Chris Aldrich

Last week I wrote up "Some Thoughts on Academic Publishing" after reading “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone” from Science | AAAS which made some heavy rounds in social media, particularly in academic spheres. Originally I began typing my thoughts/comments into the Disqus box on their website. After getting to the third graph, I began thinking, I should be writing this on my own website as a standalone comment/piece of content and just POSSE it over to their Disqus box.

Despite the fact that the editors/moderators of one of the most venerable science journals of our day will allow internet trolls like CPO_C_Ryback and CPO_C_Rybacks_Mother to go thirty rounds on nearly every comment on their featured piece for the week, my slightly more tempered comment is still sitting in their moderation queue untouched. 

Fortunately I had the foresight to have self-published it before hand, or the not-insignificant time I spent thinking and writing about the topic at hand would have been gone the moment I pressed send. It's one thing to get lost in the shuffle of hundreds of comments amidst trolls, it's another thing altogether to be moderated out of existence. The IndieWeb movement has prevented me from feeling like I did two decades ago after writing a term paper for hours only to lose it after discovering that I hadn't hit control-s to save what I'd written. The additional benefit was that I was able to post those same thoughts on multiple other networks effortlessly while still being able to own what I'd originally written.

The greatest irony of the whole affair is that in conjunction with the particular article I was commenting on, Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief Science Journals, published a companion piece about the high costs and attention to detail and quality that journals try to maintain in their digital presence. Apparently this massive expense and terrific effort doesn't go as far as preventing internet trolls like those mentioned from running roughshod over their own site (which is "moderated" by the way) while keeping out commentary that may add to the discussion and community that they're apparently not attempting to foster.

#sciencecommunication #publishing #indieweb #academicsamizdat 

Last night I upgraded my WithKnown installation from 0.7.5 to 0.7.7.1 and was shocked to see all of the social media integration of my instance had completely disappeared!  

Suddenly POSSE wasn't POSS-I-ble!

Starting with 0.7.7, Known had taken out the old social media plugins and replaced them with Convoy. While I'm sure Convoy is awesome and makes social media integration for POSSE dead simple, something in my gut told me that it just wasn't for me.  I also didn't want to throw away the hour or so I spent configuring all of the plugins in the first place only to end up paying $50 a year for the same thing I'd already had. Those who haven't dealt with it already, will probably find Convoy a great value, though it'd probably be better billed as a one-time fee rather than a recurring one.

I'll admit that I panicked for a while and contemplated restoring the original 0.7.5 server code from back-up.

Fortunately a cooler head prevailed and some research and internet searching began.  I didn't find much immediately - the drawback of living so close to the bleeding edge of technology when still learning how all of it works.

I tried to see if I could uninstall the Convoy plugin by going into the site configurations and changing the plugin to disable it. Sadly, of the dozen or so plugins, Convoy is the only one that didn't ship with an "enable"/"disable" button. I'm sure they'll fix this shortly, but for those who want to do it manually, simply add the following line of code to your config.ini file:

     antiplugins[] = 'Convoy'

Eventually, I spent some time digging into the code and comparing/contrasting all the files.  Noticing that 0.7.6 had six or so additional folders for each of the social media plugins hiding within the IdnoPlugins folder (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, SoundCloud, etc.), I simply dragged and dropped all of those over into 0.7.7.1 and voila! We're back up and running.

As a fine point, one should notice that both the FourSquare and Twitter plugins have been updated since 0.7.6, so they should be copied and dragged over from the main GitHub repository.  Following a similar procedure will also need to be watched/followed for future updates on occasion as well.

For future UX, I'm hoping that Known will at least as a minimum install and make Convoy available directly, but that disabling it will make the other original plugins viewable and configurable for the more technically minded, particularly as POSSE is one of the cornerstones of the IndieWeb movement.

As a quick recap for those doing general Known upgrades, try the following:

1. Back up your database and your code, just in case;
2. Download the new repository (either GitHub or on WithKnown);
3. Delete the "dummy" Uploads folder from the new install and keep your original on the server which has all of your photos, etc.;
4. Keep your config.ini; 
5. Keep your .htaccess (unless it needs a serious change; the htaccess.dist replacement file can be easily copied over, but will need to have its name changed from the version with the .dist extension);
6. Keep the social media plugin folders in IdnoPlugins that you intend to continue using; or upload newer versions which are availble from https://github.com/idno ​;
7. Upload all the new files to the server directory.

Those with an adventurous spirit may also find some of the other available plugins fun to play around with too.