Reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to WordPress of One's Own: Or, thinking through creating a not intimidating menu of options for domain installs by

AlanaCallan (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Hey there,

New and just wading in here I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department

Our medium sized college has always offered our students and faculty a choice in terms of the platform they choose to use: Wordpress, tumblr, weebly, medium, etc., mostly because we didn’t have anything else to offer them other than the LMS that was supported by the institution.

This past September our communication courses for first year have been using wordpress.com (mostly) as they were encouraged by the teaching faculty who were also using wordpress.com sites for their own writing. The redesigned communication courses have the students learning to write, give and receive feedback, and loop through this cycle several times for an authentic audience. First semester focuses on personal writing, the second focuses on professional writing.

(just wanted to provide some context for my reply - they had to go with wordpress.com as there was no plan or budget to do a local install or have it hosted for the college)

Feedback from the faculty teaching team after teaching for almost 8 weeks is how to template and simplify space for students to use, here is a direct quote: “could we create dedicated blog page for students that would be a pre-made, fool-proof template? When a student’s WordPress blog does not work and we can’t fix the problem, it is very frustrating to be helpless beside an exasperated student.”

I am inclined to suggest freeing up the expectation that the student’s use wordpress and that they instead use a platform that they may already be familiar with (like tumblr etc.,) and create a space AND use categories/titles that are consistent so that the faculty can go in and review, comment, provide feedback etc., easily.

Many students may choose to use wordpress either way but…

One thing that we do here that may help the conversation is that our library holds workshops to assist students in creating their online presence, creative commons, attribution etc.,

I’m interested in any thoughts or feedback on how to approach the our communication faculty request… am I heading in the right direction??

Thanks!!

Alana

There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.

There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.

These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don’t provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).

Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they’re so inclined.

This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I’ll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren’t just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.

For those who’d like to delve further, I did a WordPress-focused crash course session on the idea a while back: Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications at WordCamp Santa Clarita 2019 (slides).

Read The Future of Publishing? by

Dan Allosso (History4Today.com)

I got a note from the senior executive editor at Yale, who has been my main contact throughout the process of getting my book published. Peppermint Kings has not been flying out of the warehouse so…

Sorry to hear this Dan, but I might be able to help in terms of providing some perspective for moving forward.

These days the idea of bestseller means selling in the range of 10,000 books. The average book released these days sells only 250 copies, so if you’re over that, you’re doing well.

It’s also incredibly uncommon for any publishers to put any serious money behind promoting their titles unless PR opportunities are falling off the trees for them. (This means that unless you’ve been selling a million copies of everything you write, they probably don’t care.) Many publishers will assign you a pro-forma publicist to help when they can, but don’t expect much from them. Most publishers will tell you to hire your own book publicist (usually for about $1,500-3,000 a month).

My guess is that the first run of your book was probably 1,000 to 2,000 books, which will bring the cost of raw printing down to $2 a copy. If you need copies of your book and they’re remaindering them, you might offer the publisher $1-2 a copy plus shipping to get 50 or 100 copies for yourself for hand sales over the next decade (for speaking engagements, etc.) or selling a few copies from your own stash on platforms like Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, etc. The cost of keeping a book in print these days is usually around $12 a year and then they print them on demand.

Some of the methods you mentioned, talks, online readings, etc. can be useful marketing for both you and your book(s). Look around your local community/state for book events, fairs, bookstores that invite authors, etc to supplement this.

Depending on your next title, it might be worth hiring a publicist if you’re going the route of a text accessible to a broader public.Often this can be a reasonable risk but getting copies into reviewers’ hands can be helpful, as can radio or print appearances. Another option is to pay for adds in appropriate print magazine outlets related to your material.

It’s an uphill slog, but getting a publisher to take most of the risk and offering you all the free amenities of editing, proofreading, typesetting and distribution can be worth it in the end to get your material out.

When choosing your next publisher/editor, have a bit of this conversation with them at the outset to see what expectations they have for themselves. Don’t tip your hand though by letting them know prior sales numbers.

Since you’ve got your own website/newsletter/social media presence, you should also look into affiliate accounts with the bigger online platforms. Chances are you’re actually selling most of your own copies, you may as well get a 4% or larger cut of the referrals you’re giving. Your link on this page alone could give you a reasonable little return on top of the boilerplate 7% you’re probably getting from the publisher.

Read Thread by whitney trettien (Twitter)

I'm excited to share a digital edition of Susanna Collet's 17th-century commonplace book, held at @morganlibrary. @zoe_braccia & I made it using @digitalmappa. It features a full transcription/facsimile & a searchable library of Collet's source texts.https://t.co/VSCMmBhMS6 pic.twitter.com/fyrbwS9kk1
— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) April 7, 2021

Collet was a member of the religious household at Little Gidding ca. 1630s. Her commonplace book is remarkably structured: one half scripture excerpts, organized by topic, the other half secular excerpts organized under the same topics. More about it here: https://t.co/Oo0O0CtBDt
— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) April 7, 2021

In working with the manuscript, @zoe_braccia tracked down the sources of nearly excerpt. The edition highlights any variance between a source text and Collet’s copy using @digitalmappa’s hyperlinked assets. I discuss the significance of these differences in #CutCopyPasteBook. pic.twitter.com/nQ2dv99w4P
— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) April 7, 2021

There are surprisingly few digital editions of commonplace books, especially given how the genre lends itself to digitization. What we've made isn't perfect but we hope it helps others think through/with these types of books. More about that here: https://t.co/XiNShKmQzz
— whitney trettien (@whitneytrettien) April 7, 2021

There are surprisingly few digital editions of commonplace books, especially given how the genre lends itself to digitization. What we’ve made isn’t perfect but we hope it helps others think through/with these types of books. More about that here: digitalbookhistory.com/colletscommonp… ❧

I’ve seen some people building digital commonplace books in real time, but I’m also curious to see more academics doing it and seeing what tools and platforms they’re using to do it.

Given the prevalence for these in text, I’d be particularly curious to see them being done as .txt or .md files and then imported into platforms like Obsidian, Roam Research, Org Mode, TiddlyWiki, et al for cross linking and backlinking.

I’ve seen some evidence of people doing some of this with copies of the bible or Frankenstein, but yet to see anyone digitize and cross link old notebooks or commonplace books.
Annotated on April 09, 2021 at 04:55PM

Replied to New discoveries about Stonehenge by Lynne Kelly (Lynne Kelly)

Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories.

Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.

Perhaps there’s a third possibility not mentioned here?

Perhaps the group at Waun Mawn, traded a portion of their knowledge and database to a more powerful and potentially more central nearby group of people? The evidence indicates that many of the people buried at Stonehenge were originally from the area of Wales where some of the stones originated. The fact that some stones remained behind may mean that some of the needed local encyclopedia stayed behind.

Replied to a tweet by

rachel syme (Twitter)

what is a longform magazine story from before, let's say, 2010, that you still go back and look at for inspiration
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) April 2, 2021

I find myself regularly revisiting Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 essay As We May Think from The Atlantic.

Replied to a tweet (Twitter)

A warm welcome to our new Individual Members @FieryRed1 @CosmoCat @ChrisAldrich @C_Stockman @losh99 #altc #ff pic.twitter.com/3EotmwB3W2
— ALT - alt.ac.uk (@A_L_T) March 26, 2021

Thank you. I can’t wait to see everyone at OERxDomains21 coming up: https://oer21.oerconf.org/

#altc #OERxDomains #OER21

Replied to a thread by joanne mcneil, Anil Dash, Andy Baio (Twitter)

you don’t miss Google Reader you miss the World Wide Web before 2012
— joanne mcneil (@jomc) March 20, 2021

I do think folks have also conflated the generic ability to read RSS with the specific social networking features of Google Reader, so it’s hard to know which they say they’re missing.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 20, 2021

i mostly miss everyone and everything having a blog and the ecosystem of search/discovery/utilities that supported it all
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 20, 2021

I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)

I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.

Replied to a tweet by Brian LeRoux (Twitter)

why isn't https://t.co/X3v7Fs07E2 more popular?
— Brian LeRoux(@brianleroux) March 12, 2021

IndieWeb IS wonderfully popular!

You’re maybe wondering why more companies haven’t turned IndieWeb building blocks into a product like Micro.blog has?

There are a few others certainly.

For the masses, we’re going to need more providers who are ethically working toward IndieWeb as a Service (IaaS). Companies willing to allow people to be the customer rather than exploiting them as the product.

Of course, if you’re running WithKnown, you’re already there with all the trimmings. If you’re on WordPress or Drupal with your own domain, you’re already there too, but you can add lots of additional interactive functionality with a few plugins. There are dozens of available platforms that will do the job and each one has a multitude of options and configurations.

All that choice comes with a spectacular amount of complexity. Hopefully some clever companies will narrow down some popular options and make them available to large numbers of people for a reasonable price.

(Personally I wonder what things might look like if your online social IndieWeb infrastructure was run by your local public library or your local newspaper?)

The community has and continues to do a lot of incredibly difficult work to make dramatically different websites be able to interoperate and communicate with one another. Many of the roads are well worn now, we need others to come and pave them to be as equitable and easy-to-use for the rest of humankind.

All this said, of course we still also have additional complex problems like privacy, safety, anti-bullying, etc. to conquer so that we don’t end up with a decentralized version of Facebook and continue repeating the same problems of the past.

Many of us are content with small, organic growth. Massive overnight growth is often a myth, and if it does happen, you can have unmanageable and unanticipated problems seen in situations like the “eternal September“.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead