Category: IndieWeb
📅 RSVP for Homebrew Website Club (vHWC) on November 14, 2018
Virtual HWC for site builders who either can’t make a regular in-person meeting or don’t yet have critical mass to host one in their area. Everyone of all levels is welcome to participate remotely! Hosted on Google Hangouts. Virtual on Pacific Time. We will be using Google Hangouts; a link to the hangout will be posted here closer to the date.
- 18:30–19:30 PST (2:30–3:30 UTC, 21:30–22:30 EST): Quiet Writing hours: Ask for help, write code, or just talk.
- 19:30–21:00 PST (3:30–5:00 UTC, 22:30–00:00 EST): Demos, followed by talking through recent IndieWeb news.
🔖 reveal.js – The HTML Presentation Framework
A framework for easily creating beautiful presentations using HTML. Check out the live demo. reveal.js comes with a broad range of features including nested slides, Markdown contents, PDF export, speaker notes and a JavaScript API. There's also a fully featured visual editor and platform for sharing reveal.js presentations at slides.com.
👓 Recap of An Introduction to Microformats | gRegorLove.com
I gave a talk on microformats Wednesday night at the San Diego PHP Meetup group. This was my first time giving a formal talk on the topic. I think it went pretty well and I got some good feedback. There was a lot of information and links covered (and some I forgot) so I decided to make a summary pos...
👓 Rethinking The Web, The Internet, And Our Roles Within | More Themes Baby
Go indie, go punk, call it web, notice the good support, and offer an alternative to the old-school, advertising-based, closed internet.
👓 IndieWeb and the Log Lolla theme | More Themes Baby
Since they don’t support webmention and don’t seem to have comments on their site open, I’ll say “Hello!” by syndicating to Twitter. I hope you haven’t given up on the idea of what the IndieWeb stands for and are still thinking of making your Log Lolla theme directly compatible with how the IndieWeb works with WordPress. There are a bunch of us out here who’d love to give you any help and support you need as we’d all love to see more IndieWeb friendly themes in the WordPress repo. Feel free to join us in the #IndieWeb chat or the #WordPress chat to say hello.
👓 The Problem With Feedback | The Atlantic
Companies and apps constantly ask for ratings, but all that data may just be noise in the system.
https://m.signalvnoise.com
subdomain to presumably indicate “Medium”, the social silo that hosts their content.Reply to It’s time for a new branch of public media by Ben Werdmüller
This general idea also isn’t too dissimilar from Greg McVerry’s idea of having local libraries allow patrons to “check out” (aka set up) their own domains and social presences/identities using their library cards.
The difficulty I see is that as the world moves toward increased specialization, that looking for newspapers or even municipalities to oversee and maintain such infrastructure may be difficult. I already see issues with smaller outlets building and maintaining their own publishing platforms with simple out-of-the-box CMS solutions that are relatively easy-to-use and modify with simple plugins. (In a recent inventory of my local news sources, I’ll note here that nearly 100% of the local online news sources for my community are running on WordPress, but not all of them have a huge amount of technical knowledge about what and how they’re doing it in those spaces). The growth of content management systems like Ghost, which has a journalistic bent, also indicates that there isn’t a “perfect solution” to the CMS problem, much less the issues of running IndieWeb-like platforms/clusters based on simpler platforms like WordPress or even Known. There’s certainly a lot of space out there for third party companies to help grow and expand in both of these areas (community-based social platforms as well as journalism platforms and admixtures thereof.)
If local institutions or even governments did move in this direction, then their users are at the potential mercy of third-party businesses which may not necessarily be aligned with local values. An example of something akin to this was covered recently in The Daily on their episode Taking Over Local News. I’m also reminded about of my poor experiences with un-moderated third party platforms like Nextdoor.com can be.
Another microcosm to look at is how hundreds of thousands of public libraries are interfacing with the four or more media suppliers of e-books and what that financial model looks like as, if taken, I would suspect a similar trajectory for local social public media. Similarly looking at how municipalities interface with cable franchising can reveal some pitfalls to avoid moving forward with respect to monopolies and competition.
Certainly some additional thought about how to solve these issues at the smaller local and personal levels is welcome. Thanks for dipping into and expanding my surface area of thinking Ben.
👓 It’s time for a new branch of public media | Ben Werdmüller
President Lyndon B Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, which established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Previously, an independent public broadcaster had been established through grants by the Ford Foundation, but Ford began to withdraw its support. Here's what he said: "It...
👓 Google, the Social Silos and the Web Traffic Future | Brad Enslen
The video below is of interest to SEO’s, webmaster’s trying to create their own informational websites, and the Indieweb. The video, featuring Rand Fishkin, is 32 minutes long but packs a lot of current information. I agree with Rand through the first 2/3rds of the video where he is making h...
👓 The way out | Manton Reece
There have been many articles written in the last month about the role of social networks. Some even reach the obvious conclusion: that the top social networks are too big. This interview on Slate was fairly representative, covering monopolies and centralized power. But these articles always stop sh...
👓 Bridgy traffic bump | snarfed.org
A few weeks ago, Bridgy‘s traffic suddenly shot up to 20-50x its baseline, from 5-10 human visitors per day to 200-300. Humans in browsers, not bots or other requests; this ain’t Google Analytics’s first ro...
👓 Micro.blog + Mastodon | Manton Reece
For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questi...