Category: Reply

Replied to a tweet by André JaenischAndré Jaenisch (Twitter)
I 💜 @macgenie and had the pleasure of sitting next to her @IndieWebSummit last year! Matthias Pfefferle (aka @pfefferle or same handle on m.b.) is one of my favorite IndieWeb resources and his German is far better than mine.
 
If you can give your micro.blog account an RSS, JSON, or other feed for your site, then eleventy should work fine with it.
Replied to a tweet by DOMAINS 19DOMAINS 19 (Twitter)

Thanks for hosting it all and congratulations!

Here’s something I wrote earlier today: Domains 2019 Reflections from Afar

And I’ve bookmarked, linked, noted, highlighted, etc. about 40 other pieces and resources here: https://boffosocko.com/tag/domains-2019/

Replied to a tweet by Frivolous AxiomFrivolous Axiom (Twitter)

When you’re back and settled, I’d love to get together for coffee to discuss Domains 2019 and math. I couldn’t make it but caught big chunks remotely. I’m nearby in the Pasadena area and happy to come to you if necessary.

Replied to a tweet by Rachel CherryRachel Cherry (Twitter)

I’m definitely curious what you come up with! There are so many syndication options and I’m always on the look out for better/more standardized methods. (Of course, nothing beats the feed directly from the source…)

Once you have posting out done, are you going to work on backfeed to have the responses to your posts on Twitter come back to aggregate the conversation on the original site? Perhaps using Webmention and Brid.gy?

Replied to a tweet by femedtechfemedtech (Twitter)

Five is far from enough. Here’s just a few (in no particular order):

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Cathie LeBlanc, Robin DeRosa, Amy Collier, Audrey Watters, Amy Guy,  Kimberly Hirsh, Catherine Cronin, Martha Burtis, Autumn Caines, Christina Hendricks, Maha Bali, Lee Skallerup Bessette, Meredith Broussard, Helen DeWaard, Devon Zuegel, Kate Bowles, Irene Stewart, Rachel Cherry, Jess Reingold, Laura Pasquini, Laura Gibbs, Lora Taub-Pervizpour, Hilary Mason, Miriam Posner, Kay Oddone, Rayna Harris, Amber Case, Teodora Petkova, Anelise H. Shrout, Jean MacDonald, Natalie Lafferty, Lauren Brumfield, Meredith Fierro

And don’t just follow them on Twitter, fill your brain up by following their longer thoughts in the feeds from their own domains, which I’ve linked. This way you won’t miss anything truly important in the overwhelming flow of Twitter and other social media.

Bookmarked Space Food Cookbook (space-food-cookbook.pubpub.org)

The MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative is developing “Off Earth Gastronomy”--a collection of thought-provoking recipes, tools for eating, whimsical experiences and culinary designs for life in space.

Deadline to apply: July 15, 2019

MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative welcomes all forms of submissions from project briefs to existing designs (recipes, experiential designs, tools for eating, short stories, illustrations, photos) surrounding the future of food in outer space.

For inquiries about the project please email: Maggie Coblentz (mcoblent@media.mit.edu)

Submit project proposals here.

Not much here yet, but this seems like just the thing that Jeremy Cherfas (@eatpodcast) would appreciate and could potentially turn into an episode sometime in the future.

Replied to #oext360 #oextend Music Maketh Me | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

Spell out your name with songs! What are the tunes that make up “you”?

Musik auf Schallplatte


Musik auf Schallplatte flickr photo by Tim Reckmann | a59.de shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license

Everyone’s made up of Stuff. Lots of little things that come together in a collective and show who they are, y’know? One of the ways to get to know someone is through the music they listen to. But this won’t be as scary as “list the next 10 songs that come on shuffle for you,” don’t worry.

Let’s share with the world some of the tunes we jam to by spelling out our name with songs… acrostic poem style!

Here’s my example:

M: “Miss You” by Foster The People
A: “And July” by Heize (feat. DEAN & DJ Friz)
S: “Sloom” by Of Monsters and Men
O: “Our Place” by Hyukoh
O: “Obstacles” by Syd Matters
C: “Castle On The Hill” by Ed Sheeran
H: “House Of Cards (Full Length Edition)” by BTS

Feel free to link to each song so others can check them out! Or not! I ain’t your boss; do what you want!

Since this is a long one, it might help to do it in a thread form on Twitter (with each reply as one letter), or add it to one of your blog posts! Happy jamming, friends!

This was created by a Networked Narratives student for the Daily Digital Alchemy.

In keeping with my effort to focus my responses to the June Daily Extend Challenge on my own domain, I thought I’d add the additional constraint that all the songs I chose would need to be from the jams I’ve explicitly posted on my own site in the past–the assignment did say “tunes we jam to” after all! This prevents me, to some extent, of fashioning an identity using songs I might otherwise go out and freely choose. As a result you’ll get songs I actually listen to and have actively posted about in the past. 

To back it up with some additional data, I’m also linking to my listening history of them on Last.fm, though I notice that my account isn’t catching as much material as it had previously because I spend a lot of time listening to music on my Amazon Alexa now, and that doesn’t log the hundreds of times I’ve surely listened to Rich Girl over the past several years. Of course some of my Last.fm scrobbles are aggregated under other versions of these songs as well since they separate originals and remasters from various albums and re-releases.

You should be able to click through to individual jams to hear the songs inline on my site.

C: Carry that Weight – The Beatles #
H: Heart of Gold – Neil Young #
R: Rich Girl – Hall & Oates #
I: I’m Not in Love – 10cc #
S: Sinnerman – Nina Simone #

I also can’t help but mention that when I didn’t renew my subscription to Spotify a while back, they sent me a playlist that wasn’t too dissimilar from this exercise: 

A playlist whose titles spell out an homage to the song "If you leave us now you'll take away the biggest part of us"

Replied to #oext359 #oextend Daily is the New Daily: How Do You Bend Time? | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

The Daily Extend has actually been not up to its name since February; we had loosened the pace to have it published every two days. But we can do some time bending back, especially as June is the Daily Extend 20 day challenge. Keanu Reeves Film GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY

Woah, Neo.

We just bent time back, and are now back on a daily pace.

How do you bend time? Or does time bend you? What kinds of ways do you deploy your Experimenter Module chops to do this? What is your relationship with time? Show us in an image, a clever tweet, or a non-Matrix GIF.

I’ve always tried to bend time to my will using the Pomodoro method. Sadly my 25 minute blocks are regularly interrupted by this woof on a 10 minute interval for more belly rubs.

German shepherd pretends to be a pomodoro timer by laying down and presenting her belly for rubs.

Replied to #oext358 #oextend Pitch a Podcast Episode | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

Have you listened to a recent podcast that made you jump up on excitement saying “everyone should listen to this”?

Even if not, recommend a compelling podcast episode that would be meaningful to other Ontario Extenders.

podcast

podcast flickr photo by freeblogphotos shared under a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Since this #oextend is in the curator series, I’ll turn it on it’s ear to recommend my own faux cast. It’s a self-curated list of all the podcasts and audio that I’ve actually listened to and frequently comment on. Here’s the feed for it if you want to subscribe.

Many people recommend podcasts to me, but I suspect that the majority of the time, they’re just parroting back what’s popular or they’ve heard about recently. Listening to podcasts is often work and takes some effort in investing one’s time. As a result, just knowing what podcasts people have actually listened to is very valuable. If it wasn’t good, interesting, or entertaining, they’d have switched the channel. If they listened and actively chose to share it, it must be even better.

If anyone is interesting in building and sharing their own faux-cast, I’m happy to help them do something similar on their own website. 

Of course if you want the more “traditional” answer, there are lots of awesome podcasts about which I think, “Everyone should listen to this!” John Biewen’s Seeing White is one of my favorites.

Replied to My Human Readable OPML Blogroll by Ton ZijlstraTon Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
After my recent posting where I asked people which RSS feeds they read, I received several responses. One of them is Peter’s. Like me he was publishing an OPML file of his feeds already. OPML is a machine readable format that most RSS readers will be able to import, so you can subscribe to blogs I...

Ton, this is great! Though perhaps you’re reinventing the wheel a bit more than you may have needed to?

