My world on the web
How I view these content types on my personal website/online commonplace book.
This is a useful reflection Chris. I find the correlation with social media spaces interesting. For example, what maybe a clap in one space maybe a star in another. I have down the path of organising my space around contributions, creations and response. In regards to ‘responses’ I have discussed my different uses before. Basically,…
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)I’ve apparently just posted my 3,000th public post on my personal website! It feels good to be owning more and more of the data I post online instead of just giving it to social media silos.
Syndicated copies to:Author: Chris Aldrich
I’m a biomedical and electrical …
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)This week, using the magic of open web standards, I was able to write an issue post on my own website, automatically syndicate a copy of it to GitHub, and later automatically receive a reply to the copy on GitHub back to my original post as a comment there. This gives my personal website a means of …
Chris I love the methodical approach you provide here. As I read it allows me to easily identify what I have already done or still need to do. My only hiccup is Bridgy Publish. Everything that I have read seems to state that this is easy or seemingly obvious. I registered with Bridgy years ago.…
About a year ago I deleted Google Analytics from this website. I no longer know where visitors come from, what they find interesting, or what they click on. This has liberated my thinking and I believe has made my writing a bit better. I always wrote for myself but I would regularly peak at my statistics. Was my viewership going up? What did people read? How did they get there? What search terms were people using? — Who cares?
There are a lot of numbers that ‘social media experts’ will tell you to maximize. But there are few that make any difference.
Harold Jarche reflects on turning Google Analytics off. He instead suggests that the metric that matters (for him) is how many books he sells and how many people sign upmto his courses. He gives the example of a course that had hundreds of likes and reposts, yet only one person signed up. This has me…
We have had nearly 10 years of Labor’s MySchool website, which encourages parents to play the school system like the stock market. Low scores are punished with low enrolments, as privileged families flock to high-performing schools, and the least socially mobile remain at schools with the least resources to support them.
As a result, when public schools in Victoria have received meagre funding increases, these are too often wasted on programs that principals think will boost scores and reputation – even if they undermine real learning. Despite plenty of evidence that streaming actually reduces student achievement, select-entry programs are breaking out like algae plagues around the state. As are uniform policies that mimic private schools in pettiness and pricing.
Antitrust has never been just about costs and benefits or fairness. It’s never been about whether we love the monopolist. People loved Standard Oil a century ago, and Microsoft in the 1990s, just as they love Google today.
Rather, antitrust has always been about progress. Antitrust prosecutions are part of how technology grows. Antitrust laws ultimately aren’t about justice, as if success were something to be condemned; instead, they are a tool that society uses to help start-ups build on a monopolist’s breakthroughs without, in the process, being crushed by the monopolist. And then, if those start-ups prosper and make discoveries of their own, they eventually become monopolies themselves, and the cycle starts anew. If Microsoft had crushed Google two decades ago, no one would have noticed. Today we would happily be using Bing, unaware that a better alternative once existed. Instead, we’re lucky a quixotic antitrust lawsuit helped to stop that from happening. We’re lucky that antitrust lawyers unintentionally guaranteed that Google would thrive.
Charles Duhigg takes a look at the history of Anti-Trust laws and the breaking up of monopolies. From oil to IBM, he explains why it is important for this large companies to be broken up. Not because of the consumer, but rather for the sack of developnent and innovation. He uses the case of the…
I stumbled across this solution when I was quickly reaching my storage quota for my website during ds106. I needed a way to upload all the images I created and didn’t have enough room on my website. So I thought I would show you all how simple it is to embed the images in posts and pages.
I have used Flickr for embedding images for a while. One challenge I have had is with featured images. I used to use a plugin that made the first embedded image the feature, but it stopped working, so now I manually upload. Not sure if you any thoughts for that? My other concern is what…
Thirty years ago, Professor Genevieve Bell left Australia to study anthropology in America. That journey took her to the heart of Silicon Valley, where she pioneered futurist research at Intel, looking at how different cultures use technology.
Now she’s returned home with an urgent conversation about the role of technology in building our future, and what it means to be human, and Australian, in a digital world.
Since 1959, the ABC has supported the Boyer Lectures to spark conversation. 2017’s series featured Genevieve Bell discussing our fast, smart and connected world: 01 | Fast, smart and connected: Where it all began Bell begins by setting the context associated with technology for herself and Australia in general. She discusses her journey to Silicon…
Promote your own site, or promote on Facebook? Turns out you can do both, and do even better: have your website join the IndieWeb.
I still think Chris Aldrich’s introduction is the most thorough, however it is good to have some of the concepts explained by different people. For example, I like Johannes Ernst’s explanation of webmentions: Webmention is a simpler but more powerful version of Pingbacks that you might be familiar with. Webmention enables your site to tell…
Are you looking for the best alternatives to the Jetpack plugin for WordPress? Check out these best alternatives to the WordPress Jetpack plugin.
The team at WPBeginner provide a useful reflection on Jetpack: Like all things in life, Jetpack plugin comes with its own advantages and disadvantages that you need to keep in mind when choosing Jetpack alternatives. ### Pros of Using Jetpack Plugin These are the advantages of using Jetpack plugin on your WordPress website. One plugin…
Food and Drink on my own website
I’ve been wanting to do it for a while, but I’ve finally started making eat and drink posts. The display isn’t exactly what I want yet, but it’s getting there. For myself and those reading, I’ll try to continue tweaking on templates, but with the start of …
Is there a limit? Chris, I love how your site just keeps on developing. I am not sure if I am going to start adding such stories to my site, but it really gives me hope about a better web.
According to Pocket, I’m still in their top 5% of their readers/users despite the fact that I cut way back on using it this past year in strong deference to using other feed readers including one built into my website.
Apparently I read 678, 617 words in their app this year which according to the…
Apparently I am in the Top 1%. I must admit that I have come to use it more now that you can play posts. What I find intriguing is what they measure ‘reading’ as and how they decided that it was like reading 35 books. It actually made me wonder if there are many people…
Here is a collection of notes from the book National Testing in Schools, An Australian assessment edited by Bob Lingard, Greg Thompson, Sam Sellar. Approaching the topic of testing from a number of points of view, this is a useful book in making sense of all things associated with NAPLAN. A particular highlight is Margaret…
Many programs have BOTH and Android version and a Chrome Web App version. For example, you can use the Android mobile version of Google Classroom, or you can use the Chrome Web App version which takes you to the Google Classroom website instead.
Although the versions will be similar, there are often differences between the Android version of a program and then web version of that same program. For example, the Android version of Google Classroom allows the user to take pictures and videos with the device camera, whereas the web version of Classroom does not.
I recently purchased an ACER R11. I was intrigued by the ability to use the device as both a laptop and a touchscreen tablet. I was also interested in investigating Android Apps as they were unavailable on my other device. I have been pleasantly surprised. I like the ability to download videos for offline use,…
Rise of the Robots by mrkrndvs is licensed under CC BY-SA Detailing the rise of automation over time, Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford outlines a number of possible futures and the choices that we have. This is a part of the acceleration of technology and machine learning. This has led to improvements in…
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)IndieWeb and Webmentions plugin for WordPress FTW!
I don’t think I’d used it before or really seen it happening in the wild, but Khurt Williams used his website to reply to one of my posts via Webmention. I was then able to write my reply directly within the comments section of my original post…
I was wondering how I was meant to facilitate a threaded comment. Wondering Chris, is that with the Threaded Comment plugin? I remember seeing it listed as ‘optional’. Can’t remember if I installed it. I still want to know how to bake more code into my responses/posts etc. Is it something that you handcraft or…
My Month of November At work I have been exploring different means of facilitation and knowledge transfer. There are some things in life that are easier to explain than others. I am finding that reporting packages and timetables are always obvious. Another lesson learned are the dangers associated with leaving things in reach of children.…
Here is a collection of links and resources associated with GSuite and Hapara for November 2017. Updates View and modify all of your Team Drives using the Google Drive API – Google are making it easier to manage Team Drive by providing new methods in the Google Drive API that enable developers to build tools…
Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)I’ve wanted to create a podcast for a long time, but the effort involved just seemed like too much. So using my own website, I thought I’d see what I could come up with in under an hour in terms of creation and posting. Here’s the first “episode” of my microcast which I’ve conceived of, …
I loved the depth of reflection that you provide Chris, connecting it with the past and considering all the different elements. I think that I need to give the idea some more consideration. I opened up Voxer and recorded a short note while cooking tea. Forgot all the contextual elements. Had to finish it as…
Updates Exploring Contemporary Art with Google Arts & Culture – Working with more than 180 partners all over the world, Google Arts & Culture is shining a light on contemporary art, with a new collection of online stories and rich digital content at g.co/ContemporaryArt. Bringing Google Earth to Expeditions with Seurat – Seurat is a…