Google's partnership with WordPress aims to jump-start the platform's support of the latest web technologies -- particularly those involving performance & mobile experience. And they're hiring WordPress experts.
Contributing back to the community is an interesting way to go, though I’m curious how readily the community will pull the pieces back, particularly into core. This is certainly a better modus operandi than attempting to press forward on AMP technology.
Do you want to work with students to publish class assignments or research?
Instructors use PressForward in the classroom to consolidate and review student assignments, help students learn to survey their fields, and create opportunities for collaboration, communication, and research. The Lewis & Clark College Environmental Studies Program produces Environment Across Boundaries, a student-led publication that cultivates interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental issues. Participation gives students an opportunity to engage with their discipline through experiential, project based learning. They develop skills both in their field and with a suite of digital tools.
An interesting use case for PressForward: creating a “planet” website to aggregate and/or showcase work of students in an entire classroom who are all posting content to their own separate web spaces.
Sketch idea: create a standalone WordPress site for a course, install the PressForward plugin, input the RSS feeds for students’ websites to aggregate all their work collectively into one space. Various ideas include:
Use the feed for students and teacher to keep up with the entire classroom.
Publish an OPML file for students to easily subscribe to all feeds in their feed reader of choice.
Optionally publish the highlights of the best work or even all of it.
Teachers could use the feed to check that students are posting/keeping up with assignments for grading purposes.
Use the read/unread functionality to “mark” pieces as graded/ungraded or seen/unseen.
Use the internal commenting system to keep private notes on student’s work.
Create output feeds for specific tags and/or categories
Works with any student sites that produce feeds, not just WordPress, so students have choices of different CMSes.
Use the nomination functionality to quickly aggregate and disseminate online sources for classroom assignments or readings.
I had contemplated planet like aggregation at the recent WPCampus online conference. It’s interesting to see that PressForward has considered it as a use case as well though I’d love to hear about or see examples of this in the wild.
How else could this rich, multi-functional Swiss Army knife-like plugin be used in education?
Diagram of PressForward functionality as a content hub or “planet” courtesy of PressForward.org
Over the past little while I’ve been chipping away at an Indie Reader plugin for WordPress.
It’s still a bit rough at this point, but works well enough that I’m happy to announce it here.
Yarns Indie Reader allows you to subscribe to websites that publish either rss or h-feed. As well as keeping up with your subscriptions, you can like and reply and it create posts on your blog automatically.
Where to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it’s hard to know what does and doesn’t work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great?
[...]
The numbers just didn’t make sense. Yes, I could put more into Medium and try to build up readership even more. The guys at Basecamp regularly get 250k+ views on their content. But doing that helps Medium the most in the long run. They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business.
Switching back
Now I didn’t want to throw out distribution on Medium entirely. There can definitely be some benefit to syndicating content there. It’s essentially another distribution channel to expose people to our content.
So we needed a game plan on how we could still make use of Medium as a distribution channel without cannibalizing our own readership or SEO work.
This is 100% on the mark, you should definitely own your own content. Syndicating it out to Medium is a great idea, particularly when you can get a rel=”canonical” tag for the original on Medium. Incidentally Medium has their own WordPress plugin that will allow you to quickly and easily syndicate your site’s content directly to Medium without needing to separately import it. It’s also available on a per post basis.
But, even with this, you’re only getting 50% of the value of having your own website because you’ve only got one way communication out. Next you’ll need communication back in. What if I said you could get a lot of the comments, likes, and interactions from those other silos back into your website too? This way the conversations others are having relating to your content also come back to your site and enrich it there? What if you could own all (or almost all) of the conversation around your content?
Think about it, what if there was an @mention functionality that worked from website to website instead of being stuck inside Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Flickr etc.? Interestingly, it exists! And you can set it up for free with last year’s new W3C Webmention protocol which already has WordPress plugins ready to go. Roughly for WordPress you’ll need the Webmentions plugin, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin, the Syndication Links plugin, a few strategically placed rel=”me” tags on your site, (maybe some tweaks to your microformats on your theme), and a free Brid.gy account. Details for setting it up can be found on the WordPress pages of the indieweb.org website. I suspect if you’re strong enough to have figured out the tech for your article, you could probably have it up and running in under an hour or so. Then instead of feeding content from your blog to the black hole of social media, you could have actual two-way communication with many social silos! Now you won’t need to pay as much attention to those other sites as you can use your WordPress site as an “app” to interact with them instead.
