After John's reply:
John Baez says: 2 January, 2016 at 12:26 am
Cool!

In preparation for a terrorist attack on the Google servers—or just because I want control over my own writings—I’ve already transferred most of my G+ posts to my online diary. So I seem to share your philosophy, just not your know-how.

In fact, I’m such a Luddite that when I saw something about that ‘Jetpack’ module, I completely ignored it. Now I don’t see it on my blog. When I go to their website and type in my URL, I get:

Your site is safely hosted at WordPress.com which means you already have most of the Jetpack goodness right out of the box. Have you considered upgrading your WordPress.com Plan?

That’s a bit ambiguous. What kind of WordPress account do I need to get Jetpack to work?

Similarly, what sort of WordPress account do I need to “port the comments from the syndicated G+ post back to your original post on Azimuth”? That sounds really neat.

Right now I have a free plan.

I really appreciate your offer of help.

I always forget that Jetpack is essentially built-in for wordpress.com hosted sites. You can find the settings in your control panel under "settings" and then under "sharing" (alternately try going directly to https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=sharing while you're signed in) then click on "Publicize settings" at the top which will take you to a page to configure your Facebook, Twitter, G+ and a few other social network settings.

After this, in the admin interface (https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php) while writing a post, you should have a new line with the "Publish" block (typically on the top right where you hit the "publish" button) that says "Publicize" next to which is an "edit" link that will allow you to individually toggle one or more of the networks you've set up so that you can choose to cross-post or not on each and every post you make, though most often you'll probably just use the default setting, which is to cross-post to all the platforms that are set up.

When it comes to WordPress there are two flavors: the WordPress hosted version (free with various paid upgrades) with wordpress.com or a self-hosted version via WordPress.org which requires that you have your own domain name and hosting service and do the upgrades yourself. To my knowledge you should be able to do the second portion under either model, though I've only ever done it via the self-hosted version. Your free hosted version won't allow you as much flexibility as the self-hosted route, but by going to http://brid.gy you should be able to click on the WorPress.com button and follow the set up to add the webmentions part to Azimuth. The Brid.gy site has some reasonable help and discussion.

If you want the extra flexibility of a self-hosted version it's typically $10 a year to register a domain and usually between $5-15 a month for hosting depending on who your host is.

#phdchat #digitalhumanities #highered Helping physicist John Baez transition: G+ -> #indieweb @WordPress; see notes https://plus.google.com/u/0/117663015413546257905/posts/MYiSb1m4YtX

+John Baez "When in doubt, Goole it out." G+ defaults to have jetpack cross posts only seen by you (private rather than public). You can change this by following the details at https://jetpack.me/support/publicize/google/ and following the instructions under "Changing who can see your Publicized posts on Google+". For self-hosted blogs, you're somewhat limited in what/how things get posted to G+, most of them tend to be the "title" and the "excerpt" portions of your post, though within the publicize portion of the "publish" block, you can also enter a custom message that will override the "title" if you wish. You also have the option to add a "featured image" as well that will add some visual interest. From self-hosted blogs you can use modules like "All in one SEO pack" to better customize what gets ported over to social media platforms.
Ideally, you should be able to post enough to help remind your obviously devoted G+ following to click through and read the details on your blog, so that your readership doesn't suffer as much as going cold turkey. Those who are seriously engaged will take the G+ posts as a reminder to come and read your material (and honestly this is most of the reason that platforms like Facebook and Twitter took off in the first place.) Given your reach here, you might also find it easy enough to get a Twitter account, plug in your addressbook and mass-follow those you know and similarly "ghost" post to Twitter as well. You may find that you can vastly improve your reach and readership doing this.
Naturally, if you wanted to, you could manually cut and paste most/all of your entire post with a link to your blog, but this is probably more time intensive than you'd prefer.
From a PR perspective, you're taking back most of your "John Baez Brand" from Google and moving it to something you directly own and control. I'd also recommend that you encourage your readers to go to the siderail of your blog and simply sign up via email as I'm sure most all of them live as much in email as anything else. Then instead of relying on not missing anything in the flowing stream of G+, they'll get a physical notification of everything you post and have the option of not missing as much.
Feel free to call if you need specific help. I hope I'm easily enough found on the web.