Really enjoyed listening (on Huffduffer for 30 days1) to Preparing for ReclaimPress from YouTube even though it is not really in my wheelhouse (maybe a link to my Glow Blogs role). The possibilities for WordPress keep on growing. Jim talks about moving DS106 to this infrastructure. I still think DS106’s WordPress setup (as is micro.blog) is a great example of how we should run educational community.

  1. I don’t really have the space on inclination to watch videos very much, I find using Huffduffer along with huffduff-video really useful. ↩︎

montage of screenshots of pages linked in post.

Classroom

The hour approaches…

Maps

WordPress

Fun

Bookmarked Building a Block-Based Microblog by Jan Boddez.

IndieBlocks, which I am using to post this, is an alternative to the Post Kinds plugin that works with the block editor instead of classic.

I am still using mostly using classic on this blog as it seems the right tool for the job. But WordPress’s future seems to be blocks. I like the ui for bookmarks etc in IndieBlogs and guess I can ignore most of the blocks editor features.

I am a bit conflicted as to how switching approaches would work. For example Post Kinds adds an extra taxonomy for different kinds of post, IndieBlocks uses custom post types. I’ve got 7 years of post kinds posts here. I’ve also some styles based on the kinds.

I lean towards taxonomies over custom posts. This probably due to an over enthusiastic use of custom post kinds a few years back.

I think I prefer the incorporation of the link, author & quote into the main entry in IndieBlocks.

Good to have choices I guess 😉

So you love Facebook and you hate Facebook, you love Twitter and you hate Twitter. You love… You get the idea! If you’re anything like me you have at times questioned how much time you’ve spent trawling through social media. You may even be worried about how much data they’ve been gathering about you, or perhaps thinking about whether or not we’re even able to escape from it all. On the podcast today we’ve got Alex Kirk, and he certainly has been thinking about all of this. So much so in fact that he’s built a social network plugin for WordPress. Listen to the podcast to find out all about it…

Really interesting podcast discussing the Friends WordPress plugin with its author Alex Kirk. A lot of interesting features, including a built in RSS reader and a WordPress to WordPress social network.

I had a couple of thoughts, I wonder if this would work on a WordPress multi-site like Glow Blogs?

I also wondered if importing all these posts you were reading would bloat your own blog? This was answered in the podcast, you can set the number of posts kept or the length of time to keep them.

Alex did mention the IndieWeb, so I am wondering if there is much integration, with webmentions or bookmarking for example.

Obviously to use the social part you need friends using the plugin, but I think I’ll install it somewhere to see how it works as an RSS reader when i have a mo.

 

Replied to Why I Haven’t Embraced WordPress Blocks by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
As someone who maintains a very specific set of WordPress plugins, over the last few years, I’ve been asked why I have not updated them to the block editor. The simplest reason is I don’t use the block editor, and I write the plugins for me, not for a commercial purpose, so while I keep saying I...

But it adds the microformats for different types of Indieweb posts outside of the traditional content block using WordPress filters. That is something I never particularly liked, and wouldn’t mind replacing with something integrated into content.

I’ve been using Post Kinds and other indie web plugins on this blog for a good few year now. Very grateful for the work in developing and maintaining them. I don’t yet use the Block editor very often on this blog either.

Adding the microformats, I presume links & quotes, to the main contents of the post would be great. I am guessing it would future proof the content of the classic editor goes away.

Liked a tweet by Matt Mullenweg (Twitter)

Can we all agree that giant per-post image headers look terrible on most blogs? It’s been a curse of default WP themes past few years, too. We need it to be easier to have posts without image headers and even without titles.

Mostly, sometime the image is the thing, it is carefully created or curated. I do dislike them more on web pages I’ve gone to to look for information.