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Replied to A note from Katherine M. Moss by Katherine M. MossKatherine M. Moss

Just … not again, not tomorrow … Let me have some breathe time so that I can work on more important things.

I hear you when it comes to breathe time. Things have been crazy around here with regard to work, but I’ve made it a point to keep as much of my free time to offline pursuits as possible lately, with the exception of things I find genuinely enjoyable, like helping others join the Indieweb. It’s made things a lot less stressful for me. I realize that may not be an option for you, but I really hope you get a break soon.
Replied to Face Down In Mud by John CarsonJohn Carson

WOW! I finally made it. After approximately 8 weeks of reding and studying 3 books on using WordPress and learning about design and development, along with plugin and theme development I’m here. This is impressively powerful stuff. Stay tuned as there will be more to come! I’m not selling out, I…

Welcome to the IndieWeb John!
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I love baseball. Thanks for posting these, including the alt text! I listen to the games using the At Bat app, and caught part of Monday’s game.
Replied to
I love baseball. Thanks for posting these, including the alt text! I listen to the games using the At Bat app, and caught part of Monday’s game.
Replied to a post by Changeling mxChangeling mx
I’m glad to hear you’ve found something that will allow you to more easily get your job done. I’m not biting the Aira bullet yet, because I have some serious concerns with regard to their privacy and data protection policies which have yet to be answered, coupled with some ethical concerns, but regardless of my concerns it makes me happy to see others in our community getting things done and living their lives to the fullest.
Replied to a post by Changeling mxChangeling mx

Really liking the new #SeeingAI feature that lets you explore photos. Now I have an understanding of what it means when a person is centered.

I haven’t had a chance to play with this feature of SeeingAI yet, but I can’t wait to do so. I always assumed that something or someone being centered in a photo was similar to something being centered on a page or on a screen, but I could be very wrong about that.
Replied to Chris Aldrich by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich)

Did something go sideways with your site at https://www.arush.io/? Something feels off and it appears most of your content has disappeared?!

@chrisaldrich no, nothing’s gone sideways with the site, but I forgot to go add the rest of the post kinds to the menu once I added the static front page. I will go do that today. I also need to finish the custom archive template since I need a decent way to search through archives. Thanks for the reminder though.
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@Chris it would definitely be nice if they’d mention any of the Indieweb alternatives in these listings. Micro.blog for example is pretty easy to set up if you’re not a technical user. Also, I think what goes without saying at this point is that most of these alternatives lack accessibility, and in some cases aren’t implementing it without a lot of pushback. See for example, Mastodon and link underlines which sparked this thread on Twitter and this quite poetic tribute to the link underline. So along with ending up in the possible same position socially if your platform is run by other people, there’s also the part where you get to decide whether or not you want to start the accessibility conversation.
Replied to ssawczyn on Micro.blog by ssawczynssawczyn (micro.blog)

@arush Thanks for replying to this … months ago, I’m just seeing it now. I think I’m going to switch back to WordPress for blogging, still having trouble with the editor here and there’s not much support on Android. Also, the emoji tag system is cute, but not practical or flexible for me.

@ssawczyn @a11y4all If I’ve done this correctly this should reach you on micro.blog and on Twitter. I completely understand about the micro.blog editor giving you trouble. From what I understand from following some of the development conversation around it, the problems are coming from the javascript used to facilitate markdown composition, and there is talk about making that a toggleable feature until the js can be fixed so that it no longer presents accessibility issues. I could have some of this wrong and @manton may need to correct my recounting of what I’ll call an overheard conversation via interwebz. Regarding the tagmoji, I can see both sides of this. I completely understand how it’s not practical for you. I’m just now starting to play more with emoji, which is weird because I’ve had it on my phone accessibly for years now, but I’m not that familiar with the emoji keyboard and I find it difficult to find the exact emoji I’m looking for, plus I don’t know what most of them mean or even how to figure it out, so I just don’t use them that often. On the other hand, I think hashtags have become a problem, not because they can be used to organize things, but because, (in my opinion), they’ve been horribly abused, and it’s not just marketers or spammers doing it. Hell, most of the time it’s not even marketers doing it, because the good ones tend to keep up with the data on the subject and what’s useful/acceptable on each social network and based on that data will use them accordingly. It’s everyone trying their hand at marketing who manages to abuse them, and I’ve seen this most often in the assistive technology space. That last is based solely on my own experience and is not necessarily meant to be a general statement of badness, although every time I encounter a tweet that uses four or more hashtags I get cranky, and the more hashtags the crankier I get, until we reach ten (yes, that’s a real number, I’ve seen that from at least one blindness organization in the wild) and we’re at go-To-Your-Room-And-think-About-What-You’ve-Done levels of insanity and I start wishing I had the ability to ban hashtag usage altogether. The way tagmoji on micro.blog seem to be designed is, I think, slightly superior. They cover very broad categories, and there’s just enough social pressure to prevent, (at least for the time being), people from abusing the system. The broad categorization is, (I think) a deturrent against attempted gaming of the system. So it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, especially now that you can interact with Mastodon users via micro.blog and I believe vice versa as long as you have things appropriately set up.
Replied to a post by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich

Is not even Halloween yet. What in God’s name is the Hallmark Channel doing running a countdown to Christmas movie marathon already?

Personally I’m convinced that Hallmark hates the human race. Doing anything Christmas-related this early is nauseating.
Replied to Bill Boules on Twitter (Twitter)

“@megarush1024 @aca_fan1980 Again, I was there. Basically, it comes down to a bunch of angry people who have not accomplished anything complaining about others who have actually accomplish something. They have use the desperation of people who are blind to push their agenda. It’s gross.”

Not withstanding my overall agreement with you on this specific issue or on criticism of the NFB in general, I think the assertion that the NFB has accomplished nothing is unfair, and the pollemical tone of it risks alienating the rank and file of the organization.
Replied to I’m done with syndication. Let’s help people be themselves on the web. by Ben WerdmüllerBen Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)

The IndieWeb has long promoted the idea of POSSE: Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, lots of platforms are re-evaluating their API policies.
This is kind of rearranging the deck chairs on the privacy Titanic, because the problem was that all this data was collected in one place, not that there was an API that allowed third party apps to publish on a user’s behalf. (To be fair, the publish API possibly enabled algorithmic propaganda / marketing campaigns to operate more efficiently.)
Still, here we are. I think this is a good opportunity to reconsider how the independent social web thinks of itself. I’ve long stopped syndicating posts to Twitter, and instead just post there directly. But I do try and post anything of substance on my blog.

Speaking as a citizen of the indieweb and not one of its architects, it seems to me that POSSE is so heavily promoted because platforms like Twitter and Facebook are more often than not the only significant exposure most people have to the web, and therefore in order to help most people transition from those closed platforms to the open web, there’s some weaning that has to happen. POSSE is, I think, that weaning process. Of course the hope is that all of us will eventually go full indieweb, and I think those of us who are indieweb evangelists need to come up with a method of helping people easily transition. With regard to posting on social media, I think we also have a situation where we’ve been trained not to value our content unless that content serves some sort of business or self-promotional purpose, and we’ve also been trained to believe that short content has no value because it doesn’t have a title and it’s not thousands of well-thought-out words. As a consequence, the content we post to social media is seen as throw-away content, and who cares if the content is scraped for marketing or manipulation purposes, and if we care at all about whether or not our content is used without our explicit consent, we hope that it’s someone we like doing the scraping and only object when it’s someone we don’t like doing the scraping and analyzing. So we need to find a way to communicate that content, even short content or content with no words at all, is valuable to the individual simply because the individual took the time to create it. Not sure how we do that.

For the most part, my reposts happen on the closed platforms directly, simply because it’s easier to retweet from a Twitter client or share from the Facebook mobile site than it is to repost and syndicate from my own site. Facebook, for example, doesn’t support reposts, so if you want to share someone’s post you came across on that network, you’re forced to do so from within Facebook. Twitter is a bit more permissive I think, but those days are numbered.

