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All this WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg stuff got me thinking.  With WordPress it seems like the Indieweb starts making serious and cool progress and the WordPress people come along and knock the game board and pieces off the table.  And it sounds like the disruption from WordPress is going to continue for a couple of years.

Why not take a page out of Apple’s playbook and take control higher up in the food chain? Why not come out with an Indieweb compatible blog engine of our own?  Either fork an existing open source project or build new?  This does not mean you have to make it exclusive but make it the way the Indieweb wants the Indieweb elven magic to function.  Also put in the standard blogging features most people expect.  Why keep trying to adapt the Indieweb stuff to blog or CMS platforms that are at best indifferent, never designed for or just that don’t want to play ball?

This isn’t a slam on the coders who are working so hard to make everything work on WordPress, I’m just asking if maybe it’s not time to find better terrain to fight from.

If the Indieweb really wants widespread adoption they need to come out with a turnkey solution.  It would act as a solution for many and a proof of concept for others to emulate. Something that can be put in hosting C-panels for one touch install. Something that just works, is easy to move to and move away from. Something supported, active, growing with enough polish that it inspires confidence in the user.

I’d really like to hear serious discussion on this.

Also on:

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On the term “Content”:

 

STOP using THEIR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR belief. OUReffort.

START using OUR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR belief. OUReffort.

Like: Owning Your Content – Words

Agreed.  John can bang words together pretty good. Read his essay on the term “content” at the link above.

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DuckDuckGo, the privacy focused search engine, has acquired Duck.com from Google. Responding to rumors from a few days ago, CEO Gabriel Weinberg said that the new domain would make it easier for people to use the company’s search engine. The Duck.com domain was previously owned by Google, after it acquired On2 Technologies back in 2010.

Like: Google relents and transfers Duck.com to DuckDuckGo – The Verge

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Publish blog posts, photos and media to your own site, and syndicate it to your social networks. Keep everything on your own site.

Source: Known: social publishing for groups and individuals

I’m looking at Known this morning.  The website has that Silicon Valley – Apple vibe to it – lots of short sentences – completely lacking in key details. How many templates? Any screen shots of templates? Buried: yes they do have comments but no word on what kind of spam protection or what moderation looks like. Also buried: you can get a free Known site on a subdomain or managed hosting on a Pro plan – except no pricing anywhere for the Pro plan.  That tells me they are not serious about that service.

What I like about Known is the core support for Indieweb stuff.  The rest of the blogging features look a bit light weight, as far as I can tell from the scant details on the site.

But still we come back to the Indieweb stuff.

It begs the question, How important are the Indieweb features to me?  I think they are very important.  But I have to weigh that vs. blog script features that I have to directly use, hands on, all day long.  Indieweb sort of lurks in the background and you don’t notice it until another Indieweb user comments or mentions your post. Indieweb can get you discovered and engaged in conversations but it does not write the posts.  The actual features of the blog or CMS script outweigh having Indieweb goodness.  It would be nice to have both out of the box but I don’t think that is possible.

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I have several blogs: 1 x Micro.blog hosted blog plus 2 x WordPress blogs.  After the Holidays, I’ll probably migrate my main WP blog (you are here) to some other blogging platform.  No matter what I do I will lose my Indieweb features on that blog.  But that said, I forsee it becoming increasingly hard for the Indieweb moveement to continue to support WordPress in the coming months and years.

So here are some options I’m considering:

  1. Blot.im – this is kinda cool.  I like that you have a backup of each post on your harddrive plus on Dropbox plus on Blot’s servers.  I like that it is compatible with txt files and Markdown plus HTML. My problem is I currently have 2 laptops in rotation and my Blot post files would be scattered between the two harddrives.
  2. ClassicPress – I know I’m going to use this in the future that I wanted to build with WP.  They have a plugin that should convert most WP 5.0 sites to ClassicPress.
  3. TikiWiki  – the admin panel stretches beyond the horizon.  It’s a full blog, wiki, discussion forum, article poster, static html page creator, FAQ generator, web directory, newletter engine and more stuff I can’t remember.  You just turn the features you are going to use on as needed.  Not for beginners.
  4. Micro.blog – I already have one here.  I use it mainly for quick Tweet-like posts. Frankly it’s under utilized.  I think that will change if I move to any of the three platforms above.  The main problem, for me, with Micro.blog is that anyone that wants to comment must do so on Micro.blog which means that a friend from university following me on an RSS reader (it could happen) can’t really comment on a post or participate in a conversation.  MB might get those capabilities someday just not for now.  I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out how to overcome this but I’m not coming up with any answers.  I do know that if I move to TikiWiki or Blot I will use my existing Micro.blog hosted blog more.

Right now TikiWiki looks the best.  It’s got nearly everything and then some.  It updates to a new major release every 8 months so it is well supported and not a beta.  I can syndicate out to Twitter and Mastodon via my Micro.blog account.  I’ll have to give up Indieweb magic until I can figure out how to add bits of that to it. It has comments protected with Akismet.  Still thinking.

I’m just posting this to give people a snapshot of my current thinking.  This could all change tomorrow. But if you are stuck on WordPress you might want to explore these as options for yourself.

 

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To recap, Gutenberg Phase 2 will: Be outside of post_content. Focus on customization. Upgrading themes, widgets, & menus. Early version of phase 2 will be in the Gutenberg plugin. Be sure to reactivate it! Last updated: December 9th, 2018

Source: Gutenberg Phase 2 Plan Revealed – Gutenberg WordPress Editor

This is the other shoe dropping.  The next phase of Gutenberg for WordPress will need new themes.  Unfortunately this is going to effect the Indieweb in even more ways.  Will it make Indieweb themes obsolete?

Gutenberg: All your bases are belong to us!

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Migrating your WordPress website to ClassicPress is easy and only takes a few minutes. Follow the simple steps below to get started:

Bookmark: Migrate your WordPress site to ClassicPress – ClassicPress

The folks at Classic Press have created an easy migration plugin that works with WordPress 5.0.  I recommend you watch the short video on the link.

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Thinking out loud:

  1. The more I learn about it the less it sounds like I would be able to live with Gutenberg.
  2. Sure I have 3 years before Classic Editor plugin is discontinued, but …
  3. I have 475 posts today on this blog in about 9 month posting.  The longer I wait to move the more I have to move, which can get problematic.
  4. If I move I’ll probably lose Indieweb capability. But are the Gutenberg changes going to allow Indieweb to continue to support WP?  Lose – Lose.
  5. My brain hurts.
  6. Automatic red line spell check has quit working on both WordPress sites.  WTF?

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