 Yeah, so welcome to the November community chat. This community chat is officially titled, you can thank Pilot for this one. Open publishing and why you should do it, parentheses, come to our flex course in two weeks, exclamation point, close parentheses. That is the title of it. I dared Pilot to put it in the roundup that way, but yeah, that is a pilot original. And really, I mean, yeah, two objectives. Yeah, the close parentheses are essential. Open and close. Two kind of things for me is, obviously, we've got a flex course coming up in two weeks. And we want folks to participate and be there. I have, it's a free flex course, so I'm selling you nothing other than your time, I guess, which is important and valuable. But if you are unfamiliar, these are things we do from time to time at Reclaim Hosting around various topics. They basically amount to a, we premiere like a video or recording of a video once a week, and we have a discussion in our discord around that premiere time. But the nice thing is, while you can participate at the premiere time, you can also participate throughout the week. We want these to be, have a synchronous feel, but not require synchronous participation, because we know that's just not going to work for everybody. So really, the main thing is, if you're interested, you'll want to go to our events.reclaimhosting.com calendar, click the button and you'll get email updates about it. Or you can join discord, because that's where the discussion will be happening. That's the one thing is we want folks to be thinking about that. We want you to participate. The other thing is, I kind of said a few minutes before we started recording, I'm kind of hoping this could a little bit be story time for the community chat. I mean, sometimes our community chats are like that, but really, we wanted to kind of try to see if people would share what drew you to open publishing in the first place. I guess for the purposes of this community chat, I'm really interested in making that publishing word kind of broad. I don't know that we need to necessarily limit it to, you could talk about OERs and that's great, but even if it's just websites, I love hearing about how people got started with this stuff, and what they liked about it, what challenges are, what your goals are, those kinds of fun things. Before we get into that, I wanted to talk a little bit more details about the flex course, I guess. I'm going to front load it with that. Just because I have now been talking nonstop for like two minutes, I'm going to completely throw it right over to Pilate to kind of what is this flex course about? What is it called? So when you said you were going to do this bit, you meant I was going to do this bit. Yep, that's what I meant. I was not informed about this ahead of time. Yeah. Yeah. This is the part where I try and remember what's been said and what's just happened in my brain, and I think it's been said, but yeah, it's going to be happening. We're going to cover a couple of different types of web publishing platforms. Sounds very formal, but over the course of a couple of weeks, we're going to, Taylor and Amanda in particular are going to be sitting down with, first to talk through Hedge Dock, which is sort of a collaborative markdown application that you can use to write things up in markdown. And then you guys got the chance to sit down with either makers or power users of the different apps to sort of get a perspective on what each one is really good for. So there's starting in Hedge Dock, but then Docsify and Docsify this with Paul Hibbits, which is for publishing that sort of markdown work that you might do in Hedge Dock. There's Hacks, where you guys are going to be talking to Brian Olandike about what that platform looks like and what it's sort of meant to accomplish, what the goals there are, what tools it has available, Manifolds, which you guys are talking to JoJo Carlin from NYU? Yep. Yes. And oh boy, there's another one. I'm remembering it. I'm totally remembering it right now and I'm not pulling up the page for, no I got all four of them. Never mind, nailed it. You got all of them. And that was, I'm sorry for throwing you in it. I didn't expect you to go into that much detail, but yeah, those are the four platforms and we're highlighting them specifically because they all kind of serve different roles in a space that you could call publishing, but they're all pretty intentionally different and we're just kind of excited to talk about these different tools, what they're good at, what they're, you know, what they would be best suited for and highlight how they can work for you. So, Jim, you got your hand raised. Yeah, just a simple question. Did you, you didn't include press books and I'm just curious, was there a particular reason other than probably you had four weeks and there's only so much to cover or? That would be reason, honestly, one in that we wanted it to be. Which is legitimate, you can't cover everything. Yeah, and the other thing is, I think we really wanted to highlight, you know, these aren't like, you know, this flex course, I think all of our flex courses are supposed to be sort of exploratory, right? So some of it is we're sharing what we've learned, but really in this case, because we're bringing these guests in, we're trying to learn alongside everyone else who wants to learn with us basically. And we think there's a lot of good information out there in press books. We ourselves have done many different streams on it and how you can run it in things like that. And there's also, because of what press books is, you know, you can find, you know, good information from the company that offers it. But also, you know, we're obviously, I mean, like we are probably first and foremost here at Reclaim WordPress people. So we're also personally most comfortable and familiar with that, like what it can do and things like that. So we just wanted to give some air to some of these other tools and what they can offer. I fully expect, you know, we haven't announced the December community chat yet, but we think it will be in some ways kind of a follow on to what we're talking about during that flex course and even this one. And press books is going to come up, press books is going to be compared to all of these tools. And I think it should be, right? So yeah, we're not saying these are the only four tools you should use. Like these are four tools I think there's more of a story to uncover if that makes sense. Sure, that makes sense. Yeah. And the other thing I'm thinking also now is that I remember at least one of the things that we talked about wanting to accomplish is to look at each tool as its own thing, as its own what the design goals are, what the affordances are, what you can accomplish. And press books, like Taylor was saying, there's a lot of resources out there. There's a lot of sort of information on what you might use it for and how you might use it. And so, yeah, the ability to look at and explore these tools and then also to say we don't, there's a lot out there for press books. And rather than potentially setting up a situation where we are comparing anything against the giant, these are other tools that deserve a moment in the spotlight. Yeah. So that being said, I'm really kind of excited about that flux course. And these are also kind of two-way things too. So I think so as as the sessions come out and folks have questions, we're more than happy to kind of discuss through like, you know, you didn't talk about this in this particular tool or have, has anyone heard of this other thing? I think those conversations will happen and branch out and that's what we want to happen. So cool. Yeah. So that's my pitch. Come join our free thing. We want you there. And as a pilot already through the Lincoln, but the, you can sign up on our event calendar events.reclaimhosting.com, you get an email update about it. And that will start up on November 28th. This is the first premiere. So moving a little bit to kind of, to kind of the rest of this community chat. I, yeah, I think pilot and I are particularly really interested to hear from folks like what, what drew you to this space in general? I obviously our flux course is kind of geared towards publishing in the context of, you know, OERs and things like OERs. I don't want to limit it completely. But I think, you know, for this chat, we're kind of interested in like open web stuff in general and what got people here. So I'm kind of curious to see if people will share like, I guess starting out, yeah, what drew you to publishing openly on the web in the first place? And I guess there's a lot of, that's a big question a lot of directions ago. But yeah, I mean, pilot, do you, can you share what like, what was like, what's your first website or first thing you helped publish as a website? Recall. See, now I'm going, trying to go through like, okay, first website or first publishing. And this is the sort of totally unhelpful dichotomy. I remember that when I was in college, there was a tech club, I don't really, it wasn't really a tech club. I don't totally understand what their mission was, but somehow I ended up on their newsletter. And they had a night that was just, here's a workshop, we'll show you how to get set up HTML flat file and put it on GitHub pages. And I'd done some HTML CSS work for computer science, software engineering classes, things like that. But that was the first sort of independent project that I ever put up. And then in terms of publishing, that was something I got more familiar with when I started working with Domain of One Zone and digital humanities at Carlton. And I learned about scalar. And I didn't do too much work with the platform of scalar itself. But I worked a little bit with one of the librarians who was helping a lot of faculty members with their scalar sites and helping them think through how they wanted to put out those books, essentially. But I actually didn't do a whole lot with open publishing as a concept in my head until I came to reclaim. I didn't know press books existed before that, which is crazy. The first real project that I can think of was working with SNC sort of on the Domain's Camp thing, which is kind of an open publishing thing. It absolutely is. I'm going to use it as an example. Some of the content is an example, actually. Perfect. Great. Then I said that on purpose. It's all planned. Cool. Yeah. I have a kind of a similar thing. I would say my first website was, so I should say, I feel like growing up when I did, the age that I am, the web was kind of like when I was really young, there was a lot of talk, at least in my school, about what the web is and isn't, because it was kind of new still, very new. So there was a lot of how to be safe, but also, I even remember in elementary computer classes, our teachers describing, this is what a server is, not the technicals, but just what that means and stuff like that. I kind of wonder constantly, honestly, about the state of that type of, I feel like in a lot of ways, a lot of the things I do now is still, I can draw a line all the way back to fifth grade computer class and learning about what is a browser and what is a search engine. This was when Google was new, kind of, well, not that new, I guess at that point, but somewhat new. But I didn't really make my own website. I didn't even think I had the tools or skills. I thought it was something only programmers could do, basically, until college. And I got a Raspberry Pi in, there used to be these Reddit gift exchanges, and you would just get signed up with a completely random stranger. I don't remember what I got for the person, but the person on the other end got me the original Raspberry Pi, and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't really know much about Linux or anything. And I was just kind of reading, like, what can you do with this? And one of the things was, you could set up Apache web server and WordPress. And so I did just to see, like, I just followed the instructions. And it was crazy slow, like those originally Raspberry Pi's are not really capable of even a empty WordPress site at that time, because it just was too much for that. But I set it up, and I had it plugged in in my parents' basement, plugged into their router, and I just started playing with it. And I didn't ever do too much with it. But that was technically my first website. And I didn't really return to that until years later, basically, after I had graduated college and got a little bit more interested in other web stuff. But that was my first website. And it worked. You could visit it, technically. Probably not that many people, though, could visit it, even if they knew about it. Oh, I don't think I had a domain map either. I think it was just an IP address. So that was technically my first website. And then, yeah, I got very involved with Domain of One's Own at St. Norbert College when I worked there, and now I work at Reclaim. So that's kind of my journey. But it was kind of revealing to me, even though getting it working on a Raspberry Pi was hard. I learned a lot from doing it, but also it wasn't that hard. It was just following instructions. And I was like, oh, you don't really... I don't know what I thought a website really was, but it's not that complicated. It was kind of the revelation for me. I had a lot of exposure to non-open web things and non-open resources, not publicly available, at least. But I wrote an entire ISP and Mac admin at previous career, and I used to write a ton of documentation for our end users on a Mac OS server wiki, which is super awesome. No one will ever have the chance again to do that, but if you spin up an XServe and put Mac OS server from the 10, 4, 10, 5 days on it, then you can experience the joys of Mac OS server wiki. And yeah, that was just the first documentation I ever wrote. But since then, I work at St. Auburn now. Taylor turned me on to the internet, I'd like to say. You should check this out. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty great. And I was like, oh yeah, it's pretty cool. And then I was like, oh, everything's just a file. This is just like working on Macs. And that was a big green light for me. But I have a long way to go. That's why I'm here. And I'll probably be enjoying that for a shout out that Taylor talked about earlier. So I wrote a bubble sort in Fortran on an IBM 360 and I didn't enjoy it. So I stuck with my first career choice and became a glassblower and spent 20 years working in Santa Clara, California, supporting computer manufacturing and would often go to some programmer engineer's house with my little six pack of beer. And they would show me the latest and greatest. My favorite was the purple translucent Mac desktop thing, the giant jelly bean thing. And so as would always happen, we would open a couple of beers and watch the little thing go around. And oh, and in between then I wrote a, I can't even remember something. It was follow the instructions. I wrote a program on an IBM PC in 1983, when I was thinking about being an engineer, but went back to glassblowing. And so and didn't enjoy that. And then I spent a lot of evenings watching that little circle go around, even in Santa Clara, you know, dial up was slow. And and watching it, you know, it'd be so then, okay, we're online. Great. What's it doing now? Oh, now it's downloading the program. Okay. And then