Read Adding Some Context to (Web)mentions by Jan BoddezJan Boddez (janboddez.tech)
Triggered by Ton’s “Webmention tweaks”—or is it “Semantic Linkbacks tweaks”?—I decided to have a look at how WordPress generates its increasingly rare pingback “previews.” The resulting gist is a somewhat ugly PHP function that, given an HTML string and target URL, returns the link...
Read Local First, Undo Redo, JS-Optional, Create Edit Publish by Tantek ÇelikTantek Çelik (tantek.com)
For a while I have brainstormed designs for a user experience (UX) to create, edit, and publish notes and other types of posts, that is fully undoable (like Gmail’s "Undo Send" yet generalized to all user actions) and redoable, works local first, and lastly, uses progressive enhancement to work wi...
Read Choosing an Online Bank for Your Blog or Podcast by Joe BuhligJoe Buhlig (joebuhlig.com)
Save yourself the trouble. Set up a bank account for your blog or podcast early on in the process. The accounting mess of managing the finances within your personal account isn’t worth the trouble. This is especially true when there are online business banks that make the process smooth. I did it ...
Read 7 Reasons Why You Should NOT Use Jetpack (Toolbar Extras)
The Jetpack Plugin from Automattic leaves no one cold. And it polarizes extremely. Either you love it or you hate it. There doesn’t seem to be a grey area in between, does there?
Some interesting and useful points here. Is Automattic becoming a bit too much like some of their fellow social silos?

I’m curious if anyone has done a grid comparison or set of suggestions to replace Jetpack functionality with other community based plugins for those that only want one or two of the features?

Read Twitter demands legal fees from Devin Nunes’ attorney in new filing over fake cow’s identity by Kate Irby (The Fresno Bee)
Twitter is demanding that Rep. Devin Nunes’ lawyer pay its legal fees in a new court filing responding to one of the Republican congressman’s attempts to identify anonymous people who heckle him online. Nunes is suing Twitter in a Virginia court, but the new filing is part of a lawsuit that is not related to the California lawmaker.
Devin Nunes is such a bone head.
Read thread by Brendan SchlagelBrendan Schlagel (Twitter)
Just finished reading this. Some interesting tidbits hiding in it.
Read Announcing THATCamp retrospective and sunsetting by Amanda French (thatcamp.org)
The first THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) was held at the Center for History and New Media (now the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media) at George Mason University in the summer of 2008 (back when Flickr was a big deal — click the above screenshot to browse THATCamp photos on Flickr). I wrote a fair amount about how THATCamp first came to be and how it was turned into a larger initiative in a 2013 talk called “On Projects, and THATCamp.” Nearly seven years later, I’m still proud of THATCamp; I think it has been a model of sustainability among grant-funded projects, and I think it did a great deal to demystify the digital humanities and digital methods more generally for a whole generation of scholars and information professionals. The number of registered THATCamps has grown from 170 when I wrote that talk in 2013 to (my goodness) over 320 events today, a phenomenon that has taken place without a single full-time THATCamp employee, with just a dedicated distributed community and the hosting support of staff members at RRCHNM and Reclaim Hosting. The WordPress Multisite instance on thatcamp.org has 11,803 users, and while it’s true that several hundred of those might be spam or inactive users, I think that’s still impressive.
Read Take the Quiz: Could You Manage as a Poor American? (New York Times)
See whether you make the kinds of mistakes that can cost poor families food or health insurance.
This is some horrid evidence. 

From a web development perspective, I love the way the mail in this article moves as you scroll. It adds to the overall effect of the story here.

Originally bookmarked on January 29, 2020 at 06:39AM


Debates about how to structure these programs have long been influenced by a related economic assumption: The more people really need a benefit, the more effort they’ll put into getting it. “For decades, economists had this view that burdens could quote-‘help’ separate out those that are what one calls truly disadvantaged versus those who might be more marginally needy,” said Hilary Hoynes, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “Our current research suggests it could be exactly the opposite.” These burdens, she suggested, may instead be tripping up the worst off: hourly workers who can’t shuffle their schedules for a meeting; parents dealing with domestic violence, disabilities or low literacy; families without bank accounts to automate monthly payments; households already facing unpaid bills and late notices when another urgent letter arrives in the mail.

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 11:12AM


It can be easier to apply for farm subsidies than it is to get SNAP benefits, said Joel Berg, a former official with the Department of Agriculture, the agency that administers both programs.

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 11:14AM


Read Electric Book Works: Producing The Economy: a case study in multi-format book production by Arthur Attwell (Electric Book Works)
Very rarely, a book-maker gets to add new tricks to the 500-year-old craft of book-making. We got to do that in producing The Economy.
This is an awesome piece with some good overview of dovetailing some of the issues between physical and digital publishing. Some good resources here to check out.

Originally bookmarked on January 28, 2020 at 01:55PM


Notice how print books have remained ad-free in an age when every other available surface carries advertising – something about print books has kept them immune from the disease of advertising.

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 09:58AM


Books as websites can be public goods in a way that printed books cannot, especially for the poor.

Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 09:59AM


There are other great teams doing similar work: PressBooks uses a WordPress backend for online book and website development. Booktype, which has been around for a long time, also uses a browser-based editing workflow to produce HTML and PDF books. PubSweet is developing a modular editorial workflow, optimised, for now, for journals and monographs. The MagicBook project is being used at New York University. And our Electric Book workflow uses on- and offline static-site generation to make print and digital books.

Nice list of tools for digital publishing for the book space.
Annotated on February 04, 2020 at 10:01AM

Replied to Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? by Wendy Hanamura (Internet Archive Blogs)
We agree. Much work has been done and some of the fundamentals are in place. So on January 21, 2020 the Internet Archive hosted “Exploring Decentralized Social Media,” a DWeb SF Meetup that attracted 120+ decentralized tech builders, founders, and those who just wanted to learn more. Decentralized social media app builders from London, Portland and San Francisco took us on a tour of where their projects are today.
Something important to notice about this article. Not a single person here is linked to using their own website, or via a link to their presence on any of their respective decentralized networks. All the people whose names are linked are linked to on Twitter. All of the people who’ve written pieces or articles linked to in this piece are writing on Medium.com and not on their own sites/platforms. How can we honestly be getting anywhere if there isn’t even a basic identity for any of these people on any of these decentralized networks? At least most of the projects seem to have websites, so that’s a start. But are any of them dogfooding their own products to do so? I suspect not.

I’ll circle back around shortly to watch the video of the event that they recorded. I’m curious what else they’ve got hiding in there.

Interestingly, I’ll note that it appears that my site will at least somewhat federate with the Internet Archive’s as they support pingback. (Great to see technology from almost 20 years ago works just as well as some of these new methods…)

Graber helped us understand the broad categories of what’s out there: federated protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix; peer-to-peer protocols such as Scuttlebutt, and social media apps that utilize blockchain in some way for  monetization, provenance or storage.

Missing from this list is a lot of interop work done by the IndieWeb over the past decade.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:48PM

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected.

An apt analogy which I’ve used multiple times in the past.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:50PM

Read Kyiv not Kiev: US changes spelling of Ukrainian capital | KyivPost - Ukraine's Global Voice (KyivPost)
The United States Board on Geographic Names, or BGN, has changed its English spelling of Ukraine’s capital from Kiev to Kyiv, the Embassy of Ukraine in the U.S. announced in a statement on June 13. The U.S. BGN is a federal body under the U.S. Secretary of the Interior that is tasked with deciding on …
Interesting to see the date on this vis-a-vis the whole Ukraine and impeachment business.