Replied to a thread by pkamb and Kicks Condor (Hacker News)

pkamb :

> I use it to follow people
This is something I have a real need for. Specifically, podcast hosts. I want to follow certain hosts and listen to every random show they're on.
Some hosts do keep lists of their appearances across many shows: http://hypercritical.co/about/appearances/
But that forces me to manually find the episodes and add each one to my podcast app.
I want something that aggregates appearances into a cross-podcast RSS feed that I can subscribe to in my app. Automatically subscribe to every one of their appearances.

Kicks Condor:

This is a brilliant concept. Hosts could keep a feed of their appearances, but it would be interesting for someone to make a site that tracked this sort of thing (using user-submitted links I suppose).
https://huffduffer.com/ is another good discovery/bookmarking tool for podcasts. It has RSS feeds for everything on the site including custom searches that could potentially pick up your favorite contributors. The bookmarking functionality also makes it easy for you to quickly add things you find to one or more followable feeds for the one-off guest appearances you may hear about.
Replied to What is up with the 2020 WP Theme by autumnautumn (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Curious if anyone has any experience with the new 2020 theme. I’m particularly confused as to why on fresh install it seems like an out of the box theme. But then if you touch the Customizer at all it fills your site with all this content for a musume in Sweden!?!?!

I like using the customizer to change the look and feel of my site but it seems I can’t use it with this theme without it doing this dump of content.

Can anyone point me to articles about this theme and why this content is supposed to help me? Maybe this is just a new way of working with a theme that I’m not used to?

Autumn, It’s been a while since I’ve done a fresh install, but I’ll confirm that what you’ve experienced is true. The base theme was shown off using a Swedish museum, so I wasn’t too surprised to hear that portion, but I too was a bit freaked out by the content they created on my behalf.

From what I can tell, they’re creating the content to help users realize how to set up a separate front page and a separate blog page which isn’t always intuitive to newcomers to the platform. Fortunately they haven’t made too much useless content and new users can simply either edit the front page the theme creates to something that suits them or just delete that page and create something of their own.

The only other content I can see that one might want to modify are the two footer widgets that you can either edit or simply delete or replace.

In all I think they’ve taken this route simply to give new users an idea about how they could set up their sites and give them an idea about the way the theme uses the Gutenberg editor. (It’s not too different from the long standing “Hello World” introductory post or the “Hi, this is a comment.” first comment on a fresh install.) For people new to WordPress this is probably pretty helpful, though for older hands it may be annoying. Fortunately the content the customizer creates is pretty minimal and easy to get rid of.

Bookmarked Podcast Creator Profiles (Podchaser)
Creator Profiles for all your favorite podcast hosts, producers, editors, guests, voice actors (and more) creating podcasts today. Podcast and podcast episode appearances for each creator.
This looks like a cool little service for following creators even when they’re not aggregating all of their content on their own sites. It still relies on a broader community of bookmarking for the discovery, but it’s an interesting interesting model and a cool directory, particularly if it can reach a larger scale. Seems like part of a potential answer to my question How to follow the complete output of journalists and other writers?

This is a lot like Huffduffer, but looks like it may have more users, but less actual functionality?

Read Freeman Dyson, Math Genius Turned Technological Visionary, Dies at 96 (nytimes.com)
After an early breakthrough on light and matter, he became a writer who challenged climate science and pondered space exploration and nuclear warfare.
How did I miss this when it came out?

Bookmarked on March 21, 2020 at 02:39PM

Read - Reading: Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974 by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer (W. W. Norton & Company)
When did America become polarized? For leading historians Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, it all starts in 1974 with the Watergate crisis, the OPEC oil embargo, desegregation busing riots in Boston, and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
I’m 29% done with Fault Lines (page 207/Location 3173)
Discussion of the tail end of Reagan’s presidency, Iran/Contra, and the beginning of the fall of USSR.
Watched Introducing JIMU Robot Mythical Series: UnicornBot Kit from YouTube
Introducing the JIMU Robot Mythical Series: UnicornBot Kit.
The instructions for the Jimu Unicorn robot don’t describe what the white pen-like thing, part T01 x 1 (WHT), is used for. The videos online don’t have it either.

Essentially it’s a building tool that can be pulled apart and the thin pointy end is for pushing the connectors out of their positions while the other end can be squeezed lightly like a tweezer to remove the connector pieces if they’re stuck.

Bookmarked Type Scale - A Visual Calculator (type-scale.com)

A type tool by Jeremy Church

How to Use

I like to enter the base font-size for paragraph text. Then I select from the surrounding values for headers and small text.

There are no rules. Just experiment and have fun. Try using the values for line-height, margins or whatever, and see what works.

hat tip: gRegorLove

Participating in PressEdConf20 directly from WordPress

Last year I thought it would be fun to outline how people might use their websites to actively participate in by posting content on their WordPress website and syndicating copies to Twitter for those following that way.

