Hello, my name is Ton Zijlstra
I welcome conversation. Contacting me is easy and appreciated.
Here is how I prefer to keep in touch, and why:
- E-mail is always my favourite and almost always the fastest way for you to get in touch. See the right side bar.
- If you have my phone number and can’t reach me, please do not leave a voicemail message. Send an e-mail (fastest!), or send a text message (Signal, Threema or SMS) stating your actual question or specific reason to call (“Can you call me please? I’d like to talk to you.” does not qualify as a valid question or reason, please be specific.). Phone calls are always an interruption, unless planned. My phone is always in silent mode, I will only pick up if I happen to see the call come in, ensuring that it is not interrupting if I pick-up.
- On Calendly you can schedule a planned conversation with me, where you set the topics of conversation.
- My blog here contains everything I share online, you are welcome to comment or link to my writing from your own website, which will sometimes show up here as a mention too. You can subscribe to RSS feeds to keep track of it all. My blogposts are also shared to Micro.blog/ton and any replies there will come back to my site.
- You can find my profile on LinkedIn, but their timeline has become Facebook’s only marginally better behaved twin and I fully ignore it. I have unfollowed everyone, and my timeline is always empty. LinkedIn is only a self-updating rolodex to me. You can use it to send me messages if we’re connected though, I will see those. Please do not connect there unless we actually met or interacted before. In all other cases see the first bullet: you’re welcome to send me an e-mail.
- I am active on Mastodon. I run a single person instance for my Mastodon account, and post there directly and through my website. I do interact there, and will respond to messages, though I may not see them immediately. Same for my company Mastodon account.
- I am infrequently active in the community channels of IndieWeb, Obsidian, Code for NL, Thingscon, Digitale Fitheid, and CoderDojo. If in that context you mention me or ping me, I will eventually see it, but not immediately.
- I am not on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter/X, Threads, Snapchat nor Telegram, all for the obvious reasons.
- Really need to reliably contact me quickly? Send an e-mail, maybe followed up with a Signal or SMS message to let me know that your e-mail is urgent.
This is a Hello Page, modelled after a suggestion by Alistair Johnson.
Following Alistair Johnston’s example, I have added a Hello page, explaining the various ways you can contact me outside of the social media platforms. The TL;DR of it is: send me an e-mail. Added the page to the About menu above, and the About section in the right side bar.
HT to Patrick Rhone for pointing to it, and to Peter for spreading the breadcrumb leading me to find it.
This Article was mentioned on alastairjohnston.com
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)