Dr. Scott Schopieray (schopie1.commons.msu.edu)When the Humanities Commons team started to spin up hcommons.social I started to wonder if this platform would be a way to conduct my microblogging activities in a space that might have a better distribution network, allowing my work to be more visible.
Scott (@schopie1), you are not alone! There are lots of us out here doing these things, not only with WordPress but a huge variety of other platforms. There are many ways to syndicate your content depending on where it starts its life.
In addition to Jim Groom and a huge group of others’ work within A Domain of One’s Own, there’s also a broader coalition of designers, developers, professionals, hobbyists, and people of all stripes working on these problems under the name of IndieWeb.
For some of their specific work you might appreciate the following:
- https://indieweb.org/Indieweb_for_Education
- https://indieweb.org/A_Domain_of_One%27s_Own
- https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat
- https://indieweb.org/WordPress
- https://indieweb.org/Category:syndication
Incidentally, I wrote this for our friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick last week and I can’t wait to see what she’s come up with over the weekend and in the coming weeks. Within the IndieWeb community you’ll find people like Ben Werdmuller who founded both WithKnown (aka Known) and Elgg and Aram Zucker-Scharff who helped to create PressForward.
I’m thrilled to see the work and huge strides that Humanities Commons is making to ensure some of these practices come to fruition.
If you’re game, perhaps we ought to plan an upcoming education-related popup event as an IndieWebCamp event to invite more people into this broader conversation?
If you have questions or need any help in these areas, I’m around, but so are hundreds of friends in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org.
I hope we can bring more of these technologies to the masses in better and easier-to-use manners to lower the technical hurdles.
@chrisaldrich Thanks for these links, in particular the post you wrote in response to Kathleen is helpful in thinking through the connections back to Mastodon. My intent of the RSS to WP is to provide a way to document this shorter form work (and clearly it works as it connected us!) but realized in the process that feeding my long-form posts back into hcommons.social completes that circle. Though there’s an amusing possibility of an infinite loop at play here 😄 Looking forward to continuing to discuss and tinker with this!
@schopie1, It also bears notice that we don’t necessarily need to use Mastodon as a third party player for doing the distributed conversation. If your WordPress site has Webmention capability (typically using the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins and (ideally) has a theme that has reasonable support for microformats), then we could be talking website-to-website and let the native web be our platform rather than relying on Mastodon. Webmention is an evolution of the old refbacks, pingbacks, and trackbacks, but with some addition usability and display affordances as well as spam prevention.
You’ll notice that as the result of the way I’ve got things set up, I’ve got a threaded copy of this full conversation on my site: https://boffosocko.com/2022/12/05/55812399/#comments
Syndicated copies: