Notes

Short content: a microblog of status updates or short notes
There was an eerie and surprisingly large overlap of a lot of what Matt Lumpkin said in his talk this morning and the IndieWeb movement. If you just change the disease from Type 1 Diabetes to Social Media, there are a tremendous number of similarities between the two approaches of problems to be solved in terms of giving people agency, ownership of their data, the silo nature of the big corporations in the space, and the lack of solid inter-operability and standards.

I can’t wait for Chuck Chugumulung and the gang to get the video for this week up on YouTube so I can share it with colleagues.

Based on what I’ve heard, it might not be a completely terrible thing to class what the IndieWeb is working on fixing as a broad public health issue–but in its case a mental health one instead of a pancreas and diet related one.

Matt Lumpkin on stage pointing at a slide on the screen stating "Restoring one's own agency is the most critical task for people working to negotiate a healthy relationship with a chronic disease."
Matt Lumpkin during his talk “For Patients, by Patients: Pioneering a New Approach in Med-Tech Design“.
Matt Lumpkin on stage with a slide displaying the text "Do the people who use the things you make feel their power returned to them?"
Another IndieWeb sentiment in a presentation on UX/UI for improving health of people dealing with type 1 diabetes.
I’ve been looking at potentially switching themes again on my website,  but I’m still not sure I want to make the jump. If I do, I’m going to simplify things down a bit.

In the process, I’ve been looking at tweaking some of the CSS in the Post Kinds Plugin, particularly since I’m using it so heavily for a lot of my content. One of the small things I’ve wanted to do was to make what I can only call the pseudo-titles of the bookmarks, reads, etc. slightly larger to bring more attention to the titles and authors of those parts.

To do it, I’ve added the following couple of lines to my child theme’s style.css file:

/* Changes the font size on the titles of Kinds */
section.response > header {
  font-size: 20px;
}
For quite a while I’ve had an upcoming events widget in the sidebar of my website. It was a simple HTML widget that was maintained by hand, but I’d been getting tired of updating it. To keep things a bit more DRY (aka don’t repeat yourself), I’m using the JetPack Upcoming Events widget now that pulls in iCal feed data from a special shared Google Calendar where I put my public events. This way I can put things in my calendar and my website will automatically update within an hour or two. Hooray for the little wins.
As I’m putting the final touches on my presentation on Micropub for WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley tomorrow, I’m reminded how fantastically powerful this simple concept really is. Even WordPress beginners can gain tremendous leverage with a simple plugin.

To top it off, it’s only one of many phenomenal IndieWeb technologies that one can quickly add to websites that extends their functionality dramatically.

Looking forward to brainstorming about  books at the next session at IndieWebCamp New Haven in about 30 minutes.

 

I’ve been researching all evening on some IndieWeb ideas as they relate to education. I’ll continue early tomorrow with IndieWebCamp New Haven, where I’ll be thinking and tinkering more with DoOO, SPLOTs, books, OER, and related topics.

Remote attendance is still a possibility for those interested.