commonplace books | Chris Aldrich

Small progress in my wiki explorations and a fix to my MediaWiki administrative user email address

I’d looking into maintaining a wiki a while back and have recently been determined to get back to it. As a result, I’ve been looking at TiddlyWiki since that’s what some of Kicks Condor‘s group has been using. (Yep, I’ve still got that tab opened and am tinkering away slowly on the ideas–but mostly the technology.)

I’ve been having some issues in self-hosting a TiddlyWiki the way I’d like to. If anyone has any clear cut documentation on how to host a TiddlyWiki on one’s own domain name, I’d appreciate it. The documentation doesn’t seem as clear as I would expect (or perhaps more likely my server is having issues propagating/connecting?). If anything it’s muddled by the fact that they can seemingly be hosted in dozens of places one might not otherwise expect. My primary reservation is that it looks to me like they’re designed as single user instances, so I’m not exactly sure how Kicks et al. are effectuating their hyperconversations. Part of my issue is my mental model of some of the wikis involved in addition to the busy-ness of the sites’ themes, not to mention some of the non-standard conversational style on some. (I’ll get there eventually.)

I’ve also been using the IndieWeb’s MediaWiki for several years, so I’ve become much better at how it works as well as the ins-and-outs of the markup and how to do some slightly more advanced things using it. I’d set one up nearly a year ago this month and used it sporadically at best.

One of the bigger problems with my MediaWiki install was that somehow I wasn’t able to log into the primary account to do some of the necessary administrative functions. Today I got fed up with being hampered a bit and went spelunking into my install to see where things went wrong, suspecting that it was a one button install issue.

After digging through some documentation, I dug into the mySQL database and found a daunting looking [Blob] in the user_email field. Why couldn’t it be an easy-to-edit field? I not knowing anything better to do, I downloaded it, opened it up in my text editor, and discovered that I’d managed to leave a letter out of my own name in the email address! No wonder it wouldn’t work and the system wouldn’t let me reset my email address or password. A quick text edit later, the email was fixed, I uploaded the (now less intimidating) [Blob], and did a reset of the password in the admin interface, and we’re back in business! I’m always glad not to have borked the entire database and site.

If nothing else, it’ll help me in my explorations. Onward.

Listened to Microcast #082 – Nodenoggin by Doug Belshaw from Thought Schrapnel

This week, I’ve been delighted to be able to catch up with Adam Procter, academic, games designer, open advocate, and long-time supporter of Thought Shrapnel.

We discussed everything from the IndieWeb to his PhD project, with relevant links below!

Show notes

Adam’s website / Southampton uni staff page

Nodenoggin (and alpha app / project code / project feedback forum)

Adam’s PhD work / blog

Read 2020/Austin/fromflowtostock (indieweb.org)

From Flow to Stock was a session at IndieWebCamp Austin 2020.

I’d love to see the video for this conversation once posted. The notes give a reasonable idea, but there’s a lot of discussion of silos going on here. I’m curious how those who attended might begin to own some of the ideas on their own websites in the future.

I see a lot of overlap with the ideas of commonplace books with what is going on here. Looking at the list of participants I’m not seeing any that I think might actually have both “stock” and “flow” on their personal websites yet. I feel like I’m getting ever closer to having them on mine.

Read Building a personal knowledge base by Kirill Maltsev (kirillmaltsev.net)

I try to unload all information that has any meaning to me from my brain to external storage because I don’t like to rely on my memory nor do I trust it. In this blog post, I’m going to describe my current approach of working with a personal knowledge base.

He’s got a solid listing of tools here, many I’ve either tried or am currently using myself. Looks like he hasn’t come across Roam yet which I like for it’s ability to change tags across many linked pages. I wish other tools had that one killer feature.

Bookmarked Knovigator (knovigator.com)

An Infinitely-Threaded Social Knowledge Base with BitcoinSV Microtransactions

Read Hyperchatting by

Jack Baty (baty.blog)

People seem very focused on technological solutions to online communication (ActivityPub, Indieweb, this absurd BlueSky idea), but the hyperconversation approach is trying to prove that the problem is a human problem. If you read and listen to each other and try to respond thoughtfully and carefully - and try to

Read 6 tips for low-cost academic blogging by Matt Might (matt.might.net)

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.

Replied to a tweet by

Dr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)

Has anyone gathered a collection of interesting and/or unexpected ways of using @hypothes_is beyond its standard use case? @xolotl #SquadGoalsNetwork
— Dr. Ryan "Rebel Without a Clause" Straight (@RyanStraight) December 7, 2019

What a great prompt! Here are a few interesting off-label use cases I’ve used, imagined, or seen in the wild:

Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.

I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:

Writing posts with a reasonably full-featured text editor and the ability to edit and delete posts later;
HTML and markdown support;
Public and private posting as well as sharing content with other private groups;
The ability to reply to other websites;
The ability for others to comment on your posts natively;
A robust tagging functionality;
The ability to socially bookmark web pages (blank page notes);
An RSS feed;
The ability to share posts to other social platforms including meta data for Twitter cards;
Naturally, it’s very easy to use for writing short notes, creating highlights and annotations, and keeping track of what you’ve read;
It has a pseudo-social media functionality in that your public posts appear on a global timeline where people can read and interact with them.
It’s also opensource, so you can self-host, modify it, or add new features.

I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.

And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.

And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?

If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.

Replied to a tweet by

Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass) (Twitter)

As a personal project, I want to build my own application that will help me plan my wedding. Basically an online wedding binder. I know there are sites and apps out there but I want to build my own. What all could/should it do?
— your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass (@allie_nimmons) December 4, 2019

This was an inspiring question to me, so I thought I’d spitball a few ideas for doing this in an IndieWeb way. Personal events like this are an excellent use case with respect to personal websites!

I had thought of doing some of this ages ago to own this sort of great nostalgic data on my own website. Sadly I couldn’t get it up due to other work commitments. I now really wish I had.

At the moment, the only direct wedding-related page on the IndieWeb wiki is a snarky definition for engagement. When I’m done, I’ll create a stub for wedding with the following brainstorm.

Of course if you’re looking for general inspiration, the prior artwork of Pinterest, various registries, and other wedding sites will naturally be useful. But I think there are a number of IndieWeb building blocks that can be leveraged to accomplish a lot of what these sites do.

I think if I were doing it today, I’d meld some of the work from bookmarks and photos to create a Pinterest-esqe post type (probably by extending the Post Kinds Plugin, maybe with a custom wedding type with a custom display).

There is lots of prior art on the registries front on the wiki under wish or wish lists. To goose things a bit, I’d definitely add referral links from places like Amazon.com, etc. and use the money either to make a donation to a charity in honor of the event or to defray honeymoon costs. If you want to encourage direct donations or funding mechanisms, there’s also some interesting prior art at the payment wiki page.

Now that the IndieWeb has some very solid support for events and RSVPs, I might even try doing an online wedding invitation and collecting RSVPs. I’ve recently seen Jacky Alcine’s website leveraging CommentPara.de to connect to Quill for comments/replies, and it would be cool to get Quill to also add RSVP functionality to allow those without their own websites to RSVP using the non-anonymous functionality in CommentPara.de. I suspect that since many people have trouble getting RSVP functionality into their sites, that Aaron Parecki might be Tom Sawyered into providing that functionality as a quick and easy win for the broader community. (I’m not immediately aware of any other Micropub tools that do RSVPs though I may be wrong.) Of course potentially expanding it with meal options would be a lovely bonus so people can choose meat/vegetarian/other options. I’ll also mention that gRegor Morill has been tinkering with RSVPs using Webmention on Twitter. As a minimal fallback, you can also allow people to respond directly in the built-in commenting system in WordPress, but if you’re going to do it…)

The biggest piece that would be fun to figure out would be to see how to get things set up to receive social media related wedding photos of the pre-, during, and post-event stuff back to my website from friends and family. Using Brid.gy with Twitter to pull back photos that tag your twitter user name is fairly straightforward, but I’m not sure that services like Flickr or Instagram may work as easily. This may require some thought and programming, but being able to backfeed social photos to your site or even providing friends and family a serviceable photo upload functionality to your site so you can document and keep photos from the event in real-time would be a cool win and could likely be a great feature for any event-related website to have built in or widgetized. It’s usually weeks or months for paid wedding photos to show up and it’s generally a big hassle finding all the online social photos, much less keeping copies of them, so having this could be both fun and useful, particularly for looking back on the event years later.

Naturally, being a WordPress person, I’m sure there may be some interesting prior art in the plugin repository, but I think it would be far cooler to IndieWebify this sort of data and functionality for the broader world.

Depending on the wedding date, this general topic (even for other non-wedding related events) would be an awesome one to look at and explore during an upcoming IndieWebCamp. Perhaps someone is up for it at San Francisco this weekend? (I suspect they’ll have some good live-streaming options for those who aren’t local.)

Given her weddings/events background and web-based work, perhaps Liz Coopersmith (t) might be someone interesting to collaborate with on something like this?

Similarly, I recall a great presentation by Brianna Privett at WordCamp US 2017 called The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse. She may have some useful tidbits and advice in there as well.

Featured photo: Wedding cake. flickr photo by THEMACGIRL* shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license