Reply to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.”

Replied to The Patreon Fiasco: Jack Conte tells creators “We ****ed up.” by Todd Allen (The Beat)
The creative community is still waiting on Patreon to officially address the new policy of passing transaction fees on to the patrons (backers), but it appears that co-founder and figurehead Jack Conte has been calling some of creators to discuss the situation with them. Jeph Jacques, the cartoonist behind Questionable Content (over 5,300 patrons as of this typing. though the number of patrons as been… fluid… for many Patreon creators in the last few days) tweeted about his conversation with Conte
Perhaps coincidentally, there was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin yesterday (12/09/17) entitled Payments, Pledges, and Donations, Oh My!. The link includes the video of the session via YouTube as well as notes. The premise is that many creators already have their own websites/platforms for promoting or featuring their work. In some sense Patreon is only…

👓 No one makes a living on Patreon | The Outline

Read No one makes a living on Patreon (The Outline)
Who is really benefiting from the crowdfunding site for artists?
This makes me want to find alternate and more direct means of donating money to people I want to support. This could be a use case for people to have payment pages on their own websites to make the process more direct. This would also mean that they could post their update content on their…

Alpha Release of Linkback Module for Drupal 8 with Webmention Support [8.x-1.0-alpha1]

Bookmarked Alpha Release of Linkback Module for Drupal 8 with Webmention Support [8.x-1.0-alpha1] by Dan FeidtDan Feidt (Drupal.org)
We are proud to bring you the first alpha release of Linkback, an interesting suite of modules which can help integrate your website with the wider internet. Linkback provides the backend functionality to save both outgoing and incoming pings and webmentions involving remote sites.
Drupal 8, now (along with platforms like WithKnown, Perch, WordPress, Craft, Kirby, ProcessWire, Elgg, and Django) has Webmention support. Congratulations to Dan Feidt (aka HongPong) and everyone involved! This means that more websites can communicate directly with each other on the open and decentralized web. (Wouldn't you like to "@mention" someone from your own website…

Reply to doesn’t link back by Khürt Williams

Replied to doesn’t link back by Khürt Williams (Island in the Net)
I ran my domain through IndieWebify.me. Almost all of the rel=“me” links either don’t link back or couldn’t be fetched. The following work perfectly and can be used with the IndieAuth authentication plug-in. GitHub Flickr Goodreads Twitter That’s 4 out of 43.
Khürt , The majority of them don't link back because the silos (like Keybase, Instagram, and Medium which you mention) aren't putting the rel="me" microformat on the URLs in your profile like Twitter, Github, and Flicker do. If you view the page source for those silos, you'll see that they list your URL, but don't…

🔖 The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse

Bookmarked The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse by Brianna Privett (WordCamp US 2017)
The Personal Web of the 1990s/early 2000s was the first wave of online diarists and bloggers who use the web as a platform to chronicle and share their our daily lives. WordPress came out of this movement, and is now in its second decade. 2017 marks 20 years that I’ve been using the web to create and archive memories, and 12 years that I’ve been doing it with WordPress. I’ve learned a few things about creating a real and permanent record of a lifetime on the ephemeral digital landscape, and together we’ll discuss how to use WordPress to create your own home on the web. We’ll cover topics such as how to maintain your (and your family’s) privacy, using WordPress to build a keepsake repository your friends and family can contribute to, and how to ensure that these digital spaces are available as a legacy for lifetimes to come.
I can't wait until WordPress.TV (presumably) posts this up in a few weeks. This sounds a lot like Brianna's talking about a web-enabled commonplace book, a topic which intrigues me greatly and the purpose for which I'm most often using my own site. In looking briefly at her personal site, I don't see lots of…
I really love that I can post an event on my website and people can use their own websites to RSVP to it. It's so simple, but it feels so magical. Even better, the Webmention plugin and the Semantic Linkbacks plugin allows for a beautiful display of the responses. #IndieWeb FTW! [caption id="attachment_55701549" align="alignleft" width="609"]…

Reply to Aggregating the Decentralized Social Web by Jason Green

Replied to Aggregating the Decentralized Social Web by Jason Green (þoht-hord)
There are actually three problems to solve, reading, which is relatively easy, posting, which is harder, and social graph management, which is quite complex.
Some brief thoughts: There are actually three problems to solve, reading, which is relatively easy, posting, which is harder, and social graph management, which is quite complex. I might submit that posting is possibly the easiest of the three and that the reader problem is the most difficult. This is based on the tremendous number…

📺 Jeremy Keith – Building Blocks of the Indie Web

Bookmarked Building Blocks of the Indie Web by Jeremy Keith (View Source London)
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that's how!
Based solely on what I know from just the title of the talk, this wasn't quite at all what I was expecting. It was far more interesting and philosophical than I expected, but I suppose that's the extra magical bit that you get for a something presented by Jeremy. Approaching the subject from a more…

A reply to Aaron Davis about h-cards

Replied to A Further Reply to Chris Aldrich in regards to the IndieWeb by Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I know that I have provided my perspective [already](https://readwriterespond.com/2017/10/indieweb-reflections/), but I have been doing a lot of thinking about it of late. There are so many elements that just feel so foreign. Take for example H-Cards.
Aaron, thanks for your continued thoughts on my post. These are some good observations. Interestingly, on November 9th of this month I had noticed that the h-card page on the wiki was one of the few around that had absolutely no section heading for IndieWeb Examples which is nearly ubiquitious on most other pages. (Examples…

Reply to Pingbacks: hiding in plain sight by Ian Guest

Replied to Pingbacks: hiding in plain sight by Ian Guest (Marginal Notes)
Wait! Aren’t you researching Twitter? I am indeed and the preceding discussion has largely centred on pingbacks, a feature of blogs, rather than microblogs. I have two points to make here: firstly that microblogs and Twitter may have features which function in a similar way to pingbacks. The retweet for example provides a similar link to a text or resource that someone else has produced. I’ll admit that it has less permanence than a pingback, patiently ensconced at the foot of a blog and ready to whisk the reader off to the linked blog, but then the structure and function of Twitter is one of flow and change when compared with a blog; it’s a different beast. The second is that my point of entry to the blogs and their interconnected web of enabling pingbacks was a tweet. Two actually. Andrea’s tweet took me to another tweet which referenced Aditi’s blog post; had I not been on Twitter and had Andrea and I not made a connection through that platform, the likelihood of me ever being aware of Aditi’s post and the learning opportunities that it and its wider assemblage brings together would be minimal.
I'm finding your short study and thoughts on pingbacks while I was thinking about Webmentions (and a particular issue that Aaron Davis was having with them) after having spent a chunk of the day remotely following the Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. It's made me realize that…
In honor of Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 this week, for free (hosting and domain registration not included) I'll offer to build one journalist or academic a basic IndieWeb-capable WordPress-based portfolio website to display and archive their personal work. Preference will be given to those in attendance at the conference, but any who need an "author…

OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager

Last week I wrote about creating my following page and a related OPML file which one could put into a feed reader to subscribe to the list itself instead of importing it. I haven't heard anyone mention it (yet), but I suspect that like I, some may be disappointed that some feed readers that allow…

A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)

The humble blogroll is long overdue for some updates in form and functionality on the open web.

👓 Do Things that Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

Read Do Things that Don't Scale by Paul Graham (paulgraham.com)
One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don't, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
This is a slightly older post, but still has some generally sound advice for start up companies. As I read it, I can't help but think about how the structure and set up of the IndieWeb community is mirrored in a lot of this advice. The fact that everyone is diligently selfdogfooding the ultimate product…