Tag: blogging

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The linked post: Teachers Are Moonlighting As Instagram Influencers To Make Ends Meet and the thread on @audreywatters’s tweet are fascinating.

 

I think of instagram as a nice silo for sharing and liking photos in a casual way (I like being liked too). It went bad when it removed the ‘time’ from the timeline. (I don’t like its lack of interoperability much either).

I don’t think I follow any influencers so this is a world outside my ken.

The idea of using instagram as a way of showing a shiny classroom has some of the same problems at tweeting to my mind. Not that my blogging is a great example of sharing classroom practise.

I am not sure about the Teachers Pay Teachers, concept. I feel a slight distaste, but am not sure why.

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Firstly; I’ve removed most of the post formats leaving the 2 I actually use here. Standard goes to the front page, status to the status. I organise kinds with the post kinds plugin. My Format box now looks like this:

add_action( 'after_setup_theme', 'childtheme_formats', 11 );
function childtheme_formats(){
add_theme_support( 'post-formats', array( 'status') );
}

I added the above to my child themes function.php

Based on Post Formats Formats_in_a_Child_Theme in the WordPress Codex. Standard Format is formatless, so you just add the ones you want in addition.

Secondly; I’ve moved the quote and content generated from the Post Kinds plugin to below the post. This is in the Post Kinds setting so was simple. Having them above my remarks meant that the quote was going to micro.blog and twitter rather than my comment.

I hope to have a bit more time over the summer holidays to rethink and rewire the blog. Some of the decisions I’ve made were perhaps not the best.

Most of the functions that have do with micro.blog and microblogging that live in my child theme’s functions.php in a gist.

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Glow Blogs Reader Screenshot

In Glow Blogs, we have the Glow Blogs Reader (Follow Blogs)

The Glow blogs reader allows you to ‘follow’ a number of Glow Blogs. In following blogs you will be able to see which of these blogs has been updated in your dashboard rather than have to visit each site to check for updates.

Useful because 1. it allows you to follow private blogs which an RSS Reader will not and 2. For teachers unfamiliar with RSS and readers it will be a lot simpler.

It doesn’t have the facility to mark off or record posts that you have commented on which is of interest to Aaron.

 

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The ScotEduBlogs site which aggregates posts from Scottish Educational bloggers mostly hums along by itself.

Every so often I get an email to add a blog, or one for someone ignoring the, “Please do not use this form if you want us to review a product or you want to post here, we will not do so or reply”. notice.

Recently something went wrong with the form and I missed a couple which I’ve now rectified.

This reminds me to post about SEB here. I think it is a valuable resource, gathering blogs posts from around the country and sectors. It provides a handy twitter feed too: @ScotEduBlogs auto tweeting the posts.

I guess a lot of educators are a lot more engaged in twitter than blogging now. I think that is a pity.

You can follow ScotEdublogs by just reading the site, by following  @ScotEduBlogs or by adding the RSS feed to your feedreader.

If you are a blogger and write from a Scottish pov or about Scottish educational matters you can add you site.

 

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I just saw a provocative link from Aaron Davis, down with syndication, it was a reply on his site to an original post with that title by Ben Weirdmuller.

Arron has be a great example of an educator exploring the IndieWeb of which Ben is a major proponent.

Ben’s post is concerned with the idea of gaining more independence from the silos (twitter, Facebook and the like) and publishing more on his site. A lot of IndieWeb concepts involve publishing to your own site and sending links or repeating the posts across social media (like a link to this one will be auto posted to Twitter).

In his post Ben writes of leaving the silos behind completely. Just keeping things on his own site:

I think it might be more effective to move all the value away: publish on your own site, and use independent readers like Woodwind or Newsblur to consume content. Forget using social networks as the conduit. Let’s go full indie.

Ben mentions IndieWeb readers, that allow folk to create their own ‘syndication’ and reply, bookmark etc on their own site.

Nothing I’d disagree with there. I am quite shallow and enjoy likes, especially from Instagram coming a back to my blog via brid.gy but, in theory, I love the idea of full independence.

The provocation, to me came from the word Syndication. Before I’d heard of IndieWeb I’d been involved in DS106. This means that for me syndication means something different than a silo. To me a syndication is something set up for a group, long or short term that can be completely separate from any silos. DS106, and many other educational syndications uses a WordPress blog to syndicate content from other sites. Alan Levine, @cogdog, has set up many examples of this sort of thing.

When I was involved in the migration of Glow Blogs one of the features I managed to get included was a syndication plugin. This took quite a lot of insistence on my part, but the University of Dundee and Derek Robinson have certainly made that worthwhile with EduShare which syndicates trainee teacher reflections. 1

These non-silo syndications are, if not a gateway drug to the IndieWeb, a great way to get people considering how and where they publish to the web and how community could be built.

These syndications can be used for long running or short projects 2, the participants don’t need the expertise beyond setting up a blog. You can participate in different communities from the same blog.

The great thing about a syndication is that the content doesn’t go away if the syndication does. Any discussion can take place on the participating sites. All the hub does is make it easy to read and make connections. Micro.blog reminds me of this in many ways, although the participants are not grouped round a class or topic.

Now I am thinking I should do a lot more to publicise the possibilities for syndication in Glow Blogs.

Featured image: Silos | Darko Pevec | Flickr Creative Commons — Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic — CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

  1. The UoD is by far the biggest and best example of syndication in Glow Blogs. I’ve used it for a couple of smaller examples but it is IMO one of the features of Glow that could be used much more widely.↩
  2. A example of a short aggregation I organised on Glow Blogs Blogging Bootcamp #2 | Get your blogs up and running Autumn 2015 ↩
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At the end of last year I started using Good Reads again, but quickly found I want to record what I’ve read but don’t want to write a review.

I am much happier writing one line notes/reviews here. I’ll probably manually POSSE to Good Reads, but consider this where I keep the record.

I’d really like to map posts with the book emoji, 📚, to the Read Post Kind automatically. That means posts from micro.blog would get sorted here without me having to go to the dashboard and edit. I do have a function on the blog to add a wwwd category to any post containing colon wwwd colon but I don’t know how to set the post kind in the same sort of way…

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Just over a year ago I read about the micro.blog kickstarter project, it seemed a no brainer to back. I got in early at number 51.

Since the launch (25-April-17) I’ve been using micro.blog I’ve made over 300 posts categorised as micro. It has made me think quite a bit about blogging and social media. It is certainly one of the bigger steps of this blog’s history 1.

I am beginning to feel real affection for the software/service that micro.blog is developing into. Here, in no particular order, are some reasons why:

  • The apps, for mac and iOS are so simple elegant and clean. Both are in very early version, but they are the fairly stripped down type of software I find enjoyable to use.
  • I don’t need to use the app, I can post content in all sorts of ways 2
  • The discourse on micro.blog is at a different pace than twitter, mostly more thoughtful, certainly less hypeful. I am reading things that are sometimes marginal to my interests and enjoying them.
  • The folk on micro.blog who produce the discourse.
  • If micro.blog suddenly goes away my content and conversations will not. I’ll lose the continuing discourse & software but I can go on posting my short form posts to my own blog. The posts I made and any conversation around them is still here.
  • Manton, I started listing to his timetable microcast when I signed up for the kickstarter. The pace micro.blog is developing is on one hand reasonably quickly but on the other hand it is incredibly thoughtful. He really does seem to care about principals as opposed to grabbing huge user numbers. On one podcast he describes working on the export that would allow hosted micro.blog users to leave the service. This as an early feature!
  • You can use the service for free. I pay for cross posting of my rss feed to twitter. That is $2 a month, the service is very neat, the tweets are sensible reflections of the post, but I also want to pay something to keep the service going.
  • For a variety of reasons I’ve not fully grasped I feel like I am becoming a little more thoughtful posting than I was on twitter. I’ve not stopped using twitter, but some short posts feel as if I should own them on my own blog. Not necessarily anything deep or important but owning some of these feels better.
  • Micro.blog photo blogging is weaning me away from instagram, I get a lot less engagement but I like it. I still like Instagram, but I’ve not posted in December yet, I have visited and like a pile of pictures. I wish Instagram would: 1. let me post here and then push out to Instagram, 2. see my friends posts without out algorithmic help.
  • I am learning a bit more about the indieweb and the workings of WordPress.
  • Learning and thinking about blogging, social media, both from the growing micro.blog community and by thinking my way through how I want my blog to work.

That final point is not finished by a long way. I still am puzzled about how webmentions and other indieweb technology I am using works in practise. I’ve not finalised how I want to present the different kinds of post here on the blog.

Some other posts about microbloggin

  1. These would would include: starting my own blog as part of my school’s site, joining twitter, moving to my own domain, changing from Pivotx to WordPress and micro.blog. Every part of the blog has changed except for the text of the posts, but I think of it as the same blog.↩
  2. I post, in no particular order, in WordPress, from TextMate, any text in any app on my mac via appleScript, from Drafts via Workflow on iOS and with the micro.blog applications. ↩
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Replied to On WordPress and Webmentions by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
In a backchannel conversation, I was asked about what is involved in setting up webmentions. I responded there, but thought that I would keep a note of it here: Hmmm, my suspicions to why my webmentions/linkbacks are not getting through is that they are being flagged as spam by spam filters. On th...

I really love the idea of webmentions, they seem to return us to the earlier days of the web, where conversation spanned sites. It also feel much more of an acknowledgement to get a mention on someones own site as opposed to a social media silo.

I’ve already turned off the moderation of webmentions here, they get published immediately.

As Aaron’ says the solution is technical. Even the basic use of webmentions take a step or two more than just setting up a blog.

I notice mentions from some folk come through as mentions but don’t link to the post they come from. I do get the full post via email notification, so they must be sending all the information,but either my blog is not handling it correctly or they are not formatted in a way the blog understands.