I’ll see you your blogroll and add in images and descriptions as well! https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

A while back I did something similar to what you and Peter have done, I just did it with the old built in Link Manager feature of WordPress. The primary difference is that I’ve got some meta data about what the site/feed is about in addition to an image. I left out the feed in the human readable version as it’s less likely to be used, while it’s more valuable to the computer readable version. I’ve also figured out the a URL query parameter for breaking my blogroll up by category, so that folks can copy smaller subsections of it.

Another added bonus is that I’m using Inoreader which supports OPML subscriptions so that any time I update my OPML file, my feed reader auto-updates for me without needing to manually upload the new OPML file! This means I just add the follow in one place and everything else follows without any additional work.

Here are the details for how I did most of it:

Perhaps what we really need is to give some love to that Link Manager in core to update it to OPML v2 and add in the rel attributes from XFN microformats to the links? 

When you have a moment, be sure to add your example to the OPML and blogroll pages on the IndieWeb wiki, where you may find some additional inspiration.

Thanks for experimenting to bring back the blogroll! (And thanks for sharing, there are a few of your feeds I see that I ought to be following and I also recognize those we have in common of many educators I already do follow.)

Replied to Subsite of my subdomain? (is that the right term?) by Lisa Koster (Extend Activity Bank)

A response to the Adding a Self Contained Site with File Manager Activity
created  by Lisa Koster (@lkoster)

So this was a bit different for me. This year I am doing everything within the camp2019.learn4growth.com site, so I had to look at slightly different places for the files and to create the subdirectory.

It was a great test to see if I remembered anything from last year.

I added a directory called “Subsite” and uploaded the zip file.  Once extracted, it created the site easily.

Changing the information by editing the index file was straightforward.  I used the visual editor. no HTML required.

Changing the pictures was a different story.  I changed them as the directed, but for some reason the pictures weren’t changing. I changed browsers, and it worked. I went “incognito” and it also worked.

I am guessing that it wasn’t truly re-loading the pictures (although the text was changed).

I think I will have to explore the HTML UP (https://html5up.net/) now!

Lisa, the pictures didn’t refresh in your browser because they were cached within it. (This typically means that pages you visit often don’t need to re-download everything each time.)

If you had cleared your cache (Google it to see how for your particular browser), they would have updated immediately the way they did in a different browser or in “incognito” mode because those two didn’t have those same photos cached.

Replied to Adding a Self Contained Site with File Manager by Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)
Screenshot of sample basic calling card web page featuring a background with a 6 year old with his mouth agape.

Many of the sites we create in our cpanel are installed via a cpanel tool because they have complex file structures and often require database set ups. But there are quite a few web site themes that are all self contained HTML/CSS/Javsscript files that we can upload directly to our domain with the File Manager.

This activity walks you through the steps to put a self-contained web site within a directory of your site.

I created a sub-folder on my sub-domain and uploaded a simple templated HTML5/CSS website to create a simple calling card page at http://sp.chrisaldrich.net/me/. I couldn’t bring myself to replace the picture of the little kid with the gaping mouth because it was just too cute.

While I occasionally do some small uploading tweaks like this, it seems like ages since I created webpages like this outside of more elaborate content management systems. Hooray for raw HTML and CSS! It’s also a bit refreshing to do it all manually in an interface instead of via FTP or other means.

Replied to Building a Front Entrance for Your Domain with Site Publisher (Extend Activity Bank)

ornate stone gate standing freely in a countryside field with the words domain.me superimposed on the bottom

A Domain of your Own gives you more than one web site you can put there, think of it as a plot of land with many different structures.

It’s useful to have an entrance gate or a simple “calling card” for the main URL of you domain (e.g. like extendlabs.ca). Later we will show you how to install blogs and other applications at different locations within.

Your web hosting cpanel includes an easy to use tool that will let you create your first web site just by filling out a few items in a form. These are simple, and probably in no time you will find them limiting. But for now, in a few minutes you can create something with information you choose to replace the temporary screen a new Reclaim Hosting domain provides you. Consider it as a placeholder for a fancier front entrance.

These are an interesting little side experiment for getting something quick and dirty up. I think they’d be more valuable as simple templates if they’d let one define some additional links like “Blog” with an icon and a field to redirect to a subdirectory or subdomain. I was also surprised that there were so many religious-related templates instead of educational ones.

My favorite was the Pravatar tool hiding in the lesson. I can think of lots of fun uses for a tool like this. 

