Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
My last post to Facebook was almost a year ago on July 31, 2018, a day before Facebook turned off their API and prevented my website from interacting with their service. Other moral and ethical concerns with Facebook aside, I’ve got what I hope to be a useful method for people’s interactions with my Facebook account to come back to my site. This will let me better own and control my data while still interacting with people “stuck” on this problematic service.

This return post will serve as a test to see if I might return to and occasionally post there again.

I’ve created a Domain Camp Twitter list of those I know are participating in Domain Camp this month. Please let me know if I’ve missed you. Feel free to subscribe to the list or follow those in it individually.

If everyone replies with their websites/new domains, I’ll compile those as well and create an OPML file that people can import into a feed reader to easily follow along with our fellow campers.

Wooden looking sign for Domain Camp

Hypothes.is doesn’t have a social media-like follow functionality baked into the system, but there are a few methods to follow interesting people. My favorite, and possibly the simplest, is to add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=abcxyz as a feed into my feed reader where abcxyz is the username of the person I’d like to follow.

So to subscribe to my Hypothes.is feed you’d add https://hypothes.is/stream.atom?user=chrisaldrich to your reader.

Of course, the catch then is to find/discover interesting people to follow this way. Besides some of the usual interesting subjects like Jon Udell, Jeremy Dean, Remi Kalir, et al. Who else should I be following?

Ideally by following interesting readers, you’ll find not only good things to read for yourself, but you’ll also have a good idea which are the best parts as well as what your friends think of those parts. The fact that someone is bothering to highlight or annotate something is a very strong indicator that they’ve got some skin in the game and the article is likely worth reading.

If it helps Domains 2019 attendees, I’ve got a Twitter list of educators, researchers, technologists, and others who are using DoOO, IndieWeb, or other related ethical edTech technologies. The list includes people who attended in 2017, many of those tweeting during 2019, as well as those regularly tweeting about DoOO and closely related topics throughout the year or on the list of Educators in the IndieWeb.

I’ve also got a regularly updated OPML file for many of the same people if you prefer to subscribe to/follow their websites directly (this method is more Domains-friendly right!?!). If you use Inoreader or other services that support OPML subscription technology, this feed will auto-update for you as new people are added to the list, preventing you from needing to regularly refresh the OPML file manually. I’ll try to update this OPML file this evening for today’s/tomorrow’s attendees based on their websites in their Twitter profiles.

Don’t hesitate to ping me if you’d like to be added to the lists, or if I’m missing anyone. Be sure to include your most relevant RSS feed(s) for the OPML portion of that list. Feel free to copy/modify either of the lists to your heart’s content.

I don’t use it frequently, but I just noticed that the WordPress.com feed reader has some functionality to concatenate and display multiple posts together for feeds that update relatively frequently. I like the fact that there’s a little less cognitive load in changing contexts from one source’s posts and those of others which have longer inter-post times.

Screencapture of the WordPress reader UI in which the New York Times feed has four items collected together despite other sources being posted between them in time.

While some don’t like feeds that aren’t ordered temporally, this seems like a useful compromise when looking at feeds with large numbers of different sources.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the way Tantek Çelik concatenates likes within his homepage.

A screencapture of Tantek's homepage showing two blocks of concatenated likes amidst other posts

Whether within a stream of posts on a personal site or within a feed reader, this UI pattern is very subtle, but incredibly useful.

I’m heading to a design-related event shortly in support of Mike Monteiro’s new book Ruined by Design. As I’ve been thinking about it today, it occurs to me that the FX television series The Americans reflects a bit of his thesis about designers taking control of their portion of their work.

In some sense Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, the two Russian spies living undercover as Americans, are very much like designers who have been blindly taking their orders from corporations on high and literally executing those orders (and people) without much regard to life going on around them. As the show progresses, they seem to take an arc much like one that Monteiro might suggest as they begin to question the morality and effects of those orders to not only better live their own lives, but to improve the lives of those around them and even across the world.

I’ve been to a number of WordCamps over the past year, and invariably, in the registration process I’m asked for my Twitter handle and the majority of the time that Twitter handle is printed on my name tag.

Why are we doing this?! It’s not TwitterCamp. It’s a W-O-R-D-C-A-M-P!! Why can’t we ask for and put our own domain names (running WordPress, natch…) in our registration and on our name tags?! Let’s get with the program people… Twitter is nice, but obviously WordPress on a domain name we own and control is far better.

A common sticker-type name tag that is preprinted with the large text "Hello My URL is" with smaller text underneath that reads <a href=" "> and a blank space in the middle where someone has handwritten in pen "photomatt.net"
This is the sort of name tag I’d much rather support!