By supporting Micropub, indie-config, and/or action URLs, current feed readers can make it far easier for people on the open web to not only read content the way they currently do on siloed social media services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. Increased ease-of-use to allow these functionalities with beautiful user interface will help to move users out of walled-gardens where they’re trapped into the larger universe of the free and open internet. Individuals with their own websites can support the acceptance of these posts to save their interactions with what they’ve read, be they comments, likes, bookmarks, or other interactions. They can also close the loop by supporting Webmentions so that their comments can be sent to (and potentially displayed) on others’ websites. All of these pieces combined make for a more open and democratic web.
When this publication from Richard MacManus (the founder of ReadWriteWeb.com, one of my old favorite standbys) popped up a few weeks ago with the tagline “A non-profit tech blog about the open web”, I immediately bookmarked it and knew it would be at the top of my subscription list. When I read his founding manifesto for the blog, I was hooked and bumped it to the top of my list and tipped off others:
This looks like a must-read blog for #Indieweb proponents.https://t.co/pVvG1h34nb
— ChrisAldrich (@ChrisAldrich) May 31, 2017
There’s also some great articles up by Emre Sokullu, Brian Hendrickson, and Richard MacManus on a variety of other great topics. I hope you’ll take a look at what they’re doing and subscribe.
I’m pleased that they’ve taken something I was planning on posting here on my site and are giving it some wider exposure.
If you’re a journalist, blogger, or writer in the space, do feel free to connect with them to pitch ideas.
So the real question facing companies with stand alone traditional feed reader products–like Feedly, Digg Reader, The Old Reader, Inoreader, Reeder, NewsBlur, Netvibes, Tiny Tiny RSS, WordPress reader–and the cadre of others is:
In short the primary question is:
What should a modern RSS feed reader be capable of doing?
For more information see the blog post for the event at http://virtuallyconnecting.org/blog/2017/05/31/domains17/
There’s some interesting discussion of Indieweb-related principles in this live-streamed (and recorded) conversation (below) from the Domains 2017 conference for educators and technologists which covers a lot of what I’d consider to be Indieweb for Education applications.
In particular, some asked about alternate projects for basing education projects around which aren’t WordPress. Some suggested using WithKnown which is spectacular for its interaction model and flexibility. I suspect that many in the conversation haven’t heard of or added webmentions (for cross-site/cross-platform conversations or notifications) or micropub to their WordPress (or other) sites to add those pieces of functionality that Known comes with out of the box.
Another section of the conversation mentioned looking for ways to take disparate comments from students on their web presences and aggregating them in a more unified manner for easier consumption by the teacher and other students (as opposed to subscribing to each and every student’s RSS feed, a task which can be onerous in classrooms larger than 20 people). To me this sounded like the general concept of a planet, and there are a few simple ways of accomplishing this already, specifically using RSS.
I was also thrilled to hear the ideas of POSSE and PESOS mentioned in such a setting!
I’d invite those in attendance at the Domains 17 conference to visit not only the Indieweb wiki, but to feel free to actively participate in the on-going daily discussions (via IRC/Slack/Matrix/Web). I suspect that if there’s enough need/desire that the community would create a dedicated #education channel to help spur the effort to continue to push the idea of owning one’s own domain and using it for educational purposes out into the mainstream. The wiki pages and the always-on chat could be useful tools to help keep many of the educators and technologists who attended Domains17 not only connected after the event, but allow them to continue to push the envelope and document their progress for the benefit of others.
I’ll admit that one of my favorite parts of the Indieweb wiki is that it aggregates the work of hundreds of others in an intuitive way so that if I’m interested in a particular subject I can usually see the attempts that others have made (or at least links to them), determine what worked and didn’t for them, and potentially find the best solution for my particular use case. (I suspect that this is some of what’s missing in the “Domains” community at the moment based on several conversations I heard over the past several days.)
