Recap of Los Angeles Area Homebrew Website Club February 21, 2018

After a relatively quiet quiet writing hour where I worked on acquisition posts a bit, people began arriving just before the 6:30 pm official start time. I kicked off the meeting with a quick overview of IndieWeb's concepts and principles for newcomers. As a mini-case study I talked a bit about some of my work…

Facebook is Censoring My Notes

I don't post "notes" to Facebook often, but I'd noticed a few weeks ago that several pieces I'd published like this a while back were apparently unpublished by the platform. I hadn't seen or heard anything from Facebook about them being unpublished or having issues, so I didn't realize the problem until I randomly stumbled…

Homebrew Website Club Meetup on February 21, 2018

Are you building your own website? Indie reader? Personal publishing web app? Or some other digital magic-cloud proxy? If so, come on by and join a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Bring your friends who want to start a personal web site. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project... Everyone…

🔖 PressForward in the classroom

Bookmarked PressForward in the classroom (pressforward.org)
Do you want to work with students to publish class assignments or research? Instructors use PressForward in the classroom to consolidate and review student assignments, help students learn to survey their fields, and create opportunities for collaboration, communication, and research. The Lewis & Clark College Environmental Studies Program produces Environment Across Boundaries, a student-led publication that cultivates interdisciplinary perspectives on environmental issues. Participation gives students an opportunity to engage with their discipline through experiential, project based learning. They develop skills both in their field and with a suite of digital tools.
An interesting use case for PressForward: creating a "planet" website to aggregate and/or showcase work of students in an entire classroom who are all posting content to their own separate web spaces. Sketch idea: create a standalone WordPress site for a course, install the PressForward plugin, input the RSS feeds for students' websites to aggregate…

A better way to subscribe to or follow sites on the open web

Just as I was getting sick last week, Colin Walker wrote "There has to be a better way to subscribe to sites." He's definitely hit the nail right on the head. The process is currently painful and disorganized, it's also working on technology that's almost two decades old and difficult for newcomers at best. I've always posited that…

Yarns Indie Reader

Bookmarked Yarns Indie Reader by Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)
Over the past little while I’ve been chipping away at an Indie Reader plugin for WordPress. It’s still a bit rough at this point, but works well enough that I’m happy to announce it here. Yarns Indie Reader allows you to subscribe to websites that publish either rss or h-feed. As well as keeping up with your subscriptions, you can like and reply and it create posts on your blog automatically.
I'm hoping this is another great example of the types of feed readers we need in the world. ​​​​​​​

Reply to “To PESOS or to POSSE?” by Dries Buytaert

Replied to To PESOS or to POSSE? by Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert (dri.es)
Comparing two different approaches that help you take control back over your own data on the web. [...] The goal of this analysis was to understand the pros and cons of how I can own my own content on https://dri.es. While PESOS would be much easier to implement, I decided to go with POSSE. My next step is to figure out my "POSSE plan"; how to quickly and easily share status updates on my Drupal site, how to syndicate them to 3rd party services, how to re-organize my mailing list and my RSS feed, and more. If you have any experience with implementing POSSE, feel free to share your takeaways in the comments.
What a fantastic breakdown of the concepts of POSSE vs. PESOS, though to be sure there are also additional variations for syndicating, cross-posting, or moving content around to reach various audiences. One thing that I think you've only briefly touched upon is the ability to also have likes, replies/comments, etc. also come back to your site…

Reply to Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog | Baremetrics

Replied to Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog by Josh Pigford (Baremetrics)
Where to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it’s hard to know what does and doesn’t work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great? [...] The numbers just didn’t make sense. Yes, I could put more into Medium and try to build up readership even more. The guys at Basecamp regularly get 250k+ views on their content. But doing that helps Medium the most in the long run. They’ve been fumbling left and right trying to figure out how to make Medium sustainable, and I’m just not convinced they’ll always do what’s best for us and our business. Switching back Now I didn’t want to throw out distribution on Medium entirely. There can definitely be some benefit to syndicating content there. It’s essentially another distribution channel to expose people to our content. So we needed a game plan on how we could still make use of Medium as a distribution channel without cannibalizing our own readership or SEO work.
This is 100% on the mark, you should definitely own your own content. Syndicating it out to Medium is a great idea, particularly when you can get a rel="canonical" tag for the original on Medium. Incidentally Medium has their own WordPress plugin that will allow you to quickly and easily syndicate your site's content directly…

