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Technical

An update on Wordpress as my Social Hub

How do you let people interact with a static website? At FOSDEM last month, Matthias Pfefferie discussed the changes to the social layer on the web. The new Social Web builds on earlier tools like RSS and PingBacks, with new tools like ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

The whole day at the Social Web devroom made it clear there is a lot to do still. And perhaps combining the reach of Wordpress with the little experience I have managing Wordpress sites (and a bit more in programming PHP) is my best bet to add a social layer to my now static main website.

So thanks to the wonderful world of LLM-assisted programming ("AI for software development"), I managed to develop a first version of a Wordpress plugin to enable social interactions on a static site.

Adding my site to the Fediverse

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Thanks to the renewed interest in actual social media, rather than an algorithm-driven advertisement space, I find myself having interesting online conversations again.

I really wanted to use my own website and domain for further engagement.

But… experience with earlier attempts at federating networks made me cautious. Setting up and maintaining my own Jabber/XMPP and Diaspora servers was a lot of effort for little result. An excursion into the current field of microformats and protocols again suggested a lot to choose from, with very little guidance.

So after reading about Ton Zijlstra’s vision on “an operating system for the Open Social Web” (presented at the Dutch WordCamp 2022), we had a good conversation about experiences and the state of things (thanks Ton!).

FOSDEM 2021

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Like many years before, I will attend FOSDEM, the biggest open source convention in the neighbourhood: up to around 8000 attendees at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, a good reason to take the train down south for a weekend.

Obviously, this year it will be (more than ever before) an online event. So from the comfort of my home, I’ve assembled a list of sessions I hope to attend:

The new official IATI Validator

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While I was on holidays, my colleagues wrote a little announcement at the Data4Development site to accompany the update by the IATI Secretariat about our work:

[Originally posted by Jesse Burns at the Data4Development website]

The last few months, Data4Development, especially Rolf Kleef, has been working on IATI’s new official Data Validator. In the fall, the new validator will finally launch and help organisations check the quality of their IATI publications more easily!

IATI Traceability in the Health Systems Advocacy Partnership

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By now, most of the have published their first data sets in the IATI Standard. This is the start of mandatory publishing of data to replace written progress reports, and, as the Partnership programmes are also just starting up, allows everyone to first focus on traceability. The provide details and examples on how to create proper links between activities of your organisation and those of others.

Examining structures in IATI

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Dozens of new organisations are getting ready to publish IATI data: the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs made it a requirement for the grantees in the strategic partnerships programme on lobby and advocacy that started this year.

The Ministry has published their guidelines on how to create a useful IATI data set, and part of those guidelines (chapter 3) is an overview of how to represent the structure of funding and activities.

I’m helping organisations get their data in order, and so I was looking for an easy way to see the structure of activities in their data. Browsing through XML data only gets you so far…

Active versus passive DisplayPort adapters

A while ago I bought a new laptop, and it has a mini DisplayPort to connect to a monitor. The mini DisplayPort rose to fame thanks to Apple users: when doing a presentation they always ask “does anyone have a spare adapter so I can connect to the projector?”.

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(image Aurélien Selle, via Wikipedia)

I’m one of those people now: my Dell laptop (with factory-installed Ubuntu!) has a mini DisplayPort. When I ordered, I could add an adapter, to connect to my VGA monitor. But why pay around €35 for an adapter when I saw them elsewhere for more like €15. With no apparents difference.