I’m happy to help walk you through it if you’re interested and need help. My own personal site has some documentation of some of the above as well as examples of how it works.
In some sense, hopefully this post on my site will be an interesting exemplar. I own it and “loaned” or syndicated copies to Disqus and Twitter. Comments, likes and reposts you make to the Twitter copy will automatically be ported back here after the fact using Brid.gy. (Sadly, Disqus isn’t supported–yet.)
For all the bullet journal related blogs I’ve seen on WordPress, I’m surprised there isn’t a related plugin that allows one to turn their website into an actual digital online Bullet Journal.
After hearing from a number of schools running Domain of One’s Own, we thought it might be useful to host an in-person workshop that focuses specifically on implementing this project on your campus. Workshop of One’s Own is a two-day, geared towards the instructional technologist who assists with managing DoOO on an administrator level, but also focuses on project conceptualization, instructional uses, and empowering their community from a teaching/learning standpoint. You’ll not only be receiving the in-person, focused attention from the entire Reclaim Hosting team, but you’ll also get a chance to brainstorm with folks from other schools who are running their own Domain of One’s Own projects. We’ll work through common troubleshooting tips, SPLOTs with Alan Levine, cPanel application case studies, and more.
I’m almost painfully tempted to attend this workshop on March 15-16 with the idea of and setting up a side business to specialize in hosting WordPress and Known sites for IndieWeb use. While it could be a generic non-institutional instance for academics, researchers, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students who don’t have a “home” DoOO service, it could also be a potential landing pad for those leaving other DoOO projects upon graduation or moving. Naturally I wouldn’t turn down individuals who wanted specific IndieWeb capable personal websites either.
Either way it’s an itch (at an almost poison ivy level) that I’ve been having for a long time, but haven’t written down until now. It would certainly be an interesting platform for continuing to evangelize the overlap of IndieWeb and Educational applications on the internet.
I think there are almost enough IndieWeb friendly WordPress themes to make it a worthwhile idea to have a multi-site WordPress install that has a handful of microformats performant themes in conjunction with tools like webmentions and micropub that allows easy interaction with most of the major social silos.
I think the community might almost be ready for such a platform that would allow an integrated turnkey IndieWeb experience. (Though I’d still want to offer some type of integrated feed reader experience bundled in with it.) Perhaps I could model it a little bit after edublogs and micro.blog?
Who wants to help goad me into it?
h/t:
Workshop of One’s Own: March 15 & 16 // Attendees will not only receive focused training from the entire Reclaim Hosting team, but also join in on discussion with members from other institutions running their own unique instances of Domain of One's Own // https://t.co/31NIQIRvQgpic.twitter.com/HvU8qKhQXA
Our next (free) conference, WPCampus Online, will take place Tuesday, January 30. It will be a free event and completely virtual. View the schedule and join us for a full day of professional development. No travel required!
The WPCampus Online schedule is filled with 16 free sessions focused on using WordPress in higher education.
This looks like a cool event at the end of the month. I’m curious to see what #edtech and #IndieWeb-esque things they may be touching on during the day.
WordPress Content Types and Fields WordPress is all about creating content. It comes bundled with Posts and Pages, which you can organise using the Categories and Tags taxonomies. It’s also got post meta fields which you can use to append data to your content – author, date, and custom fields, for example.
The Pods Framework is an open-source, GPLv2+ licensed PHP project released on October 8th, 2008. The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs.
The Pods Framework allows an ordinary user or developer to easily create and extend custom post types, content types, taxonomies, users, media, or comments — helping you keep your content organized and speed up the development of your project.
Pods starts as a blank slate, as most frameworks do. The control is put into the hands of the developer to mould it into what is needed, without the fluff. Much of Pods’ functionality is coupled with a UI for easy administration, however, there are large portions of the codebase that can be optionally used for advanced implementations or specific project needs. You control everything while Pods Framework does the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting.
