Recently there's been a big shift to move away from Meetup.com as a platform. Something that may come as a shock to most attendees of events is that organisers have to pay for each of you to be part of the Meetup group, even if you are just there to keep up to date on events, but don't attend anything.
Month: November 2019
Jesse Stommel (Twitter)When you worry students won’t understand an assignment, the answer is often not to add more instructions, but to take instructions away.
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) November 14, 2019
Chatting about my website.
👓 Meetup Alternatives | Marcus Noble
Marcus Noble (marcusnoble.co.uk)A look at the various alternatives to Meetup.com after recent online backlash to their proposed new pricing model.
A nice recap of what is potentially happening in the online events space and a quick review of the potential platforms that are currently available. I have some ideas about how to do this in an IndieWeb way.
👓 New Feature: Sort by Magic and Article Popularity Indicators | Inoreader blog
The best part of using RSS is that you see all the news, unfiltered and sorted exactly chronologically without a smart “AI” messing with your data and deciding what to feed you. It is, however, useful sometimes to have the power to sort through thousands of articles and see the most interesting ...
👓 Free Bundt Cakes: Get In On Giveaway Friday In Greater LA | Patch
Swing by your local Nothing Bundt Cakes shops before the sweets run out. Or be among first 22 in line, and win free "Bundtlets" for a year.
Chris Wiegman (Twitter)Crossposting from Mastodon to Twitter to test results:
— What even is this? (@DavidWolfpaw) November 14, 2019
Should I stop using Twitter?Yall could join mastodon
— Chris Wiegman (@ChrisWiegman) November 14, 2019
Can’t I just follow you in a single place? Maybe just your website? (BTW, it’s possible to turn your WordPress site into a Federated/Mastodon-like instance using Activity Streams.
@chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com is a followable thing in the Fediverse and the UI is continually improving.
Here are some instances you should be able to follow: https://the-federation.info/wordpress
I was already partway there, but following on Ryan Barrett’s excellent suggestion, I spent a few minutes today and added several of my favorite Twitter lists to my feed reader. I spend less and less time in Twitter because all the notifications come to me via my own site and webmentions. I’m not unfollowing people to completely clean out the timeline just yet since there are a few people who have private accounts and I’d need to refollow or do something unique to cover them.
I do wish someone had a simple method of following the one or two people who have blocked me (I’m presuming they did so accidentally or I’ve been rolled up in a larger block list and they weren’t aware.) I was half-hoping that some API and list workarounds would work, but I’m stuck with creating another account and following separately or manually revisiting their feeds at scheduled intervals. I don’t need to interact with them so much as I have to read their excellent work. If anyone has ideas to fix this, I’m open to suggestions.
Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)Recently there's been a big shift to move away from Meetup.com as a platform.
Something that may come as a shock to most attendees of events is that organisers have to pay for each of you to be part of the Meetup group, even if you are just there to keep up to date on events, but don't attend anything.
Some organisers just don't fancy spending the money on it, and some are outraged by the news about new monetisation strategies that Meetup may be looking at moving to.
These issues have led many groups to investigate the alternatives that we can pursue, but unfortunately many have decided to build their own instead of pooling resources with the existing Free or Open Source platforms, of which there are many.
Jamie, your post reminds me about upcoming.org which was a social site that got bought and sold several times becoming a corporate controlled silo, but was relatively recently bought back by the founder and relaunched with some of the old and missing data. (It has been open sourced on GitHub by the way.) They’ve been slowly been iterating on it to add additional functionality and have considered being IndieWeb friendly.
One of the pieces that makes MeetUp.com so valuable is its centralized nature as a one-stop-shop for every locale. To better disrupt the space and still provide that value, perhaps an open source version that could be very IndieWeb friendly might attempt to act as an aggregation hub and provide some of the services while still allowing people to post their events and RSVPs to their own sites, but still provide the clearing house to bigger communities. This could be a service like meetup.com or upcoming.org but it would work more like IndieWeb News or Kicks Condor’s IndieWeb.xyz.
The resulting workflow would look like roughly like this:
An organizer posts an event with details to their website and then uses webmention to syndicate a copy to the hub event site. The hub then parses the basic data and allows it to be displayed on pages that were sortable by date and city (at a minimum). People could then have their one-stop centralized location for events, but then RSVP directly to the original on their own sites as you indicated.
To take things further, additional useful services could be added by the hub in the form of a micropub client that organizers could use to input all their event data and then publish it to their micropub capable website. (Quill already has the ability to post events like this as an example in the wild.) Similarly, for individual attendees, the hub could have a micropub client to do RSVPs to both the attendees’ websites (and/or the events’ site) as well.
Naturally this presupposes that a benevolent actor(s) could serve as the hub and handle the maintenance and overhead of that piece.
👓 The Truth About Pregnancy Over 40 | NYT Parenting
More than 100,000 Americans give birth in their 40s each year, but what does that mean for the health of their pregnancies and their babies?
How this phenomenon translates into absolute, rather than relative, risk, however, is a bit thorny. A large study published in 2018, for instance, found that among women who had children between 34 and 47, 2.2 percent developed breast cancer within three to seven years after they gave birth (among women who never had children, the rate was 1.9 percent). Over all, according to the American Cancer Society, women between 40 and 49 have a 1.5 percent chance of developing breast cancer.
The rates here are so low as to be nearly negligible on their face. Why bother reporting it?
November 14, 2019 at 06:49PM
Originally bookmarked this article on November 12, 2019 at 06:53PM
Directed by Vincent Misiano. With Rob Lowe, Dulé Hill, Allison Janney, Janel Moloney. A possible third-party candidate threatens to upset the President's lead in the polls. As Qumar threatens to blame Israel for Shareef's death, Leo must convince the Israeli ambassador not to respond. Charlie teaches his new ward a lesson in basic government. When the committee in charge of presidential debates rules that there will only be two, Sam and CJ propose a risky strategy.
Followed Jeff Paul
Aloha! My name is Jeffrey Paul. I was born and raised near Baltimore, Maryland and currently reside near Chicago, Illinois. I manage open source product and enjoy helping others grow professionally. Like my father, I’m a documentarian and can regularly be found with my phone in front of my face capturing all the things my kids are up to.
👓 How you can contribute to WordPress (yes, YOU!) | Jeff Paul
Me: Do you regularly use WordPress?
You: Yes, I love it, it’s fantastic!
Me: Have you ever thought about helping contribute to WordPress?
You: No, I am not a developer.
Me: Well, good news, you do not have to be!
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Whether you have considered it...
What if writing on the web could be as easy as writing on paper?
That is the kind of infrastructure I want on the web - a world where I could write anywhere, even if I didn't have a blog or a website or anything like that. I mean, do you need an account to write on a piece of paper?
I guess Telegraph is a good example of that in action. But why make anonymous publishing platforms second-class citizens? What if they were also integrated into blogs and other platforms? Don't know what that would look like but it would be like little slips of paper inside books, y'know, like newspaper clippings and grocery lists inside used books.
More freedom of where I can write and how I can write.