Videos

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.

The web is my social network: My talk from WordCamp Riverside 2018 was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications My talk from WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019

WordPress.tv has posted my talk from WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019. If you missed it live, you can review it again now. The slides are available for download as well.

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Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications

April 6, 2019, 3:30 pm Horseshoe Ranch Room, University Center, College of the Canyons — The W3C recommended Micropub specification (2017) allows developers to create custom posting applications for a wide variety of data targeting any content management system that supports the spec.

Chris Aldrich provides an overview of the available plugin and endpoint for WordPress and a variety of client applications like Quill, Teacup, OwnYourGram, OwnYour Swarm, Omnibear, that allow one to post status updates, bookmarks, likes, check-ins/location data, photos, and more directly to WordPress sites.
We’ll also talk about how developers can create custom posting interfaces to drastically simplify content creation and posting for clients in ways that can be even simpler than working with Gutenberg.

Micropub and WordPress: Custom Posting Applications My talk from WordCamp Santa Clarita Valley 2019 was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use

Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use

I spent some time this morning doing a dry run through setting up a suite of IndieWeb plugins on a fresh WordPress installation. Going off of a scant outline I talked for almost two hours describing IndieWeb functionality as I set it all up. Hopefully it will provide a useful guide to newcomers to the space until I can write up a more solid outline and take a more polished approach. Apologies in advance for the roughness of the audio, lack of quality, and even live mistakes. Hopefully folks won’t mind suffering through until we can come up with some better tutorials.

As prerequisites, I assume you’ve already got your own domain and have installed WordPress on a server or other host. I actually finish setting up the WordPress install as I start the video and then sign in for the first time as we begin.

While many of the core plugins are straightforward, there is a huge amount of leeway in how folks can choose (or not) to syndicate to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Here I make the choice to use the Bridgy Publish plugin and only demonstrate it with Twitter. With one example shown, hopefully other silos can be set up with Brid.gy as well. The IndieWeb wiki details other options for those who want other methods.

At the end I walk through creating and syndicating a post to Twitter. Then I demonstrate commenting on that post using another CMS (WithKnown) from a separate domain.

I do my best to provide verbal descriptions and visual examples, but these can certainly be supplemented with further detail on the IndieWeb wiki. I hope to come back and add some diagrams at a later date, but this will have to suffice for now.​​​​​​​​​

For those who would like an audio only version of this talk, you can listen here (.mp3):

Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use was originally published on Chris Aldrich

📺 Jeremy Keith – Building Blocks of the Indie Web

Building Blocks of the Indie Web by Jeremy Keith (View Source London)

In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that's how!

Based solely on what I know from just the title of the talk, this wasn’t quite at all what I was expecting. It was far more interesting and philosophical than I expected, but I suppose that’s the extra magical bit that you get for a something presented by Jeremy.

Approaching the subject from a more architectural standpoint was quite refreshing and a great way to frame the subject for this audience. I found myself wishing he’d had twice the amount of time to expand on his ideas. Often when I’m explaining IndieWeb building blocks, I’ll touch on webmention prior to micropub, but I like the way he turned my usual thinking on it’s head by putting micropub first in his presentation.

Thanks, Jeremy (and Mozilla for the conference). This was great fun! 🎉 ​​​​​

📺 Jeremy Keith – Building Blocks of the Indie Web was originally published on Chris Aldrich