Chris Aldrich | Chris Aldrich

It’s been a while since I tweaked auto syndication from my website to Twitter. Let’s give it a try.
#IndieWeb #POSSE

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I was considering doing a follow post for Malcolm Blaney’s unicyclic IndieWeb Planet, then I realized that I’m already on it! Definitely an interesting experiment here. Nice that he includes an OPML file too.

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Read On planets and reading lists by

Malcolm Blaney (unicyclic.com)

This is going to be a long one, so the short version is summed up in this screenshot:

That's from the top of this page: unicyclic.com/indieweb, which is a feed combined from different sources, commonly referred to as a planet. Up until now I've been adding new feeds to that page as people join th...

This may be the first time I’ve heard this, though it’s possible that Kicks Condor or Bran Enslen has mentioned something along these lines:

the year of the indieweb directory ❧

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Read a thread on Twitter by

N. K. Jemisin (Twitter)

A post-#DemDebate2 thought: I too was a beneficiary of bussing. Except now I understand how damaging that framing is. Really, bussing allowed white schools to benefit from *me,* all for the low price of student budget dollars they were wasting anyway.

My mom was like most black parents then -- doing the best she could. The private schools in town cost the earth. The black-neighborhood schools had 12+ yo textbooks, no AP, underfunded everything, tired teachers. White public schools were a good middle ground. But.

I struggled for years with poor self esteem because I had somehow absorbed the idea that black =/= smart, and that I should be grateful to sit by white kids. That my school was doing me a favor by making me get up predawn to ride a bus for an hour. I had that Joe Biden thinking.

But in retrospect, I made those schools look good as hell. Won academic awards left & right, mostly bc I loved to read and that was half my education right there. The much-vaunted AP classes were a joke; I mostly did self-study and busted 4s and 5s on the exams.

There were dozens of black kids like me in those white schools. Probably more. But I don't know, bc we were parceled out so there would be only a few of us in each class. Enough to look good, diversity-wise. Not enough to support each other, or make the white ppl uncomfy.

My most vivid memories of high school aren't social, but pathological. I remember being on prom committee and fighting to get *any* black music played; the principal still banned rap. I remember the school pulling shenanigans to bump a black valedictorian to 2nd place.

Battles like that every day, every step of the way. We did well, and everyone expressed surprise, and told us it was because we'd been "given" an opportunity to share space w/white kids - not that we'd earned it. If we struggled, though, of course it was because we were black.

On balance, they got bragging rights. Scholarships! Ivy League acceptances! *I* got an early introduction to how racism covers for white mediocrity and ego, and probably a couple of extra years of therapy. Also maybe an early start on a few novels. Was so bored I wrote in class.

So I'm like most black Americans of my gen in having mixed feelings about integration. Structural racism worked as hard to erase whatever we gained as our parents had worked to give us those gains. And a big part of the struggle was people like Biden. "Not racist" racists.

The equivocators, the pleasant moderates, so happy to appease blatant racists at our expense. Sure, integration, but not if it forces white kids to sit alongside inferior black kids. (We're always inferior.) Sure, "states rights"! Sure "school choice" (to reinstate segregation)!

White liberals who would be appalled to be called racist... but who believed, same as white conservatives, that we really *weren't* as good or smart as them. But at least they were willing to do us a favor -- a limited one, dependent on their generosity and continued primacy.

Not going anywhere in particular w/this. I'm not a Harris supporter. She did say a thing that needed saying, tho -- a thing that moderate white Dems really need to think about when they wonder why we don't trust them. We *remember.* We see you. That's why.

You are as much to blame for where we are as a country right now as Trump & his ilk -- because you won't push back. You have principles but won't stick to them. You're weak and cowardly when lives are on the line, but you tell yourself you're being smart and diplomatic.

We need strength and courage right now. We need conviction, and obstinacy, and anger. If you won't fight, what fucking good are you? Looking deadass at Nancy Pelosi right now.

::sigh:: My pressure's probably up, and I'm harshing my own post-vacation mellow. Rant over. Toodles.

hat tip:

A post-#DemDebate2 thought: I too was a beneficiary of bussing. Except now I understand how damaging that framing is. Really, bussing allowed white schools to benefit from *me,* all for the low price of student budget dollars they were wasting anyway.