Microblogging by Paul Robert Lloyd

Bookmarked Microblogging by Paul Robert Lloyd (paulrobertlloyd.com)
I stopped using Facebook because I didn’t trust the people behind Facebook. I had grown weary of the sly and underhand tactics used to grow their network and was unwilling to remain part of it. But if I’m honest, I couldn’t trust myself either. Visiting Facebook would elicit behaviour you could only describe as stalking; trawling through the feeds of my friends, seeking out people I vaguely knew. I had better things to do with my time. Almost a decade later, I’m having similar thoughts about Twitter.
He's got some interesting, but subtle references to pieces of the "old" web including Small Pieces, Loosely Joined. ​​​​​​

📅 Domain of One’s Own Workshop for Admins

RSVPed Might be attending Domain of One's Own Workshop for Admins
After hearing from a number of schools running Domain of One’s Own, we thought it might be useful to host an in-person workshop that focuses specifically on implementing this project on your campus. Workshop of One’s Own is a two-day, geared towards the instructional technologist who assists with managing DoOO on an administrator level, but also focuses on project conceptualization, instructional uses, and empowering their community from a teaching/learning standpoint. You’ll not only be receiving the in-person, focused attention from the entire Reclaim Hosting team, but you’ll also get a chance to brainstorm with folks from other schools who are running their own Domain of One’s Own projects. We’ll work through common troubleshooting tips, SPLOTs with Alan Levine, cPanel application case studies, and more.
I'm almost painfully tempted to attend this workshop on March 15-16 with the idea of and setting up a side business to specialize in hosting WordPress and Known sites for IndieWeb use. While it could be a generic non-institutional instance for academics, researchers, post docs, graduate and undergraduate students who don't have a "home" DoOO…

📅 RSVP for WPCampus Online: A Virtual Conference for WordPress in Higher Education

RSVPed Attending WPCampus Online: A Virtual Conference for WordPress in Higher Education
Our next (free) conference, WPCampus Online, will take place Tuesday, January 30. It will be a free event and completely virtual. View the schedule and join us for a full day of professional development. No travel required! The WPCampus Online schedule is filled with 16 free sessions focused on using WordPress in higher education.
This looks like a cool event at the end of the month. I'm curious to see what #edtech and #IndieWeb-esque things they may be touching on during the day.

Fragmentions for Better Highlighting and Direct References on the Web

Fragmentions Ages ago I added support on my website for fragmentions. Wait... What is that? Fragmention is a portmanteau word made up of fragment and mention (or even Webmention), but in more technical terms, it's a simple way of creating a URL that not only targets a particular page on the internet, but allows you…
Liked Fears of the IndieWeb by Michael SingletaryMichael Singletary (Michael Singletary)
Prior to diving headfirst into the idea of taking back control over my content online, I held a number of reservations about the ongoing process of true ownership. I’m the kind of guy that likes to let other people worry about things when I can and, despite being a fully capable systems administrator, I generally avoid running my own personal servers, hosting accounts, or platforms. I have, traditionally, outsourced this job to hosted platforms like Blogger, Flickr, MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and countless others. Only MySpace has failed me so far, erasing much of my early adulthood from the internet. Why should I turn this control over to smaller teams of developers that may not remain motivated to maintain the projects I’ve, now, come to rely on?
I long for the day in which the web has become IndieWebified to the point that I don't need to worry about my non-tech friends and family anymore either. I feel like the walls will eventually come down with technology like Webmentions and I won't need to spend as much time on machinations like syndication…
Replied to a tweet by Mel ChoyceMel Choyce (Twitter)
@jeremyfelt Pingbacks need a redesign!
Not coincidentally, David Shanske (), the maintainer of Pingbacks/Trackbacks is a major contributor to the WordPress Webmention plugin as well as many other IndieWeb related WordPress tech.

Reply to 2018: Some Hope by Brent Simmons

Replied to inessential on Twitter (Twitter)
2018: Some Hope: http://inessential.com/2018/01/03/2018_some_hope
Brent, I think you've hit the nail directly on the head. I'm glad someone working on a feed reader has these ideals. It may be a bit pedantic for you, but since you mention it in the close, here's a reasonable primer which may help: http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/28/an-introduction-to-the-indieweb/