Chris Aldrich Blog: BoffoSocko.com

Replied to How to Set up and Maintain Your Academic Reading List in Obsidian by Natalie Kraneiss (Field Notes)

The combination of Zotero (with the Better BibTeX plugin) and Obsidian with the Citation and Projects plugins are the perfect way for me as a PhD student to keep track of the literature to be read and already read.

This is excellent! I’d already had the majority of it set up and I was going to spend some time this week to write some custom code with Dataview to do this, but apparently there’s a reasonably flexible plugin that will get me 95% of what I’m sure to want without any work! Thanks Natalie.

Incidentally, I spent a chunk of yesterday looking at S.D. Goitein’s note taking process (zettelkasten) in his work on the Cairo Geniza, specifically with respect to:

Zinger, Oded. “Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza: A Practical Guide to Collections, Editions, and Resources.” Jewish History 32, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 279–309. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10835-019-09314-6.

Princeton Geniza Lab. “Goitein’s Index Cards,” 2022. https://genizalab.princeton.edu/resources/goiteins-index-cards.

Reposted a post by

Geoff Cain (@geoffcain@mastodon.social) (Mastodon)

The Handbook of Open, Distance and Digital Education, a great (1400+ pages!) resource on elearning has been released as an openly licensed book. Great essays in here on learning theories - I will write more as I get through this, but it looks some of the most interesting writers/researchers on elearning are well represented here. Pay a lot for the print copy or download it free as a pdf. https://link.springer.com/referencework/10.1007/978-981-19-2080-6

Full RSS feeds for Mastodon Instances with OpenRSS

I’ve wanted full RSS feeds for several Mastodon instances for ages.

They can be particularly useful for small instances (aka communities) with slow posting velocity—you know, that instance you wanted to join for the local camaraderie, but having/maintaining/maintaining yet another Mastodon account wasn’t worth it, the hashtag discovery wasn’t going to cut it, and trying to follow all the people in the local community individually is irksome. Well OpenRSS.org might be able to cover you.

As an example, I wanted to follow what’s happening at toolsforthought.rocks/public/local so I added that slightly trimmed local timeline URL onto https://openrss.org/ and put it into my feed reader. After they wire things together for you a bit (presuming it’s one they’ve not seen/done before), voilà your RSS feed just starts working! Now I’m following ToolsForThought at: https://openrss.org/toolsforthought.rocks/public/local.

Since my personal website works with Mastodon and the Fediverse, this last part of more easily following groups of people in my social reader helps me complete the circle of reading, following, and responding in a more IndieWeb way. (Of course I wish that Mastodon 4.0 had not gone full js;dr, which would have allowed following them using Microformats mark up with much better fidelity. le sigh)

Replied to a post by

Buster Benson (@buster@medium.social) (Mastodon)

@tchambers @coachtony @jeffjarvis @mathowie Thanks for these links! Definitely exciting to see how this is being approached from different angles. I’m excited for this next chapter.

@buster@medium.social @tchambers @coachtony@medium.social @jeffjarvis @mathowie
Another example of longer posts which are folded under a “read more” type link within the Fediverse itself can be seen in the Hometown fork of Mastodon (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown), which is running the hcommons.social platform. The admins have upped the character limit to 1000 instead of the usual 500. Ideally those reading in other parts of the network would see the beginning of a post and a “Read more” link to read the remainder of the piece.

I often post to my own WordPress website which has a plugin to make it appear as if it were ActivityPub compatible. If I follow it via a Hometown-based (Mastodon) server, like my hcommons.social account, I see all the full short notes/replies content which are usually 1000 characters or less. For posts over that limit, there’s a “Read More >” which opens up the entirety of the article within the hcommons.social interface where I can read it in its entirety. Naturally there’s a link to the original, so I can also go back to read that if I chose.

I’ve just gone over the 1000 character limit, so I’ll post this on my own site, syndicate a copy to my hcommons.social account, and with any luck it will serve as an example of how all this might work between WordPress, a forked version of Mastodon, and Mastodon itself, as well as for testing it for reading in other parts of the Fediverse if one wished.

Beyond this reading experience, one should also be aware of a separate user interface/interaction problem inherent in how Mastodon and potentially other parts of the Fediverse handle replies and who can see them. I’ll leave this link to explain that issue separately: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036. (Hopefully your instance will let you see a subsection of some of the replies to it…)

An additional benefit that one gets in bolting on ActivityPub the way it works for my WordPress site is that folks who subscribe to @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com can see linked text natively from within Mastodon despite the fact that Mastodon doesn’t allow one to wrap text with URLs to link out.

social media (n): /ˌsoː.ʃəl ˈmiː.di.aː/
A DDoS, usually perpetrated by surveillance capitalists, on a person’s attention preventing them from traditional sensemaking, clear thinking, learning, and generally otherwise experiencing life.

It’s not lost on me that historically multiple votes to elect a Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives like this happen when the United States is grappling with its white supremacist history and what Eddie Glaude, Jr. calls “the lie”.

Seems odd that Pope Benedict XVI has died, yet we’re all watching the U.S. House of Representatives for the proverbial “white smoke”? Perhaps we’ll see it tomorrow on January 6th?

@JerryMichalski @j3rry@toolsforthought.rocks With respect to your idea of a NeoDeck, I’m reminded of a slideshow set up that was built into a MediaWiki site which might fit some of the prototype you’re seeking?

Details: https://indieweb.org/Template:slideshow

Example: https://indieweb.org/2018/Baltimore/Building_Blocks

Individual pages could also likely be done via transclusion thereby giving one the ability to create re-orderable versions.

🎧 Space, Pixels and Cognition (Yiliu and John) | T4T S01E03

Listened to Space, Pixels and Cognition (Yiliu and John) | T4T S01E03 by Jerry Michalski from Tools for Thinking | Betaworks

A conversation about spatial computing and the power of operating in a spatial environment with the founder of Softspace, Yiliu Shen-Burke, and John Underkoffler of Oblong Industries.

Some interesting ideas about generative and playful spaces here. Also some references to Aby Warburg and murder boards, which may be of interest to Shawn Gilmore and J.D. Connor (@jdconnor@mastodon.social)

A multi-layered statement, but let’s reflect for a moment on how the West wholly misses out on a hidden personal knowledge management technique inherent in orality. #ToolsForThought #PKM