Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist
Dr LJ (Twitter)I cannot code but had learned a lot about @wordpress as I use it for my personal/professional blog https://t.co/jY1XGzLtVN Anyone can make a website with a bit of time & patience! #RespEd #MedEd #PressEdConf19 /5
— Dr LJ (@drlaurajane) April 18, 2019
I like that old school Blogroll you’ve got! I wish I could have kept mine small enough for a sidebar:
https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-following-page/
Damian Yerrick (Twitter)I tried to recommend #IndieWeb technologies to those affected by a recent Tumblr policy change. But many I talked to claim that recommendation is the whole draw of silos, and IndieWeb's lack of a recommendation engine is a deal breaker.
"None currently."https://t.co/k9c7ehsoZb — Damian Yerrick (@PinoBatch) December 4, 2018
Because of the decentralized nature of the IndieWeb, it’s most likely that more centralized services in the vein of Indie Map or perhaps a Microsub client might build in this sort of recommendation engine functionality. But this doesn’t mean that all is lost! Until more sophisticated tools exist, bootstrapping on smaller individually published sorts of recommendations like follow posts or things like my Following Page (fka blogroll) with OPML support are more likely to be of interest and immediately fill the gap. Several feed readers like Feedly and Inoreader also have recommendation engines built in as well.
Of course going the direction of old school blogs and following those who comment on your own site has historically been a quick way to build a network. I’m also reminded of Colin Walker’s directory which creates a blogroll of sorts by making a list of websites that have webmentioned his own. Webrings are also an interesting possibility for topic-related community building.
Since Tumblr is unlikely to shut down immediately, those effected could easily add their personal websites to their bios to help transition their followerships to feed readers or other methods for following and reading.
Of course the important thing in the near term is to spend a moment downloading and backing up one’s content just in case.
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs. The problem here is me: I’m running out of time. I’m duplicating a lot … Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory We’ll see what happens. It...
Brad, much like Kicks Condor, I think you’re making a laudable effort, and one of the ways our work grows is to both keep up with it and experiment around.
If I recall, programming wasn’t necessarily your strong suit, but like many in the IndieWeb will say: “Manual until it hurts!” By doing things manually, you’ll more easily figure out what might work and what might not, and then when you’ve found the thing that does, then you spend some time programming it to automate the whole thing to make it easier. It’s quite similar to designing a college campus: let the students walk around naturally for a bit then pave the natural walkways that they’ve created. This means you won’t have both the nicely grided and unused sidewalks in addition to the ugly grass-less beaten paths. It’s also the broader generalization of paving the cow paths.
In addition to my Following page I’ve also been doing some experimenting with following posts using the Post Kinds Plugin. It is definitely a lot more manual than I’d like it to be. It does help to have made a bookmarklet to more quickly create follow posts, but until I’ve got it to a place that I really want it, it’s not (yet) worth automating taking the data from those follow posts to dump them into my Follow page for output there as well. Of course the fact that my follow posts have h-entry and h-feed mark up means that someone might also decide to build a parser that will extract my posts into a feed which could then be plugged into something else like a microsub-based reader so that I could make a follow post on my own site and the source is automatically added to my subscription list in my reader automatically.
In addition to Kicks Condor, I’me seeing others start to kick the tires of these things as well. David Shanske recently wrote Brainstorming on Implementing Vouch, Following, and Blogrolls, but I think he’s got a lot more going on in his thinking than he’s indicated in his post which barely scratches the surface.
I also still often think back to a post from Dave Winer in 2016: Are you ready to share your OPML? This too has some experimental discovery features that only scratch the surface of the adjacent possible.
And of course just yesterday, Kevin Marks (previously of Technorati) reminded us about rel=”directory” which could have some interesting implications for discovery and following. Think for a bit of how one might build a decentralized Technorati or something along the lines of Ryan Barrett’s indie map.
As things continue to grow, I’m seeing some of all of our decisions and experiments begin to effect others as these are all functionality and discovery mechanisms that we’ll all need in the very near future. I hope you’ll continue to experiment and make cow paths that can eventually be paved.
Featured Image: Cows on the path flickr photo by Reading Tom shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs. The problem here is me: I’m running out of time. I’m duplicating a lot …
Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)I think the idea behind Blog Snoop is solid—I mean you’re just talking about trying to define the edges of a certain community. I’m sufficiently convinced now (between Reddit wikis and ‘awesome lists’) that directories still serve this purpose. Find The Others. I guess part of the problem ...
Response to Brad and Kicks forthcoming…
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)I’m hitting a fork in the road with this site and the experiment of using a blog as a directory of blogs. The problem here is me: I’m running out of time. I’m duplicating a lot … Source: Announcement: The Future of Blog Snoop – Blog Snoop Weblog Directory We’ll see what happens. It...
Ton Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)When I link to another blog or site that has enabled webmention, my server log should record that it received a 20* response when trying to reach a webmention end point.
Assuming this is indeed in my server log, then it should be possible to have a script that pulls the successful webmentions from the server log. From that a growing list of IndieWeb sites can grow. Especially if you’d share that list, and others do too, so you can compare and detect new additions to the list. An incremental way of mapping the IndieWeb. Might even become a new, indie Technorati of sorts. At the very least it’s a discovery vehicle to find others interested in the distributed web and outside the silos and media sites.
Or does something like that already exist?
I like this idea…
Somewhat in the same vein, Colin Walker has built a Webmention Directory on his site that lists all the people (selectively) who have mentioned him in the past. It’s not too different from the purpose of a blogroll.
Similarly Ryan Barrett has built the IndieMap which has a much larger data sample behind it. He unveiled it almost a year ago at IndieWeb Summit 2017.
Maybe we could get the old Technorati alumni in IndieWeb to build something out of this?
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)After much discussion I came up with a new blogroll. Ta da! Not perfect but a bit easier to maintain. I used the Links Shortcode plugin to resurrect the “Links” function in WordPress and let me put the links on a Page rather than a Widget. I still have not fully figured out the formatting fo...
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Summary: David Shanske and I recap the recent IndieWeb Summit 2018 in Portland Oregon including recent developments like microsub, readers, Vouch, and even the comeback of webrings!
So wait. Where are you? I guess I’m caught in my filter bubble again. After #DeleteFacebook, maybe you went back to your bicycle and your Polaroid camera. But maybe you’re out there still...
I love some of the growing ideas about links, discovery, and serendipity that I’m seeing bubble up in my feed reader lately. I bookmarked this one quickly while skimming on my birthday and finally got to revisit it. Can’t wait to see where Kicks Condor takes the exercise.
Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)Feh. Apparently there are no good blogroll plugins for WordPress. I did look extensively through the WP plugins directory but didn’t find anything interesting. Most plugins were way out of date for my version of WP.
Might be an opportunity there for the Indieweb movement to aid discovery.
Apologies Brad. I just saw your follow up post and had meant to reply to your earlier one when I saw it last week, I just didn’t have the time to write a quick response. I had hoped you might have found something even better than what I’ve put together previously or perhaps started building a newer and shinier edifice.
There is actually an excellent and solid “plugin” for creating a blogroll, but it’s actually been hiding in WordPress core for ages: the original Link Manager. Use of it declined so much it was programatically “removed”, but all the code is still in core, it still works wonderfully, and it only requires a single line of code (or the simplest plugin ever written) to re-enable it.
It was very solid and didn’t need much iteration, so it should work fine with current versions of WordPress–it certainly does on mine.
I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
Even if you just want a plug and play plugin, there are details for that in the post as well, you’ll just be stuck with putting the blogroll into a traditional sidebar position. (With conditional statements in the sidebar widget, you could restrict the blogroll widget to only displaying on a “Following” page, for example.)
I do think there is still a more IndieWeb way of doing this, potentially by making follow posts with mark up that could be parsed by microsub readers perhaps? Certainly dovetailing something with microsub seems to be a laudable goal. I would like to eventually dive into the Link Manager code and add some additional microformats as well as update the OPML to v2, but there’s enough back compatibility that the older version is fine for most use cases I’ve run across. I know David Shanske has some ideas about some changes he’d like to see in the future as well. You could always also go super low tech the way Greg did and have a blogroll post that you update over time, though perhaps a page is a better way to go? Updating things to be more automated is certainly a reasonable goal though.
Give it a spin and see what you think. Here’s my Following page (aka blogroll) with details at the very bottom for subcategories of OPML subscription. I’ll try to update the IndieWeb blogroll page with some of these details to make them more imminently findable as well.
Brad Ensler (Brad Enslen)Does anyone have a recommendation for a good blogroll plugin for WordPress? I’ve looked at Indieweb blogroll solutions and there are some really good implementations. I really like Colin Walker’s directory of people who have commented via webmention. It would be great to aid blog discovery a...
gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)This is one of those posts I have wanted to write but kept forgetting to. I was reminded again while chatting with Marty, and when I asked him what podcasts he recommended, he went and wrote a whole post. So it's time I finally wrote mine. I'll try to break mine down into categories, too. Well-known...
Jeena (jeena.net)It's interesting to see what others listen to
For those of us wanting to leave Twitter and other silos behind and focus more on microblogging on our own domains, discovering new people to follow can be a little tricky. Manton Reece has a Discover tab on Micro.blog to find people, but the service is still in its infancy. Colin Devroe suggested a #FollowFriday movement. I’ll start off with two bloggers I’m enjoying. Feel free to use webmentions for your own lists! Please correct me if anyone else has started this, I haven’t had great connectivity for the last few weeks.
Jimmy has added me to his list of recommendations. Perhaps I missed the webmention/notification for it while I was moving, but I saw it organically anyway–since I follow him myself. His list has several people that I also follow pretty closely, so I’m honored to be included.
It also reminds me that I ought to get to work on keeping a following list of my own or add a follow post type to my site eventually. Perhaps something to think about over WordCamp LA and IndieWebCamp NYC this weekend?
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