My placeholder “site” lives at https://sp.chrisaldrich.net/.

Quickly making watch posts on my website

I was reading about how Cathie LeBlanc sometimes felt overwhelmed about logging the movies she’d recently seen:

I have to be better about posting my movie “reviews” more quickly. I get overwhelmed thinking that I need to write something about the movie when really the whole point of me doing these reviews is just to record what movies I’ve seen. So this month, I’m writing very little about each of these viewings.

I always had this problem too and finding quick and easy ways of posting them before I forgot became part of the solution. I’m not sure I’ve fully documented what I’ve been doing, but it’s slowly changed over time, so I thought I’d take a moment to write down some of the faster methods I use or have used.

One can always use the WordPress mobile posting app, bookmarklets in conjunction with Post Kinds, or even posting via email, but it usually takes a few minutes and can distract from conversations and family/friends when they’re around. Generally I’m looking to immediately capture the title of the film/tv show, the date/time stamp, and maybe the location. Later on, when I’ve got a few extra minutes, I’ll come back and optionally add details/context like poster art, cast, crew, etc. and a mini review with a rating. The method you use will depend on what kind of display you want and how much detail you’d like. At the end of the day, do what works best for you.

Checkin Method

I’m a relatively avid user of the Swarm app (fka Foursquare), so I’ll often take a photo of the movie poster, ticket, theater/other while I’m at the theater and then quickly checkin on my phone. Swarm typically has some interface to indicate which movie I’m seeing when I check into movie theaters. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to manually type things in while I’m waiting for the show to start. Once the movie is over I can discretely can go back to the checkin and add a few quick comments and a rating without disturbing the rest of the party, otherwise I’ll revisit it later.

To get this all on my website I’ve set up the Micropub plugin and configured OwnYourSwarm (for public/private posting–you choose), and the service takes care of posting all the data for me as a checkin so that I don’t forget. In the end it’s usually less than 10 seconds, and I’ve got the data I need as it happens.

Traditional PESOS watch method using IFTTT

This alternate PESOS method can be done using popular services like IMDb.com or Letterboxd.com and relies on using RSS feeds from them to pipe content to my site using IFTTT.com. (Other silo services may be able to do this as well.) Most often I send the URLs of movies/tv shows of what I watch from IMDb to my Reading.am account which has an RSS feed to trigger IFTTT.com that, in turn, creates a draft post on my website. (If only IMDB.com had a usable RSS feed, I could skip the Reading.am account. Typically I’ll search for the movie on IMDb, share that from my browser to may email client and email it to a custom Reading.am email address that autoposts it to my Reading.am account.) Later I can peek in on it, add a mini-review and rating if I like, and publish publicly or not. Letterboxd can be used similarly, but it has the added benefit of having a rating system built in so it can send that data as well.

Hopefully they’ll resolve with a logged in account, so here are the two IFTTT.com recipes I’m using as reference:

(If you can’t access the recipes to recreate your own, let me know, and I’ll manually delineate all the relevant settings.)

Both methods will work without it, but I’m also using the Post Kinds plugin to create explicit watch posts which have a nice contextual presentation which I kind of like. It also has the ability to parse URLs to create the context quickly, so if you put in an IMDb or Letterboxd URL, it will fetch artwork, cast, description, etc. automatically and there’s no need to cut/paste.

Examples

To get some idea, here are some interesting examples of these methods.

If others have better/faster methods, I’d love to hear them or see them documented. Perhaps one day someone (or maybe even IMDb or Letterboxd) will build a custom Micropub client specifically for watch posts (something akin to Teacup for food/drink or Indiebookclub for reading) that will automatically poll the data related to a film/television title and post it to one’s site?

Replied to a tweet by John StewartJohn Stewart (Twitter)

I bookmarked a great post by Jim Luke (@econproph) a few weeks ago on scale and scope. I suspect that tech’s effect on education is heavily (if not permanently) scale-limited, but scope may be a better avenue going forward.

I also suspect that Cesar Hidalgo’s text Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies may provide a strong clue with some details. To some extent I think we’ve generally reached the Shannon limit for how much information we can pour into a single brain. We now need to rely on distributed and parallel networking among people to proceed forward.