In Annotation by Kalir and Garcia, the authors observe that several things we now see as integral to what a non-fiction book is were actually also emergent phenomena from annotation by readers. Things like labels, rubrics, glossary and index. Kalir and Garcia make much of the social aspects of annotation, and the conversations those create. I’m fond of things that generate (distributed) conversations, I blog after all, but also have reservations when it comes to sharing tentative notes, associations and other annotations.
There are steps possible however to do a little bit more in allowing others to explore what I’ve written here. And an Index is an easy enough step to make. Easy enough because I can follow the footsteps of Chris Aldrich and Frank Meeuwsen who did this last year September/October.
Like them I installed the Multi column tag map WordPress plugin. Now this blog too has an Index, which shows you the tags I’ve used the past 20 years. Or rather the tags I’ve used at least 5 times.
It’s also immediately a useful tool for myself it turns out. Some postings had all their tags joined into a single tag (an error from when I imported posts while switching from Movable Type to WordPress, a decade ago), other tags are simple variations of the same word (e.g. singular and plural). Fixing these is easy, now that the Index list has surfaced the ones that need fixing.
A photo of a book index, by Ben Weiner, license CC BY ND
A much clearer page compared to my archives page, thanks for sharing. I modified my own
/archivesto better reflect yours and Frank’s layout. Not yet sure what the cut-off point should be, I’m not that big on tagging yet and my blog isn’t as old as your, we’ll see how it goes. I have removed one-offs now, and might retro-fit in more tags from older articles.A summary overview of changes I made to this site, to make it more fully a indieweb hub / my core online presence. The set-up of my WordPress installation also has been described.
Theme related tweaks
Created child theme of Sempress, to be able to change appearance and functions
Renamed comments to reactions (as they contain likes, reposts, mentions etc.)
in the entry-footer template and the comments template
Removed h-card microformats, and put in a generic link to my about page for the author in the Sempress function sempress_posted_on. Without a link to the author mentions show up as anonymous elsewhere.
Removed the sharing buttons I used (although they were GDPR compliant using the Sharriff plugin, but they got in the way a lot I felt.
Added a few menu options for various aspects of my postings (books, check-ins, languages)
Introduced several categories to deal with different content streams: Dutch, German for non-English postings, Day to Day for things not on the home page, Plazes for check-ins, Books for ehh books, RSS-Only for unlisted postings, and Micromessage for tweets I send from the blog. This allows me to vary how I display these different types of things (or not)
Displaying last edited and created dates to (wiki)pages
Added a widget with projects I support
Added to the single post template a section that mentions and links the number of Hypothes.is annotations for that post, where they exist.
Functionality related tweaks
Started creating pages as a wiki-like knowledgebase, using page categories to create the wiki structure
To show excerpts from webmentions I changed the template for a webmention in the Semantinc backlinks plugin, class-linkbacks-handler.php
Added a plugin to display blogposts on the same date in previous years.
Added plugin Widget Context to remove recent posts and comments from individual posting’s pages, as they cause trouble with parsing them for webmentions.
Using categories as differentiator I added language mark-up to individual postings, category archives. Also added automatic translation links to non-English postings in the RSS feed (not on the site). On the front page non-English postings have language mark-up around the posting.
Added a blogroll that is an OPML file with a stylesheet, so it can be equally read by humans and machines.
Added an extra RSS feed for comments that excludes webmentions and ping/trackbacks
Added a /feeds page
Added a Now page
Added a Hello page
Added a way to share book lists / feeds.
Stopped embedding slide decks, and stopped embedding new Flickr photos (as well as removed older embeds, currently 23 postings between January 2013 and July 2018 still have them, and 22 postings from June 2006 to July 2009)
Removed all affilliate links to Amazon books as it entails tracking
Added an Index (using a plugin)
Added my own basic check-in and Dopplr style posts
Other tweaks
Set up 2 additional WordPress instances for testing purposes (Proto and Meso)