When I started to experiment with different ways of blogging, I realised what I was doing was a bit off. So I decided to redesign the blog.
I appreciate that others are grappling with these design ideas as well. I need to get back to some of my own work and experimenting in this area. It’s also a bit reminiscent of Dries Buytaert’s recent post Reclaiming my blog as my thought space in which he contemplates some of these types of issues and questions, though from a slightly different perspective.
I've had my site for quite some time now, the internet archive goes way back to 2002 even! To be fair, most of the content until 2007 wasn't that interesting (not sure what makes me think it is nowadays though, but okay ... ), but it was mostly the primary source of well .. me :). Apart from that, I also use Twitter, but I want to turn this around and let my site be the primary source. The IndieWeb movement is something I only recently discovered, but somehow, the philosophy was in my mind for the last few weeks, and I am not the only one that is talking about it.
So, as a first small step, to figure out who links to my content, I created a simple Drupal 8 module that can receive and store webmentions and pingbacks from Webmention.io. The source is available at https://github.com/swentel/webmention_io. I'll move this drupal.org at some point once it gets into a more polished state, but it also depends on further iterations of getting more interaction feedback to my site.
Next up is looking at https://brid.gy/ as the service has integration with social networks to post and retrieve replies from there.
This isn’t as direct a solution as I would have expected, but I suspect that it probably works pretty well. While reading it, I feel obliged more than usual to make a read post and send a webmention to it…
It’s interesting to see some of the great strides forward Drupal has been making in the IndieWeb arena since November .
Broadcasting app Anchor, which helps anyone record and share audio, is relaunching its app today with a new focus on serving the larger podcaster community...
Of course, there is one concern for professional podcasters migrating to Anchor’s platform – and that’s whether it will be around in the long-term.
For now, the company isn’t generating revenue – it’s living off its funding. Podcasters who pay for hosting or self-host don’t generally have to worry with whether they’ll one day have to quickly migrate elsewhere because the company is shutting down or being acquired – and that’s always a concern with startups.
I appreciate that they both give and highlight some reasonable caveats about using this Anchor given its start-up nature. Mentions of potential site-deaths should have been de rigueur for the past decade and change.
It also makes me wonder why an app like this, which has some great and useful higher end utility, doesn’t offer its production service as the product? Sure they can offer the hosting and other bits to the general public, but for the professionals who are already out there, why not give them inexpensive access to the root production service and then allow immediate export so that the company could host the end product on their own website? This would amount to a very solid PESOS service. In fact, they could probably offer the production side for free for the big players for the advertising leverage to gain the smaller players in the space.
I’ve noticed some very large publishing concerns, notably The Atlantic Interview recently, who are sadly relying on third party services to host their podcast content. For large companies that actually have a team that manages their presence to at least some extent, there’s really no reason that they should be relying on a third party to be holding the URLs to their content.
I’m curious to try this out now for my own too-often-neglected microcast. Having a simpler and more straight-forward production flow would certainly help lower the bar for making it even despite my already low requirements for making it.
After a relatively quiet quiet writing hour where I worked on acquisition posts a bit, people began arriving just before the 6:30 pm official start time.
I kicked off the meeting with a quick overview of IndieWeb’s concepts and principles for newcomers. As a mini-case study I talked a bit about some of my work and conversations earlier today about thinking about adding acquisition posts to my website and the way in which I’m approaching the problem.
Asher Silberman was glad to be back at a meeting. He has recently been working on more content over functionality.
Micah Cambre showed off a gorgeous development version of the new theme he’s building for his site which is a super clean and pared down theme based on the Sage platform using WordPress. He’s hoping to finish it shortly so he can relaunch his personal site at http://asuh.com. He spent some time talking about the process of using David Shanske’s IndieWebified version of the Twenty Sixteen theme as a template for adding microformats and functionality to the Sage set up.
Richard Hopp, a gen2/gen3 user who is completely new to the community and interested in learning, has a personal domain at http://www.ricahardhopp.com/ on which he’s installed WordPress. He’s currently considering whether he’d like to begin blogging soon and what other functionality he’d like to have on his site. He’s relatively new to Facebook, having only joined about six months ago. On the professional side, he does some governmental related work and has some large collections of documents that he’s also doing some research for in consideration of how to best put them on the web for ease of search and use.
I wrapped up the demo portion with a quick showing of how I leveraged the power of the Post Kinds Plugin to facetiously add chicken posts to my site as a prelude to doing a tad more work to begin adding explicit follow posts.
We took a short break to take a photo of the group.
In the end of the evening we talked over a handful of broad ideas including user interface, webactions, and Twitter interactions.
We wrapped things up with a demo of how I use the URL Forwarder app on Android to post to my website via mobile. We then used some of this documentation to try to help Asher fix his previously broken browser bookmarklets to hopefully work better with the Post Kinds Plugin. I spent a few minutes to create a similar bookmarklet to add the ability to more easily add follow posts to my website since I hadn’t done it after adding them last week.
Although I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore, old habits are hard to die. I plan to reduce my time on social media this Lenten season. Less time here and more on my blogs:
Personal Blog: http://bryanruby.com/
Fifty-Two Posts a Year: http://fiftytwoposts.com
I like the concept of this. Lent done #IndieWeb style.
I don’t post “notes” to Facebook often, but I’d noticed a few weeks ago that several pieces I’d published like this a while back were apparently unpublished by the platform. I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Facebook about them being unpublished or having issues, so I didn’t realize the problem until I randomly stumbled back across my notes page.
They did have a piece of UI to indicate that I wanted to contest and republish them, so I clicked on it. Apparently this puts these notes into some type of limbo “review” process, but it’s been a few weeks now and there’s no response about either of them. They’re still both sitting unseen in my dashboard with sad notes above them saying:
There is no real indication if they’ll ever come back online. Currently my only option is to delete them. There’s also no indication, clear or otherwise, of which community standard they may have violated.
I can’t imagine how either of the posts may have run afoul of their community standards, or why “notes” in particular seem to be more prone to this sort of censorship in comparison with typical status updates. I’m curious if others have had this same experience?
We’re reviewing these posts against our Community Standards.
This is just another excellent example of why one shouldn’t trust third parties over which you have no control to publish your content on the web. Fortunately I’ve got my own website with the original versions of these posts [1][2] that are freely readable. If you’ve experienced this or other pernicious problems in social media, I recommend you take a look at the helpful IndieWeb community which has some excellent ideas and lots of help for re-exerting control over your online presence.
Notes Functionality
Notes on Facebook were an early 2009 era attempt for Facebook to have more blog-like content and included a rather clean posting interface, not un-reminiscent of Medium’s interface, that also allowed one to include images and even hyperlinks into pages.
The note post type has long since fallen by the wayside and I rarely, if ever, come across people using it anymore in the wild despite the fact that it’s a richer experience than traditional status updates. I suspect the Facebook black box algorithm doesn’t encourage its use. I might posit that it’s not encouraged as unlike most Facebook functionality, hyperlinks in notes on desktop browsers physically take one out of the Facebook experience and into new windows!
The majority of notes about me are spammy chain mail posts like “25 Random Things About Me”, which also helpfully included written instructions for how to actually use notes.
25 Random Things About Me
Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.
(To do this, go to “notes” under tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)
Most of my published notes were experiments in syndicating my content from my own blog to Facebook (via POSSE). At the time, the engagement didn’t seem much different than posting raw text as status updates, so I abandoned it. Perhaps I’ll try again with this post to see what happens? I did rather like the ability to actually have links to content and other resources in my posts there.
Are you building your own website? Indie reader? Personal publishing web app? Or some other digital magic-cloud proxy? If so, come on by and join a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Bring your friends who want to start a personal web site. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project…
Everyone of every level is welcome to participate! Don’t have a domain yet? Come along and someone can help you get started and provide resources for creating the site you’ve always wanted.
Parking at the library is at a premium, so please park on the street or use one of these nearby lots: Parking details
5:30 – 6:30 pm (Optional) Quiet writing hour at your favorite location within the library for those interested. Use this time to work on your project or do some writing before the meeting.
6:30 – 8:00 pm Meetup in 4th floor Conference Room
More Details
Join a community of like-minded people building and improving their personal websites. Invite friends that want a personal site.
Work with others to help motivate yourself to create the site you’ve always wanted to have.
Ask questions about things you may be stuck on–don’t let stumbling blocks get in the way of having the site you’d like to have.
Finish that website feature or blog post you’ve been working on
Burn down that old website and build something from scratch
Our space within the library is somewhat limited, so please RSVP prior to attending so we can ensure that we can accomodate as many people as possible.
Over the past little while I’ve been chipping away at an Indie Reader plugin for WordPress.
It’s still a bit rough at this point, but works well enough that I’m happy to announce it here.