To add to all this, for me, social media, (with the exception of Mastodon and Micro.blog), has, to put it charitably, lost its luster. It’s become a chore, both personally and professionally, and the bad has finally gotten to the point where it outweighs the good for me. On a professional level, publishing criteria are getting so strict that publishing content, (especially when you’re scheduling it so as to not spend all your time staring at a social media client), has become fairly difficult, both because of the publishing rules themselves and because of the inaccessibility of scheduling services and their apps. This is most of the reason why I’m pulling the trigger and going full indieweb later this month. How the closed platforms treat their third-party developers also has some influence on my decision to pull the trigger.


Also posted on IndieNews

Replied to Adding Simple Twitter Response Buttons to WordPress Posts (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

Simple Twitter UI buttons on an IndieWeb-enabled site can allow Twitter to become part of your commenting system.

I’m writing this reply from my own site while I wait for my Twitter client to update and reload everything. One more advantage to the Indieweb. Anyway, I think having functionality like this inside either the Post Kinds or Bridgy Publish plugins would be great, and possibly have the advantage of wider user adoption. Press This is a feature that’s been removed from current WordPress Core and separated out into a plugin, due to the general lack of bookmarklet use. I happen to be a fan of WordPress’s post formats feature, but am now wishing they would just incorporate microformats 2 so that they conform to indieweb post kinds where possible. I think WordPress should possibly keep the “Aside” format as a longer form of status, or that there should be an indieweb equivalent of this.
Replied to a post
I’m testing this out with WordPress now. Let’s see how this works. I need to remember to add all these cool little indieweb apps to my phone’s home screen. It’ll make not using the WordPress app a lot easier.
Replied to a post by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich)

@cswordpress I hadn’t run across the keyboard issue with the bookmarklet yet, but I’m glad you’re taking a look at fixing it. If you

OK I think I might have this slightly more figured out. Write the post, check the appropriate post kind in the post kinds meta box, move down to the response meta box, enter the URL. Must look at markup examples this weekend.

I want to say that Genesis supports some microformats, but I’m not sure which ones, and I’m definitely sure there’s no microformats 2 support. the main reason I want to check and/or add support, maybe as a plugin at first, is because I’ve got some custom post types on my work-related site that I can’t afford to lose, and that I’d have to add to another theme. I’d like to incorporate as much indieweb into that site as possible, and start incorporating it into client projects as well, so accessibility plus open web plus own your data. Thanks for the resources, and of course as I get free time, I’ll definitely work on this. And of course document all the things.

Replied to a post by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich)

@cswordpress @redcrew Thanks for the recommendation Amanda!
I’m guessing you installed PressForward directly on your production server without using a test environment? I can tell

As I was scrolling through Twitter this morning, I came across a recommendation in favor of Press Forward, a free software alternative to closed-source tools for journalists that can also act as a self-contained RSS reader and Instapaper/Pocket replacement for use on WordPress-powered sites. The above is to provide context for those who haven’t been following this conversation. Plus, I’m still figuring out this crafting replies on my own site thing.

Anyway, I received some very helpful feedback from the author of the original post regarding my current installation, which included a link to the project’s Github. This is great, both because I’m really looking forward to using this since I really don’t like messing around with Pocket/Instapaper due to their accessibility issues, plus owning your bookmarks. So far the only problem I’ve found, other than the issue mentioned in the feedback, is one where the bookmarklet cannot be accessed with a keyboard. You have to use a mouse. So I’ll be filing an issue, and hopefully a pull request, because along with the Indieweb implications and uses for this, it also presents a great alternative for controlling the display of the lists of links we collect, allowing for the creatin of accessible user interfaces.

Also, Twitter’s 140-character limit is extra frustrating when you realize that you can reply to tweets from your own website, not be stuck trying to fit things in 140-char chunks, and keep ownership of the content, which is why I replied here. I need to finish getting customerservant.com switched over to a theme with complete microformat/microformat 2 support, and am looking at how to do this with the Genesis framework if possible.