If you’d like, please add yourself to the growing list of Indieweb related educators and technologists. If you need help connecting to any of the community resources and/or chat/IRC/Slack, etc. I’m more than happy to help. Just call, email, or contact me via your favorite channel.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=INB-h9eEcpY
Treat Facebook as the private walled garden that it is. If you want something to be publicly accessible, post it to a real blog on any platform that embraces the real web, the open one.
Content that isn’t indexable by search engines is not part of the open web.
Welcome everyone to AltPlatform, a non-profit tech blog devoted to Open Web technologies. What do we mean by “Open Web”? Firstly, we want to experiment with open source (like this WordPress.org blog) and open standards (like RSS). We’re also using the word open to signify a wider, boundary-less view of the Web. In other words, we want to look for opportunities beyond the Walled Gardens – proprietary platforms like Facebook and Twitter where you don’t own your own data, you have little control over your news feeds, and you have to live by certain rules.
Temporary censorship of Matthew Caruana Galizia – who worked on the Panama Papers – raises concern over Facebook’s power to shape the news
I’d written about some ideas related to this in the recent past: The Indieweb and Journalism.
I’m happy to help any journalist who is interested in creating their own easily maintainable website that uses Indieweb principles.
These remarks were given at Coventry University as part of my visiting fellowship at the Disruptive Media Learning Lab
In this episode, we talk about Audrey's decision to block annotations from her websites.
While I have been seeing some really great and thoughtful conversations, particularly in the last 6 months or more, as a result of people posting on their own websites and using open standards like webmentions to carry on conversations, the rest of the internet still needs to take great strides to improve itself. A lot of these issues are ones of bias, and particularly of the white male sort, but I think that the ideas encapsulated in this short podcast will help to open people’s eyes. While it’s sad that Audrey had these experiences on Twitter, I’m glad that she and Kin took the time to discuss them here in hopes of improving the space in the future for others.
https://soundcloud.com/contrafabulists/episode-52
Why Audrey Watters has blocked annotations from News Genius and Hypothes.is from her website.
I also wanted to use this post as an experiment of sorts to see how sound her script actually is with respect to people using both of the annotation services she mentions.
The text of her post appears below in full and unaltered (as it did on 2017-05-17 aside from my obvious annotations and highlights). It (and my commentary and highlights) is (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) as she originally licensed it.
I’ve spent some time thinking about this type of blocking in the past and written about a potential solution. Kevin Marks had created a script to help prevent this type of abuse as well; his solution and some additional variants are freely available. — {cja}
I have added a script to my websites today that will block annotations – namely those from Genius and those from Hypothes.is. I have been meaning to do this for a while now, so it’s mostly a project that comes as I procrastinate doing something else rather than one that comes in response to any recent event.
I took comments off my websites in 2013 because I was sick of having to wade through threats of sexualized violence in order to host conversations on my ideas.
My blog. My rules. No comments.
The article linked at the bottom of the paragraph is a must read in my opinion and sparked some of my original thoughts last year about this same phenomenon. I suspect that Ms. Watters has been wanting to do this since this article was posted and/or she read it subsequently. — {cja}
I’ve made this position fairly well known – if you have something to say in response, go ahead and write your own blog post on your own damn site. So I find the idea that someone would use a service like Hypothes.is to annotate my work on my websites particularly frustrating. I don’t want comments – not in the margins and not at the foot of an article. Mostly, I don’t want to have to moderate them. I have neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth. And if I don’t want to moderate comments, that means I definitely do not want comments to appear here (or that appear to be here) that are outside my control or even my sight.
This isn’t simply about trolls and bigots threatening me (although yes, that is a huge part of it); it’s also about extracting value from my work and shifting it to another company which then gets to control (and even monetize) the conversation.
Does the script Audrey Watters is using really stop people from annotating her site directly?
Based on my quick test, one can still (carefully) use Hypothes.is to highlight and annotate her site, but the script at least prevents Hypothes.is from showing that annotation. When visiting her site with Hypothes.is’ Chrome browser extension on, it does show that there is one annotation on the page. It then requires some hunting to find this comment.
And this particular post is proof of the fact that it can still be annotated, but without impinging on the sovereignty of the original author or her site. — {cja}
Blocking annotation tools does not stop you from annotating my work. I’m a fan of marginalia; I am. I write all over the books I’ve bought, for example. Blocking annotations in this case merely stops you from writing in the margins here on this website.
In the long run and for easier mass adoption, I’m hoping Manton can figure out how to parse RSS feeds in a simpler way so that users don’t need to do serious gymnastics to import their microblog posts from other sources. I’d imagine it’s far easier for him to adapt to the masses than for the masses to adapt to micro.blog. At the very worst, he could create a checkbox on the RSS import feeds to indicate which feeds are status updates and which aren’t and this would quickly solve the problem for the average user as most CMSes allow users to define custom feeds based on content type.
While there are a number of people doing things from simply adding date/time stamps (which micro.blog ignores) to functions.php tweaks to to custom plugins, some of which I’ve tried, I thought I’d come up with my own solution which has helped to kill two proverbial birds with one stone. (Note: I’ve listed some of these others on the Indieweb wiki page for micro.blog.)
The other day, I’d had a short conversation about the issue in the Indieweb chat with several people and decided I’d just give up on having titles in notes altogether. Most people contemplating the problem have an issue doing this because it makes it more difficult to sort and find their content within their admin UI dashboard which is primarily keyed off of the_title() within WordPress. I share their pain in this regard, but I’ve also been experiencing another admin UI issue because I’ve got a handful of plugins which have added a dozen or so additional columns to my posts list. As a result the titles in my list are literally about four characters wide and stretch down the page while knucklehead metadata like categories needlessly eat up massively wide columns just for fun. Apparently plugins aren’t very mindful of how much space they decide to take up in the UI, and WordPress core doesn’t enforce reasonable limits on these things.
So my solution to both problems? If found a handly little plugin called Admin Columns with over 80,000 users and which seems to be frequently updated that allows one to have greater simple control over all of the columnar UI interfaces within their sites.
In just a few minutes, I was able to quickly get rid of several columns of data I’ve never cared about, expand the title column to a reasonable percentage of the space so it’s readable, and tweak all the other columns to better values. Even better, I was able to add the slug name of posts into the UI just after the title columns, so I can leave status update titles empty, but still have a field by which I can see at least some idea of what a particular post was about.
For those who aren’t aware of the broader concept of Indieweb, here is a great introduction with some history by Tantek Çelik entitled The Once and Future IndieWeb
This is also a good time to remind those who are interested, that the annual IndieWebSummit is coming up soon and RSVP’s are now open:
June 24-25, 2017
Portland, Oregon
The seventh annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
I hope to see people there in person, though I’ll note that remote attendance is possible as well.
This post started out initially as a brief status update and I extended it with the video and notice about the upcoming Summit.
Now that I’m past what I would consider “note” length, and since it’s a milestone of sorts, I thought it would be interesting to take a nostalgic look back at my last year of Indieweb. I didn’t think it would be quite so much, but it’s really amazing what you can do if you take things in small steps over time. So here’s a quick review of some of the things I’ve done in the last year on my site. (Thank goodness for documentation!)
Other Indieweb activities, which don’t necessarily appear on my site:
As a separate statistic I made approximately 1,071 posts to my (main) site in the last year compared to 136 in the same time frame the year prior. There are over 2,400 posts on my social stream site this past year. It’s great owning it all here now instead of having it spread out all over hundreds of other sites and thousands of URLs over which I have no control.
To my recollection I’ve only joined 6 new silos in the past year (to which I really only syndicate into). In that same time frame at least 15 services of which I was a member or used at one time or another have shut down and disappeared. Entertainingly (and perhaps miraculously) one which had previously disappeared came back to life: Upcoming.org!
