WordPress provides a nice little function for displaying the title of the current post: the_title(). This function gets used all over the place: in the site header, at the top of single posts and pages, in the loop, in the footer, etc. It is probably one of the most commonly used functions by theme developers,…
Category: WordPress
Following Roy Tanck
Hi. My name is Roy Tanck. I’m a freelance web developer, specializing in WordPress. Whenever I can, I release WordPress plugins though the wordpress.org repository.
👓 A quick introduction to Blogmesh | Blogmesh
Blogmesh aims to make blogging more social, and in doing so create an alternative for existing social networks. The main idea is to connect existing blogs in a way that resembles other social networks, like Twitter. Simply follow your friends and see a timeline of their updates.
Because blogs are usually self-hosted, this means Blogmesh has the potential to become a decentralized network that belongs to its users, and where every user owns their own content.
Blogmesh uses existing, well-established standards like RSS. This means that many existing sites are already Blogmesh-ready.
Hi @simonw remember blogmesh? my friend @roytanck behind blogmesh made this https://t.co/wMPe5tQpVC to show how to re-blog. This proof-of-concept uses WordPress. It’s super easy to re-create the social aspects of walled garden social media with RSS & #WordPress #Openweb #indieweb
— Bjorn W (@Bjorn_W) August 21, 2018
Blogmesh looks like an intriguing concept, and on its face it sounds like it’s in a tangential space to Alex Kirk‘s Friends plugin, which allows private connections to friends via WordPress, or even to PressForward, which is a very full featured RSS plugin for WordPress. It almost sounds like a version of Jack Jamieson‘s original Yarns reader which integrates a feed reader with micropub capabilities into one’s WordPress site, but perhaps may not be as powerful as Jamieson’s pending rewrite of Yarns as a Microsub server.
Clicking a post from a friend will take you to their blog, where you can read the full post and leave comments.
While this may be an interesting concept, it isn’t adding much to the broader IndieWeb stack of technologies which are already in place for WordPress. I don’t imagine greater power with this compared to the Micropub spec which might allow me to write a reply within the reader portion of the plugin, publish it to my website and then send a Webmention to the other site the way the coming wave of Microsub servers and reader interfaces will allow. 1
While Blogmesh seems like a relatively solid solution and may fix a few UI issues for some, it doesn’t seem like as robust or decentralized a solution as Microsub, which I think has more promise and which almost any website (WordPress or otherwise) could support. This being said, I also suspect that Roy likely has a much broader vision for the plugin’s functionality that hasn’t yet been stated. It always impresses me the ingenuity and work that people are putting in to fix the problems that exist with current social media and this case is certainly squarely in that category.
I will say that it appears that Roy’s user interface is very solid–I wish there were more WordPress IndieWeb contributors with these kinds of design chops.
The repost functionality which Bjorn W highlights is very cool looking and quite intuitive. It has a simple, but intuitive user interface. However, it isn’t very different from David Shanske‘s solution for reposting content to one’s website using the Post Kinds Plugin. In this case, Post Kinds is even more powerful because it also includes a lot more social post types and can also be easily dovetailed with Webmention and Micropub for broader decentralized social interaction.
I’ve bookmarked the Github repository for Blogmesh and look forward to seeing what develops. I’ve also helped to stub some of Blogmesh on the IndieWeb wiki. I’d love to hear what others think of it if they try it out. I’m blocking some time for the weekend to add it to a WordPress instance I’ve already spun up to test it out.
References
👓 Keep Track of Your Conversations in One Place | WordPress
You can now stay on top of the discussions you care about, right from your Reader.
🔖 Write, Right? Write! – TRU Writer
Welcome to a new experiment in simple but elegant web publishing. This site let’s you quickly publish full formatted and media rich articles, essays, papers — without requiring any logins or tracking of personal information. Don’t take our word for it, explore one piece published here, chosen at random.
A published work includes a header image which you can upload to the TRU Writer. Choose how you wish to credit yourself as an author, or choose to by anonymous.
You should be able to copy the contents of anything you have written in a Word Processor, or already published on a web page, paste it into the TRU Writer editor. Most standard formatting (headers, bold, italic, underline, lists, blockquotes, hypertext links) will be preserved.
