@Mentions

This page collects (mostly Twitter) @mentions and homepage webmentions of Chris Aldrich, @chrisaldrich, or www.boffosocko.com which don’t otherwise directly relate to specific content on this site.

If you like, you can also think of this as a guestbook or my personal (non-)Facebook Wall. Go ahead and write something about me on your own website and webmention this page.

Your site doesn’t support sending webmentions yet?! You can send me one manually.

And of course if you want to, you can leave a manual comment as well too.

758 thoughts on “@Mentions”

  45. Putting my house in order: Phase 1

    5 min read

    For a while now I’ve been concerned about owning my own data, in the spirit of IndieWeb. In June 2015 I started an experiment in the indieweb using a CMS called Known, and bits of that worked well enough. Trouble is, I actually have almost no control over the details of the CMS, which has meant that whenever I come across a little problem that might be within my capacity to solve, I generally can’t even try. This frustration has finally reached the point where I’m prepared to do something about it, like host my own copy of Known rather than rely on Indiehosters.
    I’ve also been hanging around in the Indieweb Slack channel, where I’m both amazed at what people are doing and increasingly convinced that it is beyond me. But I’m determined to give it a proper try.
    The first step is to figure out just how to organise myself, and this post is intended to describe how things are currently and why, in an effort to clarify my own thoughts and maybe get some advice from the indieweb gurus.
    The properties
    jeremycherfas.net
    This is the site I currently view as the mothership. It has been through many incarnations, from NucleusCMS to WordPress to Octopress to its current platform Grav. I dumped WordPress because it was just too complex, slow and hard to fix for what was essentially a very simple site. I’m only about 10% of the way through transferring old posts from Octopress to Grav, because I insist on doing it by hand to catch broken links and stuff. The big downside of being on Grav is there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of indieweb interest in that community.
    There’s nothing really social associated with this site; I have the same username on ADN (for now) and on Flickr (maybe also not long for this world) and on 10Centuries. Also Facebook, but I hardly use that except for promoting episodes of …
    eatthispodcast.com
    Where my food podcasts live. This is a WordPress site. Why? Because it was relatively easy to set up for podcasting, and that part of it works very well. Why a separate domain? Because I think it is quite likely that people who are interested in that podcast might not be that interested in everything else I do, and it seems a natural to keep it separate. The vast majority of posts are podcast episodes, although there are also copies of the email newsletter and occasional other posts related to topics that have been covered in podcast episodes. I doubt that it would be worth moving this to another CMS.
    This site has accounts at Twitter and Instagram. Posts there go beyond the strict confines of the podcast, but generally stay in the area of food studies in the widest sense.
    http://www.fornacalia.com
    (Got to fix that www thing.)
    Like Eat This Podcast, this is a WordPress site. It is dedicated to my various breadmaking activities, again kept separate because I wasn’t sure whether people interested in my breadmaking would be interested in my other activities.
    No social activity, except that I post breadmaking things to the Eat This Podcast account at Instagram.
    This is the site that could most easily become a category of jeremycherfas.net if I wanted to get rid of sites, but I rather like the URI.
    vaviblog.com
    The indiweb experiment, running on Known CMS but hosted at Indiehosters, which gives me very little freedom to tinker. [^1] Bits of this work, and work well. Now, however, I think I’m ready to declare an end to the first experimental phase and start to embrace the indieweb in earnest.
    I should note that vaviblog.com used to have a much more interesting website associated with it, and that I would eventually like to get that back (I have all the content). I used this domain for my experiment because it was one I already owned. In retrospect, that was a mistake. There is a Twitter account called Vaviblog but I have used it very little recently. If I got the old content back, I might use it more often.
    [^1]: That’s perhaps not fair. It doesn’t give me any kind of FTP access, so I can’t use that route to add a new plug-in or fiddle beneath the hood. I recently learned that there is a way I could use Git to make changes and have Indiehosters pull those changes, but I haven’t actually bitten that bullet. If I’m going to go that route, I may as well save myself a bit of cash and host it where I host other sites.
    potp.it
    The site for a short-lived project, hosted at 10Centuries. Although I’ve almost stopped posting longer things there, it is possibly my most active social site, but for a small society.
    What I’m thinking
    One approach I’ve seen and liked is the way Chris Aldrich has implemented his “primary hub” in WordPress with his “social stream” in Known in a sub-domain (though I’m not entirely sure what makes a post there different from a post in the hub). I don’t really want to migrate my main site back to WordPress, but maybe I can achieve a similar sort of thing in Grav. Mind you, I still haven’t enabled comments on Grav; how on Earth am I going to manage pulling them in from other sites? My main worry there is that because Grav developers are not all that interested in indieweb, it will be beyond my abilities. So maybe back to WordPress really is the best option.
    I’m open to any and all suggestions, and I’m going to crosspost to vaviblog.com because that should be able to receive replies from elsewhere.

