tools | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by

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.

👓 What is Discourse? | Discourse

Read What is Discourse? (Discourse - Civilized Discussion)

Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

As I look at this it makes me wonder when small, single-purpose services might allow themselves to be white listed and/or custom styled to live on a users personal domain, yet still look like they’re part and parcel of that user’s native site.

As an example, Disqus and Webmention.io are interesting examples of how a company could specialize into handling comments for user’s sites. These two are both doing things very differently and at much different price points. Disqus is large and bloated and seems to have quite innovating and iterating. I have to wonder what it would look like with more players and more competition in the space?

In fact, I’m still wondering why hasn’t Disqus picked up and run away with the Webmention spec?

👓 My New Posting Workflow | grant.codes

Read My New Posting Workflow by

Grant Richmond (grant.codes)

So I have been working away on some new features on my site for quite a while now and it looks like everything is about ready. Honestly I don't particularly enjoy writing long-form content, so it is kind of strange that I have really enjoyed working on this new functionality.The Inspiration I was ra...

This is awesome Grant!

May have been a nice addition to add some links to the browser extensions (or maybe I missed them?) and make it more explicit that they’re publicly available. Can’t wait to try this out!

👓 5 CMS tools for indie bloggers | Indie Digital Media

Read 5 CMS tools for indie bloggers by Richard MacManus (Indie Digital Media)

This is a golden age for indie digital media creators, who have more content creation options than ever in 2019. In fact, there are arguably too many tools to chose from. That’s why I’m going to regularly examine the tools of digital media creation here on IDM - for everything…

👓 The year you actually start to like your CMS | Nieman Journalism Lab | Eric Ulken

Read The year you actually start to like your CMS by

Eric Ulken (Nieman Lab)

"If we do it right, users benefit from a feedback loop that helps make our work more valuable and relevant to them. And no journalist ever again has to wear their clunky CMS as a badge of honor."

Without saying it directly, there’s a very IndieWeb flavor to this piece. I’d love to see more journalists and technologists who are working in journalism contributing to improving the web. The Nieman Lab’s collection of Predictions for Journalism in 2019 also has some other IndieWeb-centric articles for those who might be interested.

Eric Ulken, product director for newsroom tools at the USA TODAY NETWORK, has a great list of UI elements in the article that many journalists, newsrooms, and even average people would love to see built into content management systems. I hope that as people build and iterate that they write about their experiences and open source pieces so others can use and leverage them.

Personally, I think that W3C specs like Webmention, Micropub, and Microsub can help change the tide in the coming year.

Some things your tools will soon do for you — if they don’t already:

Automatically find and link relevant background material.

Suggest topics and contextualize newly created content as part of a bigger story arc, when relevant.

Show which topics, story forms and content types, in the aggregate, are resonating with priority audience segments and help you take action based on that info.

Dynamically alert you when there’s potential for promoting your work on other platforms and help you prioritize those efforts.

Keep track of the things you’ve published, show you how they’re doing with key audiences and suggest follow-up opportunities.

Call out popular evergreen content that could use freshening.

Run headline tests and other content experiments directly from the authoring and curation environment.

Identify missed opportunities and help you find out where your content fell flat with readers.

Enable the creation of mobile-first multimedia narratives and other non-text story forms.

Help you productively interact with your audiences and help them inform your coverage.

Calculate — at the staff, team and individual level — effort spent on things that don’t serve audiences well (thereby helping you devote more time to the things that do).

Elevate your phone from in-the-field last resort to full-fledged content creation and management tool, because the best device is the one you have with you.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”. ❧

This sounds a little bit like what the IndieWeb is building for itself!

December 21, 2018 at 08:02PM

And while content analytics tools (e.g., Chartbeat, Parsely, Content Insights) and feedback platforms (e.g., Hearken, GroundSource) have thankfully helped close the gap, the core content management experience remains, for most of us, little improved when it comes to including the audience in the process. ❧

December 21, 2018 at 08:00PM

👓 Making it easier to discover datasets | Google Blog

Read Making it easier to discover datasets by Natasha Noy (Google)

In today's world, scientists in many disciplines and a growing number of journalists live and breathe data. There are many thousands of data repositories on the web, providing access to millions of datasets; and local and national governments around the world publish their data as well. To enable easy access to this data, we launched Dataset Search, so that scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else can find the data required for their work and their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity.