Publishing

There are 7 posts filed in Publishing (this is page 1 of 1).

On the topic of link blogs

There has been some discussion somewhere this month on the Web (although I cannot find it) of a new list or lists of link blogs. Brad Enslen noted earlier this month that he sees an increase of link blogs in his browsing. The discussion of linkblogging has been going on for a long time (see this Manton Reece post form 2016 as an example). I have a Links category on my website (with its own feed), so someone could follow just the links part of my website. It is a simple thing to do in WordPress, as well as most other weblog tools. I also have another blogging tool (MyStatusTool) which is well suited to use as a link blog and has its own feed. Of course, there are many ways to publish a link blog, but why not get started with the tools you have at hand? As I mentioned recently, we have great tools available – let’s create some great things! Start blogging those links!

Are we creating great things?

In 2017, I wrote a post with the title “We have great tools to create – are we creating great things?”. It was in reference to a Doc Searls liveblog post on a podcasting conference at Columbia University. My observation was that there are a lot of low-quality podcasts, but as time goes on, better ones will appear.

Since then, the availability and quality of tools has increased (blogging, podcasting, video, etc.). Ken Smith recently commented on the tools aspect by linking to a video by actor Jason Alexander on acting/screenwriting – that the tools needed for creating videos are available to everyone (Alexander finishes by saying “You can create a movie on your phone…”). Ken mentions that the same is true for active citizenship as well. I will follow up on this in a minute.

In a recent post, I listed the tools I needed to create a podcast in the car, and have other posts on how to add podcast cover art to a WordPress-hosted podcast, and simple instructions for using WordPress as a podcast hosting tool. The tools available for blogging are always increasing, as is the same for video production. So, since we have the tools part covered, are there some great things out there? Are there more great things that need to be created?

Two excellent instances of group efforts in a topic are the Election Law Blog and the Americans of Conscience Checklist. The first is a group blog following current events in election law and the politics of election law. The second is a group creating lists of bite-sized actions that people can take to promote progressive causes. Both sites use WordPress as their main platform.

Jeffrey Issac’s Democracy in Dark Times blog does an excellent job of addressing issues relating to Donald Trump. Recently, he has been covering the student protests at his university, Indiana University, and calling out bad behavior by the university administration and Indiana elected officials.

I have made efforts to document events such as the protests in Portland, Oregon in 2020, the Georgia Trump election interference trial, a podcast about the “tools for thought” space, a site documenting news on the “return to office” efforts in the American workforce, and a “link zettlekasten” capturing news on elections.

Dave Winer has called for “determination” in using tools and resources to pick up the slack for lack of coverage by the New York Times and other outlets. Ken Smith has called to start “the work of a generation” (I am assuming this is work to try to ensure that our democratic system continues). I recorded a podcast addressing these calls (punchline: take some action, do something, don’t just call for resistance/protest). I think that this quote from a more recent post of mine is a good way to wrap this up:

… I recently listened to a Radio Open Source podcast episode focusing on the life of Hannah Arendt, who lived under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in the 20th century. One line of her writing stood out to me: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it.”. I think that every podcast is a chance to change the world, and anyone is free to create one and send it out into the world.

https://andysylvester.com/2024/04/19/the-joy-of-podcasting/

As Ken Smith quoted Pete Buttigieg:

“Don’t wait. Start now.“

http://oldschool.scripting.com/ksmith3123@gmail.com/2024/04/20/123857.html#a124210

A talk between two users

I had a great discussion today with Frank McPherson about OPML, OPML includes, my OPML Includes test app, and our joint experiment in using drummer.this.how to show included files. We agreed that to view updates in drummer.this.how for an OPML file that includes another OPML file, the master OPML file has to be opened in Drummer and refreshed to see updates. In my test app, when a user goes to the app URL, they will get the latest updates for all included files. This will also occur each time the test app is refreshed in the browser.

Another subject we discussed was how a user could know if updates had been made to one of the OPML files. The JSON object for the included OPML files contains the lastModified element from the head of the OPML file, so this date/time could be displayed like in the drummer.this.how app for any or all of the included OPML files. Frank wrote about having each top-level headline as an item in a RSS feed (one way to provide notification of changes). I could envision an app that could look at changes in an OPML file and create some kind of item using the namespace feature in RSS. It is an area worth exploring.

I also spent some time today looking at Dave Winer’s update to the outlineBrowser toolkit. I downloaded his personal site repo and set up a test site using my Oregon elections OPML file, and the rendering/navigation looked good. I am going to work on trying to incorporate these latest changes into my OPML Includes test app.

Continuing experiments with OPML files

I reviewed Frank McPherson’s OPML experiment file, and saw that he suspected that updates to included files would not be visible unless the file was re-opened in Drummer. I decided to give this a test by adding another heading in my test file with some more text, then reloaded Frank’s test file. I did not see the new content. Next, I added Frank’s OPML file being viewed with drummer.this.how to my OPML Includes test app, and was pleased to see that I could view all of the new text in my test file. Another good result from this test is that the OPML Includes app was able to read the content of Frank’s file as an include file, and of my test file, so includes within an include file are brought in using the includes feature of opmlPackage. Excellent!

What does “two-way RSS” mean?

I read Dave Winer’s post on Two-way RSS earlier today, and I agree with the concept (publishing tools should allow other editors to create content), but I am not understanding referring specifically to RSS. In the Micro.blog site, a user can publish to a timeline from a RSS feed. However, all the editing in that context occurs in the tool creating the RSS feed. In past posts, Dave Winer has advocated for publishing tools to allow other editors to create content for that publishing tool. I am just having difficulty seeing how allowing “inbound RSS” solves the problem.

A great example of organizing information for use

Ken Smith wrote a post yesterday showing a great example of activities that wedding attendees could participate in around the wedding date. The example was an outline created in Drummer and published using the drummer.this.how construct/PagePark plugin. This could be done for any event, with a permanent URL that can be sent to a group, and updated as needed since Drummer is a web app. Or – this could be a set of instructions, which could be updated based on feedback. Or – this could be an agenda for a meeting. Or – hopefully you are getting the picture – it could be any information that can be easily structured in an outine. Boom!