👓 Easy Custom Feeds in WordPress | Digging Into WordPress

Read Easy Custom Feeds in WordPress | Digging Into WordPress by Jeff Star (digwp.com)
Now that we have seen how to setup Tumblr-style posts, it would be nice to be able to segregate the Tumblr-posts category from the main feed into its own, separate feed. This would enable readers to subscribe exclusively to the Tumblr-posts feed and maybe display it in their sidebar or something.

While we’re at it, it would also be cool to be able to provide readers with a full menu of feed choices:
Everything feed: includes both the main posts and the Tumblr posts
Articles-only feed: includes only the main articles and no Tumblr stuff
Tumblr-only feed: includes only the Tumblr-style posts

Let's look at an overview of the process..

👓 Why Decentralized Search is Good, Especially for Blogs | Brad Enslen

Read Why Decentralized Search is Good, Especially for Blogs by Brad EnslenBrad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
In a previous conversation, I made a rough list of types of blog search directories and search engines. Blog Discovery:  I’m sure directories are not the best solution for blog discovery, but like blogrolls they have a place at the table because they are low tech and cheap. Here’s a rough hiera...

🎙 The IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing

The IndieWeb and Academic Research and Publishing

Running time: 0h 12m 59s | Download (13.9 MB) | Subscribe by RSS | Huffduff

Overview Workflow

Posting

Researcher posts research work to their own website (as bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, annotations, etc.), they can post their data for others to review, they can post their ultimate publication to their own website.​​​​​​​​

Discovery/Subscription methods

The researcher’s post can webmention an aggregating website similar to the way they would pre-print their research on a server like arXiv.org. The aggregating website can then parse the original and display the title, author(s), publication date, revision date(s), abstract, and even the full paper itself. This aggregator can act as a subscription hub (with WebSub technology) to which other researchers can use to find, discover, and read the original research.

Peer-review

Readers of the original research can then write about, highlight, annotate, and even reply to it on their own websites to effectuate peer-review which then gets sent to the original by way of Webmention technology as well. The work of the peer-reviewers stands in the public as potential work which could be used for possible evaluation for promotion and tenure.

Feedback mechanisms

Readers of original research can post metadata relating to it on their own website including bookmarks, reads, likes, replies, annotations, etc. and send webmentions not only to the original but to the aggregation sites which could aggregate these responses which could also be given point values based on interaction/engagement levels (i.e. bookmarking something as “want to read” is 1 point where as indicating one has read something is 2 points, or that one has replied to something is 4 points  and other publications which officially cite it provide 5 points. Such a scoring system could be used to provide a better citation measure of the overall value of of a research article in a networked world. In general, Webmention could be used to provide a two way audit-able  trail for citations in general and the citation trail can be used in combination with something like the Vouch protocol to prevent gaming the system with spam.

Archiving

Government institutions (like Library of Congress), universities, academic institutions, libraries, and non-profits (like the Internet Archive) can also create and maintain an archival copy of digital and/or printed copies of research for future generations. This would be necessary to guard against the death of researchers and their sites disappearing from the internet so as to provide better longevity.

Show notes

Resources mentioned in the microcast

IndieWeb for Education
IndieWeb for Journalism
Academic samizdat
arXiv.org (an example pre-print server)
Webmention
A Domain of One’s Own
Article on A List Apart: Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet

Synidicating to Discovery sites

Examples of similar currently operating sites:
IndieNews (sorts posts by language)
IndieWeb.xyz (sorts posts by category or tag)
 

Reply to Brad Enslen about The Future of Blog Snoop

Replied to Memo: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop Blog Directory by Brad EnslenBrad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs.  The problem here is me: I’m running out of time.  I’m duplicating a lot … Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory We’ll see what happens.  It...
Brad, much like Kicks Condor, I think you’re making a laudable effort, and one of the ways our work grows is to both keep up with it and experiment around.

If I recall, programming wasn’t necessarily your strong suit, but like many in the IndieWeb will say: “Manual until it hurts!” By doing things manually, you’ll more easily figure out what might work and what might not, and then when you’ve found the thing that does, then you spend some time programming it to automate the whole thing to make it easier. It’s quite similar to designing a college campus: let the students walk around naturally for a bit then pave the natural walkways that they’ve created. This means you won’t have both the nicely grided and unused sidewalks in addition to the ugly grass-less beaten paths. It’s also the broader generalization of paving the cow paths.

In addition to my Following page I’ve also been doing some experimenting with following posts using the Post Kinds Plugin. It is definitely a lot more manual than I’d like it to be. It does help to have made a bookmarklet to more quickly create follow posts, but until I’ve got it to a place that I really want it, it’s not (yet) worth automating taking the data from those follow posts to dump them into my Follow page for output there as well. Of course the fact that my follow posts have h-entry and h-feed mark up means that someone might also decide to build a parser that will extract my posts into a feed which could then be plugged into something else like a microsub-based reader so that I could make a follow post on my own site and the source is automatically added to my subscription list in my reader automatically.

In addition to Kicks Condor, I’me seeing others start to kick the tires of these things as well. David Shanske recently wrote Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following, and Blogrolls, but I think he’s got a lot more going on in his thinking than he’s indicated in his post which barely scratches the surface.

I also still often think back to a post from Dave Winer in 2016: Are you ready to share your OPML? This too has some experimental discovery features that only scratch the surface of the adjacent possible.

