December, 2020 | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet (Twitter)

@ChrisAldrich Hi Chris. Any suggestions for a browser extension (or something similar) that replaces the functionality of Press This for WordPress? I'm looking for a way to quickly get a selection of text into a draft post, ideally with attribution metadata included.
— Michael Rowe (@michael_rowe) December 9, 2020

The original Press This spun itself off as a stand-alone plugin, so look there first to recreate its functionality. If that doesn’t suit, try David Shanske’s Post Kinds plugin which incorporates a lot of Press This functionality and extends it quite a bit. You can create bookmarklets with it that work well (including mobile).

Another option is Tom Critchlow and Toby Shorin’s Quotebacks which you might leverage though they won’t necessarily create new posts on your behalf.

If you’ve got some programming experience, you might be able to do something interesting with a set of bookmarklets I just made too.

I think I’ve also shared most of my documented workflow for using Hypothes.is for some of this too, though that may require some work on your behalf.

Another good option is to add Micropub functionality and use some clients like Quill, Omnibear, or others in conjunction with the Post Kinds plugin. I think Quill may also have some useful bookmarklets you can use with it as well.

Replied to a thread by

Scott Jenson (Twitter)

#indieweb folks. there are a ton of self hosted commenting systems. But what about a "universal comment" system? Where all of my comments, on any site I use, are just links back to my server. I own/host all of my comments. I'm assuming this has been discussed?
— Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) December 10, 2020

This sounds like what Webmention enables. This tweet for example is actually a copy of my reply to you that I've posted to my website. It works directly from site to site too of course.
— Aaron Parecki (@aaronpk) December 10, 2020

Excellent thanks. What would be the 'next step'? If we could get social networks to have the tweets/comments ONLY be a link to your website what does that buy us? I appreciate the solution you have but it's about working within the current siloed approach
— Scott Jenson (@scottjenson) December 10, 2020

Aaron’s site is so advanced, his replies on Twitter don’t have a permalink back to his site. So you’re missing out on the way he replies and collects replies/likes/reposts. See: https://aaronparecki.com/2020/12/10/7/

Mine is less so; you’ll see my permalink on Twitter back to my original.

It doesn’t look like he threads his entire conversations (publicly), but you can currently see the contexts and replies from your conversations at https://aaronparecki.com/replies.

A difference you’ll notice is that Twitter caps me at 280 characters, while I can waffle on for days and Aaron’s website will likely (but doesn’t have to) capture it.

Webmention also allows for editing/sending updates, so I can edit after-the-fact and Aaron’s site will show it whereas Twitter doesn’t allow edits, so… I could also delete my response in the future and send a “410 webmention” and Aaron’s site should delete it.

I’m sure that Twitter, Facebook, and most other social media systems could implement sending/receiving webmentions in under a week (even if they’re dragging their feet on a well written spec) and add microformats to make cross-site notifications and comments a reality. It will assuredly require legislation for them to do so however.

Many common CMSes already support Webmention either natively or with plugins/modules, so there’s some pretty solid proof of interoperability with various software and programming languages.

Read - Want to Read: Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else by Jordan Ellenberg (Penguin Press)

From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong, himself a world-class geometer, a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything
How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play chess, and why is learning chess so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry.
For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly-remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of 9th grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps, only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. OK, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, a border section that has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel.
Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word geometry, from the Greek, has the rather grand meaning of measuring the world. If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world - it explains it. Shape shows us how.