Tag: own your data

Syndicating my IndieWeb Wiki edits to my personal website

I don’t have a specific “Edit” post kind on my website (yet!), but I’ve set things up–using a prior recipe–so that edits I make to the IndieWeb wiki are syndicated (via PESOS) to the Micropub endpoint on my website to create draft posts on my personal website!

Presently they were easiest to map to my website as bookmarks until I can create the UI to indicate edits, but changing the UI piece, and retroactively modifying some data for posts, should be fairly simple and straightforward for me.

I’m not sure I’ll keep the entire diff content in the future, but may just keep the direct text added depending on the edit and the potential context. We’ll play around and see what comes of it. It’s reasonably sure that I may not post everything publicly either, but keep it as either a draft or private post on my website. In some cases, I may just add the edit syndication link on an original bookmark, read, watch, or other post type, a pattern which I’ve done in the past for articles I’ve read/bookmarked in the past and simply syndicated manually to the wiki.

I’ll also need to tinker with how to save edits I make directly in the chat channels via Loqi, though I think that is straightforward as well, now that the “easy” part has been done.

I only wish I had thought to do this before I made the thousands of edits to the wiki earlier this week. Both IndieWebCamp West 2020 and the edits for part of organizing that were the inspiration for finally getting around to doing this.

This isn’t as slick as the process Angelo Gladding recently did a demo of and is doing to syndicate his edits to the wiki from his website using a POSSE syndication workflow, but I’ll guarantee my method was way less work!

Also, since my edits to the wiki are made as CC0 contributions, the POSSE/PESOS flow doesn’t make as much difference to me as it might on other social silos.

I don’t edit Wikipedia incredibly often, but perhaps I set that functionality up shortly too.

Here’s the first example (public) post: https://boffosocko.com/2020/06/30/55772818/

I’ll get around to fixing the remainder of the presentation and UI shortly, but it’s not a horrific first pass. It’s at least allowing me to own copies of the data I’m putting out on the Internet.

Read "Your Data" is Broader Than You Think by Tim Marinin (marinintim.com)
On the weekend, publisher Pragmatic Programmers migrated to a new system, which is noticeably faster than the previous one. That's good. But the new version lacks the wish list. Now, I don't know if it's an artifact of migration and wish list is to be reinstated, or if it was a deliberate decision t...
I just automated my creating stars on Github to syndicate that intent and data (by PESOS) back to my website as bookmarks. Here’s an example on my site.

This is done using a variation of Using IFTTT to syndicate (PESOS) content from social services to WordPress using Micropub.

As part of this I used the feed pattern https://github.com/{{username}}.atom to input a feed which I’m filtering with my username and the word “starred” to pull out the correct items to syndicate.

I couldn’t find a permalink URL for the star itself, so I’m adding a syndication link that points to the page of “stargazers” for the individual repo that I’m bookmarking. 

While GitHub calls these stars and I might have mapped them to “likes” on my website, I’ve always thought of my intent as more of a bookmark. In practice I often use my stars as bookmarks for things I want to come back to visit on their site anyway. Since it’s my website and I have the control, I get to choose.  Of course I also have the facility to create a star post kind on the site too, but the semantic difference just doesn’t warrant the work.

Now to figure out how I might extract out all of my prior data to backfill old bookmarks like this…

I’ve now got about 20 webhooks set up to pull back data out of silos like this including ones for GoodReads, GitHub, Hypothes.is, Last.fm, Spotify, Untappd, Twitter, Letterboxd, Diigo, Reading.am, Huffduffer, Google Calendar, Meetup.com, YouTube and Pocket.

Read Hypothes.is Collector by John Stewart (johnastewart.org)
One of my favorite online tools is Hypothes.is. It allows you to annotate web pages as you would a book. When you’re using Hypothes.is you can highlight text on a webpage or add notes. The tool can be used to take private notes, but it becomes all the more powerful when you use it for collaborat...
TWELVE

By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.

Gif of grain silo on a farm collapsing in on itself.

 
 
EIGHT

These plugins with WordPress allow teachers to post course content and students can then post their responses on their own sites and send notifications that they’ve read, listened to, or watched that content along with their ideas and commentary.