You can then edit/augment your work using a rich text editor, including embedding content from social media sites, and you can upload new images to be included within the text of your writing.
So find an essay or article and see what you can do with it by publishing online with the TRU Writer.
This is implemented as a WordPress theme, so it can be created for many different sites. Learn more about TRU Writer and where to find the theme.
A reply to David Shanske regarding implementation of the DiSo Project
tl;dr for the video:
- WordPress base install
- IndieWeb Plugin (gives you quick access to most of the plugins below)
- The SemPress Theme or Independent Publisher Theme
- Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins (for site to site communication and notification)
- IndieAuth plugin (for authenticating with Micropub, Microsub, and other related tools)
- Micropub plugin (for a variety of clients you can use to publish to your site)
- Syndication Links plugin (to indicate which sites, like Twitter, that you syndicate your content to to stay in touch with those left behind)
- WebSub plugin (to ping feed readers for real-time communication)
- Brid.gy for WordPress plugin (to pull in backfed comments from other social silos)
- Post Kinds plugin (for better delineating articles, status updates (notes), replies, favorites, likes, etc. with appropriate microformats markup)
- Aperture Plugin (allows you to sign into a variety of Microsub readers which also act as your stream and allow you to reply to others directly from your reading interface. This part is still a bit experimental, but the kinks are being worked out presently for a richer experience.)
Additional pieces are discussed on my IndieWeb Research Page (focusing mostly on WordPress), in addition to IWC getting started on WordPress wiki page. If you need help, hop into the IndieWeb WordPress chat.
For those watching this carefully, you’ll notice that I’ve replied to David Shanske’s post on his website using my own website and sent him a webmention which will allow him to display my reply (if he chooses). I’ve also automatically syndicated my response to the copy of his reply on Twitter which includes others who are following the conversation there. Both he and I have full copies of the conversation on our own site and originated our responses from our own websites. If you like, retweet, or comment on the copy of this post on Twitter, through the magic of Brid.gy and the Webmention spec, it will come back to the comment section on my original post (after moderation).
Hooray for web standards! And hooray for everyone in the IndieWeb who are helping to make this type of social interaction easier and simpler with every passing day.
👓 Things that baffle me about WordPress in 2018 | a.wholelottanothing.org
So I’m back blogging! And I haven’t used wordpress.com in ages, but I wanted to share my running list of WTF moments over the past week of using the site and service, both at work (we j…
👓 My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice | Robin DeRosa
I’ve spent some time talking about open pedagogy at several universities this Spring, and in each of those presentations and workshops, I have usually mentioned The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature, an OER anthology that my students and I produced last year for an American literature survey course I taught. When I talk about the anthology, it’s usually to make a point about open pedagogy. I began the project with the simple desire to save my students about $85 US, which is how much they were (ostensibly) paying for the Heath Anthology of American Literature Volume A. Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions. As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
Most of the actual texts in the Heath were public domain texts, freely available and not under any copyright restrictions. As the Heath produced new editions (of literature from roughly 1400-1800!), forcing students to buy new textbooks or be irritatingly out of sync with page numbers, and as students turned to rental markets that necessitated them giving their books back at the end of the semester, I began to look in earnest for an alternative. ❧
Repackaging public domain texts and charging a steep markup too much above and beyond the cost of the paper is just highway robbery. Unless a publisher is adding some actual annotative or analytical value, they shouldn’t be charging outrageous prices for textbooks of this nature.
August 13, 2018 at 12:14PM
If OER is free, what hidden costs exist in its production? Making these textbooks is taking me a chunk of time in the off-season. Thanks to my salaried position, I feel ok about putting in the overtime, but it’s a privilege my colleagues who teach under year-to-year part-time non-contracts can’t afford. Who should be funding OER creation? Institutions? Students? For-profit start-ups? How will you invest time in this project without obscuring the true costs of academic labor? Right now, we pass the corruptly high cost of academic publishing onto the backs of academia’s most vulnerable members: students. But as OER gains steam, we need to come up with funding models that don’t land us back in the same quagmire of exploitation that we were trying to get out of. ❧
This is a nearly perfect question and something to watch in the coming years.
August 13, 2018 at 12:35PM
working in public, and asking students to work in public, is fraught with dangers and challenges. ❧
August 13, 2018 at 12:36PM
What David told me was his energy, enthusiasm in the class was at a much higher level with the OER approach. Sure we choose the polished “professional” textbook because of its assumed high standards, quality etc, but then its a more passive relationship a teacher has with it. I make the comparison to growing and/or making your own food versus having it prepared or taking it out of a package. Having produced our own food means we know everything about it from top to bottom, and the pride in doing that has to make the whole experience much more energized. ❧
As I read both this post and this comment from Alan, I can’t help but think again about scholars in the 14th century who taught students. It was more typical of the time that students were “forced” to chose their own textbooks–typically there were fewer, and at the advent of the printing press they were significantly higher in price. As a result students had to spend more time and attention, as Robin indicates here, to come up with useful things.
Even in this period students often annotated their books, which often got passed on to other students and even professors which helped future generations. So really, we’re not reinventing the wheel here, we’re just doing it anew with new technology that makes doing it all the easier.
As a reference, I’ll suggest folks interested in this area read Owen Gingerich’s The Book Nobody Read which I recall as being one of the texts I’ve read that references early teaching and textbook practices during that time period.
August 13, 2018 at 12:44PM
👓 WordPress spam statistics: comments, pingbacks, trackbacks | Ryan Barrett
Comment spam is one of the most common forms of WordPress spam, if not the most common. Here are some anecdotal statistics for this site. During the month of November 2014, snarfed.org received 796…
Reply to Curtis McHale and David Wolfpaw on rel-alternate
15:27 aaronpk: “my post permalinks now have a rel=alternate link to an mf2 and jf2 JSON version of the post”
And continued over the next several hours and days primarily with participation of aaronpk, GWG, and pfefferle among a few others.
David Shanske (GWG) and I discussed an overview of it in the most recent episode of An IndieWeb Podcast. The conversation about rel=”alternate” begins at the 11:00 minute mark.
Somewhere there’s a note that GWG has already built a big chunk of code into the Webmention/Semantic Linkbacks plugin that implements a large chunk of the work already. There’s also some work done in https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-mf2-feed as well.
An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 9 30 Days of IndieWeb
Running time: 0h 58m 33s | Download (18.9MB) | Subscribe by RSS | Huffduff
Summary: David is about to head off abroad for a month. We talk about what’s been happening recently and his plans for his upcoming sojourn.
Recorded: August 5, 2018
Shownotes
IndieWeb Camp NYC–September 28-29, 2018–RSVPs are open now
Micropub Plugin work for WordPress
It will include a Media endpoint
Code for integration with the WordPress REST API
rel=”alternate”
This sketch solution may be an end-around the issue of getting WordPress (or potentially other CMSes) Themes to be microformats 2 compatible, and allow a larger range of inter-compatibility for websites and communication.
Facebook API changes cause breakage of Brid.gy
Ditchbook, a micropub-based tool for exporting data from Facebook and importing into other services
Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course Digital Teaching and Learning Too (🎧 00:47:57)
👓 First Look at Live Demo of the Gutenberg Content Editor for Drupal 8 | WP Tavern
Drupal Europe has just announced its program for the upcoming event in Darmstadt, Germany, September 10-14. The conference will host more than 1,600 Drupal professionals and enthusiasts for 162 hou…
Reply to Kat about daily ponderance
This also means that when we use Post Kinds to reply to her, the built-in parser will find her name and photo automatically.
I do notice that it’s missing picking up her website URL properly. I suspect it’s because she left her user profile’s Website field (located at http://kasem-beg.com/wp-admin/profile.php#url
) empty.
Sketches of my Home and About page designs
Lately I’ve added a bunch of different ways to slice and dice the content on my site so that readers can hopefully more easily find or discover the content they may be most interested in reading. I’ve also been trying to pare down on the amount of information and detail which I present.
So without additional ado, here they are: