👓 A stream-of-consciousness review of the Indie Web’s onboarding experience | Aaron Patterson

Read A stream-of-consciousness review of the Indie Web’s onboarding experience by Aaron Patterson (aaroncommand.com)
This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none of this comes across as too critical. I am REALLY impressed by what is already working.  This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none...

👓 IWS Summary | Zegnat

Read Untitled ¶ Zegnåt (wiki.zegnat.net)
DAY 1 ===== Keynotes: • “we got building blocks” -- aaronpk, • “we have grown this last year” -- tantek, • “I built websites for 20 years but still do not code and want your tools to be easy” -- anomalily, • “I used my laptop to crawl the internet, it got hot, but now I have fancy network graphs” -- snarfed.

👓 Confusion about indieweb | Richard MacManus

Read Confusion about IndieWeb by Richard MacManusRichard MacManus (ricmac.org)
Colin, you hit the nail on the head. The IndieWeb community has done brilliant work over the years, but I think 2017 is the year to make it easier for “the users” to tap into these Open Web technologies too. It feels quite similar to 2003/04 in that way.

🔖 A relatively comprehensive list of Indieweb sites

Bookmarked The 2300+ sites in the public IndieWeb social graph and dataset by Ryan Barrett (Indie Map Project)
Indie Map is a complete crawl of 2300 of the most active IndieWeb sites, sliced and diced and rolled up in a few useful ways: Social graph API and interactive map. SQL queryable dataset and GUI analytics. Raw crawl data in WARC format: 2300 sites, 5.7M pages, 380GB HTML + mf2. Indie Map is free, open source, and placed into the public domain via the CC0 public domain dedication. Crawled content remains the property of each site's owner and author, and subject to their existing copyrights.
So you’re looking to start an Indieweb blogroll? This is a reasonably large place to start…

cc: Richard MacManus

📺 Vaccines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) | YouTube

Watched Vaccines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) from YouTube

The benefits of vaccines far outweigh the minuscule risks, but some parents still question their safety. John Oliver discusses why some people may still feel uncertainty about childhood vaccinations.

📺 Coal: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) | YouTube

Watched Coal: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) from YouTube

We’ve heard a lot of talk about coal miners in the last year, but what are the real issues surrounding coal? John Oliver and a giant squirrel look into it.

👓 Preview of Sunlit 2.0 | Manton Reece

Read Preview of Sunlit 2.0 by Manton ReeceManton Reece (manton.micro.blog)
A few years ago, Jon Hays and I built an app for photos called Sunlit, powered by the App.net API. We evolved it to work with other services, like Flickr and Instagram, but as App.net faded away we could never justify the investment to rewrite significant parts of the app to bring it forward and kee...

👓 HxA’s Guide to Colleges in The Wall Street Journal | Heterodox Academy

Read HxA’s Guide to Colleges in The Wall Street Journal by Jeremy Willinger (heterodoxacademy.org)

We are beginning to see a few universities taking concrete steps to show that they value viewpoint diversity and the free and open exchange of ideas. An article over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal describes some of these steps and discusses them in the context of HxA’s newly revised Guide to Colleges. (See Colleges Pledge Tolerance for Diverse Opinions, But Skeptics Remain, by Douglas Belkin.)

The article opens with a discussion of an extraordinary step at Johns Hopkins (for which we just raised its HxA score and its rank):

A string of protests on college campuses that shut down events hosting conservative speakers has prompted universities around the country to pledge more tolerance for diverse opinions, but skeptics say they’ll believe it when they see it. Johns Hopkins University announced Thursday a $150 million effort to “facilitate the restoration of open and inclusive discourse.”… The new initiative at Johns Hopkins, an institute funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, hopes to “examine the dynamics of societal, cultural and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse,”

The article contrasts Hopkins with Harvard (as well as Berkeley and Yale):

Harvard University, which has repeatedly been in the crosshairs of free-speech advocates, was 103rd out of 106 schools in the Heterodox ranking. Heterodox, which weighs schools’ regulations as well as the ratings of other first-amendment groups, cited Harvard’s history of censoring outside speakers, a blacklist on private clubs, fraternities and sororities, and a laminated “social justice” place mat handed out to students before winter break in 2015.

The article closed by discussing our top-ranked school:

The top-ranked school is the University of Chicago. Provost Daniel Diermeier said the ideal of viewpoint diversity is central to the university’s mission. “We believe that the best education we can provide students to prepare them for the world is to hear diverse points of view even if they feel uncomfortable,” Dr. Diermeier said. “We want to provide them with the tools to find counterarguments.

👓 More Thoughts on Annotations | Audrey Watters

Read More Thoughts on Annotations by Audrey WattersAudrey Watters (Audrey Watters)

It’s been well over a month since I blocked annotations (Hypothesis and Genius) on my websites. I’m a little taken aback that some folks are still muttering about it. Perhaps I need to restate a couple of things:

  • You can still annotate my work. Just not on my websites.
  • My work here and on Hack Education is openly licensed. As long as you follow that license – CC BY NC SA – you can copy and redistribute my articles without my permission.
  • The CC license on my work also means you can post my articles in another file format or medium – that is, they needn’t stay in HTML. You can publish my articles as PDFs. You can hit “print.”
Some important things about control of one’s own website here. She doesn’t say it, but having one as a platform is a means of self-distributing one’s own work. It shouldn’t also necessarily mean distributing someone else’s and amplifying their voice too.

👓 Using Custom Fields with PressForward and WordPress | PressForward

Read Using Custom Fields with PressForward and WordPress by Amanda Regan
One of the questions that the PressForward team gets repeatedly is how publications can use custom fields to automatically print data about a post once it is published. Publications often wish to display a generic name, such as “The Editors,” on a post rather than the name of the user who published the post. On Digital Humanities Now we use custom fields to store the names of our Editors-at-Large for the week a piece is featured as well as the name of the Editor-in-Chief for that week.

👓 Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation” | Jon Udell

Read Thoughts on Audrey Watters’ “Thoughts on Annotation” by Jon UdellJon Udell (Jon Udell)
Back in April, Audrey Watters’ decided to block annotation on her website. I understand why. When we project our identities online, our personal sites become extensions of our homes. To some online writers, annotation overlays can feel like graffiti. How can we respect their wishes while enabling ...