Read Pocket Casts acquired by NPR, other public radio stations, and This American Life (The Verge)
One of the best podcast apps just got bought by some of the biggest podcast producers
Owning their own pieces of distribution is going to be key to their long term interests. This is a brilliant move.
Replied to a post by Brett KosinskiBrett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)
Taking back control of my content, I’m pulling my (modest) book reviews from Goodreads back to my blog. An underrated favourite of mine is Last Chance to See by the astounding Douglas Adams. #ownyourdata

Congrats! I love the increasing number of people I’ve seen even in the last few days working on this! Are you using IndieBookClub.biz to post to your website?

I’m waiting for people to start documenting examples of owning their knitting on their websites and syndicating to/from Ravelry. #​IndieWebKnittingChallenge 

Read 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments by Derek Powazek (Derek Powazek)

The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.

So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)

I love this list which I feel is very solid. I also think that newspapers/magazines could do this with an IndieWeb approach to give themselves even more control over aggregating and guiding their conversations.

Instead of moving in the correct direction of taking more ownership, most journalistic outlets (here’s a recent example) seem to be ceding their power and audience away to social media. Sure people will have conversations about pieces out in the world, but why not curate and encourage a better and more substantive discussion where you actually have full control? Twitter reactions may help spread their ideas and give some reach, but at best–from a commentary perspective–Twitter and others can only provide for online graffiti-like reactions for the hard work.

I particularly like the idea of having an editor of the comment desk.

 

Owning my Untappd Content

As a pre-IndieWebCamp Austin exercise, I’ve gone back and imported all of my Untappd data into my own website. It wasn’t too painful since I only had one post which didn’t include very much data.

To put the cherry on top of the dessert, I’ve created a PESOS workflow that uses my Untappd RSS feed to import future posts into my site automatically using webhooks to my Micropub endpoint. I still need to do a bit of testing and see if I can figure out if there is an mf2 prefix I should be adding to tell Post Kinds that the post is a “drink”. I suspect there isn’t since they don’t really have a microformat associated with them.

Maybe off in the future I’ll tweak the presentation of my drink posts to differentiate between coffee/tea, cocktails, beer, and other generic drinks so that I can have custom per-type icons that match up with the drink types. Maybe I can do it the same sort of way that the Post Kinds plugin has the ability to differentiate Read posts with small differences to indicate “want to read”, “reading”, and “finished”? Though honestly that type of data differentiation may be more trouble than it’s worth, particularly since I’m reading much more often than I drink.

I’ll also want to take a closer look at the IndieWeb wiki for both Untappd and drink/food posts and some other examples before deciding on anything too specific.

Featured image from page 75 of “The human body and health : an elementary text-book of essential anatomy, applied physiology and practical hygiene for schools” (1908) flickr photo by Internet Archive Book Images shared with no copyright restriction (Flickr Commons)

Read Always. Own. Your platform. (alwaysownyourplatform.com)

Stop giving away your work to people who don't care about it. Host it yourself. Distribute it via methods you control. Build your audience deliberately and on your own terms.

Be in charge of the relationship with your audience.

Deliver value and then ask for money. Avoid unnecessary middlemen.

I’ll admit that I love the meta data cards that Twitter, Facebook, et al. will display for this website will look roughly like this:

Stock photo of a punk 9 year old holding up his arms to make an X with text below from the meta data fields that reads I refuse to display meta data for other platforms. Nope. Not doing it. Always own your platform.

Reminds me a bit of Kevin Marks’ experiment Decaying Silos as Dead Malls, though I’ll have to see if this site went to the extremes that Kevin did.

Makes me think I should do something similar when I syndicate my content to social silos? Hmmm….

Today I exported all my YouTube subscriptions as an OPML file and imported them to my website’s following page (aka blogroll). I still have a bit of clean up to do to categorize and present them all the way I’d like, but I’ve got a huge start on it.

I’m hoping now that I’ve cut the cord, I’ll be able to use my various feed readers to watch and stream more video content.

It’s amazing how many inactive channels I was following. 

Special thanks to Martijn van der Ven who had done some great research on YouTube Atom feeds and OPML and created documentation on the IndieWeb wiki YouTube page.

How slick! The WordPress Micropub server supports experimental properties so you can add &post-status=draft to your IFTTT webhook-based recipes for Micropub PESOS syndication. This is useful in cases where you can get most of the data fidelity you’d like to have, but still may want to go back and modify things before publishing them.

Next I’ll have to try out &visibility=private which should work as well. 

Replied to tweets by Bill Seitz and chronology samhjao mereko (Twitter)
#​TeamPESOS or #​TeamPOSSE?

As long as you’re not #​TeamPOOSNOW. #​OwnYourData