Reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Adding a Self Contained Site with File Manager by Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)

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.

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:

IMDb/Reading.am: https://ifttt.com/applets/100364186d-reading-am-feed-creates-wordpress-watch-draft
Letterboxd: https://ifttt.com/applets/71675589d-letterboxd-syndication-to-wordpress-as-watches

(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.

Main watch feed: https://boffosocko.com/kind/watch/
Checkin: https://boffosocko.com/2017/07/23/checkin-at-pacific-theatres-glendale-18/
IMDb/Reading.am: https://boffosocko.com/2019/03/23/captain-marvel-2019-walt-disney-pictures/
Letterboxd: https://boffosocko.com/2019/03/02/studio-54-2018-zeitgeist-films-%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85%E2%98%85/

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 Stewart (Twitter)

What are ways to engage students in conversation around “salvation through technology.” #domains19

One example I’ve heard: “No worries about our planet with plans for space exploration.”
— Keegan Long-Wheeler (@KeeganSLW) June 10, 2019

There's a long history of using tech and rhetoric around tech as a way out of Malthusian limits on resources. Tech as salvation has been a dominant way of thinking, but needs to be challenged/critiqued. #Domains19
— John Stewart (@JohnStewartPhD) June 10, 2019

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.

Watched Generous Thinking: Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good by

Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Digital Humanities Professor of English Michigan State University from Coalition for Networked Information | Vimeo

Generous Thinking: Sustainability, Solidarity, and the Common Good from CNI Vimeo Video Channel on Vimeo.

See cni.org/events/membership-meetings/past-meetings/spring-2019/plenary-sessions-s19#opening for more information.

Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Spring 2019 Membership Meeting
April 8-9, 2019
St. Louis, MO
cni.org/mm/spring-2019/

Joseph explores the extent to which discourses about community suggest an antidote to or escape from capitalism’s depredations, while distracting us from the supplementary role that community actually serves with respect to capital, filling its gaps and smoothing over its rifts in ways that permit it to function untrammeled. The alternative presented by community allows the specter of socialism, or genuine state support for the needs of the public, to be dismissed. This relationship becomes particularly clear in Joseph’s discussion of the role of non-profit organizations — entities highly likely to participate in and benefit from the idealized discourse of community — which often fill needs left behind by a retreating state, allowing that retreat to go unchallenged.

— Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Community, Privatization, Efficiency

Also cross reference: Strategy and Solidarity

From the video at timecode [22:05]:

…raises the key question of what it is we mean when we talk about community?
As Miranda Joseph argues in Against the Romance of Community, the concept is often invoked as a place holder for something that exists outside the dominant economic and institutional structures of contemporary life. A set of estensibly organic felt relationships that harken back to a mythical pre-modern moment in which people lived and worked in direct connection with one another without the mediating forces of capitalism.
Now community is in this sense, in Benedict Anderson’s sense, an imagined relationship, and even an imaginary one. As its invocation is designed to yoke together bodies whose existence as a group is largely constructed. It’s a concept often used both idealistically and as a form of discipline.
A claim of unity that smoothes over and thus suppresses internal difference and disagreement. And as Joseph points out, the notion of community is often deployed as if the relationships that it describes could provide an antidote to or an escape from the problems created by contemporary political and economic life.
But this suggestion, serves to distract us, she says, from the supplementary role that community, in fact, actually serves with respect to capitalism. Sort of filling its gaps and smoothing over its flaws in ways that permit it to function without real opposition. So we call upon the community to support projects that the dominant institutions of the mainstream economy will not. And this is how we end up with social network-based fundraising campaigns to support people facing major health crises rather than demanding universal health care, and elementary school bake sales rather than full funding for education.
So community becomes, in this sense, an alibi for the creeping privatization of what should be social responsibilities.

Some interesting thought here with respect to economics, community, the commons, and education. While a large piece of the talk is about higher education, there are definitely some things that can be learned and used with respect to social media, and particularly the IndieWeb movement. I’d recommend everyone take a peek at it and think about how we can better deploy and give credit to some of our shared resources.

