Reply | Chris Aldrich

👓 IndieWeb and the Log Lolla theme | More Themes Baby

Replied to IndieWeb and the Log Lolla theme (More Themes Baby)

Lately I found myself posting a lot about IndieWeb, and thinking about how useful it could be for the next versions of the Log Lolla theme.

I ran across this article today as the result of a refback of all things (hooray for old web infrastructure!). The site had reposted a few IndieWeb related articles I wrote in the past year.

Since they don’t support webmention and don’t seem to have comments on their site open, I’ll say “Hello!” by syndicating to Twitter. I hope you haven’t given up on the idea of what the IndieWeb stands for and are still thinking of making your Log Lolla theme directly compatible with how the IndieWeb works with WordPress. There are a bunch of us out here who’d love to give you any help and support you need as we’d all love to see more IndieWeb friendly themes in the WordPress repo. Feel free to join us in the #IndieWeb chat or the #WordPress chat to say hello.

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Reply to Taylor Jadin about planet functionality for education

Replied to a tweet by

Taylor Jadin (Twitter)

It was a pretty productive Open Domains Lab for me. Got my sort "funnel" site set somewhat set up using FeedWordpress. http://taylor.jadin.me/

I’m curious to hear your thoughts after using it. It sounds like it has a lot of functionality overlap with Press Forward (for WordPress). Planet-like functionality is commonly requested in the education and technology space. Are there others? Stephen Downes‘ gRSShopper perhaps?

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👓 Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos | Hapgood

Replied to Civix Releases New Online Media Literacy Videos by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

I worked with Civix, a Canadian non-profit, to do a series of videos showing students basic web techniques for source verification and contextualization. I had boiled it down to four scripts runnin…

As I read this and tinker around a bit with some of the resources, including one for canadafactcheck.ca mentioned within one of the videos and add the “Wikipedia” to the Omnibar or try the “-site:” trick, the results there aren’t very solid themselves. Similarly a search for NewsWise.ca is rough because there are dozens of similar products with the same name which makes me think about the phrase “Doctor heal thyself.”

On the idea of the “-site:xyz.com” trick, perhaps one could create a browser extension or a bookmarklet that would use javascript to take the URL in the browser bar and massage it to return the requisite string and then execute the appropriate search so that with a simple click of a button, anyone can “remember” how to do it?

Similarly with searching for the root URLs of particular outlets by clipping off the longer paths of URLs one could use a browser bookmarklet to accomplish this with a simple click and save the seconds involved with highlighting and pasting? The more dead simple and quicker it can be, the better off we are. I’ve documented a browser bookmarklet on my site that trims news article URLs down to the base URL: https://boffosocko.com/2017/03/27/to-amp-or-not-to-amp-that-is-the-question/

As an example of this type of functionality, albiet probably with a lot more programming and manual work, Brill’s company NewsGuard has developed a Chrome browser extension that is meant to provide visual indicators on pages and in search for levels of fact checking: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/newsguard/hcgajcpgaalgpeholhdooeddllhedegi?hl=en

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👓 Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released | David Shanske

Replied to Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released by

David Shanske (David Shanske)

At the Indieweb Summit in June, someone said something to me that made me decide to embark on a major rewrite of the Micropub endpoint for WordPress. For those of you not familiar with it, Micropub is a standard that allows for you to publish to a website. The major work on this actually finished in...

Hooray! And Congratulations!

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Replied to Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century Education 2018 (youtube.com)

Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century Education
13:00 – 14:15
Probe 3: How might an ethically and morally-informed AI be conceived in a culturally diverse global context? How might we realize a more equitably-designed, developed and deployed AI in light of the rate and range of disruption some have forecast as inevitable?
Panel: Abhishek Gupta, Nevena Francetic, Stephen Downes and video clips of Timnit Gebru & Rediet Abebe
Facilitator: Tylor Burrows

For the #e21sym question about Amazon’s AI discriminating against women, we do have some control. This article about how Sears helped to provide equality in the Jim Crow south is a great historical example of how economics can create equality: https://boffosocko.com/2018/10/18/searss-radical-past-how-mail-order-catalogues-subverted-the-racial-hierarchy-of-jim-crow-washington-post/

Reply to Introducing Alhambra Source’s new publisher

Replied to Introducing Alhambra Source’s new publisher by

Staff (Alhambra Source)

Jon Thurber, a veteran journalist whose long career at the Los Angeles Times included serving as managing editor of the print edition, has been named publisher of the Alhambra Source.

Thurber held a number of other management positions at the Times, including news obituary editor and editor of the book review, and he was also a leader of the paper’s reinvention committee as the Times transitioned from a predominantly print product to refocus its efforts on digital publication.

“Jon has the experience and vision to move the Alhambra Source forward to an even more dynamic civic institution in Alhambra and the larger SGV,” said Sandra Ball-Rokeach, Professor of Communication and Sociology Emerita at USC Annenberg School for Communication and one of the founders of the Alhambra Source.

Congratulations both to and on the new publisher!

I’ve recently begun reading a variety of more local news sources, most of which are built on the WordPress CMS, as is your publication. As a digital native, I often prefer reading my news via RSS feeds, but I find it surprising that many local SGV sources have (accidentally?) broken or are mismanaging their feeds.

I notice that the Alhambra Source’s main feed only contains the “News Round up” articles which primarily feature news in other outlets. While this type of advertising for and promotion of others’ work is nice, I’m subscribed to many of them already and would prefer a single feed with all of the Alhambra Source’s own original work instead! In fact, because I automatically subscribed to the AS’s main feed without looking at the site first, I was under the mistaken impression that it only did aggregation rather than original reporting, an impression which is obviously the opposite of reality.

Because a “main” feed is not available, I’m forced to subscribe to 8 separate feeds to attempt to get all of the great work coming out of AS. This feels like a bit much and could be easily fixed on your back end. A better solution would be to have your main feed include all of your articles (perhaps including the News Roundup), and then still provide the separate category-based feeds for those who are only interested in the subsections of news. (This would typically be the default for an out of the box WordPress installation.)

Finally, I’ve noticed that your feeds don’t include any of the photos featured in the articles, which is a shame since the site has some generally nice photography (particularly in comparison to competitors) to go along with the stories.

If you need any technical help, I’m happy to assist as I’d love to see better local news and events coverage in the Pasadena/SGV areas.

Congratulations again!

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Reply to Pasadena Busing Controversy: Sept. 14, 1970 by Roxanne Elhachem

Replied to Pasadena Busing Controversy: Sept. 14, 1970 by

Roxanne Elhachem (ColoradoBoulevard.net)

The busing proposition in Pasadena brought mixed emotions for its citizens. Although many were happy about the social progression that was occurring in this town, it may have indirectly kept, if not increased, some of the segregation within the city. Private schools were not included in this new plan, and because of that, people who didn’t agree with the plan — and could afford it — sent their kids to affluent private schools. This lead to around 30 private schools (currently 53) being present in the city of Pasadena.Students arriving by school bus in early 70s (Photo – The U.S. National Archives).In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. In the 1970s and...

Thanks for highlighting this archival news footage. I’ve always wondered why it seemed like Pasadena had so many private schools given its relative size, though I do wonder how it compares to the rest of southern California on a private school per capita basis. I’d never considered that this may be one of the largest driving factors.

I’m curious what the numbers for the city’s public and private schools are? Perhaps a follow up with some graphs, charts, and further analysis would be worthwhile? I’m definitely curious.

In the meanwhile, the topic reminded me of this relatively recent segment of Jon Oliver’s show which focused on school segregation and which also featured Ronald Reagan: