IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

👓 How to replace Facebook with “Nicebook” | Mike Elgan

Read How to replace Facebook with "Nicebook" by Mike Elgan (Mike Elgan)

Many people would like to leave Facebook, but fear that leaving Facebook means losing connection with family and friends. But that’s not true. You CAN leave Facebook and still stay in touch with your loved ones. I call my replacement a “Nicebook” because if give...

I know Mike has always been a major fan of Google+, so it’s nice to see that he’s finally got his own website now. It’s not surprising to see him suggest Google Photos as a potential replacement for something like Facebook, especially since a lot of his content is so visually done. For him I suspect that a lot of the functionality of Google+ is baked right into Google Photos.

It’s an interesting idea in general, but wouldn’t work for me because of a lot of pieces I would be missing as a complete solution. However, for small scale social sharing with family and friends with the ability to have some general private communication, it’s probably not a very bad idea.

Replied to a tweet by

David Chartier (Twitter)

#LazyWeb Anyone know if there's a way to import a bookmarks HTML/OPML file (from something like Pinboard or Dropmark) into WordPress as individual posts? Ideally, individual link posts?

I'm tinkering with using WordPress for bookmark saving and sharing.
— David Chartier (@chartier) February 17, 2019

You could try WP All Import https://t.co/K84Irl9p9E

Pair it with Advanced Custom Fields and you could have your own WP bookmark site.
— Amber Hewitt (@amberrhewitt) February 17, 2019

Oh interesting find, thanks. I’ll give it a look soon.
— David Chartier (@chartier) February 18, 2019

David Shanske, have you gotten this far with your work on the Post Kinds plugin? I know you wanted to import your Pinboard account, but I’m not sure if you’ve got infrastructure for the import piece.
Any other ideas #IndieWeb (aka #ActiveWeb)?

👓 Differential privacy, an easy case | accuracyandprivacy.substack.com

Read Differential privacy, an easy case (accuracyandprivacy.substack.com)

By law, the Census Bureau is required to keep our responses to its questionnaires confidential. And so, over decades, it has applied several “disclosure avoidance” techniques when it publishes data — these have been meticulously catalogued by Laura McKenna

I could envision some interesting use cases for differential privacy like this within an IndieWeb framework for aggregated data potentially used for web discovery.

📺 Micro.blog custom themes | YouTube

Watched Micro.blog custom themes from YouTube

Importing and editing custom templates on Micro.blog.

I do sort of wonder if Micro.blog functionality would break if new themes don’t have the correct microformats 2 markup? I suspect it runs in conjunction with various common parsers and thus may have issues. It’s a cool thing though that this sort of customization is available now on the platform which is quickly becoming more and more flexible.

👓 Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play | Stratechery by Ben Thompson

Read Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play by Ben Thompson (Stratechery)

Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.

An interesting take on Spotify’s recent acquisitions. I’m worried what a more active aggregator play in the podcast space will look like, particularly with most of the players (by this I mean companies) in the audio game using players (by this I mean the actual JavaScript interfaces that play online audio) hiding the actual audio files.