Finished my drawing of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment (you can see the work in progress here) and added some text from Robert Lowell’s For the Union D…
Source: For the Union Dead | Don MacDonald
This is really good.
(Also testing webmantions.)
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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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Like: Mumblings – My Micro.blog Wishlist
Wow. Good, thoughtful, constructive list. Well done Simon! If you are on Micro.blog this is a must read. It also shows the immense amount of improvements already made and being added weekly and those are much appreciated.
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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:
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:
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I am scrolling through history (h/t to Kevin Marks for reminding of the ccurated posts by danah boyd) as we discuss how best to follow
Source: Following People or Feeds in the #IndieWeb #mb #DoOO #edtechchat #literacies
This reminds me: I still need to sort and tidy the feeds in my feed reader. I’m using Chris Aldrich’s OPML feed file which is a firehose.
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In sort: there ain’t shit out there.
Like: Brad Enslen Micro Blog – If Gutenberg Breaks my Blog Where to Move?
I found a third option: Known. Known seems to have Indieweb webmention support built in. Like Micro.blog and Tikiwiki there are some catches: it’s not listed in any hosting panel for auto install, it’s not even at version 1.0 so technically it’s a Beta, very limited eco system, development seemed stalled for awhile but I hear it has restarted.
Micro.blog. Moving my WordPress site from ramblinggit.com to MB would still give me partial Indieweb functions, excellent support, constant development and a great posting interface. The downsides, strictly for me, no comments or incoming webmentions, no categories or tags, third party site search only. On other things I I have plugins for on WP I could probably find a work around on MB using pages. I think all these things will be addressed in time but, right now it’s just not ready to take on the job of a web presence.
TikiWiki. Frankly, if I was starting out now I would be really tempted to use TikiWiki. It has everything, not as a plugin, the stuff is already there: Blog, wiki, forums, directory, articles, newsletter and more are all part of the core script. The only downsides are: zero Indieweb elven goodness, I couldn’t find any cross posting capability. Work arounds: Bridgy might provide some Indieweb goodness and I know can syndicate using Micro.blog. No Indieweb is a big downside but surprisingly it’s not a deal killer for me.
I have a couple of years to make a decision. I’m thinking some more blog scripts will start being developed in response to Gutenberg so it’s wait and see. In the mean time I’ll keep a weather eye on these three.
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