❤️ dimensionmedia tweeted Armchair WordCampers: Discover #WordPress friends in California w/ @WordCampRS

Liked a tweet by David Bisset on Twitter (Twitter)

❤️ WordCampRS tweeted WordCamp Riverside 2019 Day 2 was jam packed

Liked a tweet by WordCamp Riverside - Nov. 8-10 2019 (@WordCampRS)WordCamp Riverside - Nov. 8-10 2019 (@WordCampRS) (twitter.com)

❤️ WordCampRS tweeted @ChrisAldrich presents on “Welcome to Web 3.0, the internet you always wish you had.” https://t.co/MWjXZv7VXs

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❤️ MinorityPostdoc tweeted at 3rd @WordCampRS Riverside event organized by local Inland Empire community

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🔖 Integromat – The glue of the internet

Bookmarked Integromat (Integromat)
Integromat is an easy to use, powerful tool with unique features for automating manual processes. Connect your favorite apps, services and devices with each other without having any programming skills.

🔖 Speakers: Round Two | WordCamp Riverside 2019

Bookmarked WordCamp Riverside 2019 Speakers: Round Two by Verious B. Smith III (2019.riverside.wordcamp.org)

This group will join our other speakers for 3 days of sessions on November 8th – 10th. We hope you’ll join us for their sessions. View the Full Schedule Here & Get your ticket today!

WordPress and IndieWeb: Creating Your Dialtone on the Internet

Next weekend, I’ll be giving a talk at the third annual WordCamp Riverside on Saturday, November 9th at 11:00 AM Pacific in the Innovation room. If you haven’t registered already, there are still tickets left for purchase.

After having watched the livestream of Tantek Çelik’s invited talk at WordCamp US entitled Take Back Your Web, I’ll note that my intention is to generally pick up from where he left off and get into some of the nuts and bolts of what some of the IndieWeb philosophies and technologies are and how they work with WordPress. (Though don’t worry if you missed his talk, I’ll put all the ideas into their larger context.) I’ll approach it from the perspective of a WordPress beginner, but will have some pointers to lots of in-depth resources for designers and developers. In short, I’ll attempt to provide a crash-course overview of what the IndieWeb looks like from a WordPress perspective.

Below is a brief teaser for the talk:

Welcome to Web 3.0, the internet you always wish you had.

I can have phone service on Verizon and you may choose to use AT&T, T-Mobile, or Sprint, but as long as we’ve got phones we can talk to each other or any other phone number that’s connected to the network. But why can’t Facebook users interact directly with Twitter users or Instagram users or vice versa? Crucially why couldn’t one website built on WordPress talk to another website built with Drupal or Kirby? The internet is an open communication platform after all! I’m going to show how this (and so much more magic) can all be done with some simple plugins in under an hour!
Over the past several years a group of dedicated bloggers, technologists, and designers has been innovating, building, and testing a suite of open W3C web standards to allow their personal websites to recreate the major pieces of interactive functionality that are part of the largest social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, etc. These larger pieces are now all working together across dozens of content management systems including WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, ProcessWire, Elgg, Nucleus CMS, Craft, Django, Kirby, static site generators like Hugo and Jekyll and services like Micro.Blog and Mastodon. This means that instead of relying on smaller non-interoperable social media sites that obsessively surveil you and then pollute your stream with obtrusive ads, you can now better own and control your own data and comprehensive identity on your own domain name. In this talk we’ll take a high level look at W3C web specs including Webmention, WebSub, Micropub, and the forthcoming Microsub to see how you can make your own website a first class citizen on the (social) web. Using WordPress and a few simple plugins you can now close the circle of website-to-website intercommunication across the open web. Use your own website to read and consume web content, post your own status updates, bookmarks, likes, and replies while interacting directly with other websites. In many cases you can also do this with social platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, GitHub, Mastodon, and Micro.blog.

The web is my social network: My talk from WordCamp Riverside 2018

WordPress.tv has posted my talk from WordCamp Riverside 2018. If you missed it live, you can review it again now. The slides can be found here on my site.


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The web is my social network

Growing toxicity on Twitter, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, algorithmic feeds, and a myriad of other problems have opened our eyes to the ever-growing costs of social media. Walled gardens have trapped us with the promise of “free” while addicting us to their products at the cost of our happiness, sense of self, sanity, and privacy. Can we take back our fractured online identities, data, and privacy to regain what we’ve lost?
I’ll talk about how I’ve used IndieWeb related technologies in conjunction with WordPress as a replacement for my social presence while still allowing easy interaction with friends, family, and colleagues online. I’ll show how everyone can easily use simple web standards to make WordPress a user-controlled, first-class social platform that works across domains and even other CMSs.
Let’s democratize social media using WordPress and the open web, the last social network you’ll ever need to join.

Thoughts about Southern California WordCamps

I was at the awesome WordPress Orange County all day yesterday and attended remotely via live stream for portions of today.

While I was there, my gut feeling after looking at the rest of this year’s calendar was confirmed. I heard from several people that WordCamp Los Angeles and WordCamp San Diego aren’t being planned for this year as they typically would be. Naturally I’m distraught at the thought, but I’m also wondering if part of the reason is that there are several smaller nearby regional camps that have popped up over the past year? Some of these newer camps include WordCamp Riverside, WordCamp Santa Clarita, and the upcoming WordCamp Long Beach.

This trend can be an interesting one in large part because it means that the community is growing in size and sophistication as well as leadership to be able to sustain these new area camps. It’s good to have been able to have gone to two camps within driving distance in the last two months and also know that there are two more camps within that same distance before the end of the year. Instead of having one or two major camps nearby, I’ve now got twice the amount.

Of course, with all the extra awesomeness that this provides, I also wonder about the ideas of community cohesion, leadership, continuity, and even burnout. Should we have better regional conversations about these camps, their timing, and their content? Are we possibly spreading ourselves too thin? Is there enough leadership and continuity to continue all these individual camps on an annual basis for the next 5 years? Are the benches deep enough that we’re not working toward burning ourselves (and our volunteer base) out? Would it be better to have a little less? Should we alternate having bigger camps in LA and San Diego with the smaller ones in nearby cities? What does that look like? Are we thinking about longer term sustainability?

I’m mulling over the idea of spearheading either a WordCamp Los Angeles, to keep the central continuity, but I’m also wondering about doing something like that with a slightly smaller Pasadena Camp. I also started a discussion yesterday about doing a kids’ WordCamp in the LA area when I found out that there is already some organization and institutional support for these in other cities. And of course this all comes with my pre-existing plans for doing a local area IndieWebCamp sometime within the next calendar year. All of these ideas are appealing to me, but I only have a finite amount of time for planning and executing them.

In the coming weeks, I’d like to reach out and touch base with all of these nearby camps to hear other’s ideas on the topic and their long term plans to see what the best way forward might look like. Has the central organization run across these rapid growth problems in other metropolitan areas in the past? What was were the near-term and longer-term results? Without some additional data, I feel like I’m operating in a bit of a vacuum. Is it possible that as a major market city that the LA area is the first to see potential effects like I’ve described?

This post mostly serves as an informal dump of some preliminary ideas and potential concerns for the future; I’d welcome ideas and additional thoughts.

❤️ WordCampRS tweet: Group activity in Fun with Fonts with Jessica Broctor

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I could have sworn I still had some dark hair on the crown of my head. Apparently not anymore…

❤️ DawnHeuft tweet: Own your own content. Learning about IndieWeb.org at Chris Aldrich session.

Liked a tweet by Dawn HeuftDawn Heuft (Twitter)