👓 Why Decentralized Search is Good, Especially for Blogs | Brad Enslen

Read Why Decentralized Search is Good, Especially for Blogs by Brad EnslenBrad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
In a previous conversation, I made a rough list of types of blog search directories and search engines. Blog Discovery:  I’m sure directories are not the best solution for blog discovery, but like blogrolls they have a place at the table because they are low tech and cheap. Here’s a rough hiera...

👓 How to Deliver Separate WordPress Category RSS Feeds | GreenGeeks

Read How to Deliver Separate WordPress Category RSS Feeds (GreenGeeks)
Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, is a common method for content marketing. Feeds are used to share your content with RSS readers of all kinds. For example, users can connect a WordPress custom RSS feed directly to their Netvibes accounts for the latest news. But what if you have categories...

👓 Easy Custom Feeds in WordPress | Digging Into WordPress

Read Easy Custom Feeds in WordPress | Digging Into WordPress by Jeff Star (digwp.com)
Now that we have seen how to setup Tumblr-style posts, it would be nice to be able to segregate the Tumblr-posts category from the main feed into its own, separate feed. This would enable readers to subscribe exclusively to the Tumblr-posts feed and maybe display it in their sidebar or something.

While we’re at it, it would also be cool to be able to provide readers with a full menu of feed choices:
Everything feed: includes both the main posts and the Tumblr posts
Articles-only feed: includes only the main articles and no Tumblr stuff
Tumblr-only feed: includes only the Tumblr-style posts

Let's look at an overview of the process..

👓 How to Customize the RSS Feed on Your WordPress site | First Site Guide

Read How to Customize the RSS Feed on Your WordPress site (firstsiteguide.com)
Although WordPress creates an RSS feed for your blog automatically, that doesn't mean you can't customize it. Learn more about it and modify RSS to your needs.

👓 How to create custom RSS feeds with WordPress | Raphael Hertzog

Read How to create custom RSS feeds with WordPress by Raphael Hertzog (apt-get install debian-wizard)
Wordpress has many alternate built-in feeds: per category, per tag, per author, per search-keyword. But in some cases, you want feeds built with some more advanced logic. Let's look at the available options.

📺 "Father Brown" The Eye of Apollo | BBC

Watched "Father Brown" The Eye of Apollo from BBC
Directed by Matt Carter. With Michael Maloney, Camilla Power, Kasia Koleczek, Alex Price. Susie is fallen under the spell of the charismatic leader of a sect. When his wife dies in a suspicious accident, Father Brown intervenes but the prophet has a cast-iron alibi.

👓 RSS is undead | TechCrunch

Read RSS is undead (TechCrunch)
RSS died. Whether you blame Feedburner, or Google Reader, or Digg Reader last month, or any number of other product failures over the years, the humble protocol has managed to keep on trudging along despite all evidence that it is dead, dead, dead. Now, with Facebook’s scandal over Cambridge Analyt…

👓 The death of a TLD | blog.benjojo.co.uk

Read The death of a TLD (blog.benjojo.co.uk)
Another one bites the dust. The gTLD gold rush is now seeing a steady flow of TLD’s that clearly just didnt work out. In the last week, ICANN removed the documentation for .xperia a TLD owned by Sony for their smartphone brand.

👓 IndieWeb has many meanings and a singluar meaning | Gist

Liked a post by Michael Bishop (Gist)

Note: this will probably be rambling and will need editing to add links and such, but I needed to put it odwn and put it out there

IndieWeb has many meanings and a singluar meaning–own your content on a domain you control. Plumbing, how you create the content, how it is stored and how you display it is all up to you. As long as it is your content that you can take with you on a domain name you control, you are IndieWeb already.

But with the recently published article about Webmentions, IndieWeb also takes on having the ability to also interact from your own site. A practical example:

  • I publish this post its syndicated to Twitter, micro.blog and a feed (atom as well as jsonfeed).
  • You reply with a tweet, it shows up as a comment on the site. Someone else replies within micro.blog, same thing. Someone else reads it in their feed reader and writes a blog post sendinga webmention, same - shows up as a comment.
  • I can reply natively to each comment and it will aggregate back to my site.

All accomplished with existing WordPress plugins available in the wp.org repo.

The catch? Microformats. Specifically Microformats 2. That is the semantic markup in the theme that facilitates communicating the context of the content.

WordPress still supports the original microformats, which can cause problems when parsing mf2. There was an attempt to introduce mf2 into WP core

Then, it was closed as wontfix because changing a class name might break themes that used it as a style hook.

I can't see how the change could be made without breaking a majority of WordPress sites.

That was 2 years ago. And while I'm still trying to get an exact current state of affairs to know precisely what needs changed, I'm saying its time to rethink this decision.

WordPress has always had the tag line "democratizing the web." As we enter a new phase of the Internet and fears of walled gardens and homogonized social silos, now more than ever WordPress should use a major update to introduce what I would suggest a minor breaking change in display on some sites to allow further development of inter-site communication using WordPress.

Gutenberg is ushering in a slew of changes in how themes will work best, so if there is a good time to change something like a css class, why not now?

Reply to Greg McVerry on changing themes from GitHub

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)
Just updated @dshanske 2016-IndieWeb theme, didn’t use GitHub plugin, will be too hard for students, instead it was backup, switch themes, go into file manager>wpcontent>themes and delete, then reupload, activate. If you want autoupdates use SemPress but it wasn’t bad
Might be easier for them to do it through the admin ui located at /wp-admin/themes.php

  1. Change temporarily to another theme
  2. Delete old version of theme by clicking on it and then clicking on delete in the bottom right corner of the pop-up/modal
  3. Click Add New button at top
  4. Click Upload Theme button
  5. Select and upload the .zip file they downloaded from GitHub (or other location)
  6. Activate the updated theme

Fortunately needing to update themes doesn’t happen often. If you’re using a GitHub theme then be sure to “watch” the repository on GitHub and enable email notifications for it so that you’ll see any future updates, issues, or ongoing work to know about needing to update in the future.

Hint: this workflow could also be used to upload the theme from an external source in the first place.

As the new school year draws near and enthusiasts continue to push the benefits of #OER, let’s also take  a moment to remember and celebrate the ability of students to choose their own educational resources and books.

Teachers need to do a better job of providing options, flexibility, and guidance in the panoply of choices available to students of all income levels and abilities. Increased choice at the student level will drastically improve both the literal and proverbial marketplace of ideas.

Here’s some additional detail I wrote on this day a few years back:

https://boffosocko.com/2011/07/30/on-choosing-your-own-textbooks/

Reply to actualham on Koch and education

Replied to a tweet by Robin DeRosaRobin DeRosa (Twitter)
Given the statement he makes I honestly wonder if he’s considered taking Malcolm Gladwell’s advice about where to best focus his money for the best outcome based on statistical mechanics–particularly given his stated background?

https://boffosocko.com/2018/05/01/episode-06-my-little-hundred-million-revisionist-history/

👓 Just do it — by hand | Jeremy Cherfas

Read Just do it -- by hand by Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)
So when I do syndicate out to a silo, I do it by hand. Sure it would be tedious if I wanted to do that for every little thing, but I don't. I share the things I want to share, in the way I want to share them.
I’ve noticed that I typically syndicate almost everything manually despite the fact that I’ve got the ability to do it automatically. Doing it manually actually gives me a greater feeling of ownership somehow.

I do miss the ability to have public comments coming back however…