To Live and Write in LA - Share Your Blog: Los Angeles Bloggers (Los Angeles, CA) | Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Share-Your-Blog-Los-Angeles-Bloggers/messages/boards/thread/50202990/#129703401

Leo, I find it tough to keep up with even one or two sites, so I'm impressed that you're wrangling 3 (or maybe even more)...

http://toliveandwriteinla.com/
I love the magazine style set up you've got here and with a humongous amount of well-written and well thought out content. My one note here is that stylistically, the theme is probably getting a bit long in the tooth. As you'd commented to me, something that's responsive would certainly be cool.

Some small things you might consider:
On the next/last links under articles, articles with longer titles aren't properly buffered which causes the text from one to overwrite the other.
Notify me of comments/new posts renders oddly with some quirky overlap that could be tweaked.

http://leosopicki.com/
Personally I was never a fan of the "masonry" movement (I always felt it was too "busy", though here it does help to highlight a larger number of articles to help get the first time visitor into a topic they might enjoy.

On individual articles, I like the way you intersperse the visuals to change up the flow. However your line lengths are a bit too long to read as comfortably. If you added some more white space on the sides of your text blocks, things would be much more readable. (Try to shoot for 58-70 characters per line for ease of reading -- I'm guessing you're running almost as high as 125 in full-width which makes it harder to move one's eyes from one line to the next. Notice it's easier to read, especially for longer periods of time, with the left/right aligned photos because they shorten the line lengths.)

You really have a great voice in most of your posts that draw the reader into the experiences you're sharing. The captions on the photos really add to the experience too. You've obviously been doing this for a while and are good at what you're doing (which is also seen in some of the great feedback you've given to others here on meetup... thanks by the way.)

Your "Writer" menu link just goes to the homepage, which I understand to some extent as everything on the site is writer-centric, but I might have expected something a bit narrower and focused on screenwriting posts perhaps.

I would more likely have suspected to find a Twitter account, but was a bit surprised to see you pull out Pinterest in the left rail. Further I was shocked that there was some interesting stuff to be seen on Pinterest! I'm sure you can't do too much about the Pinterest widget, but the content shown there was so small and the vertical slider was a bit weird, you might see if you can either dig into it and fix it or perhaps find a better one.

Though speaking of Twitter accounts, I know you've got one, but one's really got to dig for it. Perhaps you could be leveraging the social media portion of things to help your work find more eyeballs?

Overall:
I know that changing themes can be difficult with lots of potential pitfalls and work (especially with a large portfolio), but as a writer, you might consider some themes with more white space and really fantastic readable typography to make your words a bit more front and center (without minimizing your great use and placement of photography). Even if you don't completely change themes, you might consider just punching up the typography and adding some extra whitespace to make things more readable.

Given that you're a photographer, you might also consider finding something that allows for adding some larger photos to better feature your work there. (I wish I knew of something to recommend that does a great job of melding both pictures and words, they're hard to come by.) Often I was disappointed that some of the photos were relatively so small and wished I could have seen full res versions.

@virgilgr you can always live vicariously through others! Thanks for reading along!

@sillygwailo Okay, I thought you might know some trick I didn't! That line is more about reading and the use of timeshifting there is probably too subtle. Timeshifting is usually more frequently applied to live video/audio In particular, I've been thinking a lot about reading; I was apparently capturing the zeitgeist when I coincidentally posted this yesterday: http://boffosocko.com/2016/08/22/a-new-reading-post-type-for-bookmarking-and-reading-workflow/

@RikMende I'm curious about your #readlater and #readinglist hashtags. Do you revisit your site with a search for those and change them after you've read them? Do you have an alternate exterior workflow for reading later?

I usually use the "like/favorite" functionality on Twitter to "highlight" things I want to read with an IFTTT.com recipe to save the URLs from Twitter to my Pocket account for reading later. Pocket allows me to download the data from my account, so I can technically "own" it, but I'm always looking for a better workflow for this.

Curious what others use/do for this kind of work flow...

#indieweb

@natalieasis I think that a lot of researchers would be better off with additional "insider" industry data that isn't commonly or easily obtained. If you can get access to book manuscript submissions (for books) or screenplay submissions (for movies) from within the industry and cross-match those against what was in the zeitgeist for the current crop of 25-40 something aged book editors when they were reading in their formative teen years, you could better predict the next big thing. Watching manuscript purchases now will give you better lead times about what will be big a year to two years from now.

I have just gone through the process of setting up Medium's plugin, so I'm giving that a spin for a couple weeks prior to kicking the tires of SNAP's integration. SNAP has done an excellent job on other platforms, so I'm guessing they're using all the available features there and probably have a stronger 1-1 mapping of data from one platform to the other, particularly as Medium is aiming at WordPress directly first. The one thing you might want to be careful about with Medium is making sure you don't have a "rel=canonical" tag [https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical] showing up on your Medium post, otherwise you might be getting docked by Google and others with respect to SEO. I know the Medium plugin handles this well, but haven't checked on how IFTTT or SNAP handle this yet.

