Reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Un podcast bien fait by Stéphane Deschamps (nota-bene.org)

Quand c’est bien fait, il faut le dire aussi.

Pardon the English, parce que mon français est très mal.

You indicate at the bottom of the post (the rough English translation is mine)

Bonus : c’est bien plus facile pour moi d’ajouter un texte à wallabag (au hasard) que de stocker un fichier audio pour une « consommation » facile. L’audio me demande toute une mise en œuvre assez pénible, pas le texte.
Bonus: It is much easier for me to add text to wallabag (at random) than to store an audio file for easy “consumption”. The audio requires quite a painful implementation, but not so for the text.

If you’re a fan of Wallabag for bookmarking text for later, you might appreciate using Huffduffer.com for your audio. It has a simple bookmarklet that will pull audio files, text, and tags from webpages and save them to your account. Your account then has a variety of iTunes audio feeds that you can subscribe to in your podcatcher of choice so that you can listen to the audio at your convenience later. If your podcatcher supports it, you can play it back at speeds that suit you (vite, donc).

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Replied to a tweet by

Bill Bennett (Twitter)

“@ChrisAldrich Hi Chris, have you found an easy way to send different types or kinds to separate RSS feeds from Wordpress?”

Bill, I’m not sure I follow your question. What problem are you trying to solve?

If take a stab and read it as “how could one subscribe to a subset of content from a WordPress website”, then it helps to know that the core functionality of WordPress automatically includes feeds for all the taxonomies (and a variety of combinations) on a site. This means that all your tags, categories, Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have those) all have individual feeds. Thus if you wanted to separate your “featured” longer reads from your status updates, checkins, likes, or other post types, you could add a specific category or tag to those posts and they’d have a feed you could provide people with to subscribe. If you added “featured” as the tag, then the feed from your site would be:

https://billbennett.co.nz/tag/featured/feed/

Since you’re using post kinds, you already have an “article” feed at:

https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/article/

All of your top level menu items look like they have feeds associated with them, for example:

https://billbennett.co.nz/telecommunications/feed/

Post Kinds will also allow you to create aggregate feeds based on type so you could provide a linkblog feed of things you’ve liked, favorited, read, and bookmarked (if all of these are enabled on your site) with a link like:

https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/like,favorite,read,bookmark/feed/

It’s a bizarre hodgepodge of both Post Kinds and a category, but you can also specify exotic things like https://boffosocko.com/?kind=note&cat=945 which are things on my sites which are notes and categorized as reads. Simply throw in feed (to the right spot) for https://boffosocko.com/feed/?kind=note&cat=945/ et voilà! Something like this could allow you to tag/categorize your notes, likes, etc. and still not “spam” readers with them because they might be subscribed to your content with the taxonomies of “article” and “telecommunications”, for example.

Some additional illustrative examples include the fact that for most/all of the post kind links on my own homepage one could add /feed/ to the end of those URLs and get a subscribeable feed out of them. I also have some examples on my Subscribe page.

I’ve written a bit about some of this at “Cleaning up feeds, easier social following, and feed readers“, which also includes some links to prior work which may be helpful.

Here’s some additional detail from the WordPress Codex that may be helpful as well: https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/#finding-your-feed-url

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Replied to Do you keep a diary? Or a life log? by Matt Maldre (Spudart)

Do you keep a daily diary? I have a couple questions for you: Length: Do you keep it really short? Or do you write longer form? Medium: Where do you write it? In a physical notebook? Or maybe online in a blog? Maybe some sort of software, or Google Drive. The short diary in a …

I keep the sort of diary/commonplace book you’re talking about. Generally it lives in two places. The biggest portion lives on my website where I can generally quickly bookmark almost everything I read, listen to, watch, annotate, reply to, or deal with online in some fashion. Not all of my posts there are public, but they’re archived there privately for search.

My secondary backup is on OneNote (I’d used Evernote in the past and I find them roughly similar), where I’ll tend to keep some personal daily to do lists (not too dissimilar from a digital bullet journal) and other private things that are easier to keep there than on my own website.

I like that both OneNote and my website are available on almost all the platforms I regularly use, so they’re always accessible to me.

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Replied to The IndieWeb and Webmentions by

Brett Terpstra (BrettTerpstra.com)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a while back I added a nifty feature to posts on this site which displays activity from Twitter and Mastodon (likes, retweets, replies) on each post. In most cases, more responses to my work happen on social media...

Be careful, because Webmention also means you’ll get responses from other websites too! Congratulations and welcome to the new world. I’ve added a link to your article to the IndieWeb Jekyll page which has some other useful resources too.

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Read How I did a Twitter giveaway, got 10K+ new followers and discovered you can hack most giveaways to win them (levels.io)

It was almost New Year's Eve and I wanted to do something special on Twitter. I had 69,800 followers and because I admittedly am an imperfect and superficial human addicted to vanity metrics, I wanted to get to 70,000 followers before midnight and it becoming 2020. To celebrate

My friend Marc again to the rescue. He suggested that since there was 10,000+ people RT’ing and following, I could just pick a random follower from my current total follower list (78,000 at this point), then go to their profile to check if they RT’d it and see. If they didn’t, get another random follower and repeat, until you find someone. With 78,000 followers this should take about ~8 tries. ❧

Technically he said it would be random among those who retweeted, but he’s chosen a much smaller subset of people who are BOTH following him and who retweeted it. Oops!
Annotated on January 13, 2020 at 01:10PM

So, based on your write up it sounds like you’re saying that if one retweeted, but wasn’t following you, one had no chance of winning. This means a few thousand people still got lost in the shuffle. Keep in mind that some states have laws regarding lotteries, giveaways, games like this. Hopefully they don’t apply to you or your jurisdiction.

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Read Converting Webmentions to Push Notifications by

Jamie Tanna (jvt.me)

Automagically sending push notifications to my mobile phone when I receive a Webmention.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but this seems like a nice real-time feature. Since I have an RSS feed for comments on my website, I’ve just thrown that into IFTTT with workflow that takes new feed items and then sends me a Pushbullet notification.

Replied to a tweet by

curried apotheosis (Twitter)

A frequently recurring product wish I have when interacting with issue trackers: labels that I can add to issues, and only I can see.

They're for my organization and tagging. That's it.

Not going beyond "me" is a *feature*.
— curried apotheosis (@warpfork) January 8, 2020

I do something like this on my own website. Post issues there so I can own the data (and tags) and control the details and notes and syndicate a copy to GitHub. I’ve documented some of it here: Enabling two way communication with WordPress and GitHub for Issues. Others have done it as well: https://indieweb.org/issue. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but it works well for me and just for the reasons you describe.

If others want to see my details, the’re available on my site (when I make them public), but they’re primarily for my benefit and not others. The public copy conforms to the silo’s requirements and can be modified by the repo owners, if necessary.

Bookmarked at 2020/01/10 9:51:41 pm

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Read We're closing Crosscut's comment section. Here's why — and what's next by Ana Sofia Knauf, Anne Christnovich, Mohammed Kloub (crosscut.com)

With the rise of social platforms and an uptick in threatening comments, the newsroom is taking reader engagement in a different direction.

We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.❧

The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.

Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:33PM

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by:
Liking us on Facebook
Following us on Twitter
Following us on Instagram
Chatting with us on Reddit
Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters ❧

It seems like they’ve chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?

Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community’s responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected? How can the paper better help to shape the community without it?

I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:42PM

It would be cool if they considered adding syndication links to their original articles so that when they crosspost them to social media, at least their readers could choose to follow those links and comment there in a relatively continuous thread. This would at least help to aggregate the conversation for them and their community while still off-loading the moderation burden from their staff, which surely is part of their calculus. It looks like their site is built on Drupal. I would suspect that–but I’m not sure if–swentel’s IndieWeb Drupal module has syndication links functionality built into it.

Rather than engaging their community, it almost feels to me like they’re giving up and are allowing a tragedy of their commons when there may be some better experimental answers that just aren’t being tried out.

The worst part of this for me though is that they’ve given up on the power of owning and controlling their own platform. In the recent history of journalism, this seems to be the quickest way of becoming irrelevant and dying out.

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