(Meta: Welcome to my talk: I know it’s cheating & early, but I’m hoping a few presenters will borrow this method.) 


My general thought was:

The only thing better than A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter would be A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference using WordPress itself!

(Meta: Sure, post it to Twitter: but why not own a copy of your presentation on your own website when you’re done?)

Wordpress > Twitter in logos


So let’s give it a spin by providing an outline for how to accomplish it in true #IndieWeb & #DoOO fashion? Perhaps a few people might trying doing this year’s conference this way? Here’s an early presentation to get the juices flowing.

Upside down Twitter Logo(Meta: Hint for those on Twitter: I’m including links to my website, so you can get just a little bit more information than Twitter limits me to–oh, the fringe benefits of having one’s website where they’re not censored by the confines of the platform on which they’re creating!)


First, we’ll start off by making the humble presumption that you’ve got your own domain and an install of WordPress running on it. Hopefully this covers most attendees.

(Meta: If it doesn’t there are lots of options: You could do something similar a bit more manually if you like using WordPress.com. You’ve also got a great community of people who could help you to better own your online identity and domain right here! I’ll bet our friends at Reclaim Hosting could help as well.)


Next we’ll want the Webmention Plugin (+Semantic Linkbacks) which will let our site communicate with other websites as well as to receive replies and reactions on Twitter with the help of Brid.gy. Install and activate both.

(Want to go deeper into the idea of what Webmention is and how one could use it?  I wrote an article for A List Apart that goes into details.)

Cartoon of baseball player hitting a ball with a bat to a waiting player with a tennis raquet
Illustration by Dougal MacPherson
Image courtesy of A List Apart

One could manually syndicate content from WordPress to Twitter, but there are multiple plugins and ways to syndicate it. My favorite is the Syndication Links plugin, which we can use for syndicating to other services. Install and activate. 


Next we’ll want an account on Brid.gy for Twitter. This will allow us to publish from our website to Twitter; it will also allow us to reverse syndicate reactions  from on Twitter back to our posts using Webmention.

(Meta: Publishing this way will require Microformats: Your theme will need the proper microformats support to use this method, but again other methods are available.)


Authenticate your website and Twitter account with Bridgy and enable Bridgy publish on your account page: https://brid.gy/twitter/username.

Bridgy Logo


In Syndication Links settings at example.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links

  • Enable Syndication to Other Sites
  • Enable Twitter via Bridgy

Add a custom provider using the following:

  • name: XYZ pressEdconf20
  • UID: XYZ-pressEdconf20
  • target URL: https://indieweb.xyz/en/pressEdconf20/

Save the settings.

WordPress' cartoon character Wapuu holding a ball with the IndieWebCamp logo(Meta: Syndication Links Settings: These will help you set up syndication targets on other platforms and can be configured for a variety of social media.)
 
 
 
 

Now write all of your posts in your presentation as status updates (without titles) and include any media (photos, videos, etc.) making sure to mark up the photos with a class of u-photo in the HTML. Don’t forget the hashtag .

Meme photo from Ferris Bueller's Day Off with Ferris in the bathroom of Chez Louis with superimposed text: A personal IndieWeb site with Webmention, Micropub, Microsub, and WebSub support is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.


Set posts for one every minute. Use the SL Syndicate To meta box to syndicate your Twitter account and to the indieweb.xyz sub where everyone can find them (if they’re not following the proceedings via Twitter).

indieweb.xyz logo


Others at with Webmentions can reply to your posts on their sites. Replies will show up in comments depending on settings. Bridgy will also find responses to your content on Twitter & syndicate those back to your website automatically.

(Meta: Give it a whirl!: Reply to this post on Twitter to see it boomerang back to the comment section of my website.)

Webmention rocks logo
Webmention rocks

Those who are paying attention at will see the value in webmention for allowing cross-site interactions without the need for “social media”. WithKnown, Drupal, Grav, and other CMSs are capable of doing this too.

(Meta: Ownership of your Open Pedagogy Anyone? Who needs invasive corporate social media to interact online now?)


With luck, I’ll have created this entire presentation on my own website and syndicated it to Twitter without actually needing to visit Twitter itself. I’m around for questions. Thank you for your time and attention. [more…]

Those looking for more details can find documentation on the IndieWeb wiki at https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress, or https://boffosocko.com/2018/04/27/setting-up-wordpress-for-indieweb-use/

I’m also happy to help people set things up and make alternate suggestions via video chat or you can find online help in the IndieWeb WordPress chat.

IndieWebCamp Logo featuring the stylized letters "I W C" over the text "#IndieWebCamp"


P.S. There’s still some time to submit your talk for . Since it’s all designed to be online from the start, I’m hoping it won’t be cancelled like all the other events lately.

(Meta: PressEdConf 2020: A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter March 26, 2020)