Category: Social Stream

Last year I thought it would be fun to outline how people might use their #WordPress websites to actively participate in #PressEdConf20 by posting content on their WordPress website and syndicating copies to Twitter for those following that way.
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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!
#PressEdConf20
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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 #PressEdConf20 presentation to get the juices flowing.
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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 #PressEdConf20 attendees.
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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. #PressEdConf20
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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. #PressEdConf20
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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 #PressEdConf20 on Twitter back to our posts using Webmention.
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Authenticate your website and Twitter account with Bridgy and enable Bridgy publish on your account page: brid.gy/twitter/userna…. #PressedConf20
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In Syndication Links settings
* Enable Syndication to Other Sites
* Enable Twitter via Bridgy
Add a custom provider:
* name: XYZ pressEdconf20
* UID: XYZ-pressEdconf20
* target URL: indieweb.xyz/en/pressEdconf…
Save the settings.
#PressEdConf20
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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 #PressEdConf20.
boffosocko.com/2020/03/19/557… 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). #PressEdConf20
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Others at #PressEdConf20 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.
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Those who are paying attention at #PressEdConf20 will see the value in webmention for allowing cross-site interactions without the need for “social media”. WithKnown, Drupal, Grav, and other CMSes are capable of doing this too.
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With luck, I’ll have created this entire #PressEdConf20 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…]
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P.S. There’s still some time to submit your talk for #PressEdConf20. 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.
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Replied to a tweet by Kevin TofelKevin Tofel (Twitter)
If you’ve got your own domain name and can export your content, that’s 100% IndieWeb. The rest is gravy. The key is to have a site do what you want it to. Join us for regular meetups/camps/chat if you’d like to work at adding other pieces you find useful.
Bookmarked a tweet (Twitter)
It’s starting to feel too late on the West coast of the US to start something right now, but my mind is buzzing. I’ll see if I can come up with something IndieWebby/Domain of One’s Owny overnight to post tomorrow. 

In the meanwhile, I’m curious what Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, and others might whip up while I’m sleeping?

Bookmarked Subscribe to Hypothesis annotations (diegodlh.github.io)
Do you want to know when someone annotates your webpages? Do you want to follow somebody's annotations? You have come to the right place.
I’ve seen a few people in the wild using Hypothes.is as a blog commenting system.[1][2] Since they don’t yet have separate support for Webmention or require a bit of programming to get notifications, I thought I’d highlight this particular implementation as it has a simple, but relatively elegant user interface for creating feeds to provide notifications for just such a use case.

One could easily wire up the output from this through a service like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc. to push the notifications to email, or other modalities as desired. 

It doesn’t give anything over and above what a Hypothes.is addict with some programming skills could already produce, but for those who are code averse, or just too busy with building other pieces of the Domain of One’s Own this could allow some simpler outputs.

If you are a tinkerer, there is a GitHub repo for the project.

While you’re at it, why not throw in the usernames of some of your favorite annotators and subscribe away in your favorite feed reader? Some of the best things I discover online are through colleagues’ annotations, I think, in part, because it’s a much higher level of engagement with the material than the pablum found in many Twitter feeds.

It could also be a good means of following annotations on some of your favorite hashtags in the system as well. Want to learn some new words? Follow wordnik in your feed reader. Want to know the state of the art in Open Education Resources? There’s a tag serious people are annotating with that you could follow in your reader.

Liked There's a light over in the IndieWeb space by Jason YavorskaJason Yavorska (metaluna.io)

In the end, I'm really glad the IndieWeb is out there as a kind of light in the darkness of what can otherwise seem like a more or less completely corporate daily web experience. It's weird in a good way. It's not corporate at all. It's rough around the edges and not tuned for maximum engagement. There are interesting people.. I've already connected with a few who are doing all kinds of creative things.

I feel like I've found a cozy little corner where people are following their passion, connecting with each other, and building creative things together. Long live the IndieWeb!

Read County Shuts Down Eaton Canyon Hiking Trails (pasadenanow.com)
“Eaton Canyon Natural Areas & Trails are closed for the rest of today & Memorial Day, May 25, due to overwhelming crowds that were not following the COVID-19 public health requirements. No walk-ins” the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation tweeted on Sunday.
The neighborhood has been overly busy since Friday at around noon. I’ve never seen so many people parking (even past our block) in the neighborhood to go hiking over here. Memorial day would have been insane if they didn’t shut it down.
Replied to a thread by Jesse Lang and Andrew Makousky (Twitter)
What about IndieWeb + WebRing? https://indieweb.org/indiewebring 
Replied to Webmentions and Campfires by Kevin CunninghamKevin Cunningham (kevincunningham.co.uk)
Over in the garden, I’ve started a section on webmentions - including how Lauro (@laurosilvacom) and I got them up and running on our Gatsby blogs. We streamed that and I’ll link to the video when it’s available. Equally, I’ve linked to some excellent examples and posts over there.

I want these posts to be part of a conversation rather than a one-sided proclamation from the roof-tops. Using webmentions to poll for replies on Twitter and other blogs seems like a good start.

What other ways can we stop ourselves standing in dark rooms and shouting into the void? How can we light campfires and create spaces for conversation that are welcoming and mutually beneficial?
Kevin, I like your ideas here and there are many of us who have been discussing it in various nooks of the internet over the past couple of years. It’s a movement and a discussion that has been slowly brewing, but seems to be coming to a boil.

While some of these ideas sound romantic at present with minimal penetration and implementation, we’ll definitely need to be cognizant of how they grow and building tools to mitigate abuses in the future as they become more common. No one wants Webmention to become a vector for spam and harassment the way it’s poorly designed and implemented predecessors like Pingback or Trackbacks were.

While the IndieWeb seems to be the largest hub of this conversation so far, especially for the technical portions, it’s also been distributed across multiple platforms and personal websites and wikis. If you haven’t come across the IndieWeb you may appreciate their wiki and bridged chat channels.

Lately I’ve noticed a big spillover into the wiki space primarily by way of Tom Critchlow, Kicks Condor, some from TiddlyWiki and the Roam Research spaces, and many of your colleagues at egghead.io. I’m personally looking forward to the convergence of the website, blog, personal wiki, commonplace book, etc. in a single platform. 

As I notice that you’re in Brighton, if you haven’t been before, you might consider joining in one of the local Homebrew Website clubs either there, in other parts of the UK, or across the world. I see events for Nottingham and London coming up on the schedule, but I’m sure Jeremy Keith or other organizers will do another in Brighton soon.

In any case, you’re on the web, and we can “see” and “hear” you. Thanks for drawing up a campfire to create a discussion.