— N. K. Jemisin (@nkjemisin) June 28, 2019

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Read cPanel unleashes price hikes on its most dense customers by

Richard Speed (The Register)

Yeah - because hardware is better these days, we're going to need to charge you more. Much, much more...
cPanel has dropped a bombshell on its customers with a price hike for its services that has left some running for the door marked exit.

This must be why I saw Tim tweet this a few days ago:

Looks like I’ll be experimenting in earnest with alternatives to cPanel this weekend.

— timmmmyboy (@timmmmyboy) June 27, 2019

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🔖 granary 2.0 documentation | Granary

Some amazing documentation.

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Social Reading User Interface for Discovery

I read quite a bit of material online. I save “bookmarks” of all of it on my personal website, sometimes with some additional notes and sometimes even with more explicit annotations. One of the things I feel like I’m missing from my browser, browser extensions, and/or social feed reader is a social layer overlay that could indicate that people in my social network(s) have read or interacted directly with that page (presuming they make that data openly available.)

One of the things I’d love to see pop up out of the discovery explorations of the IndieWeb or some of the social readers in the space is the ability to uncover some of this social reading information. Toward this end I thought I’d collect some user interface examples of things that border on this sort of data to make the brainstorming and building of such functionality easier in the near future.

If I’m missing useful examples or you’d like to add additional thoughts, please feel free to comment below.

Examples of social reading user interface for discovery

Google

I don’t often search for reading material directly, but Google has a related bit of UI indicating that I’ve visited a website before. I sort of wish it had the ability to surface the fact that I’ve previously read or bookmarked an article or provided data about people in my social network who’ve done similarly within the browser interface for a particular article (without the search.) If a browser could use data from my personal website in the background to indicate that I’ve interacted with it before (and provide those links, notes, etc.), that would be awesome!

I’ll note here that because of the way I bookmark or post reads on my own website, my site often ranks reasonably well for those things.

On a search for an article by Aaron Parecki, my own post indicating that I’ve read it in the past ranks second right under the original.

In some cases, others who are posting about those things (reading, commenting, bookmarking, liking, etc.) in my social network also show up in these sorts of searches. How cool would it be to have a social reader that could display this sort of social data based on people it knows I’m following?

A search for a great article by Matthias Ott shows that both I and several of my friends (indicated by red arrows superimposed on the search query) have read, bookmarked, or commented on it too.

Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is is a great open source highlighting, annotation, and bookmarking tool with a browser extension that shows an indicator of how many annotations appear on the page. In my experience, higher numbers often indicate some interesting and engaging material. I do wish that it had a follower/following model that could indicate my social sphere has annotated a page. I also wouldn’t mind if their extension “bug” in the browser bar had another indicator in the other corner to indicate that I had previously annotated a page!

Reading.am

It doesn’t do it until after-the-fact, but Reading.am has a pop up overlay through its browser extension. It adds me to the list of people who’ve read an article, but it also indicates others in the network and those I’m following who have also read it (sometimes along with annotations about their thoughts).

What I wouldn’t give to see that pop up in the corner before I’ve read it!

Reading.am’s social layer creates a yellow colored pop up list in the upper right of the browser indicating who else has read the article as well as showing some of their notes on it. Unfortunately it doesn’t pop up until after you’ve marked the item as read.

Nuzzel

Nuzzel is one of my favorite tools. I input my Twitter account as well as some custom lists and it surfaces articles that people in my Twitter network have been tweeting about. As a result, it’s one of the best discovery tools out there for solid longer form content. Rarely do I read content coming out of Nuzzel and feel robbed. Because of how it works, it’s automatically showing those people in my network and some of what they’ve thought about it. I love this contextualization.

Goodreads

Naturally sites for much longer form content will use social network data about interest, reviews, and interaction to a much greater extent since there is a larger investment of time involved. Thus social signaling can be more valuable in this context. A great example here is of Goodreads which shows me those in my network who are interested in reading a particular book or who have written reviews or given ratings.

Are there other examples I’m missing? Are you aware of similar discovery related tools for reading that leverage social network data?

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