I'm curious what specifically you found confusing about IndieWeb? Some of us in the WordPress group have been trying to make the value proposition and workflow better, particularly over the past several months. (Admittedly, before about April, the onboarding process was MUCH messier and the end user had to do a lot more reading/discovery and work to set things up, but I think the hurdle has moved much lower since then.) If you take a look at it again, I'd love to know where you experience problems/issues, so we can make things better for others. If you need help, there are many of us on IRC [https://indieweb.org/IRC] who can often help in real time.

As for privacy, in general, Facebook, Google+, et all are all public facing networks, so people posting there are really posting for everyone to see in the first place. If they're posting privately, I believe that the IndieWeb protocols respect that and don't import private webmentions. Most of the rest is about data ownership for you and your blog as well as trying to maintain a central repository for your blogs posts of all the conversation taking place around what you're posting. Part of the downfall of social media is that it can often fragment conversations. In some sense IndieWeb helps glue them all back together.

On your last point, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with this as well when I started into IndieWeb, but I've just streamlined my workflow significantly (and for the better). I've turned off all the emails and notifications from individual social media platforms (at least as they relate to my content) and I rely on my WordPress install to do all the notifications. This way, for example, when someone replies to one of my posts on Facebook, I see the webmention via WordPress, and then use that to click on the contained link to the reply on Facebook. I'll then reply natively on Facebook so the other party sees it there (typically by Facebook notification), but then the IndieWeb backend ports over my comment back to the comments section of my own blog. My "audience" can follow me on their platform of choice, and I can still interact, but I still own all the resulting data: Win-win-win!

The concept of task completion in IndieWeb also reminds me a little of the functionality GoodRead.com has for updating one's status on reading a book: Either I'm on page X of Y or I'm X% done with book. Eventually one completes the book. In their UI, they also present a completion bar with the percentage of the book that's read to give a visual indicator as well. I don't suppose there's any reason a webmention couldn't also include a percentage finished to add this piece of data.

@devonzuegel I came across your blog serendipitously and was impressed with some of the nifty tools you've implemented as well as the workflow you seem to have worked out vis-a-vis your website and miscellaneous tools. Thanks for sharing it all!

The idea of Instanote is intriguing to me, though I've been using MS OneNote instead of Evernote, which I've sampled several times. In addition to InstaPaper's API, I've previously used IFTTT.com to port over highlights. I've also been experimenting around with using http://hypothes.is (and their API) lately for notes/highlights as it seems to have a more scholarly bent among the highlight/note tools out there. You might find it interesting.

Given the way you use your website(s) for both identity and knowledge gathering (and owning your own data), I feel compelled to mention a group of hackers working in loose (but very open and very collaborative) concert at http://indieweb.org. You might find some of the tools and ideas over there interesting/useful.

Also given the terrific overlap in books we're reading/read, I might recommend physicist Sean Carroll's relatively new book The Big Picture (particularly part 4 on Complexity) which had some overlap on topics like Schelling's model of segregation as they relate to complexity and spontaneous organization which you may find interesting.

Mostly I'm just thinking about this from the IndieWeb "Own Your Own Data" perspective, so if I'm reading this all correctly, the way the plugin is handling things, it's relying on Twitter's long term existence to serve up the physical content of the tweet?

I would suggest that using the blockquote method with the associated .js may be preferable for IndieWeb users as it saves the content of the tweet as a blockquote with the associated metadata. At worst, if Twitter disappeared, then one would at least "own" the text of the original which would minimally fallback to display as a simple blockquote rather than the fancier embedded Twitter card.

About/FAQ missing reference to webmention-endpoint? · Issue #673 · snarfed/bridgy

I'm always a fan of instructions being built intuitively into the UI flow, to guide new users along, especially if they have a solid idea of what they're getting into in the first place. In this particular instance, the reference to the HTML was a tad too nebulous and may confuse many -- especially those who begin reading rather than jumping right in.

Shortly the indieweb will be so big that totally tyro users with no facility with code will be on the doorstep and will need better explanations/instructions. Perhaps I'll take some time in the coming months to put together simple walk thrus for the handful of major platforms? If you think it's worthwhile, can you let me know, based on the current userbase (or even recent growth in the past 6months-year), how you'd rank them in order of priority so we can help the biggest groups first? Or perhaps it's worth starting at the lowest hurdle for the least technical users (Tumblr/Blogger?) and building toward the more technical (WordPress.com)? (I'd presume most above this level are okay with most of what exists now).

I'm presuming that Brid.gy was originally meant as a "code" bridge to connect activity on silos, but I can also see it as taking on a secondary meaning in providing the initial value and impetus to bridge users into to the bigger IndieWeb movement.