IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum

Replied to Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning by

Been spending a bit of time in the past 2 days adding some new functionality to the blog. I am making more of an effort to write more, thanks in no small part to the 9x9x25 blog challenge I am doin…

Right now, I just want to write. ❧

You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM

My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. ❧

Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM

Grant Potter ❧

Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM

the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were ❧

a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM

I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used. ❧

It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM

👓 Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors | CNN

Read Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors (CNN)

Don't go to BrettKavanaugh.com looking for information about the nation's new Supreme Court Justice.

I read this article and want to coin the term “domain gilding” as a sub-category of domain squatting. I’m curious if others can think of examples?

Domain gilding: using the method of domain squatting with the intent of helping a potentially corporate or personal branded website accomplish more good in the world than if it were to be used by the person, company, or concept that might otherwise be broadly associated with the name.

🔖 Hypothesis User: kael

Bookmarked Hypothesis User: kael (hypothes.is)

Joined: September 9, 2018
Location: Paris
Link: del.icio.us/kael

I don’t think I’ve seen anyone using it this way before, but I’ve coincidentally noticed that Kael seems to be using Hypothes.is in an off-label manner as a bookmarking service with tagging rather than an annotation or highlighting service. Most of their “annotations” are really just basic page notes with one or two “tags” and rarely (if ever) any highlights or annotations.

I’m curious if the Hypothes.is team has considered making such additional functionalities more explicit within their user interface?

Social bookmarking does seem like a useful and worthwhile functionality that would dovetail well with many of their other functionalities as well as their basic audience of users. Perhaps some small visual UI clues and the ability to search for them as a subset would complete the cycle?

An IndieWeb talk at WordCamp Riverside in November 2018

I’ve submitted a talk for WordCamp Riverside 2018; it has been accepted.

My talk will help to kick off the day at 10am on Saturday morning in the “John Hughes High” room. The details for the camp and a link to purchase tickets can be found below.

WordCamp Riverside 2018

Saturday, November 3rd & Sunday, November 4th
hosted at SolarMax, 3080 12th St., Riverside, CA 92507
Tickets are available now

Given that “Looking back to go forward” is the theme of the camp this year, I think I may have chosen the perfect topic. To some extent I’m going to look at how the nascent web has recently continued evolving from where it left off around 2006 before everyone abandoned it to let corporate silo services like Facebook and Twitter become responsible for how we use the web. We’ll talk about how WordPress can be leveraged to do a better job than “traditional” social media with much greater flexibility.

Here’s the outline:

The web is my social network: How I use WordPress to create the social platform I want (and you can too!)

Synopsis: Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “free” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?

I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb philosophies and related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSes.

Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.

Intended Audience: The material is introductory in nature and targeted at beginner and intermediate WordPressers, but will provide a crash course on a variety of bleeding edge W3C specs and tools for developers and designers who want to delve into them at a deeper level. Applications for the concepts can be of valuable to bloggers, content creators, businesses, and those who are looking to better own their online content and identities online without allowing corporate interests out-sized influence of their online presence.

I look forward to seeing everyone there!

👓 What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet? | Jeremy Dormitzer

Read What is ActivityPub, and how will it change the internet? by Jeremy Dormitzer (jeremydormitzer.com)

ActivityPub is a social networking protocol. Think of it as a language that describes social networks: the nouns are users and posts, and the verbs are like, follow, share, create… ActivityPub gives applications a shared vocabulary that they can use to communicate with each other. If a server implements ActivityPub, it can publish posts that any other server that implements ActivityPub knows how to share, like and reply to. It can also share, like, or reply to posts from other servers that speak ActivityPub on behalf of its users.

🔖 Open Design Kit: A toolkit for designing with distributed collaborators | Bocoup

Bookmarked Open Design Kit: A toolkit for designing with distributed collaborators by

Jess Klein (bocoup.com)

Today, we are pleased to announce Open Design Kit – a collection of remixable methods designed to support creativity and problem solving within the context of the agile and distributed 21st century workplace. We are creating this kit to share the techniques we use within our open design practice at Bocoup and teach to collaborators so they can identify and address design opportunities. As of the publication of this post, the kit can be accessed in a GitHub repository and it contains a dozen methods developed by fifteen contributors – designers, educators, developers from in and outside of Bocoup.

Design literacy needs to be constantly developed and improved throughout the software and product development industry. Designers must constantly level up their skillsets with lifelong learning. Engineers often need to learn how to collaborate and incorporate new practices into their workflow to successfully support the integration of design.

Clients and stakeholders are repeatedly challenged by the fact that design is a verb that needs constant attention and not a noun that is handed off.

To address this, Bocoup is openly compiling a suite of learning materials, methods, and systems to help our staff, clients, colleagues, and community better understand how we design and when to roll up their sleeves and get in on the action. It is our hope that this exploration will be useful for other companies and individuals to incorporate into their practice.

📺 IndieWebCamp NYC 2018 Jess Klein Keynote | YouTube

Watched IndieWebCamp NYC 2018 Keynote: Designing for participation in open spaces by Jess Klein from YouTube

Catching up on the last of the keynotes that I missed a few weeks back from IWC-NYC. Now I’ll have to spend some time going through the materials Jess highlighted…

🎧 Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? | Crazy/Genius | The Atlantic

Listened to Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened? by

Derek Thompson from The Atlantic

In a special bonus episode of the podcast Crazy/Genius, the computer scientist and data journalist Meredith Broussard explains how “technochauvinism” derailed the dream of the digital revolution.

I was excited to hear Dr. Meredith Broussard, a brilliant colleague I’ve met via the Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences, on this podcast from The Atlantic. I would recommend this special episode (one of their very best) to just about anyone. In particular there’s something to be gained in the people side of what the IndieWeb movement is doing as well as for their efforts towards inclusion.

From a broader perspective, I think there’s certainly something to be learned from not over-sensationalizing artificial intelligence. Looking at the history of the automobile as a new technology over a century ago is a pretty good parallel example. While it’s generally done a lot of good, the automobile has also brought along a lot of additional societal problems, ills, and costs with it as well.

I hadn’t yet heard about her new book Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World which I’m ordering a copy of today. I suspect that it’s in the realm of great books like Cathy O’Neill’s Weapons of Math Distraction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy which was also relevant to some of the topics within this podcast.

👓 The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all | The Verge

Read The breach that killed Google+ wasn’t a breach at all by Russell Brandom (The Verge)

A bug in the rarely used Google+ network has exposed private information for as many as 500,000 users. Should Google have shared more sooner?

👓 Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug | Tech Crunch

Read Google+ to shut down after coverup of data-exposing bug (TechCrunch)

Google is about to have its Cambridge Analytica moment. A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public pro…

📺 IndieWebCamp keynote: Connecting the World: Intentions and Realities with Maha Bali | YouTube

Watched IndieWebCamp keynote: Connecting the World: Intentions and Realities by

Maha Bali from YouTube

Link to slides in my blogpost

There are many things that matter that we don’t always see from an individual perspective. We also simultaneously need to be careful of attempting to only see things in the aggregate.

Originally bookmarked to watch on September 28, 2018 at 09:17AM. Missed the live stream due to time zone differential.