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After a few years of laying fairly fallow I’ve got a bit of time to work on ScotEduBlogs.

The site had chuntered on mostly under its own steam for a while. Mostly auto-updating, all I need to do was to keep the site & domain up and running.

ScotEduBlogs is a site that aggregates and shares posts from Scots Educational Blogs running since 2007. It also posts out links, for the original posts, to mastodon and bluesky.

I’ve retired from teaching this summer so hopefully have a bit more time to promote the site. I’ve just added a few sites into the mix:

I am hoping to find some more, these sites have certainly increased the diversity of posts aggregated.

Why

  • I think it is valuable to read the voices of educators at all levels.
  • I am doing this as a ‘hobby’ I like blogs and blogging.
  • It doesn’t cost much. I am not making any money from SEB. The domain, hosting and a bit of time I can manage.
  • I am fascinated by the technology, especially RSS aggregation and re-distribution.
  • I like reading blogs.

Can you help?

I’d like to add more voices to the site. If you know an educational site with a feed (Blogs or substacks for example) please let me know about it. If you blog about education send me your site. You can fill in the form or send me an email.

Please pass this on, I am a lot less networked than I was in the noughties.

One of the main problems with SEB that is run by me. Andrew McLaughlin pointed this out a while back.

this currently hinges on centralised moderators to update and organise the aggregator.

I cannot say I disagree. I’ve never turned down a request for addition other than sites that, don’t support RSS or ones that are not about education in Scotland. Having seem the number of spam pages that have been created on the teachMeet Wiki I don’t think automatic inclusion is an option. But there is a need for more involvement, I’ve had ideas about that, and am open to discussion.

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Likes Blog Feeds by Steve Simkins.

The best part about blog feeds? It’s just an idea. There’s no central authority. There’s no platform. No massive tech giant trying to take your data. It’s just you, basic web standards, and the people you care about.

Love this. Via boost of Blain Smith’s toot by Alan is @cogdog I think Dave Winer would like it too!

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Likes Do you remember the books you read? • (Venkatram Harish Belvadi) by V.H. Belvadi .

I do not ‘remember’ most of the books I have read. I can recall which ones I liked and roughly why I liked them, but I cannot recount the plot minutely or repeat all the points made in a non-fiction work.

Quite please to read this! My wife has a great memory for books read. I do not.

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Likes Exploring WordPress, Textcasting, and Open Web Standards.

In this episode of the Fediverse Flows series, host Matthias Pfefferle sits down with pioneer technologist Dave Winer. The inventor of blogging, podcasting, RSS, and text casting. Together, they unpack the evolution of the open web, discussing why true interoperability and openness matter more than ever in an age of restrictive social media platforms.

The shownotes and transcript on this podcast are wonderful. The Takeaways, provide a great summary and worth reading after you listen.

I’ve been reading Dave Winer’s blog since I discovered rss. I’ve tried many of his more recent tools, including WordLand & FeedLand which he discusses here1.

Matthias Pfefferle is an IndieWeb & WordPress developer. I use his sempress theme & several of his plug-ins2 on this site. Recently he has been developing the ActivityPub – WordPress plugin . This allow your WordPress site to function as a federated profile. I’ve not tried that as I currently posse posts from here to mastodon via micro.blog.

Anyway, I’m a big fan of both participants.

A few interesting things

of the many in the podcast.

I don’t believe in comment sections on blogs, though. I think we could live without that, actually

Dave Winer

Like Alan I do like comments. I’ve read about bloggers who do not and mostly they are the ones with huge audiences. Apart from valuing the conversation, comments & even likes, which I fetch back via brid.gy, it does let me know that sometimes I am not writing into the void. I’d still blog for the void but it is nice to get some contact.
I’d guess bloggers like Dave dislike comments because of the way they can go on big sites.

But over time, what I hope happens is that people find that Wordland’s editor isn’t what they want. They want a different editor because you know what? There’s no one kind of editor that would please everybody.

Dave Winer

I’ve found this one of the most compelling reasons for exploring WordLand. WordLand is quite an opinionated editor. It has led me to think about all the different ways I’ve posted in the past and try out a few other options.

I think most of the younger generations are not aware of what a link is, what a URL is. They simply use one social network, and if they search for other users, they have that little search box and they search for the username. They do not understand that in a decentralized world that they may have to copy and paste URLs to find a new.

Matthias Pfefferle

This really spoke to me as a teacher. I am saddened by the way that even browsers hide paths after domains, and pupils just grab whatever google tells them. I have been surprised twice in the last few years by young kids, 9-11, doing something smart with urls or parameters.

I really enjoyed listening to this episode, lots of food for though. The ideas discussed become complicated quite quickly. A bit like the IndieWeb in general. Dave has of course been aware of WordPress but only recently started using it in earnest. Matthias comes from a different direction, the IndieWeb and Activity pub.

I’ve also now listened to another WordPress podcast with Dave: #186 – Dave Winer on Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing – WP Tavern.

In this one Dave’s optimism and enthusiasm really shines through. I don’t know who it was told me, or maybe I read it somewhere: if you wait long enough Dave Winer is always right, Not sure that is true of anyone, but Dave Winer is always interesting & though provoking to read or listen to.

  1. Other products of Dave Winer I’ve used recently include:
    BingeWorthy 3
    Drummer
    1999.io ❤️
    ↩︎
  2. indieweb/wordpress-indieweb
    wordpress-indieweb-press-this
    WebActions for WordPress
    A Webmention plugin for WordPress
    ↩︎
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Read: There There by Tommy Orange ★★★★★ 📚
Cleverly told, almost thriller from multiple characters with different POVs. Life & life histories of urban Native Americans, all carrying the weight of the collective past.

The train emerges, rises out of the underground tube in the Fruitvale district, over by that Burger King and the terrible pho place, where East Twelfth and International almost merge, where the graffitied apartment walls and abandoned houses, warehouses, and auto body shops appear, loom in the train window, stubbornly resist like deadweight all of Oakland’s new development.