I spent some time this morning doing a dry run through setting up a suite of IndieWeb plugins on a fresh WordPress installation. Going off of a scant outline I talked for almost two hours describing IndieWeb functionality as I set it all up. Hopefully it will provide a useful guide to newcomers to the space until I can write up a more solid outline and take a more polished approach. Apologies in advance for the roughness of the audio, lack of quality, and even live mistakes. Hopefully folks won’t mind suffering through until we can come up with some better tutorials.
As prerequisites, I assume you’ve already got your own domain and have installed WordPress on a server or other host. I actually finish setting up the WordPress install as I start the video and then sign in for the first time as we begin.
While many of the core plugins are straightforward, there is a huge amount of leeway in how folks can choose (or not) to syndicate to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Here I make the choice to use the Bridgy Publish plugin and only demonstrate it with Twitter. With one example shown, hopefully other silos can be set up with Brid.gy as well. The IndieWeb wiki details other options for those who want other methods.
At the end I walk through creating and syndicating a post to Twitter. Then I demonstrate commenting on that post using another CMS (WithKnown) from a separate domain.
I do my best to provide verbal descriptions and visual examples, but these can certainly be supplemented with further detail on the IndieWeb wiki. I hope to come back and add some diagrams at a later date, but this will have to suffice for now.
For those who would like an audio only version of this talk, you can listen here (.mp3):
Great photo-story on Twitter this morning. Click through for the rest:
I saw this on an OS map and couldn’t not investigate. A place of worship symbol in the middle of bloody nowhere on the edge of a wood. It was a foggy, atmospheric day up on the North Downs, so I decided to walk three sides of a square through the wood to reach it. pic.twitter.com/R47CTs9Mg2
Whenever I find myself actively seeking something to RT it always feels like there’s nothing but noise. Seem to find the most interesting things to share after I’ve already found too many things to RT at once.
Sometimes I find myself wanting to tweet just in general, and wish there was an easy way to just have casual conversations on here, tweet about the weather or something. It’s often really just a proxy for trying to meet people anyway.
I’ve had this feeling before and often long for the earlier days of Twitter when it functioned more like this. The popularization of Twitter in 2009 and the subsequent iteration on the platform and its community killed all the original spirit. It also reminds me of a piece I’d read recently by John Naughton1 about how toxic the retweet functionality (and other gamification like likes/favorites) can be.
I’ve seen the type of interaction you’re describing in smaller pockets of the internet on services like App.net (aka ADN, now defunct), pnut, and 10centuries, and a few corners of the Mastodon sphere.
The place I’ve seen it done well most recently is on Manton Reece‘s awesome micro.blog service, which I think has some strong community spirit and a greater chance of longevity. They’ve specifically left off “features” like follower counts, number of likes, and made conversation front and center. As a result it is a much more solid and welcoming community. I’m curious, as always, if they can maintain it as they scale, but the fact that they encourage people to have their own website and own their own data mean that you can take it all with you somewhere else if they ever cease meeting your needs in the future–something that certainly can’t be easily done on Twitter.
I hope you find the connections with the types of people you’d like to meet.
Originally bookmarked on April 01, 2018 at 09:22PM
We are incredibly eager to update our apps. However, despite many requests for clarification and guidance, Twitter has not provided a way for us to recreate the lost functionality. We've been waiting for more than a year.
Twitter seems to finally be closing off the remainder of their open API that allowed full-fledged Twitter clients to still exist. This certainly creates a chilling effect in the future on developers spending any time or resources on projects like it that aren’t completely open. This also makes it much harder to build competing services to Twitter which have a similar financial model. I remember the heady days when there were dozens of awesome Twitter clients to chose from and interesting new things were happening in the social space.
If I was sitting on a huge pile of Twitter related code with a full set of Twitter related reading/posting functionality, I think I’d head toward some of the new open protocols coming out of the IndieWeb to build a new user base. By supporting feeds like RSS, ATOM, JSON feed, and even h-feed (possibly via Microsub) for the feed reader portion and building in the open Micropubspec, one could rejuvenate old Twitter apps to work with a myriad of microblog-like (and even traditional blog) functionality on platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, micro.blog, and a myriad of others in the future. Suddenly all those old Twitter apps could rise from the ashes and invigorate a new, more open community. Given the open “architecture” of the community, it would give developers much more direct control of both their software and futures than Twitter has ever given them as well as a deeper sense of impact while simultaneously eating a nice portion of Twitter’s lunch. With less than a week’s worth of work, I suspect that many of these old apps could have new and more fruitful lives than the scraps they were getting before.
If the bird site doesn’t heed their cries, I hope they’ll all re-purpose their code and support the open web so that their hard work and efforts aren’t completely lost.
The #DoOO (Domain of One’s Own) hashtag on Twitter is essentially an equivalent of the #IndieWeb hashtag, but more often used by the education segment of the community. While used by educators and researchers, particularly in higher education, their content typically isn’t restricted to that sub-segment and thus are broadly applicable to our overall principles. Many using the hashtag are administrators, developers, and evangelists overseeing large installations to help Gen2+ people join the IndieWeb at scale.
Adding #DoOO tweets to one of the channels (#indieweb or #dev) could certainly make sense for the community and be a welcoming addition to those joining us from the education related communities, many of whom have attended past IWCs or are actively participating already.
Current hashtag frequency is roughly 1-3 tweets per day, though for related conferences, their velocity can go higher on a particular day. Higher velocity days likely only occur 1-3 days per year.
A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd."
"What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did.
I asked if she was doing it, she said she wasnt and showed me the new book she was getting out that she hadnt even had yet. It also had the 7 underlined! "I don't know, maybe someone really likes page 7?" I said, assuming of course that there is a serial killer in the library.
I checked some other books. Most didn't have it, but a lot in this genre did - they're "wee old women" books (romances set in wartime Britain etc). Lots of underlined 7s. The woman who pointed it out shrugged and went on her way, "just thought you should know".
My manager came back from doing arts and crafts with some of the kids and I decide to tell her about the serial killer in the library.
And that’s how I found out that a lot of our elderly clientele have secret codes to mark which books they’ve read before.
Our computers do it automatically but many have been doing it since before that was possible, so Esther might underline page 7, while Anne might draw a little star on the last page, and Fred might put an “f” on the title page. Then when they pick it up, they can check!
It’s quite clever really but now I’m dying to just underline page 7 of every new wee old women book we get in.
So, good news: there’s not a serial killer in the library whose MO include the number 7 and wartime romances. Bad news: people are defacing books rather than just asking us to scan them (smiling face with smiling eyes)
I'm now concerned that the amount of people enjoying this thread means there's going to be a new spate of readers using secret codes - apologies to librarians everywhere!
(although, in truth, I find it hard to be annoyed about it - better than torn pages and felt pen graffiti!)
(Also, I am new to the library job, hence why I hadn't seen it before! The library and our customers are great though (smiling face with smiling eyes))
Just had another victim of the page 7 vandal returned!!!
(Now checking every book that looks like it might be their taste...)
This is such an interesting little story including some cultural anthropology.
Wish Twitter would distinguish between "favorite" and "save for later." People could infer some pretty misleading things...
Intent on Twitter is often so muddled, this is the last thing some might worry about. (Yet it’s still a tremendous tool.) Pocket has browser extensions, and I know the one for Chrome has settings one can toggle an icon to appear on Twitter to allow bookmarking things to read for later directly within your Pocket account, which is generally a reasonable experience.
Pocket’s browser extension can add a much better “save to read for later” button to one’s Twitter feed.
I think the much stronger and better solution for one’s personal commonplace book is to simply add these intents to one’s own website and either favorite, bookmark, mark as read, repost, reply to, annotate, highlight, or just about “anything else” them there and syndicate the appropriate response to Twitter separately. (Examples: bookmarks and reads.) This makes it much more difficult to muddle the intent. It’ll also give you a much more highly searchable set of data that you can own on your own website.
Why wait around for Twitter or another social service to build the tools you want/need when it’s relatively easy to cobble them together for yourself on a variety of opensource platforms? While you’re at it, remove some of the other limitations like 280 characters as well…
Some interesting and generally useful insight here. Sadly I didn’t see his Twitter handle attached to the post–at least on the mobile version. So much for the “promotion” accusation…
They make up a quarter of all tweets, but at long last someone has found a way to turn them off…
This is an interesting theory. I’ll have to dig into the mechanics and try it out. I often find that don’t pay as much attention in general to retweets as I do to original content. I even far prefer people who are excellent aggregators in focused topics and post their content as bookmarks to the article rather than retweeting content.
TLDR: I wrote a Twitter bot to tweet the most interesting bioRxiv preprints. Follow it to stay up to date about the most recent preprints which received a lot of attention. The past few months have…
In a new study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we look at how often, and in what context, Twitter accounts from the Internet Research Agency—a St. Petersburg-based organization directed by individuals with close ties to Vladimir Putin, and subject to Mueller’s scrutiny—successfully made their way from social media into respected journalistic media.
We searched the content of 33 major American news outlets for references to the 100 most-retweeted accounts among those Twitter identified as controlled by the IRA, from the beginning of 2015 through September 2017. We found at least one tweet from an IRA account embedded in 32 of the 33 outlets—a total of 116 articles—including in articles published by institutions with longstanding reputations, like The Washington Post, NPR, and the Detroit Free Press, as well as in more recent, digitally native outlets such as BuzzFeed, Salon, and Mic (the outlet without IRA-linked tweets was Vice).
How are outlets publishing generic tweets without verifying the users actually exist? This opens up a new type of journalistic fraud in which a writer could keep an army of bots and feed out material that they could then self-quote for their own needs without a story really existing.
gawanmac (Twitter)
Chenoe Hart (Twitter)
Hannah VanderHart (Twitter)