reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to WordPress of One's Own: Or, thinking through creating a not intimidating menu of options for domain installs by

AlanaCallan (Reclaim Hosting Community)

Hey there,

New and just wading in here I work at Fleming College in our Learning Design and Support team/department

Our medium sized college has always offered our students and faculty a choice in terms of the platform they choose to use: Wordpress, tumblr, weebly, medium, etc., mostly because we didn’t have anything else to offer them other than the LMS that was supported by the institution.

This past September our communication courses for first year have been using wordpress.com (mostly) as they were encouraged by the teaching faculty who were also using wordpress.com sites for their own writing. The redesigned communication courses have the students learning to write, give and receive feedback, and loop through this cycle several times for an authentic audience. First semester focuses on personal writing, the second focuses on professional writing.

(just wanted to provide some context for my reply - they had to go with wordpress.com as there was no plan or budget to do a local install or have it hosted for the college)

Feedback from the faculty teaching team after teaching for almost 8 weeks is how to template and simplify space for students to use, here is a direct quote: “could we create dedicated blog page for students that would be a pre-made, fool-proof template? When a student’s WordPress blog does not work and we can’t fix the problem, it is very frustrating to be helpless beside an exasperated student.”

I am inclined to suggest freeing up the expectation that the student’s use wordpress and that they instead use a platform that they may already be familiar with (like tumblr etc.,) and create a space AND use categories/titles that are consistent so that the faculty can go in and review, comment, provide feedback etc., easily.

Many students may choose to use wordpress either way but…

One thing that we do here that may help the conversation is that our library holds workshops to assist students in creating their online presence, creative commons, attribution etc.,

I’m interested in any thoughts or feedback on how to approach the our communication faculty request… am I heading in the right direction??

Thanks!!

Alana

There may be a bit of a path forward here that some might consider using that has some fantastic flexibility.

There is a WordPress plugin called Micropub (which needs to be used in conjunction with the IndieAuth plugin for authentication to their CMS account) that will allow students to log into various writing/posting applications.

These are usually slimmed down interfaces that don’t provide the panoply of editing options that the Gutenberg interface or Classic editor metabox interfaces do. Quill is a good example of this and has a Medium.com like interface. iA Writer is a solid markdown editor that has this functionality as well (though I think it only works on iOS presently).

Students can write and then post from these, but still have the option to revisit within the built in editors to add any additional bells and whistles they might like if they’re so inclined.

This system is a bit like SPLOTs, but has a broader surface area and flexibility. I’ll also mention that many of the Micropub clients are open source, so if one were inclined they could build their own custom posting interface specific to their exact needs. Even further, other CMSes like Known, Drupal, etc. either support this web specification out of the box or with plugins, so if you built a custom interface it could work just as well with other platforms that aren’t just WordPress. This means that in a class where different students have chosen a variety of ways to set up their Domains, they can be exposed to a broader variety of editing tools or if the teacher chooses, they could be given a single editing interface that is exactly the same for everyone despite using different platforms.

For those who’d like to delve further, I did a WordPress-focused crash course session on the idea a while back: Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications at WordCamp Santa Clarita 2019 (slides).

Replied to New discoveries about Stonehenge by Lynne Kelly (Lynne Kelly)

Firstly, an entire tribe moving from Wales to the Salisbury Plain took their encyclopaedia with them. This would require the circle to be erected in the same order as in Wales and oriented in the same direction. In effect, these people were taking their database of knowledge with them, the structure in the stones, and the data in their memories.

Secondly, a different tribe conquering those in Wales might identify just how effective this memory technique is and steal only the technology. Essentially, they stole the database structure and filled it with their own data. The bluestones are particularly suited to a mnemonic purpose due to the blotches and blobs in their material makeup.

Perhaps there’s a third possibility not mentioned here?

Perhaps the group at Waun Mawn, traded a portion of their knowledge and database to a more powerful and potentially more central nearby group of people? The evidence indicates that many of the people buried at Stonehenge were originally from the area of Wales where some of the stones originated. The fact that some stones remained behind may mean that some of the needed local encyclopedia stayed behind.

Replied to a tweet by

rachel syme (Twitter)

what is a longform magazine story from before, let's say, 2010, that you still go back and look at for inspiration
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) April 2, 2021

I find myself regularly revisiting Vannevar Bush’s July 1945 essay As We May Think from The Atlantic.

Replied to a tweet (Twitter)

A warm welcome to our new Individual Members @FieryRed1 @CosmoCat @ChrisAldrich @C_Stockman @losh99 #altc #ff pic.twitter.com/3EotmwB3W2
— ALT - alt.ac.uk (@A_L_T) March 26, 2021

Thank you. I can’t wait to see everyone at OERxDomains21 coming up: https://oer21.oerconf.org/

#altc #OERxDomains #OER21

Replied to a thread by joanne mcneil, Anil Dash, Andy Baio (Twitter)

you don’t miss Google Reader you miss the World Wide Web before 2012
— joanne mcneil (@jomc) March 20, 2021

I do think folks have also conflated the generic ability to read RSS with the specific social networking features of Google Reader, so it’s hard to know which they say they’re missing.
— Anil Dash (@anildash) March 20, 2021

i mostly miss everyone and everything having a blog and the ecosystem of search/discovery/utilities that supported it all
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 20, 2021

I used to miss the reading/social aspects of GR until I switched to using my own website in combination with social readers like Aperture and Indigenous. (Aaron Parecki has a good overview of what it looks like; the space has grown quite a bit since his original post in 2018.)

I heartily agree with @waxpancake that the open web needs some better discovery options.

Replied to a tweet by Brian LeRoux (Twitter)

why isn't https://t.co/X3v7Fs07E2 more popular?
— Brian LeRoux(@brianleroux) March 12, 2021

IndieWeb IS wonderfully popular!

You’re maybe wondering why more companies haven’t turned IndieWeb building blocks into a product like Micro.blog has?

There are a few others certainly.

For the masses, we’re going to need more providers who are ethically working toward IndieWeb as a Service (IaaS). Companies willing to allow people to be the customer rather than exploiting them as the product.

Of course, if you’re running WithKnown, you’re already there with all the trimmings. If you’re on WordPress or Drupal with your own domain, you’re already there too, but you can add lots of additional interactive functionality with a few plugins. There are dozens of available platforms that will do the job and each one has a multitude of options and configurations.

All that choice comes with a spectacular amount of complexity. Hopefully some clever companies will narrow down some popular options and make them available to large numbers of people for a reasonable price.

(Personally I wonder what things might look like if your online social IndieWeb infrastructure was run by your local public library or your local newspaper?)

The community has and continues to do a lot of incredibly difficult work to make dramatically different websites be able to interoperate and communicate with one another. Many of the roads are well worn now, we need others to come and pave them to be as equitable and easy-to-use for the rest of humankind.

All this said, of course we still also have additional complex problems like privacy, safety, anti-bullying, etc. to conquer so that we don’t end up with a decentralized version of Facebook and continue repeating the same problems of the past.

Many of us are content with small, organic growth. Massive overnight growth is often a myth, and if it does happen, you can have unmanageable and unanticipated problems seen in situations like the “eternal September“.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead