Depending on where you’re syndicating to and why, one could consider leaving some of these default sidebar widgets in their installation. Some folks, Aaron Davis comes quickly to mind, add titles (sometimes with emoji) to their notes, replies, RSVPs, likes, favorites, etc., which often are defined as posts which technically don’t need titles. Doing this certainly takes some extra time and work (or coding skill if you’re automating it), but can have the benefit of populating not only those widgets, but also adding a somewhat logical title to RSS feed readers and other tools which have been trained over 20 years to want titles on everything.
Recent Posts and Comments widget displays on Aaron Davis’ website
If you have the courage, certainly go title-less as it’s a whole lot easier, but there are other options if you like those sorts of touches.
Keep in mind that you can click on the “Details” and the “Author” tabs in Post Kinds to add all sorts of additional data to flesh out the reply context for your posts. In particular many posts don’t include metadata for the Author details, but when you’re doing a quote post, it can add some additional richness to your context.
As an example, I modified the Author data for this particular post so that it shows Dr. McVerry created it and included both a photo avatar of him as well as a link to his website.
If you have some coding capabilities and want to go all-in on gaining more control over the reply contexts that Post Kinds allows, I’ve written up an outline for doing so. (I’d recommend waiting to play with it after class is over though!)
A short video on how to send a manual webmention to a WordPress site that's using the Webmention plugin.
WordPress sites also have a separate visual endpoint that can be used manually. They’re typically found at http://example.com/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint.
Learn in six easy steps how to become a master blogger (Caveat the only way is to read and write a lot)
I’m reminded here of my friend and Academy Award nominated screenwriter Millard Kaufman who once told me while standing in front of his immense library, “If you want to be a good writer, then practice writing; if you want to be a great writer, then read everything and then steal from the best.”
Interesting thoughts about identity (both offline and online) presented here.
The idea of decorating one’s locker as an example of presenting one’s identity in school is interesting. I also liked the idea that students continued using a forum long after the class was over–presumably because it represented their identity and connections and relationships from the class.
Learner identities, Big History, and collective learning also generally remind me about shrinking numbers of languages, which I’ve mentioned before. In teaching and passing on knowledge, we will need to be even far more accomodating about culture and language, or eventually we’ll loose all of the diversity of languages we’ve got today.
I’ve recently learned that even searches on WordPress websites can have their own feeds. This way if the author doesn’t provide reliable tags or categories and they publish a lot (like I tend to), you can create custom RSS feed for any search term on their site using the format
A short explanation of RSS and how it helps you save time reading the web.
This video introduces RSS as a way to subscribe to websites and save time on the Web. An "old vs. new" theme illustrates how RSS differs from visiting web sites independently, including:
• The new and old ways of reading news on the web
• An introduction to RSS Readers
• How to identify and subscribe to an RSS feed
• What to expect when using an RSS reader
A nice (visual) overview of RSS from a technical perspective but small parts of it are dated including some of the currently available feed readers. I might recommend Inoreader and Feedly now instead.
I might have gone the step further and put the Dewey portion in the Author tab and then put the source of the quote into the name field instead, but the output is still pretty solid, though some of the wrapped metadata that the plugin provides will be slightly off.
Greg McVerry from YouTube
Dr. Mary Kalantzis from YouTube