Wow! Audience is fascinated by @ChrisAldrich and his presentation on creating your own social media site with #WordPress that allows you to engage on the larger web, keep ownership of your data and create an interface that doesn’t look like Yankee code! #WCRS18 pic.twitter.com/Q0LEoY8AaO
— WordCamp Riverside (@WordCampRS) November 3, 2018
Category: WordPress
👓 Syndication Links 4.0.0 Released | David Shanske
Today, from my hotel room in Berlin, Germany, where I am preparing to attend Indiewebcamp Berlin, my first European Indiewebcamp, I released Syndication Links 4.0.0. The major version number change is because in this version, Syndication Links takes on a new role. As promised previously, I’ve buil...
👓 Version 2.0 of the Micropub Plugin Released | David Shanske
For those interested, I’m giving a more advanced version of this talk at the upcoming WordCamp Riverside on November 3rd.
Reply to Introducing Alhambra Source’s 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!
📅 RSVP to Space Apps Challenge 2018 Kickoff
Hello makers, designers and enthusiasts! Welcome to NASA Space Apps Hackathon 2018 Pasadena, a three day event with presentations by industry professionals and 48 hours of hacking! Everyone is welcome to join and a background in coding or computers is not necessary. We will open the event on Friday with speakers from JPL, The Planetary Soceity, and Space Decentral. Saturday the hacking will begin and teams will tackle an array of challenges which are designed by NASA. Two teams from this portion will be selected by our judges to go on to the national round. Space Apps takes place in over 69 countries and is the largest hackathon in the world. Last year we had 28,000 participants and in 2016 the global winner came out of the Pasadena event.
👓 Some IndieWeb WordPress tuning | EdTech Factotum
Right now, I just want to write. ❧
You might find that the micropub plugin is a worthwhile piece for this. It will give your site an endpoint you can use to post to your site with a variety of third party applications including Quill or Micropublish.net.
October 14, 2018 at 01:01AM
My hope is that it will somehow bring comments on Facebook back to the blog and display them as comments here. ❧
Sadly, Aaron Davis is right that Facebook turned off their API access for this on August 1st, so there currently aren’t any services, including Brid.gy, anywhere that allow this. Even WordPress and JetPack got cut off from posting from WordPress to Facebook, much less the larger challenge of pulling responses back.
October 14, 2018 at 01:03AM
Grant Potter ❧
Seeing the commentary from Greg McVerry and Aaron Davis, it’s probably worthwhile to point you to the IndieWeb for Education wiki page which has some useful resources, pointers, and references. As you have time, feel free to add yourself to the list along with any brainstorming ideas you might have for using some of this technology within your work realm. Many hands make light work. Welcome to the new revolution!
October 14, 2018 at 01:08AM
the autoposts from Twitter to Facebook were ❧
a hanging thought? I feel like I do this on my site all too often…
October 14, 2018 at 01:09AM
I am giving this one a go as it seems to be the most widely used. ❧
It is widely used, and I had it for a while myself. I will note that the developer said he was going to deprecate it in favor of some work he’d been doing with another Mastodon/WordPress developer though.
October 14, 2018 at 01:19AM
Reply to Doug Beal about WordCamp Los Angeles 2018
I’m probably not the best person to ask since I think most Camps don’t get as technical as I sometimes wish they’d be. These days there are always a session or two on Gutenberg, which is interesting, but I find myself not caring as much about. Otherwise pieces on things like phpunit or unit testing are intriguing, but I’m unlikely to actually use on a regular basis myself. I find that I know too much about the areas of marking and biz dev or social media related talks that have popped up in years past to gain much from them anymore.
For the past several years, the most interesting parts of these camps for me are about the general tenor of the overall web space. I find more value in the “hallway” track chatting with the other folks who are so inclined. Most often, I’ll also check the speakers to catch people who have traveled from distant cities–I find that if they’re developers, they’re usually offering something intriguing. As a result of these strategies I often get more out of camps than just the scheduled talks.
Your mileage may vary.
An IndieWeb talk at WordCamp Riverside in November 2018
My talk will help to kick off the day at 10am on Saturday morning in the “John Hughes High” room. The details for the camp and a link to purchase tickets can be found below.
WordCamp Riverside 2018
&
hosted at SolarMax, 3080 12th St., Riverside, CA 92507
Tickets are available now
Given that “Looking back to go forward” is the theme of the camp this year, I think I may have chosen the perfect topic. To some extent I’m going to look at how the nascent web has recently continued evolving from where it left off around 2006 before everyone abandoned it to let corporate silo services like Facebook and Twitter become responsible for how we use the web. We’ll talk about how WordPress can be leveraged to do a better job than “traditional” social media with much greater flexibility.
Here’s the outline:
The web is my social network: How I use WordPress to create the social platform I want (and you can too!)
Synopsis: Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “free” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?
I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb philosophies and related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSes.
Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.
Intended Audience: The material is introductory in nature and targeted at beginner and intermediate WordPressers, but will provide a crash course on a variety of bleeding edge W3C specs and tools for developers and designers who want to delve into them at a deeper level. Applications for the concepts can be of valuable to bloggers, content creators, businesses, and those who are looking to better own their online content and identities online without allowing corporate interests out-sized influence of their online presence.
I look forward to seeing everyone there!
My streak is probably much longer as the result of some private and draft posts breaking the chain.
I’ll also mention that from a commonplace book standpoint, it’s far easier to search for content I’ve read or interacted with because it’s all right here on my site (with tags and categories) and I don’t need to remember which of hundreds of sites I may have posted it to.
👓 I Overcame Glossophobia at WordCamp Riverside | WordCamp Riverside 2018
After attending my first conference at WordCamp Orange County in 2014 and watching the volunteer speakers passion for design, business, and web development I craved sharing my own experiences, but my fear of public speaking always kept me from submitting a talk. I faced them head on at WordCamp Rive...
📅 RSVP to WordCamp Riverside 2018
We are excited to announce Riverside’s second WordCamp, happening at SolarMax Technologies on November 3rd and 4th, 2018. Camp will be from 8am – 5pm on both days.
As we focus on Building Our Local WordPress Community, we invite you to join in! Plan to attend, share the event and bring a friend! Tickets are available now and sessions will be offered for every level, from total beginner to advanced developer.
This is your chance to talk, share and learn from other Southern California bloggers, designers, developers, and business owners. Our sponsors will be there to provide insight on their products, giving you the leading edge, as well.
Feel free to contact the organizers if you have any questions and make sure to subscribe to updates to stay in the loop.
I’ve documented a piece of it here and there’s some detail on the IndieWeb for Journalism wiki page which I encourage everyone to contribute to as they can.
As for Ben Keith’s concern about spam, yes, Webmention can be a potential vector like trackbacks and pingbacks, but it does learn from their mistakes with better mitigation and verification. Work on the Vouch protocol/extension of Webmention continues to mitigate against these issues. I’ll also note that Akismet for WordPress works relatively well for Webmentions too, though there have still yet to be examples of Webmention spam in the wild.
For publishers using WordPress, there are some excellent plugins including Webmention (which has some experimental Vouch plumbing included already) and Symantic Linkbacks which work with WordPress’s native comments. I’ll note that they’re developed and actively maintained by several, including the core maintainer for pingbacks and trackbacks in WordPress.
I’m happy to help if anyone has questions.
Extending a User Interface Idea for Social Reading Online
I mention it because I was specifically intrigued by a small piece of excellent user interface and social graph data that Reading.am unearths for me. I’m including a quick screen capture to better illustrate the point. While the UI allows me to click yes/no (i.e. did I like it or not) or even share it to other networks, the thing I found most interesting was that it lists the other people using the service who have read the article as well. In this case it told me that my friend Jeremy Cherfas had read the article.1
In addition to having the immediate feedback that he’d read it, which is useful and thrilling in itself, it gives me the chance to search to see if he’s written any thoughts about it himself, and it also gives me the chance to tag him in a post about my own thoughts to start a direct conversation around a topic which I now know we’re both interested in at least reading about.2
The tougher follow up is: how could we create a decentralized method of doing this sort of workflow in a more IndieWeb way? It would be nice if my read posts on my site (and those of others) could be overlain on websites via a bookmarklet or other means as a social layer to create engaged discussion. Better would have been the ability to quickly surface his commentary, if any, on the piece as well–functionality which I think Reading.am also does, though I rarely ever see it. In some sense I would have come across Jeremy’s read post in his feed later this weekend, but it doesn’t provide the immediacy that this method did. I’ll also admit that I prefer having found out about his reading it only after I’d read it myself, but having his and others’ recommendations on a piece (by their explicit read posts) is a useful and worthwhile piece of data, particularly for pieces I might have otherwise passed over.
In some sense, some of this functionality isn’t too different from that provided by Hypothes.is, though that is hidden away within another browser extension layer and requires not only direct examination, but scanning for those whose identities I might recognize because Hypothes.is doesn’t have a specific following/follower social model to make my friends and colleagues a part of my social graph in that instance. The nice part of Hypothes.is’ browser extension is that it does add a small visual indicator to show that others have in fact read/annotated a particular site using the service.
I’ve also previously documented on the IndieWeb wiki how WordPress.com (and WordPress.org with JetPack functionality) facepiles likes on content (typically underneath the content itself). This method doesn’t take things as far as the Reading.am case because it only shows a small fraction of the data, is much less useful, and is far less likely to unearth those in your social graph to make it useful to you, the reader.
I seem to recall that Facebook has some similar functionality that is dependent upon how (and if) the publisher embeds Facebook into their site. I don’t think I’ve seen this sort of interface built into another service this way and certainly not front and center the way that Reading.am does it.
The closest thing I can think of to this type of functionality in the analog world was in my childhood when library card slips in books had the names of prior patrons on them when you signed your own name when checking out a book, though this also had the large world problem that WordPress likes have in that one typically wouldn’t have know many of the names of prior patrons necessarily. I suspect that the Robert Bork privacy incident along with the evolution of library databases and bar codes have caused this older system to disappear.
This general idea might make an interesting topic to explore at an upcoming IndieWebCamp if not before. The question is: how to add in the social graph aspect of reading to uncover this data? I’m also curious how it might or might not be worked into a feed reader or into microsub related technologies as well. Microsub clients or related browser extensions might make a great place to add this functionality as they would have the data about whom you’re already following (aka your social graph data) as well as access to their read/like/favorite posts. I know that some users have reported consuming feeds of friends’ reads, likes, favorites, and bookmarks as potential recommendations of things they might be interested in reading as well, so perhaps this would be an additional extension of that as well?
[1] I’ve certainly seen this functionality before, but most often the other readers are people I don’t know or know that well because the service isn’t huge and I’m not using it to follow a large number of other people.
[2] I knew he was generally interested already as I happen to be following this particular site at his prior recommendation, but the idea still illustrates the broader point.