Status – Page 81 – Chris Aldrich

Replied to Bookish, Chapter Type Theme by

cogdog (Reclaim Hosting Community)

I’ve recently rescued the formatted version of my 1986 MS thesis (originally in Mac Word 3.0 files on floppy disks) with plans to publish in my domain. I know most people will just say “do Pressbooks” but I want my own site/theme w/o all that overhead. If anyone has a suggestion for a good clean WP theme for creating content organized into Chapters, let me know. Or maybe I should be doing in some kind of static generator.

Alan,

Did I hear someone whisper “Book SPLOT”?!

There are a few examples of this sort of publishing pattern at https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat and https://indieweb.org/book that use a variety of technologies.

The easiest method is obviously to publish a .pdf copy and simply link it. If you have a text version of it and want .epub or .mobi files for e-readers I’ve got infrastructure for converting text into those I could put into service for you. I’ve done it in the past for Stommel and Morris’s Urgency of Teachers. (I have a small publishing house on the side and can help you out with ISBN numbers for much cheaper than usual if you like.)

@kfitz has done it a few times during the process of writing and subsequently publishing books, so she may have ideas/opinions. If I’m not mistaken, she used CommentPress, so that may be most comfortable for you from within the WordPress world.

Jeremy Keith has an awesome example at https://resilientwebdesign.com/ and if you pinged him, he may have a flat html file “shell” that you could cut and paste into. (Or you could view source and manually get the same result.)

Amy Guy’s example on Github which she published using Github Pages is nice and could make a fun little project for you as well.

It would be so much nicer if there were a one click install of PressBooks, but I’ve quit holding my breath on that front. (Maybe it’s a future possibility for Reclaim Cloud though???)

A few quick notes from the New_Public Festival:

Darius Kazemi:

Darius is running a project called Friend Camp, a Mastodon instance https://friend.camp/about/more

rabble:

Just launched a new social app in the Apple store a few minutes ago. Working on the project https://planetary.social/.

Golda Velez:

Has a proposal for Twitter’s Blue Sky for message encapsulation. More details by searching Blue Sky on Hacker Noon.

rabble:

Building because there is a path in social media 2.0 that we lost. There is a lot of adversiting money to be made, and that’s fine, but it’s deeply problematic.

It’s easy to criticize Twitter and Facebook, but it’s an unfair problem. They have an impossible task because the structure is wrong. How can we come together as humans instead of having the shopping mall do the enforcement?

Bolting on work to existing platforms where one can be deleted is not a good idea.

Darius Kazemi:

Hopes that you’ll have different political places, but other places too. Places built around ethoses that aren’t tied to particular political parties or idologies.

I want to provide a place where people don’t hate their lives. The hook isn’t that it’s decentralized, but that you’ll be happier here.

Golda Velez:

We want to have a safe space where people can do creative things together.

You have to have a federated system with accountability. A graduated system of sanctions. Some democratic way of determining what those things are.

Eli Pariser 🏞📲:

Loved what @tinysubversions wrote on https://runyourown.social/

Golda Velez:

Any tool you build, attackers will use (and abuse) it.

Darius Kazemi:

Keeping nodes of communities smaller (50 people) helps to prevent context collapse. It also minimizes the reporting system from being an attack vector.

Eli Pariser 🏞📲:

Next up https://newpublic.org/festival/event/701/showcase-glimpses-of-our-digital-public-futures

Tracy Chou:

Working on building @blockpartyapp_ https://www.blockpartyapp.com/

I just ran across and am happy to follow Anasuya Sengupta (@Anasuyashh) and
Whose Knowledge? (@WhoseKnowledge) via the New_Public Festival (#NewPublicFestival). Whose Knowledge is “a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.”

As I’m reading Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly‘s (@Lynne_Kelly) Songlines: The Power and Promise, I’m curious to explore how the work of Whose Knowledge might possibly help to empower oral cultures that are neither written down nor on the internet? Also how might this also empower their “third archive”?

Replied to IndieWeb is Too Complicated for It’s Own Good by

Kevin Tracy (Kevin Tracy)

Evan Stoner has an incredibly well written (and very to-the-point) article about IndieWeb up on his site that needs more attention. As I mentioned last year, I’ve been playing around with int…

Kevin, I understand a lot of the complications for attempting to set up an IndieWeb site for a static site generator like Evan. A lot of IndieWeb tech is harder to do with SSG’s since a lot of the functionality is anything but static—yet it still works. Hopefully the small handful of plugins for WordPress are much easier, particularly for someone as adept as you. I’ll admit there’s a microformats issue for dovetailing WordPress themes properly, but that should only get better with time. We could definitely use some developers and designers to help lighten the load to make it easier for everyone. Some platforms like WithKnown have it all out of the box while Drupal and WordPress have either one or a several plugins. Evan’s set up is about as complicated as they could come.

Since you mention some of your problems, a few things you might appreciate for making your own personal use easier for WordPress are the large number of Micropub clients you could be using to post to your website. They’re way easier than dealing with the Classic editor, Gutenberg, or the mobile interface. I really enjoy using Quill and Omnibear (a browser extension) myself, but for food you might enjoy Teacup and for memes there’s Kapowski. If you want a crash-course on micropub for a non-developer, I did a WordCamp session on it a while back. Since most of them are open source, I’d imagine with your experience, if necessary, you could modify them to suit your specific needs without a lot of work.

If you want to go a step further, you could set up a social reader for subscribing to and reading other sites as well as using their built in micropub functionality to reply to posts directly from your reader.

You’re right that the ecosystem does seem overly-complicated on first view, but it’s taken almost a decade of work by hundreds and thousands of people to attempt to make a set of standards that are as simple as possible for building into almost any platform out there. Further work will only serve to make things even easier and more usable over time.

Of course if one wants an easier solution (especially for the completely non-technical person who is looking for a Twitter-like replacement), there are a few IndieWeb as a Service platforms out there. One of the best I’ve seen so far is micro.blog. You can’t beat its clean interface or ease-of-use as a service and it has pretty much everything built in out of the box. As time goes by it’ll be great to see other services like this that offer the interoperability without the heartache that Evan has seen.

If you’ve got ideas about how the WordPress parts could be improved, do pass them along.