Yarns Indie Reader allows you to subscribe to websites that publish either rss or h-feed. As well as keeping up with your subscriptions, you can like and reply and it create posts on your blog automatically.
Over the past little while I’ve been chipping away at an Indie Reader plugin for WordPress.
It’s still a bit rough at this point, but works well enough that I’m happy to announce it here.
Yarns Indie Reader allows you to subscribe to websites that publish either rss or h-feed. As well as kee...
Comparing two different approaches that help you take control back over your own data on the web.
[...]
The goal of this analysis was to understand the pros and cons of how I can own my own content on https://dri.es. While PESOS would be much easier to implement, I decided to go with POSSE. My next step is to figure out my "POSSE plan"; how to quickly and easily share status updates on my Drupal site, how to syndicate them to 3rd party services, how to re-organize my mailing list and my RSS feed, and more. If you have any experience with implementing POSSE, feel free to share your takeaways in the comments.
One thing that I think you’ve only briefly touched upon is the ability to also have likes, replies/comments, etc. also come back to your site as native content via webmentions. I’ve been able to get rid of five apps and their incessant notifications and trim it all back to just using my own site to handle everything instead. Using something I choose to use instead of something I’m forced to, while also owning my data, is really very liberating.
Like you, I too have always wanted to own my own content on the web, and there are some easier and some harder methods. Not being as strong a developer as many, I’ve taken a more hybrid approach to things which is still evolving. To some extent I began at the easy end with some PESOS based workflows and relying on simple tools like IFTTT.com to at least begin owning all my content. For many content management systems, this is nearly dead easy, and could even be done with something as simple and flexible as Tumblr without much, if any, coding experience.
Over time, as I’ve been able, I’ve moved to a more direct POSSE method as either I or, more often, others have managed to master making the simple posting interfaces easier and easier. I think in the end, POSSE is the strongest of the methods, so that has always been my ultimate goal.
From a Drupal-centric approach, you might be able to gain an interesting perspective on the multitude of ways POSSE/PESOS can be done by looking at the various ways that are available in WordPress ecosystem. It’s probably easy to discern that some are far easier than others based on one’s facility with coding. In general, I’ve noticed that the more freedom and flexibility a particular method or plugin has, the longer it takes to code and/or configure. The less flexibility a plugin offers, the easier. (So one could compare something like SNAP at the more comprehensive/difficult end to something simpler like JetPack for POSSE.) The difficulty is in the administrative tax of keeping up with the panoply of social media platform APIs to keep things working smoothly over time, particularly when you want your posts to be able to leverage the broad arrays of posting options and display outputs platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer. The other difficult questions can sometimes be: am I just replacing one or two social platforms, or am I trying to replace 20? and am I doing them with one plugin or with 20? and finally, how DRY is that process? Sometimes manually cutting and pasting is just as good.
As you do, I write first and foremost for myself and then a distant second for reaction and conversation with others. Thus I think of my personal site as just that: personal. To some extent it’s a modern day version of a commonplace book where I collect a variety of thoughts in a variety of means, while still trying somewhat to keep it in an outer facing form to look what people might expect a site to look like. This means that I have a good number more than the traditional types of posts most social media sites have. I try to own all my own bookmarks and even post what I’m reading both online and in physical form. I keep highlights and annotations of things I find interesting. I naturally keep longer posts, status updates, and photos like many. I even log scrobbles of music and podcasts I listen to as well as film and television I watch. Interestingly there’s a tremendous amount I only publish privately to myself or a small circle of others that’s hidden on my site’s back end. Depending on how far and deep you want your experience to go you might want to consider how all these will look or be represented on your site. To a great extent, I think that WordPress’s attempt to copy Tumblr (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video) with their Post Formats was interesting, it just didn’t go far enough. Naturally, this may take a different form for you depending on whether you’re building just for yourself or if you’re planning something more modular for the larger Drupal community to leverage.
A few of the post types my website supports.
The best part of all this is that I’ve not done any of it alone. While I try to maintain a list of some of my experiments to help others (you’ll probably appreciate the ones on mobile posting and RSS based on your outline), there’s also a wealth of other examples on the IndieWeb wiki and a terrifically stellar group of people around almost 24-7 in the IndieWeb chat to help spur me along. I’ll echo Tantek’s welcome to what I think is a more thoughtful and vibrant open web.
I hope others also find these resources so they’re not fumbling around in the dark as I was for so long. Since you’re obviously building in Drupal, I can recommend you take a look at some of the examples provided by the WordPress and the Known communities which Benreferenced. Since they’re all .php based and open-source, you may get further faster in addition to being able to iterate upon and improve their work. Many of the developers are frequently in the IndieWeb chat and I’m sure would be happy to help with ideas and pitfalls they came across along the way.
At ScholarlyHub we believe that a critical attitude does not stop with the platforms we use. Growing threats to open science have made it more crucial than before to develop a sustainable, not-for-profit environment. One that allows you to publish, share, and access quality work without financial constraints; find and work with colleagues in fields you’re interested in; develop research and teaching projects; store datasets securely, and mentor and be mentored in order to improve your work and help others.
Above all, we want to foster an environment that meets our needs as individuals and scholarly communities and where we are in control, not myopic political agendas, greedy publishers, or data merchants.
We believe that scholarship does little good behind pay walls, that metrified rankings rarely promote innovative research, and that transparent communication is vital to quality scholarship and healthy societies. Therefore we’re taking the best of the new and the best of the tried to create a truly open-access repository, publishing service, and scholarly social networking site, with large scope for members' initiatives. And it will be run by scholars: not for profit, greater market share, or political kudos, but for their own growth and everyone’s benefit.
Most of their manifesto sounds very familiar to me. Because of a lack of plurality, I’m guessing they’re generation 1 creators concentrating on building an inexpensive platform for generations 2 and on.
Where to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it’s hard to know what does and doesn’t work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great?
[...]
The numbers just didn’t make sense. Yes, I could put more into Medium and try to build up readership even more. The guys at Basecamp regularly get 250k+ views on their content. But doing that helps Medium the most in the long run. They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business.
Switching back
Now I didn’t want to throw out distribution on Medium entirely. There can definitely be some benefit to syndicating content there. It’s essentially another distribution channel to expose people to our content.
So we needed a game plan on how we could still make use of Medium as a distribution channel without cannibalizing our own readership or SEO work.
This is 100% on the mark, you should definitely own your own content. Syndicating it out to Medium is a great idea, particularly when you can get a rel=”canonical” tag for the original on Medium. Incidentally Medium has their own WordPress plugin that will allow you to quickly and easily syndicate your site’s content directly to Medium without needing to separately import it. It’s also available on a per post basis.
But, even with this, you’re only getting 50% of the value of having your own website because you’ve only got one way communication out. Next you’ll need communication back in. What if I said you could get a lot of the comments, likes, and interactions from those other silos back into your website too? This way the conversations others are having relating to your content also come back to your site and enrich it there? What if you could own all (or almost all) of the conversation around your content?
Think about it, what if there was an @mention functionality that worked from website to website instead of being stuck inside Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Flickr etc.? Interestingly, it exists! And you can set it up for free with last year’s new W3C Webmention protocol which already has WordPress plugins ready to go. Roughly for WordPress you’ll need the Webmentions plugin, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin, the Syndication Links plugin, a few strategically placed rel=”me” tags on your site, (maybe some tweaks to your microformats on your theme), and a free Brid.gy account. Details for setting it up can be found on the WordPress pages of the indieweb.org website. I suspect if you’re strong enough to have figured out the tech for your article, you could probably have it up and running in under an hour or so. Then instead of feeding content from your blog to the black hole of social media, you could have actual two-way communication with many social silos! Now you won’t need to pay as much attention to those other sites as you can use your WordPress site as an “app” to interact with them instead.
I’m happy to help walk you through it if you’re interested and need help. My own personal site has some documentation of some of the above as well as examples of how it works.
In some sense, hopefully this post on my site will be an interesting exemplar. I own it and “loaned” or syndicated copies to Disqus and Twitter. Comments, likes and reposts you make to the Twitter copy will automatically be ported back here after the fact using Brid.gy. (Sadly, Disqus isn’t supported–yet.)
Since the old Lanyrd site was back up over the weekend, I went in and saved all of the old data I wanted from it before it decided to shut down again (there is no news on when this may happen). Sadly there is no direct export, but I was able to save pages individually and/or save them to the Internet Archive.
One thing we very much believe in is that you should own your own data. As such, we didn’t want to just suck your data into Notist and leave it at that. Instead, we’ve built a tool that gives you access to the content as HTML and JSON, ready for you to take away today.
Lanyrd is currently up, let us grab your data for import into Notist! https://t.co/QdYsSKIF1L
Dries Buytaert
