IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

👓 Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel | Scroll Blog

Read Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel (Scroll Blog)

A note from Tony Haile, CEO of Scroll

TL;DR

Scroll is acquiring Nuzzel

The core service isn’t going to change beyond removing the ads

We’re spinning out the media intelligence business

Nuzzel is one of my favorite things, so I’m glad to hear that it will continue on… I haven’t heard much about Scroll, which appears to be a journalism startup, but hopefully they’ve got enough legs to make it for the long haul.

We need more competition in the space of “discovery” on the web and particularly in the area of allowing users to control the levers that go into some of that discovery. The blackbox algorithms of the social media giants certainly can’t be trusted because of their financial motivations. In some sense, I view Nuzzel as a real-time directory, but one whose cache is flushed at regular intervals instead of saving all the data for a later date and time or other additional searching. I wonder what a engine like Nuzzel would look like if it kept all the data and allowed itself to be searchable in a long-tail way?

❤️ Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try | David Shanske

Liked Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Over the last months, one of the regular problems mentioned with the Indieweb on WordPress is the lack of compatible themes. Most themes do not properly mark up their content in microformats, or support some of the customizations that would integrate with Indieweb plugins. I had already been working...

🔖 Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps | switching.social

Bookmarked Ethical alternatives to popular sites and apps (switching.social)

This looks interesting… Sadly a lot of their options seem to be very ActivityPub-centric, despite the fact that the site itself is run on WordPress (and they neglect to list it as an option as far as I can tell). Admittedly they do seem to be directed toward the non-technical user, but there are lots of options they’re also not listing here too. They’re also not mentioning the potential for abuse that some of these software present, particularly when they’re run by other people, or collectives of other people. While switching from Twitter to Mastodon may be a short term solution, your choice of particular instance could end you right back where you came from if you’re not careful or not running your own personal instance.

Missing from many of these lists are things like micro.blog and a plethora of IndieWeb-related projects.

With that said, it’s at least a start on overcoming some of the hurdles that exist for finding alternatives.

hat tip: Ryan Barrett

Testing out Posting to WordPress via email

I haven’t posted to my WordPress site via email in a long time, so I thought I’d give it another try to see what has changed. I’m also curious about how this might work best in an IndieWeb setting and how these pieces dovetail with things like Post Kinds, potential syndication methods, and other tidbits I’ve got set up on my website.

Let’s see how it goes?

👓 Why Founders Should Start With a Website, Not a Mobile App | Atrium | Julia Enthoven

Read Why Founders Should Start With a Website, Not a Mobile App by Julia Enthoven (atrium)

When I was a Stanford undergraduate in 2012, everyone seemed to be building apps. The sexiest tech startups—Snap, Uber, Facebook—were almost synonymous with the word “app,” and that the world was moving increasingly towards ?...

There’s a valuable lesson in here and it’s something that a lot of app builders don’t even consider.

Replied to a tweet by

Hayley Campbell (Twitter)

PSA: with all the websites dying, go save the stuff you wrote as pdfs before they disappear. Otherwise you’ll be trying to get jobs with pocket fluff.
— Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) February 1, 2019

This is an important topic and something which should be tended to on an ongoing basis.

Ben Welsh of the LA Times data desk has built Savemy.News which leverages Twitter in combination with archive.is, webcitation.org, and archive.org to allow journalists to quickly create multiple archives of their work by simply inputting the URLs of their related pages. It’s also got a useful download functionality too.

Richard MacManus, founder of RWW, wrote a worthwhile article on how and why he archived a lot of his past work.

Those with heavier digital journalism backgrounds and portfolios may find some useful information and research coming out of Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences. I can direct those interested to a variety of archivists, librarians, researchers, and technologists should they need heavier lifting that simpler solutions than archive.org, et al.

Additional ideas for archiving and saving online work can be found on the IndieWeb wiki page archival copy. There are some additional useful ideas and articles on the IndieWeb for Journalism page as well. I’d welcome anyone with additional ideas or input to feel free to add to any of these pages for others’ benefit as well. If you’re unfamiliar with wiki notation or editing, feel free to reply to this post; I’m happy to make additions on your behalf or help you log in and navigate the system directly.

If you don’t have a website where you keep your personal archive and/or portfolio online already, now might be a good time to put one together. The IndieWeb page mentioned above has some useful ideas, real world examples, and even links to tutorials.

As an added bonus for those who clicked through, if you’re temporarily unemployed and don’t have your own website/portfolio already, I’m happy to help build an IndieWeb-friendly website (gratis) to make it easier to store and display your past and future articles.

Dividing and Conquering the IndieWeb Related Content on My Website

Both for my own benefit as well as for that of others who may be following along, I realize that I’ve been tagging a lot of material on my site with the broad category of “IndieWeb”. Some of it is definitely more significant and content rich than others, but in aggregate it may often seem like a firehose. If you’re following the community relatively closely already, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of redundant material.

As a result, and since it’s easy to do, I’m only going to categorize a much smaller segment of the richer material that I write or which is I deem to be extremely broadly appealing with the IndieWeb category. The remainder of smaller pieces by others, bookmarks, short replies, or other tangential related things (UX, UI, silos, silo quits, etc.) I’m going to use the alternate and separate IndieWeb tag.

Thus if you’re active in the IndieWeb community and only want my IndieWeb related materials then follow the category and not the tag. If you’re not closely following the community and want everything then I recommend following the content from both the category and the tag.

With the subtle change this may also help IndieWeb related planets like Aaron Parecki’s https://stream.indieweb.org/ or Malcolm Blaney’s https://unicyclic.com/indieweb/ pick up relevant data without needing to do heavy de-duplication for fear of spamming various channels.

In the coming days/weeks I’ll try to go back into my backlog of posts and re-categorize and re-tag things based on this general scheme.

My direct content:
Category Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/

Miscellaneous bookmarks, replies, other content I collect for my commonplace book, etc:
Tag Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/

The firehose of everything IndieWeb related from my site:
Category AND/OR Tag | feed: https://boffosocko.com/?s=indieweb&feed=rss2

And of course I still try to aggregate and orient most of the important pieces in my IndieWeb Collection.