Month: January 2020

Checked into Cross Campus
Attending the Friday Coffee Meetup

Yipeng Zhao, a Managing Partner at Embark Ventures, a Los-Angeles based venture capital firm focused on early-stage companies, gives a talk entitled “Embark Ventures: Raising Seed Capital and Building MVP for Scientific Founders” at the Innovate Pasadena Friday Morning Coffee Meetup.

A VC talk focused on the science space. I wish there was more detail specific to the company’s particular niche, but it’s a nice overview to the space in general.

Replied to Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019) (Hacker News)

The known documentation makes it seem like you can just sign up for a play site with withknown, but that doesn’t appear to be the case anymore? —citizenkeen

I think they turned off the free sites/hosting a year or two ago, but the opensource project is still around and doing well. It’s not hard to spin up an instance with the opensource software and I think there are still a few hosts like Reclaim Hosting that offer one button installs of it.

This is a definitely a fun idea. Andy Bell created a project a year ago to do just this sort of thing. Try out: https://personalsit.es/

Yes. There are a few smaller webrings about, but blog discovery is a problem unsolved. —banfeld

Here’s a list of several including an “IndieWeb Ring” that was started in the last two years that features personal websites: https://indieweb.org/webring

Read Reducing Friction and Expanding Participation in the Continuous Improvement of OER by David Wiley (iterating toward openness)
I’m going to write a post or three about some of the friction that exists around using OER. There are some things about working with OER that are just harder or more painful than they need to be, and getting more people actively involved in using OER will require us to reduce or eliminate those po...
This reminds me I should write up something about using Webmention in conjunction with OER.
Read HTML is my API by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)
In August 2012, I wrote a quick script to stream front-page Hackernews stories to an IRC channel on Freenode (##hackernews in case you're interested) so that I could quickly glance at popular stories there instead of needing to load Hackernews. Since IRC is my feed reader, I've always tried to pipe as much there as possible.
Very smart and reminiscent of some of the stuff Drew McLellan and Jeremy Keith were doing almost a decade before. There is a lot more power in microformats that most web developers give them credit for. Aaron has a great example and use-case.

My favorite part here:

So in 2.5 years of parsing the HTML, I never had any problems. In 2 days of parsing the JSON API, I hit a glitch where all the stories were empty.
Since more people and programs see the HTML than use the API, the HTML ends up being more reliable.

Read Norms is expanding like crazy. How a SoCal institution is staying the same to get ahead (Los Angeles Times)
The company that bought Norms restaurants six years ago is expanding the brand. How the 70-year-old chain plans to stay the same to get ahead.
I was shocked the other day to realize the West LA location had apparently closed. Now that I hear they’ve been bought out and are expanding, I’m wondering what happened at that location?
Read When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage by Jeffrey Bussgang and Jono Bacon (Harvard Business Review)
How businesses shift from selling products to building networks.
The IndieWeb isn’t a business like many of the examples mentioned here, but it’s doing doing a lot of the things mentioned in the article and doing them well. It’s definitely one of my favorite communities of builders and collaborators.