Category: wordpress

Medium: Embedly is joining Medium

Medium announced today that it has acquired the embed service, Embedly.

Interesting. This is obviously Medium’s way of supporting oEmbeds in their platform, with the addition of statistics and data added to it.

I’ve used Embedly a bit, and it works well, but their Dashboard really still needs work. Medium will probably be a great boon for that development.

SOURCE: https://medium.com/@embedly/embedly-is-joining-medium-7acf54088fd2#.rqtzztyws

Embedded content overall is a great way to encourage more engagement. When my content is shared on another person’s site, I’m more likely to share it. But how will I know that it was embedded there? Embedly doesn’t currently send notifications like that, but if you are on the Medium platform already, I can imagine getting something like “Embed Alerts” could really be beneficial.

That’s part of the power of a hosted publishing platform like Medium. WordPress.com could easily implement something like that. This is different from the “reblog” tool. WordPress.com has a powerful notification area already, and notifying users of embeds of your article on other blogs would be a great feature.

The self-hosted WordPress platform would have to implement something like that as a plugin, but I’m not sure how that would work except that embeds would ping your local API when a post is published.

As the internet gets more and more complex and there are more and more ways to publish content and share content across platforms, these kinds of data notification tools will become more and more necessary and common place. That’s also why an “Open Web” is vital. But I’m getting clearly off topic now… for another post!

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Cory Miller: How Simply Clicking Publish Changed My Life

“The tragedy of life is what dies within a man while he lives.”
–Albert Schweitzer

Cory Miller shares his insight into “Simply Clicking Publish”. Cory is so great at speaking truth into people’s workdays based on his own experiences, both failures and successes.

In this presentation he talks about how publishing, putting it out there keeps you honest. If you just wait on it, sitting on it, it just becomes a narcissistic exercise.

Hit Publish! And don’t look back.

WordPress.tv

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What are Accelerated Mobile Pages?

“…So an Accelerated Mobile Page (or AMP, for short) is a project from Google and Twitter designed to make really fast mobile pages…it’s an HTML page designed to be super lightweight and critically designs really fast loading.”

I love big companies pushing new technology with Open Source. It’s really a great way for them to benefit everyone generously. I love the idea of AMP, but initially I have some concerns

  1. “So certain tags of HTML you just can’t use. Things like forms, that are out.” — forms are really basic. Also important for donations, which I’m a champion of.
  2. WordPress has already rolled out a beta plugin to for self-hosted sites. From their copy they say: “With the plugin active, all content on your site will have dynamically generated AMP-compatible versions, accessible by appending `/amp/` to the end your permalinks.” This to me harkens back to the days when everyone was creating a second duplicate site and redirecting their mobile viewers there. So glad Google put an end to that garbage. But now Google is behind this initiative and it seems like we’re still dealing with canonical tags and duplicate content issues.

I’m hoping (kind of assuming) that both of these concerns will be fully addressed by the end of 2016. Here’s to hoping!

https://moz.com/blog/accelerated-mobile-pages-whiteboard-friday