reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to Feature request: reading progress · Issue #14 · gRegorLove/indiebookclub by

Similar to Goodreads, allow entering a percentage or page number to track your progress.

I need to think about this some more, but I suspect IBC would generate text like "Progress: 25%" and include it in the e-content of the Micropub request.

Perhaps this example could be a useful model: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/13/55767168/

The progress portion is coded roughly in HTML with a label as follows:

<ul>
    <li class="bookprogress"><progress value="177" max="465">38%</progress> <label for="">38.0% done; loc 4290-4847 of 12932</label></li>
</ul>

You could always use <p> or <span> instead of ul/li tags (with some app specific classes to allow the receiving site to create its own custom CSS for display. Otherwise browsers should be able to display a reasonable visual default.

I’d recommend support for pages, percentages finished, and potentially even Amazon’s default location numbers, with the ability to translate back and forth potentially when given at least two of the parameters as a minimum which should allow the calculation of the others. I find in practice that it’s generally pretty rare to have both page numbers and location numbers, but it could happen.

I’ve also got an extended version available at https://boffosocko.com/2012/06/17/big-history/#READING%20PROGRESS

Replied to Introducing Indigenous for Android by

swentel (realize.be)

You can now download the app from Google Play. If you want to install it manually, you can also go over to the release section on GitHub. Use GitHub to post issues, ideas, documentation, nicer icons, design mockups ... everyone can help out!

Congratulations on the fantastic updates on Indigenous! The recent changes are making me wonder how I’ve lived all this time without it.

My first use of the read post functionality was a tad confusing because I wasn’t aware that either the WordPress Micropub client or Post Kinds supported the read-status set up that IndieBookClub.biz had pioneered.

The vast majority of my read posts are for online articles which are relatively short in nature and so don’t use the read-status features and are simply marked up with read-of. When I originally suggested that Indigenous support read posts, I only expected the read-of support and didn’t imagine the additional read-status support for “to-read”, “reading”, or “finished” to be included. These are highly experimental and have thus far only been supported by IndieBookClub which focuses on much longer book-length content that can take better advantage of the ideas of the idea of a bookmark to read, ongoing reading, and finished reading markers. Even with this support gRegor still thinks that it may be better to use the addition of p-category or u-category microformats instead of the read-status tags. The WordPress Micropub server is the only other software that supports these additional read-statuses besides gRegor’s own website.

Given that:

an exceedingly small number of sites have support for read-status;
the read-of microformat has somewhat better support (though it is still an experimental microformat itself);
the majority of posts that Indigenous users are likely to use for creating read posts will be articles (as opposed to either smaller posts like notes, likes, favorites, checkins, RSVPs, etc. or book length material),

I would recommend that you have a default setting in Indigenous for just read-of without a specific read-status (the UI could either indicate “none” or “read” without a read-status value). However for the occasional longer form usages leaving the other options in would be useful. I can easily imagine myself using the option for “to-read” over the simpler bookmark functionality now that it exists!

Thanks again for all your work!

Replied to Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine by

Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.

Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.

In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.

Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.

Replied to Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? by Wendy Hanamura (Internet Archive Blogs)

We agree. Much work has been done and some of the fundamentals are in place. So on January 21, 2020 the Internet Archive hosted “Exploring Decentralized Social Media,” a DWeb SF Meetup that attracted 120+ decentralized tech builders, founders, and those who just wanted to learn more. Decentralized social media app builders from London, Portland and San Francisco took us on a tour of where their projects are today.

Something important to notice about this article. Not a single person here is linked to using their own website, or via a link to their presence on any of their respective decentralized networks. All the people whose names are linked are linked to on Twitter. All of the people who’ve written pieces or articles linked to in this piece are writing on Medium.com and not on their own sites/platforms. How can we honestly be getting anywhere if there isn’t even a basic identity for any of these people on any of these decentralized networks? At least most of the projects seem to have websites, so that’s a start. But are any of them dogfooding their own products to do so? I suspect not.

I’ll circle back around shortly to watch the video of the event that they recorded. I’m curious what else they’ve got hiding in there.

Interestingly, I’ll note that it appears that my site will at least somewhat federate with the Internet Archive’s as they support pingback. (Great to see technology from almost 20 years ago works just as well as some of these new methods…)

Graber helped us understand the broad categories of what’s out there: federated protocols such as ActivityPub and Matrix; peer-to-peer protocols such as Scuttlebutt, and social media apps that utilize blockchain in some way for monetization, provenance or storage. ❧

Missing from this list is a lot of interop work done by the IndieWeb over the past decade.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:48PM

Thought leader and tech executive, John Ryan, provided valuable historical context both onstage and in his recent blog. He compared today’s social media platforms to telephone services in 1900. Back then, a Bell Telephone user couldn’t talk to an AT&T customer; businesses had to have multiple phone lines just to converse with their clients. It’s not that different today, Ryan asserts, when Facebook members can’t share their photos with Renren’s 150 million account holders. All of these walled gardens, he said, need a “trusted intermediary” layer to become fully interconnected. ❧

An apt analogy which I’ve used multiple times in the past.
Annotated on February 03, 2020 at 06:50PM

Replied to Navigating my way into veganism by Bryan Alexander (bryanalexander.org)

For the past month I’ve been I’ve following a vegan diet. So in a brief pause from my focus on the future of education, I’ll share some thoughts about this experiment. It’s…

This is excellent Bryan. It’s something I ought to look into in more depth myself, but reading about your experience actually points out to me that I’m eating a lot more rice and beans in the last few years. Having a rice cooker means I almost always have cooked rice on hand with a fraction of the effort it had taken before. I also make about 4 cups of beans every week, so those are always hiding in the refrigerator. I also bought a tortilla press and making those is far easier and they’re far tastier than those in the stores and for a dramatic fraction of the price. I’ve taken to having a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables in the house, and I find it’s easier to grab an apple, banana, orange or something than it is chips or other junk food of which I’m starting to keep almost none around the house.

Another shift that I’ve found somewhat useful is that I became lactose intolerant in the middle of last year, so diverting around large amounts of dairy has likely been helpful.

One of my other shifts in the past few years is that I truly love a great pastry. As a result, the level of what I consider good pastry and other treats has risen dramatically. Now I find that I either have to make my own or get them on demand at local shops. This has prevented me from eating a lot of inferior and rather tasteless junk food as a result. Girl Scout Cookie season is upon us, and I just can’t bring myself to eat such dreadful snacks anymore when I could have something much tastier and likely healthier. Of course as part of all this, I’m also making a lot more of my own bread now too. It isn’t nearly as difficult as I had thought it would be to make fresh bread every couple of days.

In sum, I hadn’t really noticed it until you’ve pointed it out, but I’ve largely taken to the diet you’ve outlined. The primary difference is that I’ve come around to it in a much different fashion.