my Pocket account. I then regularly visit Pocket to speed read though articles. While Pocket allows downloading of (some) of one’s data in this regard, I’m exploring options to bring in the ownership of this workflow into my own site.

For more academic leaning content (read journal articles), I tend to rely on an alternate Mendeley-based workflow which also starts with an easy-to-use bookmarklet.

I’ve also experimented with bookmarking a journal article and using hypothes.is to import my highlights from that article, though that workflow has a way to go to meet my personal needs in a robust way while still allowing me to own all of my own data. The benefit is that fixing it can help more than just myself while still fitting into a larger personal workflow.

Brainstorming

A Broader Reading (Parent) Post-type

Philosophically a read later post-type could be considered similar to a (possibly) unshared or private bookmark with potential possible additional meta-data like: progress, date read, notes, and annotations to be added after the fact, which then technically makes it a read post type.

A potential workflow viewed over time might be: read later >> bookmark >> notes/annotations/marginalia >> read >> review. This kind of continuum of workflow might be able to support a slightly more complex overall UI for a more simplified reading post-type in which these others are all sub-types. One could then make a single UI for a reading post type with fields and details for all of the sub-cases. Being updatable, the single post could carry all the details of one’s progress.

Indieweb encourages simplicity (DRY) and having the fewest post-types possible, which I generally agree with, but perhaps there’s a better way of thinking of these several types. Concatenating them into one reading type with various data fields (and the ability of them to be public/private) could allow all of the subcategories to be included or not on one larger and more comprehensive post-type.

Examples
  1. Not including one subsection (or making it private), would simply prevent it from showing, thus one could have a traditional bookmark post by leaving off the read later, read, and review sub-types and/or data.
  2. As another example, I could include the data for read later, bookmark, and read, but leave off data about what I highlighted and/or sub-sections of notes I prefer to remain private.

A Primary Post with Webmention Updates

Alternately, one could create a primary post (potentially a bookmark) for the thing one is reading, and then use further additional posts with webmentions on each (to the original) thereby adding details to the original post about the ongoing progress. In some sense, this isn’t too far from the functionality provided by GoodReads with individual updates on progress with brief notes and their page that lists the overall view of progress. Each individual post could be made public/private to allow different viewerships, though private webmentions may be a hairier issue. I know some are also experimenting with pushing updates to posts via micropub and other methods, which could be appealing as well.

This may be cumbersome over time, but could potentially be made to look something like the GoodReads UI below, which seems very intuitive. (Note that it’s missing any review text as I’m currently writing it, and it’s not public yet.)

Overview of reading progress
Overview of reading progress

Other Thoughts

Ideally, better distinguishing between something that has been bookmarked and read/unread with dates for both the bookmarking and reading, as well as potentially adding notes and highlights relating to the article is desired. Something potentially akin to Devon Zuegel‘s “Notes” tab (built on a custom script for Evernote and Tumblr) seems somewhat promising in a cross between a simple reading list (or linkblog) and a commonplace book for academic work, but doesn’t necessarily leave room for longer book reviews.

I’ll also need to consider the publishing workflow, in some sense as it relates to the reverse chronological posting of updates on typical blogs. Perhaps a hybrid approach of the two methods mentioned would work best?

Potentially having an interface that bolts together the interface of GoodReads (picture above) and Amazon’s notes/highlights together would be excellent. I recently noticed (and updated an old post) that they’re already beta testing such a beast.

Kindle Notes and Highlights are now shoing up as a beta feature in GoodReads
Kindle Notes and Highlights are now shoing up as a beta feature in GoodReads

Comments

I’ll keep thinking about the architecture for what I’d ultimately like to have, but I’m always open to hearing what other (heavy) readers have to say about the subject and the usability of such a UI.

Please feel free to comment below, or write something on your own site (which includes the URL of this post) and submit your URL in the field provided below to create a webmention in which your post will appear as a comment.

 

Reply to: Getting started owning your digital home by Chris Hardie

Replied to Getting started owning your digital home by Chris HardieChris Hardie (Chris Hardie)
My recent post about owning our digital homes prompted some good feedback and discussion. When I talk about this topic with the people in my life who don't work daily in the world of websites, domain names and content management, the most common reaction I get is, "that's sounds good in theory, I'm not sure … Continue reading Getting started owning your digital home
Chris, I came across your post today by way of Bob Waldron’s post WordPress: Default Personal Digital Home (PDH).

Both his concept and that of your own post fit right into the broader themes and goals of the Indieweb community. If you weren’t aware of the movement, I highly recommend you take a look at its philosophies and goals.

There’s already a pretty strong beachhead established for WordPress within the Indieweb community including a suite of plugins for helping to improve your personal web presence, but we’d certainly welcome your additional help as the idea seems right at home with your own philosophy.

I’m happy to chat with you about the group via website, phone, email, IRC, or social media at your leisure if you’re interested in more information. I’m imminently findable via details on my homepage.


Homebrew Website Club Meetup Pasadena/Los Angeles Notes from 8-24-16

Last night, shy a few regulars at the tail end of a slow August and almost on the eve of IndieWebCamp NY2, Angelo Gladding and I continued our biweekly Homebrew Website Club meetings.

We met at Charlie’s Coffee House, 266 Monterey Road, South Pasadena, CA, where we stayed until closing at 8:00. Deciding that we hadn’t had enough, we moved the party (South Pasadena rolls up their sidewalks early) over to the local Starbucks, 454 Fair Oaks Ave, South Pasadena, CA where we stayed until they closed at 11:00pm.

Quiet Writing Hour

Angelo manned the fort alone with aplomb while building intently. If I’m not mistaken, he did use my h-card to track down my phone number to see what was holding me up, so as they say in IRC: h-card++!

Introductions and Demonstrations

Participants included:

Needing no introductions this week, Angelo launched us off with a relatively thorough demo of his Canopy platform which he’s built from the ground up in python! Starting from an empty folder on a host with a domain name, he downloaded and installed his code directly from Github and spun up a completely new version of his site in under 2 minutes. In under 20 minutes of some simple additional downloads and configuration of a few files, he also had locations, events, people and about modules up and running. Despite the currently facile appearance of his website, there’s really a lot of untapped power in what he’s built so far. It’s all available on Github for those interested in playing around; I’m sure he’d appreciate pull requests.

Along the way, I briefly demoed some of the functionality of Kevin Marks’ deceptively powerful Noterlive web app for not only live tweeting, but also owning those tweets on one’s own site in a simple way after the fact (while also automatically including proper markup and microformats)! I also ran through some of the overall functionality of my Known install with a large number of additional plugins to compare and contrast UX/UI with respect to Canopy.

We also discussed a bit of Angelo’s recent Indieweb Graph network crawling project, and I took the opportunity to fix a bit of the representative h-card on my site. (Angelo, does a new crawl appear properly on lahacker.net now?)

Before leaving Charlie’s we did manage to remember to take a group photo this time around. Not having spent enough time chatting over the past few weeks, we decamped to a local Starbucks and continued our conversation along with some addition brief demos and discussion of other itches for future building.

We also spent a few minutes discussing the upcoming IndieWebCamp LA logistics for November as well as outreach to the broader Los Angeles area dev communities. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP. If you’d like to volunteer or help sponsor the camp, please don’t hesitate to contact either of us. I’m personally hoping to attend DrupalCamp LA this weekend while wearing a stylish IndieWebCamp t-shirt that’s already on its way to me.

IndieWebCamp T-shirt
IndieWebCamp T-shirt

Next Meeting

In keeping with the schedule of the broader Homebrew movement, so we’re already committed to our next meeting on September 7. It’s tentatively at the same location unless a more suitable one comes along prior to then. Details will be posted to the wiki in the next few days.

Thanks for coming everyone! We’ll see you next time.

Live Tweets Archive


Though not as great as the notes that Kevin Marks manages to put together, we did manage to make good use of noterlive for a few supplementary thoughts:

Chris Aldrich:

On my way to Homebrew Website Club Los Angeles in moments. http://stream.boffosocko.com/2016/homebrew-website-club-la-2016-08-24 #

Angelo Gladding:

I’ve torn some things down, but slowly rebuilding. I’m just minutes away from rel-me to be able to log into wiki #

ChrisAldrich:

Explaining briefly how @kevinmarksnoterlive.com works for live tweeting events… #

Angelo Gladding:

My github was receiving some autodumps from a short-lived indieweb experiment. #

is describing his canopy system used to build his site #

Canopy builds in a minute and 52 secs… inside are folders roots and trunk w/ internals #

Describing how he builds in locations to Canopy #

Apparently @t has a broken certificate for https, so my parser gracefully falls back to http instead. #

 

Reply to Scott Kingery about Wallabag and Reading

Replied to a post by Scott KingeryScott Kingery (TechLifeWeb)
Chris, as a kind of sidebar to this, we talk about hosting things on our own site. I’ve always kind of thought this should be 1 piece of software we use for everything. I think that way becau…
Scott, as someone who’s studied evolutionary biology, I know that specialists in particular areas are almost always exponentially better at what they do than non-specialists.  This doesn’t mean that we don’t need alternate projects or new ideas which may result in new “Cambrian explosions,” and even better products.

I also feel that one needs the right tool for the right job. While I like WordPress for many things, it’s not always the best thing to solve the problem. In some cases Drupal or even lowly Wix may be the best solution. The key is to find the right balance of time, knowledge, capability and other variables to find the optimal solution for the moment, while maintaining the ability to change in the future if necessary. By a similar analogy there are hundreds of programming languages and all have their pros and cons.  Often the one you know is better than nothing, but if you heard about one that did everything better and faster, it would be a shame not to check it out.

This said, I often prefer to go with specialist software, though I do usually have a few requirements which overlap or align with Indieweb principles, including, but not limited to:

  • It should be open, so I can modify/change/share it with others
  • I should be able to own all the related/resultant data
  • I should be able to self-host it (if I want)
  • It should fit into my workflow and solve a problem I have while not creating too many new problems

In this case, I suspect that Wallabag is far better than anything I might have time to build and maintain myself. If there are bits of functionality that are missing, I can potentially request them or build/add them myself and contribute back to the larger good.

Naturally I do also worry about usability and maintenance as well, so if the general workflow and overhead doesn’t dovetail in with my other use cases, all bets may be off. If large pieces of my data, functionality, and workflow are housed in WordPress, for example, and something like this isn’t easily integrateable or very difficult to keep updated and maintain, then I’ll pass and look for (or build) a different solution. (Not every tool is right for just any job.) On larger projects like this, there’s also the happy serendipity that they’re big enough that WordPress (Drupal, Jekyll, other) developers can better shoehorn the functionality in to a bigger project or create a simple API thereby making the whole more valuable than the sum of the parts.

In this particular situation, it appears to be a 1-1 replacement for a closed silo version of something I’ve been using regularly, but which provides more of the benefits above than the silo does, so it seems like a no-brainer to switch.

 
To reply to this comment preferably do so on the original at: A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow