web development | Chris Aldrich

Reply to Blog Engines and Indieweb Controlling Upstream by Brad Enslen

Replied to Blog Engines and Indieweb Controlling Upstream by

All this WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg stuff got me thinking. With WordPress it seems like the Indieweb starts making serious and cool progress and the WordPress people come along and knock the game board and pieces off the table. And it sounds like the disruption from WordPress is going to continue f...

Brad, I like and agree with your general thoughts, but I think that looking at the long term broader picture, most of what you’re describing is covered under the umbrella principle of plurality. For things to grow and thrive, we all need plurality to flourish. As a result there are several hundred projects within the broader IndieWeb which are growing and thriving. It seems far slower because a large number of the projects are single-maintainer single-user ones which are being built for personal use.

It’s nice that there are mass-scale projects like WordPress, WithKnown, Get Perch, Grav, Drupal, and a few others which have one or more “IndieWeb-centric” developers working on them that allow those without the coding skills to jump in and enjoy the additional freedom and functionality. The occasional drawback is that those big-hearted developers also fit into the broader fabric of those massively distributed projects and sometimes their voices aren’t as well heard, if at all.

I’m aware of the disruption of the Gutenberg Editor within WordPress v5.0 and how it applies to those using IndieWeb technology on WordPress. I’m sure it will eventually get sorted out in a reasonable fashion. Sadly, throwing out the baby out with the bathwater as it comes to WordPress and IndieWeb may not be the best solution for many people and may actually be a painful detriment to several hundreds.

While it would be interesting to see a larger group of developers converge on building an open and broadly used IndieWeb system as you suggest, it takes a massive amount of work and community collaboration to get such a thing moving. I think this bears out if you look at the lay of the land as it already exists. Just think of the time effort and energy that the core IndieWeb community puts into the tremendous amount of resources that exist today.

Looking back on the past 4+ years of IndieWeb within the WordPress community, I’m really amazed to see exactly how far things have come and where things currently stand. There used to be a dozen or more pieces that required custom code, duct tape, and baling wire to get things working. Now it’s a handful of relatively stable and well set up pieces that—particularly for me—really makes WordPress deliver as an open source content management system and next generation social medial platform that aims to democratize publishing. In terms of building for the future, I suspect that helping to bring new people into the fold (users, developers, designers, etc.) will increase and improve the experience overall. To some degree, I feel like we’re just getting started on what is possible and recruiting new users and help will be the best thing for improving things moving forward. IndieWeb integration into large-scale projects like WordPress, Drupal, etc. are very likely to be the place that these ideas are likely to gain a foothold in the mainstream and change the tide of how the internet works.

While it may seem daunting at times, in addition to the heroic (part-time, it needs to be noted) developers like Mathias Pfefferle, David Shanske, Micah Cambre, Michael Bishop, Ashton McAllan, Jack Jamieson, Ryan Barrett, Peter Molnar, Amanda Rush; enthusiastic supporters like you, Greg McVerry, Aaron Davis, Manton Reece; and literally hundreds of others (apologies to those I’ve missed by name) who are using and living with these tools on a daily basis, there are also quieter allies like Brandon Kraft, Ryan Boren, Jeremy Herve and even Matt himself, even if he’s not directly aware of it, who are contributing in their own ways as well. Given the immense value of what IndieWeb brings to the web, I can’t imagine that they won’t ultimately win out.

If it helps, some of the current IndieWeb issues pale in comparison to some of the accessibility problems that Gutenberg has neglected within the WordPress community. Fortunately those a11ys are sticking with the greater fight to make things better not only for themselves, but for the broader community and the world. I suggest that, like them, we all suit up and continue the good fight.

Of course part of the genius of how IndieWeb is structured: anyone is free to start writing code, make better UI, and create something of their own. Even then they benefit from a huge amount of shared work, resources, and simple standards that are already out there.

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👓 Gutenberg FAQ | Matt Mullenweg

Read WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)

We are nearing the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, one of the most important and exciting projects I’ve worked on in my 15 years with this community. I knew we would be taking a big leap. But it’s a leap we need to take, and I think the end result is going to open up many new oppo...

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👓 Lawsuits targeting business websites over ADA violations are on the rise | Los Angeles Times

Read Lawsuits targeting business websites over ADA violations are on the rise (Los Angeles Times)

Hotels, retailers and other businesses are increasingly the target of lawsuits for failing to make their websites compliant with the Americans With Disabilities Act.

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👓 Rethinking The Web, The Internet, And Our Roles Within | More Themes Baby

Read Rethinking The Web, The Internet, And Our Roles Within (More Themes Baby)

Go indie, go punk, call it web, notice the good support, and offer an alternative to the old-school, advertising-based, closed internet.

A clarion call on the open internet for more of the open internet (aka IndieWeb.)

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📺 The Future of SEO is on the SERP | Rand Fishkin | BrightonSEO 2018 | YouTube

Watched The Future of SEO is on the SERP | BrightonSEO 2018 by Rand Fishkin from YouTube

The good news is: the number of searches on Google keeps growing. The bad news is: decreasing clickthrough rates on organic results ( especially in mobile), fewer big companies dominating the world’s Google search results and more results answered entirely in Google’s SERPs.

As Google answers a higher and higher percent of queries in the results themselves and refers out less traffic to websites, we’re all gonna have to think about how we influence search audiences through what Google shows rather than just focusing on driving traffic to our own sites.

A big part of SEO’s future will be on the SERP rather than driving traffic to websites.

Rand Fishkin is the founder of SparkToro - https://sparktoro.com/-and was previously co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.

About BrightonSEO
BrightonSEO – is a major search marketing event in the UK. One of our favourite events of the year, This is a superb conference for search marketing professionals, novice or expert. BrightonSEO - https://www.brightonseo.com/ - is a chance to learn from some of the best minds in search, and then rub shoulders with them at one of the friendliest, and largest, gatherings of Digital Marketers in Europe.

Some interesting perspective on the future of the internet from an SEO-related perspective.

While a lot of the net is going to mobile first and the rise of the assistants (Google Home and Amazon Alexa) are taking a lot of eyeballs, I’m curious if the move toward immediate answers is more for the “I don’t have time for more in-depth search because I just want a quick answer” versus buyers and people looking for more depth that are going to prefer desktop or sit-back experiences where they’ll spend some time browsing and/or reading. Are the numbers in this presentation specific to this phenomenon or indicative of something much worse as is predicted in the video?

#1. It’s never been harder to earn organic traffic from the web’s major players. ❧

#2. It’s never been more important to make your website (and email list)–rather than someone else’s property–the center of your campaigns. ❧

The second slide point is directly from the video with the “rather than someone else’s property” part quoted and inserted from the audio portion. I love that this is a direct incarnation of the IndieWeb philosophy for business use cases. Earlier this morning I actually heard a radio advertisement use the phrase, “or find us on our socials” with word socials being indicative of a generic term for ubiquitous social media platforms which would presumably include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Perhaps the fact that companies aren’t directly differentiating social silos in their advertising anymore means that some better social readers would portend a more IndieWeb-first approach? Eventually companies are going to find that maintaining dozens of presences on multiple sites isn’t as cost-effective as just maintaining their one site and perhaps the market drops back to a more distributed web approach?

👓 Exploring queries for private feeds | Seblog

Read Exploring queries for private feeds by

Sebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)

One of the discussions this weekend in Berlin was on the topic of private feeds. Martijn and Sven made great progress by implemeting a flow to fetch private pages using various endpoints for tokens and authentication. Apart from the question how to fetch private feeds, there is also the question how...

More and more I’m wishing I had gone to Germany to attend camp…. I’m glad folks spent some time to write about and document their work there. Private posts/feeds are some of the missing pieces that represent the next frontier.

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📅 RSVP An Introduction to Microformats: November 7, 2018

RSVPed Unable to Attend An Introduction to Microformats: November 7, 2018

November 7, 2018 7:00 PM @ PayLease – San Diego, CA
I'll be giving a talk about microformats at the SDPHP meetup group. Learn about microformats(.org), a simple way to markup structural information in your HTML. I will walk through how to publish microformats, how they are parsed, and some compelling use-cases for both publishers and consumers. For more information and RSVP, visit the meetup.com event page.
Add to calendar

I wish I could attend this talk by gRegor this week. If you’re a web developer or designer in the San Diego area, I highly recommend you attend as there aren’t many people who could speak on this important topic as well as he can.

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Reply to Ben Werdmuller on social media resharing

Replied to a tweet by

Ben Werdmuller (Twitter)

“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”

I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.

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👓 Paypal bans Gab following Pittsburgh shooting | The Verge

Read Paypal bans Gab following Pittsburgh shooting by Andrew Liptak (The Verge)

The gunman had a history of anti-Semitic posts on the site

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👓 PayPal Bans Far-Right Social Network Gab After Anti-Semitic User Kills at Least 11 at Synagogue | Gizmodo

Read PayPal Bans Far-Right Social Network Gab After Anti-Semitic User Kills at Least 11 at Synagogue (Gizmodo)

On Saturday, a firearm-wielding man massacred at least 11 people attending Shabbat services at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood and injured a number of others. The Anti-Defamation League described it as likely the deadliest single attack on the Jewish community in U.S. history. Authorities identified the suspect, who was captured after a gun battle with responding police, as 46-year-old Robert Bowers—a vitriolic anti-Semite who allegedly announced the attack on the social network Gab.

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👓 Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors | CNN

Read Someone bought BrettKavanaugh.com and made it a forum to help sexual assault survivors (CNN)

Don't go to BrettKavanaugh.com looking for information about the nation's new Supreme Court Justice.

I read this article and want to coin the term “domain gilding” as a sub-category of domain squatting. I’m curious if others can think of examples?

Domain gilding: using the method of domain squatting with the intent of helping a potentially corporate or personal branded website accomplish more good in the world than if it were to be used by the person, company, or concept that might otherwise be broadly associated with the name.

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👓 How It Works | Solid

Read How It Works | Solid (solid.inrupt.com)

Within the Solid ecosystem, you decide where you store your data. Photos you take, comments you write, contacts in your address book, calendar events, how many miles you run each day from your fitness tracker… they’re all stored in your Solid POD. This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice. Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time, without interruption of service.

You give people and your apps permission to read or write to parts of your Solid POD. So whenever you’re opening up a new app, you don’t have to fill out your details ever again: they are read from your POD with your permission. Things saved through one app are available in another: you never have to sync, because your data stays with you.

This approach protects your privacy and is also great for developers: they can build cool apps without harvesting massive amounts of data first. Anyone can create an app that leverages what is already there.

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👓 undo | IndieWeb

Read undo (indieweb.org)

undo is a common action you can take (often a button or menu item) to reverse the effects of the previous action, as if the action had never occurred; on the indieweb, you may want to undo a post, a deletion, or an update.

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📺 IndieWebCamp NYC Demos | YouTube

Watched IndieWebCamp NYC Demos by

IndieWebCamp from YouTube

I saw a lot more interesting things at IndieWebCamp New York in the last two days than ultimately ended up in the demos, but I’m sure that continued work will bring a lot more awesomeness to the web to fruition.

Congratulations to everyone who attended! Special thanks to Greg McVerry, David Shanske, Marty McGuire, and all of the sponsors who helped put it all together! And special thanks to all the rest of the community (both in person and remotely) that came together to make it what it was–you all know who you are, so I won’t person tag/@mention/webmention everyone individually.

For those who missed it, there’s a wealth of information on the wiki, on the YouTube channel, and in the chat logs.

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