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  49. While I’ve been using my live-noting (well, OK, live-tweeting mostly) site noterlive.com fairly regularly to post live notes to my website, I haven’t pushed out a new release for many months.I’m off to the microservices summit tomorrow, so I thought I’d tidy up the feature requests and bug reports beforehand.Several of these were helpfully added by Chris Aldrich, including the newly-linked Instructions page and the suggestion to clear the logs and cached speaker list separately.I also made the site handle blank twitter names better, which means it can now be used as a tweetstorming tool more easily.I also added a ‘New Thread’ button that starts a new thread of comments on twitter before the next tweet, which should be useful to break up live tweeting of multiple sessionsDo try it out, and send me any further issues#100DaysOfIndieWeb

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  50. While I’ve been using my live-noting (well, OK, live-tweeting mostly) site noterlive.com fairly regularly to post live notes to my website, I haven’t pushed out a new release for many months.I’m off to the microservices summit tomorrow, so I thought I’d tidy up the feature requests and bug reports beforehand.Several of these were helpfully added by Chris Aldrich, including the newly-linked Instructions page and the suggestion to clear the logs and cached speaker list separately.I also made the site handle blank twitter names better, which means it can now be used as a tweetstorming tool more easily.I also added a ‘New Thread’ button that starts a new thread of comments on twitter before the next tweet, which should be useful to break up live tweeting of multiple sessionsDo try it out, and send me any further issues#100DaysOfIndieWeb

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  63. Sebastian, first of all, thank you for your detailed write up on this issue. I think much of your roadmap is worthwhile, and of great interest.

    I cannot, however, say that I am convinced by your contentions regarding the effect of GDPR and indieweb sites. In particular, I think your definitions are excessively broad, and you elide much information from both the Regulation itself and the Recitals.

    Take, for instance, your quotation of Recital 18, which is key to the matters here presented. I note that you have chosen not to quote the Recital in full (despite its brevity) and you use it in support of (imo) a wholly erroneous contention regarding what is and is not personal. For the record, Recital 18, in full, is as follows (emphasis mine)

    This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity and thus with no connection to a professional or commercial activity. Personal or household activities could include correspondence and the holding of addresses, or social networking and online activity undertaken within the context of such activities. However, this Regulation applies to controllers or processors which provide the means for processing personal data for such personal or household activities.

    It is quite clear, from the highlighted section, that information which is provided in the context of social networking is itself not a subject of the Regulation. I am curious as to why you omitted that second sentence in your article?

    I also do not understand your position that German Legal Literature means that any personal website where someone publishes anything regarding an area related to their professional activity automatically becomes a commercial activity for the purpose of GDPR. The GDPR has not, as yet, become law. There is no precedent support for your position in the corpus of the ECJ (nor could there be). There is disputation at all levels of the ECJ on the question of when an activity ceases to be personal activity (Lindqvist, for example, or Rynes) however it is notable that the Working Group regarding GDPR specifically cited the dictum in Lindqvist as incorrect, and both Article 9 and Recitals surrounding same were designed to place restraint on that dictum. The original intention was to broaden the exemption more dramatically, but this was resisted strongly by a curious alliance of authoritarians and anti-governmental fractions in the European Parliament. Nonetheless, the dictum is significantly broader than that which pertained in 1998. (For a more detailed look at this issue, see for example this article by Brendan Van Elsonoy, legal advisor at the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

    I would be, naturally, happy to be proven wrong, however I simply cannot accept that your various statements regarding the law of the matter are correct in the absence of evidence to support them. Unfortunately, I don’t speak German, and am unable to comment on Dr. Schwenke’s positions in the podcast. All I can comment on is the statements in your bulleted list.

    For example, the first point: “Individuals have to be informed when data about them is pulled in from third sources.”

    Informed by whom? By which site? Consent to the viewing, accessing and storage of public data is provided in the Regulation. What is the basis for this claim?

    Or the second bullet point: “Pulling “likes” and profile images from Twitter in Indieweb manner (in my opinion precisely described by the show host) requires a statement in the privacy notice and the affected persons have to be informed”

    Again – on what basis? Where is the support within the GDPR for this claim?

    I’m sorry if this sounds churlish, but as a lawyer I refuse to take such claims as meaningful in the absence of supporting rationale. Like Dr. Schwenke, I’m a practitioner as opposed to an academic of law. Like most such practitioners, I’ve been undertaking GDPR training in the last two years. Not once in any of that training has there been any support for the type of legal minefield you propose. I’ve spoken about Indieweb components, including backfeed, with legal advisors to the Irish, Dutch and Belgian DPAs. None of them have raised objections of the nature mentioned by you as being required by GDPR.

    GDPR is scary enough as it is. It is also an incredible opportunity, a moment in which we can look to a future absent the abuse visited upon us all by Corporations with a skewed view of rights and values. I look forward to it for those reasons, and I welcome all efforts to secure that future.

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  64. I’m loving glitch more and more. It’s a really interesting platform. I’d recommend playing around with it – once you get over the weird branding and the slightly odd workflow and UI around creation the core product is remarkably robust and full-featured. It’s making me want to learn node!

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  70. RSVPed Attending Virtual Homebrew Website Club Meetup on July 25, 2018

    Are you building your own website? Indie reader? Personal publishing web app? Or some other digital magic-cloud proxy? If so, come on by and join a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Bring your friends who want to start a personal web site. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project…

    Everyone of every level is welcome to participate! Don’t have a domain yet? Come along and someone can help you get started and provide resources for creating the site you’ve always wanted.

    This virtual HWC meeting is for site builders who either can’t make a regular in-person meeting or don’t yet have critical mass to host one in their area. It will be hosted on Google Hangouts.

    Time: July 25, 2018 7:30 pm PDT to July 25, 2018 9:00 pm PDT
    Location: Google Hangouts (link to Hangout TBD)

    I hope the following can come and join me:
    David Shanske
    gRegor Morrill
    Greg McVerry
    William Ian O’Byrne
    Clint Lalonde
    Aaron Davis
    Doug Beal
    Cathie LeBlanc
    John Johnson
    Taylor Jaydin
    Kathleen Fitzpatrick
    Alan Jacobs
    Dan Cohen
    Asher Silberman
    Micah Cambre
    Michael Kirk
    Scott Gruber
    Chris Bolas
    Michael Bishop
    Khürt Williams
    Eddie Hinkle
    Aaron Parecki
    I’ve never done it before, and I’ve never received one myself, but I’m going to send some invitations (via webmention) to folks to join me. I’m curious how the original post will handle it and what Semantic Linkbacks will do and what it will display. Semantic Linkbacks is set up to display RSVP:Invitations, but I’m not sure what will happen. So this post will serve as a test and we’ll see! Is anyone else supporting invitations (sending or displaying)? In the future I could see supporting an Event Invitations page similar to my Mentions page which displays all the events I’ve been invited to.
    Incidentally I’m noticing that there’s also an issue in the latest update that RSVP’s on prior event posts aren’t facepiling like they should/used to.

    Syndicated copies to: WordPress icon

    Syndicated copies:

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  72. Liked  @c, @chrisaldrich Chris Aldrich’s great list of micro.blog purposes. Micro.blog has been difficult to describe. At the moment I am not using it as a replacement service for twitter or Instagram but in addition to or a way of owning and enriching these services.

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  75. For those interested in an alternate avatar approach for their personal sites, several people have indicated to me that the Avatar Privacy plugin for WordPress may help to cover up some of the security issues your own site may allow in terms of leaking the data described above.

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  106. Hi Chris
    LaTex examples are some of the examples I give in my Getting Started notebooks. For example: https://notebooks.azure.com/OUsefulInfo/libraries/gettingstarted/html/3.2.0%20Generating%20Embedded%20Diagrams.ipynb
    It becomes more interesting the higher the levels of abstraction you have access to. eg the bloques LaTeX package for control diagrams. On my to do list is trying to provide some higher level blocks for mechanics / trolley drawing etc.
    Generating diagrams from other languages is also attractive. For example, this electronics notebook https://notebooks.azure.com/OUsefulInfo/libraries/gettingstarted/html/3.6.0%20Electronics.ipynb shows how you can define a circuit then render a circuit diagram and analyse the circuit from the model that is created.
    Plugging various tools that work at different levels of abstraction in chemistry topics is also interesting too, I think: https://notebooks.azure.com/OUsefulInfo/libraries/gettingstarted/html/3.1.1%20Chemical%20Equations.ipynb and https://notebooks.azure.com/OUsefulInfo/libraries/gettingstarted/html/3.1.0%20Chemistry%20Packages.ipynb for example.

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  113. Hi Chris, in some ways, the Reader feature of WordPress.com implements some of this. The user can subscribe to websites, read the content, like the content, and respond via comments; all within the Reader.
    I think with a bit of tweaking (and desire), Automattic could add the ability to make those comments available as new posts on the commenter’s website. It would make WordPress.com (and JetPack supported self-hosted WordPress) more like micro.blog.

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  114. Hi Chris, That directories page on the wiki is very well done. Thanks for making that, it’s kind of encouraging to think others might find what we are doing and be inspired to build a directory. I added Joe Jenett’s linkport which I think is very significant. I was able to do that much editing because there was a template from the other listings.
    Here are some posts I’ve written. I don’t know if they fit your criteria so you can use your judgement to add them or discard.
    Decentralized Search and the #Indieweb
    Directory Building Just Got: Easier, Cheaper and #Indieweb
    Finding Your Directory Niche

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  118. I’ve written up a short sketch (linked below), but I’ll see if I can carve out some time to do a full step by step tutorial, which shouldn’t be too hard for an audience that’s already using WordPress. [more…]
    boffosocko.com/2019/03/05/rad…

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  126. I once had an editor say things like. “Don’t pay this on the website tonight, we don’t want to scoop ourselves.”
    There is value in free services, as long as they don’t hinder you in any way.
    For instance: I can’t stand how Issuu wraps ads around a paid client’s content.

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  132. After my recent posting where I asked people which RSS feeds they read, I received several responses. One of them is Peter’s. Like me he was publishing an OPML file of his feeds already. OPML is a machine readable format that most RSS readers will be able to import, so you can subscribe to blogs I subscribe to. OPML however isn’t easily readable to human eyes.
    Peter describes how he added a style sheet to his OPML file, and then ends with “You can do this too!“.
    I can’t help but feel obliged to respond to that.
    I downloaded Peter’s styling file, hunted for the images mentioned in them and downloaded those too. Then uploaded them into the same folder structure as Peter used, and made changes in the header of my existing OPML file. All according to Peter’s description.
    When I say existing OPML file, that isn’t entirely true. Until now I used TinyTiny RSS to automatically post a OPML file from the feeds I follow in my TT-RSS instance. However, in practice I use Readkit as a feedreader, and every now and then I load an opml export of it into my TT-RSS. This as I use TT-RSS for some experimenting, but not as a ‘production’ environment. So in practical terms uploading my Readkit opml export to my site isn’t any different from uploading it into TT-RSS to have it automatically published on my site. So I will from now upload my Readkit OPML export directly to this blog. Which is what I used to do anyway before I started using TT-RSS.
    The result is, yes I can do this too, and now have a human and machine readable OPML blogroll file in the right hand sidebar as blogroll.
    Machine readable presentation of my opml file
    Human readable presentation of the same opml file
    Now it’s your turn 😉 : You can do this too!

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    1. Thanks for letting me know Maxwell. I thought I’d tested it on most major browsers. It’s done in flexbox, so it definitely shouldn’t do that. Do you recall which browser and modality (desktop, mobile, other) you saw it on?

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    1. @aarongarcia the instance you were reading/replying to is actually my WordPress-based website that uses ActivityPub to appear as part of the Fediverse.

      I haven’t gotten replies working properly, so I sometimes write my reply on my site and syndicate it to a separate account on mastodon.social which also has the ability to pull back responses using Brid.gy.

      I use my site a lot for educational purposes as well as a commonplace book. The IndieWeb wiki page on Education has a bunch of interesting examples of people using their sites this way if you’re interested.

      Syndicated copies:

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  143. Your screenshot provides the answer directly! There’s no link (URL) to my site or one of my posts you’re responding to in your post. By the way, since you’ve got the Webmention plugin installed, it should find the URL and send the webmention for [more…]
    boffosocko.com/2020/03/19/par…

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  148. Both should be valid and working. Nothing in spam folders either at the server level or within email client. I ended up using Google signup just to get things moving, but thought I’d report the issue, so you’re not losing business.
    boffosocko.com/2020/04/01/557…

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  154. @dshanske has done something like this before in Post Kinds Plugin within the admin UI. Perhaps he could add a similar option based on the first n letters of the_body or the_excerpt to set the permalink?
    boffosocko.com/2017/05/04/tit…

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  155. Great playlist, thanks for sharing! I was surprised to find that I can play your playlist on the Spotify mobile app even though I don’t have a subscription. Perhaps it’s because you have so many tracks – it won’t let me play them in order you list em but does fine on shuffle mode

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  156. I love it too. I did find @yachtrockradio but it’s only a couple hours a week. Since @SIRIUSXM bought @pandoramusic do you get it for free with your radio sub? They have a dedicated yacht rock station. #yachtRock #4ever @itsMrCross #isaGod

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  161. Great sleuthing! I am the creator of CurateWP and just saw this thread. Although Nieman Lab is using CurateWP on the website, it’s not currently being used to create this page.
    I saw within the code references to “wwr-” and through my own searching I could not find a related plugin. It could be a custom plugin they created for themselves.
    Regardless, I appreciate the mention! Reading how valuable this kind of page is fuels ideas that I can bring into CurateWP. I’m currently working on a new major release that focuses on the new block editor.

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  170. Sarah, great job last night! & awesome notes!! I’ve archived them on the wiki. When you get a chance, if you ping @aaronpk with your preferred email address, he can add you to the IWC Zoom account so you can login in & start meetings in the future.
    boffosocko.com/2020/07/06/557…

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    1. Glad to meet you! I’ve been following [[anagora]] for a bit. Feel free to note away! (Bonus points if you send Webmentions when you do.)

      Syndicated copies:

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  196. Thanks, I’m aware of sketchnoting and it never really worked for me. It often seems to become decorative to a point where I’m not sure it supports understanding anymore. I think it’s primarily a technique for capturing others’ ideas. When I draw when listening to a talk it’s more for attention and concentration, i.e. this digital collage of scanned fountain pen drawings: https://i.snap.as/xaP7NecI.png.
    To me Lynda Barry’s work is more interesting in that it’s about visually developing your own awareness, perception, ideas and stories.

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  199. Unfortunately I’ve been struggling with the plugin for quite some time, something that struck me again when I reread my archive. At the end of December 2020 I already ran into the same problems that I still have. In May 2021 I once again expressed my frustration in a blog post, and luckily both Ton and Jan were kind enough to steer me towards possible solutions. I know that Ton is now busy (or ready?) to phase out Post Kinds. And this plugin from Jan also offers possibilities.
    Google translation.

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  201. A recipe is special kind of post, that typically has a name, like an articles, a list of ingredients, and a list of instructions for making something, usually food or drink.

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  202. I just downloaded my instagram data to backfill my photo posts. But I can’t seem to figure out how to map the instagram post data to an instagram link for generating syndication links. Has anyone worked with instagram data export before?

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  204. search in the IndieWeb usually refers to searching your personal site for your own content (and/or caches of content you’ve responded to), sometimes searching IndieWeb chat archives or the IndieWeb wiki, or the nascent IndieWeb Search index and service to search across community posts.

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