Replied to What’s In a Domain Name? by

Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/dream-sign-the-earth-utopia-279345/

Before one even starts learning how to manage an internet domain of their own, they face the step of choosing a name for what will be their street address on the internet. What should be on the left some of “something” dot “something” as one’s own internet address?

Some people stick with something close to or based on their name, so it clearly identifies”all their web sites?

Others have chosen a name that is more thematic, a play on words, a reference to interests or just a playful attitude.

There is no “correct” answer (but plenty of search result suggestions)- it’s a matter of what fits better for your personality, and as long as you are creating and sharing at that address.

What was the thinking behind your domain name?

This Activity was created June 7, 2019 by Alan Levine (@cogdog)
Difficulty: 1 (rated by author; 1=easy <--> 5=difficult)
Module: Domain Camp
Category: Domain Camp Week 1

My current domain name (boffosocko.com) came from a crazy brainstorm several years ago when I was registering a handful of domain names related to ideas in the entertainment industry. I was surprised that there were a handful of well-known and commonly used industry phrases that were freely available, so I scooped them all up. While I was doing that I noticed that the Variety-speak words related to boffo and socko were also available. In particular, I thought boffosocko.com was pretty cool and one day I’d come up with a use for it.

After a few years I decided that since I hadn’t been able to register my own name as a URL (there was a web designer who had beat me to it), I would co-opt boffosocko.com into use, and really, what could be a better name for a personal website?

“Boffo” and “socko” are neologisms in the family of Variety-speak after the well known business trade journal covering Tinseltown (often better known as Hollywood aka the Coast, aka H’w’d.)

Their definitions from Variety’s “slanguage” dictionary follow:

boff (also boffo, boffola) — outstanding (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has been boffo at the B.O.” (See also, socko, whammo)

sock (also socko) — very good (usually refers to box office performance); ” ‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ has done socko B.O.” (See also, boff, whammo)

Incidentally, one of the first movies I saw on cable via HBO when our family first got it when I was a youth (and easily saw over 100 times that summer) was THE MUPPETS TAKE MANHATTAN. Within it, there’s a great scene where Kermit schmoozes a big Broadway producer (played by John Landis) that I’m sure must have had a profound effect on me.

Boffo Lenny! Socko Lenny!

Kermit the Frog, Impressario
in The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)

Replied to #oext356 #oextend Find a Desire Path | The Daily Extend (extend-daily.ecampusontario.ca)

Desire paths are “the trails that are instinctively chosen and created over time” in spite of constructed pathways.

In a recent post on The Open Faculty Patchbook, Maureen Glynn reflected on her experience with desire paths, both literal and the figurative ones we see in our courses.

“students will always find unanticipated and wonderful ways to enter, exit, and navigate through the learning events and environments that we design…”

For this Daily Extend, we ask you to either find and take a photo of a real desire path near you, or describe a “desire path” in the navigation of a course that you either took yourself or witnessed students taking. Bonus points for taking some kind of desire path route to completing this Daily, or the June Daily Extend Challenge as a whole!

“Caminito de deseo_desire path_Girona” by felixphs is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I mentioned it yesterday, but my “desire path” for the June Daily Extend Challenge is to accomplish the entire trip using only my personal website and just a few feeds in my feed reader rather than using Twitter directly.

smeuse n. \ ˈsmyüz, -üs\ plural -s
dialectal, England
: a hole in a hedge or wall, often created by the regular passage of animals

I always knew that it was more valuable and powerful to have my own domain and post my content there. Sadly, like many, around 2006 I started taking the well-paved roads provided by social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. But in 2010 a few people began a “desire path” of travelling back through a more open and free internet. They created a proverbial smeuse called the IndieWeb through which many have now passed and which, over the passage of time, is becoming larger, better worn, and even comfortably paved with sidewalks and custom lanes for bicycles and other modes of transportation in many places. Best of all, they’ve created a system which doesn’t require travelling down the roads of others, but provides a lot more freedom and self-determination. They’re slowly, but surely, making it easier for everyone to choose their own desire path on the internet.

I consciously re-started down my old desire path in 2014 and have found a variety of students, teachers, and even friends have not only benefited from it, but that it opens up the ability for them to pick and choose their own paths.

Featured image: smeuse (animal path) flickr photo by debs-eye shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license