...the issue for me was Known was contextless for social media. I often post across various sites in response to things and share my photos as part of a conversation, so doing it through Known seemed a bit like working in a vacuum. I use Twitter less and less for discussion, so I wonder if I would feel different about this now, but what I wanted from Known was a way to also view and respond to Tweets, Facebooks statuses, photos on Flickr, Instagram, etc. A kind of reader for my content that would collapse those various conversations for me, and I could respond through my Known as if I was within those apps. I increasingly thought Known would make an awesome read//write feed reader if it had such a feature. The main reason Known fell by the wayside for me was I was not using it to publish in all these spaces, rather doing it post-facto if at all. Does that make sense?
Interestingly, Known had a lot of these features hidden in code under the hood. Sadly they weren’t all built out. It in fact, did have much of a reader (something which Ben indicated they were going to take out of the v1.0 release to slim down the code since it wasn’t being used). It also had a follow/following block of code (and even a bookmarklet at /account/settings/following) so you could follow specific sites and easily add them to your reader. Also unbeknownst to most was a built-in notifications UI which could have been found at /account/notifications.
It’s a shame that they put many of these half-built features on hold in their pivot to focus on the education market and creating a viable cash flow based company as this is the half that most CMSs lack. (If you think about what makes Twitter and Facebook both popular and really simple, I think it is that they’re 95% excellent feed readers with 5% built-in posting interfaces.)
I’ve managed to replace some of that missing functionality with Woodwind, a reader at http://woodwind.xyz, which one could connect with Known to do the reading and then integrate the posting, commenting, and replies to complete the loop. I do have a few very serious developer friends who are endeavoring to make this specific feed reader portion of the equation much easier to implement (and even self-host) to make the hurdle of this problem far lower, but I suspect it’ll be another 3-6 months before a usable product comes out of the process. For those looking to get more social into their feed readers, I often recommend Ryan Barrett’s appspot tools including https://twitter-atom.appspot.com/ which has instructions for extracting content from Twitter via Atom/RSS. It includes links at the bottom of the page for doing similar things with Facebook, Instagram and Google+ as well.
Interestingly there are now enough moving pieces (plugins) in the WordPress community to recreate all of the functionality Known has, one just needs to install them all separately and there are even a few different options for various portions depending on one’s needs. This includes adding reply contexts for social media as well as both the ability to syndicate posts to multiple social sites for interaction as well as getting the comments, etc. backfeed from those social sites back into the comments section of your post the way Known did. Sadly, the feed reader problem still exists, but it may soon be greatly improved.
I have been using Dave Winer’s Radio3 platform/bookmarklet, but would rather a process which would allow me to store bookmarks on my blog and POSSE them. I was therefore wondering about creating a similar bookmarklet that generates ‘Bookmark’ post-kinds, as well as the possibility of posting from mobile?
Am I going down the wrong path, especially as WordPress tinkers with ‘Press This’?
Aaron, the IndieWeb PressThis version bookmarklets are certainly a laudable solution for bookmarking things (even as WordPress moves the functionality of the original out of core), but I suspect you may find a more robust solution given some of your current set up.
Post Kinds Bookmarklets
A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.
Since you have the Post Kinds plugin set up, you might consider using that for a lot of the distance it can give you instead. I’ve written up some basic usage instructions for the plugin along with screenshots, but you’ll probably be most interested in the section on Bookmarklet Configuration. I’ve created a dozen or so browser bookmarklets, with handy visual emoji, for creating specific bookmark types for my site.
As for mobile posting, I’ll mention that I’ve heard “rumors” that David Shanske has a strong itch for improving the use of Post Kinds with a better mobile flow, so I would expect it to improve in the coming months. Until that time however, you can find some great tips on the wiki page for mobile posting. I recommend reading the entire page (including the section on Known which includes tools like URL Forwarder for Android that will also work with WordPress in conjunction with Post Kinds and the URL scheme described in the Bookmarklet Configuration section noted above.)
Using these details you should be able to make bookmarklets for your desktop browser and an Android phone in under an hour. If for some reason the documentation at these locations isn’t clear enough for you to puzzle out, let me know and I can do a more complete write up with screenshots and full code. (It’s still a piece of the book I need to expand out, or I’d include it here.)
Email
WordPress has the option of setting up an email address by which to post to your site. You can configure this pretty quickly, especially for mobile use to send URLs to your website that way. I typically use this method for quickly bookmarking things to my site for private use at a later date.
PESOS Options
There are also services that do bookmarking and include RSS feeds to your content which you could also potentially use to trigger IFTTT.com actions to post to your website. I have something similar to this set up for Reading.am which I’ve described in the past. You could certainly use this in combination with Diigo, which I see you use. Again, here more often than not I use these methods when I post things to my site as drafts or private posts.
Back at IndieWebCamp Austin, I became enamored of adding additional methods of interacting with my website, particularly for those who weren’t already on the IndieWeb train. I’d seen these types of interactions already on Tantek Çelik’s site in the past, so naturally I figured I would start there.
Web Actions
Some basic searching revealed that in IndieWeb parlance, these types of functionalities are known as web actions. While they’re often added to make it easier for one site with the proper infrastructure to interact with another, they’re also designed for social web silos (Like Twitter, Facebook, et al.) to do this type of interaction simply as well.
As a small scale experiment, I thought I would begin manually and add some simple interface to allow Twitter users (who may not yet have their own websites to use to respond to me instead) to be able to quickly and easily reply to, repost, or like posts on my site. A little bit of reading on the wiki and Twitter’s developer site allowed me to leverage something into existence pretty quickly.
Interestingly, although there are many plugins that help users simply share a blog post to Twitter, I couldn’t easily find a WordPress plugin that already allows these other interactions as options at all. I suspect it may be because the other side of the interaction of bringing the replies back to one’s site isn’t commonly known yet.
Example
I was able to write a post, syndicate it to Twitter, upload the button images, and then inject the Twitter post ID (939650287622434816 in this example) for my syndicated copy into my post like so:
And voila! My new post now had some simple buttons that allow users a simple one click interaction with a popup window to reply to, repost, or like my post.
Displaying responses
Naturally, through the “magic” of Brid.gy, I’m able to collect these responses via backfeed with the Webmention protocol using the Webmention Plugin for WordPress back to my own website. In simpler and less technical terms, if you use one of these buttons, your interaction with my website as posted to Twitter comes back to live on my website. Thus users can use Twitter to write a comment or reply on Twitter and it will display in my comments section just as if they had written it directly in my comments box. Likes and reposts are sent to my site and are displayed relatively naturally as facepiles under the comment headings “Likes” and “Reposts”.
I’ll do another manual example with this particular post, so feel free to use the buttons at the bottom of this post to make your response via Twitter if you wish.
Future Improvements
Taking some of this code and abstracting into a plugin for others to use would be a nice feature. Doing this would also potentially make it available as a potential plugin in the larger IndieWeb suite of WordPress plugins. Perhaps it could be easily added into the codebase in one or another pre-existing plugins? I might think that David Shanske’sSyndication Links plugin or Bridgy Publish plugin might make sense as they’re already adding functionality for part of the publishing half of the cycle by either publishing to Twitter and/or importing the Tweet ID back into one’s WordPress site for potential display. One or the other could do a simple if/then on the existence of a syndicated Tweet, then extract the Twitter ID, and add the buttons to the interface appropriately.
It would be interesting to add full mark up to make <indie-action> functionality possible for a broader class of web actions, particularly if it could be integrated directly into WordPress in a more interesting manner to work with the Post Kinds Plugin or the IndieWeb PressThis type of bookmarklet functionality.
Instead of having these types of interactions injected at the bottom of the post, it may make more sense to have it display in the comment block instead.
I suspect that Facebook, Instagram, and others also enable some types of functionality, so adding the ability to use them the same way would be awesome. And even more so in the case of RSVP’s to events since Brid.gy handles those relatively well between Facebook and WordPress sites. (See this example.)
Try it yourself
Go ahead and use the buttons below to interact with this post via Twitter.
Michelle Robbins (Search Engine Land)
Mel Choyce
Aaron Davis
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