Liked Scripting News: Sunday, November 12, 2023 (Scripting News)
Some news. I've been working with Automattic for most of this year on a new version of FeedLand that runs in their cloud. The advantage is it will scale like the most popular websites in the world do, as WordPress does. It's meant a lot of internal changes in the software, but at the same time, it still runs on a Digital Ocean server, and on desktops as well. The next FeedLand works at all these levels, for a person, a workgroup and the world. Obviously, lots more to say about all this.

This looks like really interesting news. I’ve been using FeedLand , for a while, even had it running on a Raspberry Pi until I got into a snarl with domains.

Looking forward to the lots more Dave has to say.

Is the Jetpack AI Assistant available for free?
Yes, the Jetpack AI Assistant block is currently available for free up to 20 requests. We encourage you to try it out and share your feedback. You can upgrade your plan to continue using the AI Assistant after the initial 20 requests.

I was quite interested in this, but not enough to pay £7.50 a month for it. The need for an account and payment also rules it out of Glow Blogs too.

I’ll continue to occasionally dabble with ChatGPT.

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.