And of course just yesterday, Kevin Marks (previously of Technorati) reminded us about rel=”directory” which could have some interesting implications for discovery and following. Think for a bit of how one might build a decentralized Technorati or something along the lines of Ryan Barrett’s indie map.

As things continue to grow, I’m seeing some of all of our decisions and experiments begin to effect others as these are all functionality and discovery mechanisms that we’ll all need in the very near future. I hope you’ll continue to experiment and make cow paths that can eventually be paved.

Featured Image: Cows on the path flickr photo by Reading Tom shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

👓 Paving the cowpaths: using architecture concepts to improve online user experience | Elezea

Read Paving the cowpaths: using architecture concepts to improve online user experience by Rian Van Der MerweRian Van Der Merwe (Elezea)
In architecture desire lines or cowpaths describe well-worn paths that appear in a landscape over time. I discuss how this relates to web design.
This is interesting/relevant to the idea of “manual until it hurts”. I particularly like the twist idea at the end of looking at activity after-the-fact and then paving over those methods rather than starting at free range and then paving.

👓 Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop | Blog Snoop Weblog Directory

Read Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop by Brad Enslen (Blog Snoop Weblog Directory)
I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs.  The problem here is me: I’m running out of time.  I’m duplicating a lot …

👓 The Future of Blog Snoop | Kicks Condor

Read The Future of Blog Snoop by Kicks CondorKicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
I think the idea behind Blog Snoop is solid—I mean you’re just talking about trying to define the edges of a certain community. I’m sufficiently convinced now (between Reddit wikis and ‘awesome lists’) that directories still serve this purpose. Find The Others. I guess part of the problem ...
Response to Brad and Kicks forthcoming…

👓 Memo: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop Blog Directory | Brad Enslen

Read Memo: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop Blog Directory by Brad EnslenBrad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs.  The problem here is me: I’m running out of time.  I’m duplicating a lot … Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory We’ll see what happens.  It...

👓 How to Import Your GoodReads List Into WordPress, for free | Glenn Dixon

Read How to Import Your GoodReads List Into WordPress, for free by Glenn DixonGlenn Dixon (glenn.thedixons.net)
Here are the steps I took in order to get all of my GoodReads books/reviews over into my IndieWeb-ified Wordpress: Prerequisites: A GoodReads account with a decent amount of books reviewed and/or starred A self-hosted WordPress site Twenty Seventeen theme (could work with others) Advanced Custom Fie...

🎧 Episode 17: @eli | Micro Monday

Listened to Episode 17: @eli by Micro MondayMicro Monday from monday.micro.blog

Eli Mellen, an art historian and printmaker turned web developer, talks to Jean about how he went from his “angsty LiveJournal” to being a proponent of the IndieWeb, and why he likes the new IndieWeb Ring. Eli is also the maintainer of Micro.wiki: Community resources for the avid Micro.blogger.

Eli’s wiki is truly a hidden gem.

🎧 Episode 16: @vanessa | Micro Monday

Listened to Episode 16: @vanessa by Micro MondayMicro Monday from monday.micro.blog

Vanessa Hamshere is a musician, a crafter, a photographer, and one of the “fountain pens, paper, and planners gang.” We talk about how online communities evolve and thrive, and how a good mix of technical expertise and interests helps everyone.

It’s nice to have a group of people from across the world with different interests. I love random conversations.

Vanessa gives Colin Walker and I an overly kind little shout out during the episode. I suspect she either knows more than she lets on or she’s got a ton of tenacity, because she has a very lovely site. Lately I noticed that she’s even begun delving into microsub clients and Indiepaper, which I have barely begun to scratch the surface of, so perhaps I’ll have to pick her brain a bit in return.

Improve comments admin UI to filter out likes and Swarm replies

Logged an itch Improve comments admin UI to filter out likes and Swarm replies
I’d been considering figuring this out before given the high incidence of likes on my posts, particularly from POSSE copies, but now that I’ve fixed checkins on my site, Swarm is also sending a lot of small replies, which while nice, are adding a lot of noise to my comments dashboard.

Perhaps I can figure out a way to use query parameters to filter out some of the like webmentions and replies from Swarm so that I’m not really building anything new?

Sometimes you make a major step forward and it creates new UI problems. We’ll get there eventually.

Looks like I’ve finally got IndieAuth and my headers working with OwnYourSwarm properly and have checkin data being PESOSed from Swarm/FourSquare to my website now. Hooray!

I still have a few minor tweaks to get things working properly with Post Kinds to display everything correctly, but I feel like I’m almost there. Next we’ll have to delve back to May sometime when my system between IndieAuth and OwnYourCheckin fell apart.

Still have my fingers half-crossed that I don’t botch anything up…

Tonight I added an On This Day widget to the sidebar of my homepage. I also added an archive page at https://boffosocko.com/archives/otd/. They show old posts from the same day from prior years.

There may be one or two small display issues that I’ll come back and tweak, but functionally things are working reasonably well. I can already see that I may use it not only as a reminder, but a means of helping to clean up broken links and/or missing photos on posts.

Now if we could only get the Timehop app to add WordPress to it’s data stores…

Reply to Kevin Marks et al on Webmention and Annotations

Replied to a tweet by Kevin Marks (Twitter)
@dangillmore, @froomkin and other journos have played around with @hypothes_is (which has private group functionality):

@dwhly et al have started discussing adding webmentions as well:

There’s also a lot of potential useful overlap of the broader area of IndieWeb technologies with journalism I think.