Minimising the friction of advertising my thoughts in order to maximise the chance a clever thought gets advertised.
A nice write up for those looking at technology for academic blogging or maintaining a static website.
Tag: academic blogging
Make your own automatic blogroll
This is the script I use to generate a blogroll from my OPML:
❧#! /usr/bin/env python3 """ Parse OPML into markdown. """ import sys import re from xml.etree import ElementTree def main(fname): with open(fname, 'r', encoding='utf8') as fp: tree = ElementTree.parse(fp) for cat_node in tree.find('body').findall('outline'): print("\n## {}\n".format(cat_node.get('title'))) for node in cat_node.findall('outline'): name = node.attrib.get('text') feedurl = node.attrib.get('xmlUrl') url = node.attrib.get('htmlUrl') print("* [{}]({}) ([feed]({}))".format(name, url, feedurl)) if __name__ == "__main__": main(*sys.argv[1:])
The secret to low-cost academic blogging is to make blogging a natural byproduct of all the things that academics already do.
- Doing an interesting lecture? Put your lecture notes in a blog post.
- Writing a detailed email reply? "Reply to public" with a blog post.
- Answering the same question a second time? Put it in a blog post.
- Writing interesting code? Comment a snippet into a post.
- Doing something geeky at home? Blog about what you learned.
👓 Connections | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
There are still some wrinkles to be ironed out in getting the various platforms we use today to play well with Webmentions, but it’s a real step toward the goal of that decentralized, distributed, interconnected future for scholarly communication. ❧
...the upshot is that this relatively new web standard allows for round-tripped connections among discrete domains, enabling the conversation about an individual post to be represented on that post, wherever it might actually take place. ❧
The fun, secret part is that Kathleen hasn’t (yet?) discovered IndieAuth so that she can authenticate/authorize micropub clients like Quill to publish content to her own site from various clients by means of a potential micropub endpoint.
I’ll suspect she’ll be even more impressed when she realizes that there’s a forthcoming wave of feed readers1,2 that will allow her to read others’ content in a reader which has an integrated micropub client in it so that she can reply to posts directly in her feed reader, then the responses get posted directly to her own website which then, in turn, send webmentions to the sites she’s responding to so that the conversational loop can be completely closed.
She and Lee will also be glad to know that work has already started on private posts and conversations and posting to limited audiences as well. Eventually there will be no functionality that a social web site/silo can do that a distributed set of independent sites can’t. There’s certainly work to be done to round off the edges, but we’re getting closer and closer every day.
I know how it all works, but even I’m (still) impressed at the apparent magic that allows round-trip conversations between her website and Twitter and Micro.blog. And she hasn’t really delved into website to website conversations yet. I suppose we’ll have to help IndieWebify some of her colleague’s web presences to make that portion easier. Suddenly “academic Twitter” will be the “academic blogosphere” she misses from not too many years ago. 🙂
If there are academics out thee who are interested in what Kathleen has done, but may need a little technical help, I’m happy to set up some tools for them to get them started. (We’re also hosing occasional Homebrew Website Clubs, including a virtual one this coming week, which people are welcome to join.)
References
1.
Aldrich C. Feed reader revolution: it’s time to embrace open & disrupt social media. BoffoSocko. https://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/. Published June 9, 2017. Accessed July 20, 2018.
2.
Parecki A. Building an IndieWeb Reader. Aaron Parecki. https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-reader. Published March 21, 2018. Accessed July 20, 2018.
👓 Why Not Blog? | Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)My friend Alan Jacobs, a key inspiration in my return (such as it is, so far) to blogging and RSS and a generally pre-Twitter/Facebook outlook on the scholarly internet, is pondering the relationship between blogging and other forms of academic writing in thinking about his next project. Perhaps needless to say, this is something I’m considering as well, and I’m right there with him in most regards.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
The blog was not just the venue in which I started putting together the ideas that became my second book, the one that made promotion and various subsequent jobs possible, but it was also the way that I was able to demonstrate that there might be a readership for that second book, without which it’s much less likely that a press would have been interested. ❧
This sounds like she’s used her blog as both a commonplace book as well as an author platform.
In fact blog posts are not the kind of thing one can detail on one’s annual review form, and even a blog in the aggregate doesn’t have a place in which it’s easy to be claimed as a site of ongoing scholarly productivity. ❧
Mine have gone more like (1) having some vague annoying idea with a small i; (b) writing multiple blog posts thinking about things related to that idea; (iii) giving a talk somewhere fulminating about some other thing entirely; (4) wondering if maybe there are connections among those things; (e) holy carp, if I lay the things I’ve been noodling about over the last year and a half out in this fashion, it could be argued that I am in the middle of writing a book! ❧
Here’s another person talking about blogs as “thought spaces” the same way that old school bloggers like Dave Winer and Om Malik amongst many others have in the past. While I’m thinking about it I believe that Colin Walker and Colin Devroe have used this sort of idea as well.
5 pages to add to your academic website | Veronika Cheplygina
Previously I wrote about getting your setting up your own academic website in WordPress and installing some helpful plugins. But once you have all that, what content do you actually add to your new website? Of course, you are probably going to have pages for your CV (possibly split into different pages for research, teaching etc) and your publications. In this post I cover a few other pages I like to see on people’s professional websites. I admit I do not have all of these yet myself – but I’ve provided a few nice examples of those who do.