when the six pack was finished, I'd have to go home because I had to go to work the next day. And so I'm not really that impressed with, you know, the whole computer thing. But I now have spent an inordinate amount of time the last 10 years trying to figure it out as a user. So I come at it as a ignorant user person. And I, I'm, I'm well signed up for the course because I have this project that I'm a complete failure at for, I think seven or eight years now that I have tried to figure out how to construct a and it's evolved over the years. So it's either gotten simpler or more complex when I look at it. But I'm interested in e portfolios for lifetime learners. And so that workers and poor people and even prisoners can document their learning, whether they go to go to Harvard or not. And so now I'm to the point where, and again, for years, I've been chasing this idea. I think I want a graph database because of the relations you can create. And I have an omega s installation that I pray or fool around with once in a while on reclaim that will tag all your objects as you put them into the graph database. And, you know, there are standards already have triples and different standards you can use. Dublin core, you know, and these, these are in omega. And then now recently, I'd like to be able to publish flat archivable pages on top of all that. And there's several steps in between. I'm forgetting about, oh, and then I'm also interested as I know Chris is in note taking and linking all that together. So I'm trying to build a mem X, I guess is what it is. And you guys are going to help me, right? We hope. I mean, I think, I think the thing that I'm kind of excited about, again, with the flux courses, how like I've had one of when we were talking to the guests for this, they're like, why, why this tool next to, you know, say manifold, like why docs, they're very different. I was like, Yes. You know, like, we one of the I think one of the exciting things is how different these tools can be will hopefully cover more use cases. And we're trying to draw lines between them in ways that are logical. Like one of the things that we want to do is take like a single markdown document that we make and run it through all of these tools. And just so like, this is what that looks like when you use these three very different tools to look at this one singular piece of content, basically. But you know, that obviously we want to keep it, you know, relatable to in terms of as much as I like, you know, web technologies for the sake of them in some cases, that's not that useful. So we're also trying to, you know, ground it in like, well, you know, when would be the best case to use this type of thing? Is this something that an individual user can benefit from? Is this better as like an institutional tool that can be accessed by multiple people? You know, answer those kinds of questions as well. Here's where I get to say I've never been institutionalized. So, you know, I'm trying to do this for free, so that I can give it away for free. And I work with I do work with some institutions, a graduate institute specifically. And so I'm again, for years, I've failed to move this e portfolio concept into their program. But now the crack is open. So maybe some light will come in. Well, and I think we'll be able to kind of meet that too. And in at least one of the tools, you know, doxify this is one of the tools. And that one is, you know, technically, depending on your needs requires zero hosting, like not even hosting. And I know we're a hosting company. Right. But you're in trouble now. Yeah. But that is kind of the one of my favorite things about this course. So we can go from like, Oh, this is only possible on reclaim cloud because of all the power you have there to like, you don't even need to host this depending on what your needs are. So, you know, that hopefully we'll have something for you. I guess. And that's, and that's great because I am concerned with portability because I talked to a lot of now teachers that used to be students. And as soon as you leave your institution. Yep. You know, all your stuff is gone. Unless you've carefully archived it and who teaches archiving. It's like teaching somebody what a, you know, I work with like older students and older people. They don't know what a browser is. They use it every day. They don't know what it is. You know, and they don't know where it is in the layers of technology. And now that we're doing this stuff, I show, I have a little diagram. It's like 10 layers right now. And I show it to, you know, people and they're just like, what's that? You know, and we're on zoom. I'm showing it to them on zoom. I'm like, this is what we're doing, you know, and they don't know. Yeah. And it's, it's an interesting, you know, problem in that. Like I personally feel so strongly about like, you know, if, if we can get people to understand what those layers are, and they don't have to understand every technical, I don't understand every tech. No, nobody does just that they're there, but that they exist, right? And that can be so valuable, but you do have to hook people, right? Like if you're starting from a point of like, you don't understand any of the layers or that they exist, to start right with, let's peel this technological onion, isn't that attractive to most of you know, so it's kind of like, yeah, I want you to learn because you'll be better off if you learn certain things about this before you embark on your project. But at the other hand, like there's definitely a place for tools where it's like, you know what, just start here. And you don't really need to know at least at the onset how it all works yet. And we'll we'll get you there. Because obviously, like, my answer to everything is like, well, what if we explained it to people and it was, you know, people could learn about it. But there are sometimes you need a on ramp to that, I think. Yeah, I tried the history of computing that didn't work. I find it fascinating, but yeah, I think what increases is what you just your sound as well. And now you're frozen. So is it his browser? Is it his operating system? Yeah, who knows, could be a million things. Is there a connection? I knew Chris was cool, but I didn't think he was frozen. That's that's the coolest stuff. There was a sound. Oh, in my back? Yes. Okay, so maybe it's just my camera just is having issues today. I think what interests me the most is being able to bring a load of my data to a space and point tools at it to see what affordances those tools give me. So the way Taylor framed it as we're going to bring the same group of things to each of these to see what happens. To me, that's the interesting thing. And quite often I find with a lot of these tools, I have needs or uses for them that they'll allow me to use them for what I want to often in off label use cases. So being able to use them in ways that the builders did not intend them to is often where a lot of the fun things happen. Or what can I take this tool and add a layer on top of it and get something else out of it, whether that's interactivity or how can this tool talk to other tools? Those things have gradually increased over the years from the time when I was you know, I think my first website was roughly 1992, and I was writing raw HTML in all caps, if that even is like a thing. But I was also doing that at a time when I was running a movie theater and hanging out late at night with the newspaper right next door that was usually going to bed just as we were getting out of the projection booth. So quite often I was going halfway across town with a friend with a massive disc so that they could you know, plug it in at the printer and run off copies of their newspaper to pick up the next morning. And so seeing the old school mesh with new internet methods was phenomenally interesting to me. And in an hour and a half actually I'm going to be on a conference call with one of the senior tech leads at the Washington Post, who also had kind of that same background in both physical publishing and then in early in his career the web was growing up at the same time because we're I think within a year of each other. So it's interesting to see that how those things play together and he's always playing with fun new tools that you know, hey how can the Washington Post or the newspaper I'm working at today or the magazine use these tools to do the next big thing. And hopefully the barrier for entry goes down because you know, things like, hey yes, I could spin up my own instance of, you know, press books is a thing. I could do that. But do I really want to because the amount of administrative overhead is not worth the end result. You know, it's like press books sitting on my shoulder picking it you know my shirt with claws like kind of admin or and is it worth it for the the purring cuddles that I might get later on. So yeah, you know, and I think one of the things that I really like about perhaps selfishly, I don't know, but about doing exploring these types of things in community chats, flux courses, like working at reclaim and it being a reclaim hosting thing is we get to we have the kind of the privilege to try to look at it from, well, hey, we get to be transparent about like, well, why are we interested in this? Like, well, we're a hosting company. So, so maybe you host it with us, right? Like, don't have to, but you could. But, but also trying to simplify and make cheaper, easier, faster, better, whatever, all of the tools from all angles, right? So, you know, we, we recently did, I think it was about a month ago. It was pilot and man and I did a stream talking about like, how to manually just set up a press book site. And that was on, we showed it on shared hosting and reclaim cloud, you know, where we've been talking about a little bit about a new product that we're going to have in the next couple of months or so called Reclaim Press and you could do it there too. And, you know, that's to simplify that complex thing. Is it going to be as simple as a static HTML final server? Probably never. Like I, you know, if you understand that you can have a website by writing a single file, that's pretty simple. It's also very limited in certain ways. But, but I also think there's movement to make that stuff simple too. And maybe it's, you know, understanding it better or maybe it's eliminating the need to deal with FTP or whatever, you know, we're making that kind of stuff simpler. And I don't know, I'm just, I'm just really interested in that. And I think all of these tools that we're going to showcase try to make something simple. They focus on different things in simplifying different things and even layers, right? Like is the hosting simple or is the interface simple or both in some cases? And that's kind of one of the things that I'm most excited about with really all of these tools, but they all look at it the problem, I think they identify the problem differently. Well, I guess to the best I can shorten a long career in this. And the simple part of the first half of my career, I was not in academia. I was spent about 20, 25 years. I was in corporate planning and similar kinds of functions in the corporate world. A whole lot of it started out with NCR, which at one time was a second biggest computer company in the country. And then I ended up in the force products, paper publishing, all that kind of stuff for a long time. And I ended up with a niche as a consultant and other stuff of I was kind of like the, there's some new technology coming along. And the corporate, you know, the suits wanted to know what the heck this was going to mean for the future and all kinds of stuff. And nobody understood it. And it was all kind of, you know, give it to Jimmy, he'll figure it out. And I would always go, yeah, sure, I can do that. And then I would dive in because I didn't know I have a clue. So I came at things. So actually, my first experiences with publishing actually would go back and I would describe what was going on in corporate world in the late seventies and had some parallels in that, you know, back in those days, you couldn't write if you worked in corporate or worked in business, you couldn't write and publish your own documents because it had to go through, there was a department called the word processing department or the weighing and you had to go through word weighing word processing specialists because, you know, these typewriters with memories were too complex for humans to work unless they were, you know, you had to go through the specialists. And anyway, so moving forward around 2002, I gave up on that world, moved into academia and started teaching online and started, you know, since I understood a little bit about how the web worked, but I've always hated the coding end. Let me tell you, a dyslexic ADD guy ain't exactly your best idea for dealing with code. But I started taking my own coursework and putting it in static web files and figured out web hosting and different stuff and one thing led to another and then I decided, oh, I wanted to figure out what this blog stuff was on. And that was about the time when the great financial crisis here, I'm an economist. And I got tired of bringing copies of class stuff to class with all the news. And so I thought, oh, well, I'll just start a word, you know, I'll learn WordPress at the same time. As I'm figuring out, oh, that way I don't have to make copies for students. I can just link to it on the web. And that was working fine for a few months. And then a piece of magic happened. I wrote a blog post about whether General, I'm in Detroit, about whether General Motors was going to file bankruptcy or not. At that point, there was a lot of speculation that no, they would never want to do that. And I analyzed from an economist point of view, I'll save you a long story and I said, no, here's the debt committee structured this way. It's going to happen. Here's why. And it was the kind of thing an economist would love, nobody else. And somebody, an economist, pretty high up, somebody saw my blog post. I had no idea it was on WordPress. They saw it. They linked to it and said, hey, this is pretty interesting stuff. And next thing I knew, you know, I was used to looking and going, oh, it's pretty cool. Eight people saw my post yesterday or that kind of thing. And then one day I woke up and oh my god, 800 people saw my post and they weren't all from the U.S. And that was like, oh, wow, a community college prof. And I was hooked. And from that point on, it's, you know, I started moving into the OER stuff at school. But my obsession's been with how do we get rid of the gatekeepers? How do we make this stuff so simple, so straightforward that people can in fact publish and talk? And that's interesting because what happens, what I've observed, and this is why I'm interested in this flux course because I'm not that familiar with these four texts, I've seen this for example with WordPress. It started out real simple. And now, oh, you know, everybody wanted to make it, it's like the coders and the designers got all of it over a decade. And now it's not simple anymore. And now, oh, it's a big barrier to folks just writing something and getting it up. You know, because now it's got to be here and you got to have, you know, you can't just do a HTML page anymore type stuff because it's got to have blocks and all that crap and stuff like that. And so, you know, I'm interested in seeing all the possibilities. So that's long and along the lines there, I set up a press books install for Lansing Community College. So it helps some other families. So that's how I got here. And it's my radical democratize the whole thing. I'm here for that. And I think the thing that, I don't know, maybe an obvious thing to point out, but here I am pointing it out is the thing I guess that I see all the time working at a hosting company is democratizing it or simplifying it for whom, right? And so often I go to the individual. Like I want someone just a person don't care where you are, have a thing on the internet. It's just like that simple. Go there. And then maybe one step from that is like, okay, how simple could they publish a thing, but they have their own domain name? Because domain names are great, but you have to register them and pay for them and all this stuff, right? Which is not that hard. We try to hopefully make that easy, you know, I reclaim and answer questions and stuff. But ultimately, like, you know, there's more there. But what I see a lot to like working in a hosting company is like, sometimes that's the wrong, well, not sometimes wrong target, but there are other audiences, right? Like, I'm also really interested in seeing like, well, how can we democratize and enable people who are working at a school to help people with this? That's right. Obviously, like, that's, okay, that's domain of one's own, basically. But there is more than one way to that. Like that's domain of one's own solves a problem. But there are other ways to slice that problem up, right? Like, well, what if we're not really here to teach about this, but we just want to wait for people to publish? Okay, great. You know, maybe that's press books. Maybe that's, we'll talk about manifold, you know, that the trouble I think with all this stuff is that there's just so many, well, I shouldn't say it's not the only trouble, but one problem is there's so many options, right? Like, there's so many directions you can go, so many tools to choose from. And half of them are proprietary and locked down in, and I would say don't bother, but there's information about those two and you have to wade through the sea of it. And it's not that, you know, this flux course will, you know, unilaterally fix that. Of course, it won't. But I don't know. I just, I, I'm interested in talking about tools in a different way than if you go look up like what's better for X versus Y, you'll find a lot of like, maybe like engineering stuff or just like old, you have to use this programming language for, okay, I don't really care about that. You know, and oh, this is better for this pricing model. It's like, okay, don't really care about that either. I'm kind of more interested in talking about what tools fit individual or group needs better. And of course, there is information about that, but I don't know. I find it harder to find. And I find it harder to find discussion around that personally. Yeah, I feel like you basically said what I wanted to happen and say, especially sitting in this position of needing to support people, like there's a reason that we just keep going back to WordPress is like, we all know it really well. I have students that know it really well. And it needs the needs of like, most things, even if it's maybe sometimes overkill for what somebody needs, you know, and so, but I, the kind of the reason I'm interested in seeing these things that it's like, I know personally, I just need to have more tools in my arsenal. I don't know, like, you know, feeling comfortable to actually suggest those things in those moments, but there's still like the hesitation of like, well, when, when it goes wrong, like I know most WordPress things at this point, like when it goes wrong, I'm not stressed about getting those things done. It's, it's the experimental like, you know, and I think luckily for us, at least the main one's own is couched as mostly an experimental teaching space. So like I'm not expected to maintain infrastructure here, right? That like people like want uptime in the same way. But yeah, how do I don't know how to like, I'm very curious to see hacks because it's like too, this like lightweight kind of ish thing. It feels like WordPress sometimes like, people need a single page to do something. And I'm like, I don't know, you need all WordPress to do that. But then I don't want to send them off to like, I have to send them off to like simple web page builders. I'm like, I don't know, maybe it makes more sense to go use canvas single page, slash page thing, because it's really fancy and it does things and you don't have to do all this work. I don't know, there was a thread I was going to pull from what I've kind of lost it. But I don't know, people have wrestled with this in the same way, like too, but I always have to add a complication is like, now I have to teach my students how to do because if it's incorporated in the classroom, and faculty wants to do it, now I need to make sure my students who help other students know how to do it and it becomes to get another thing like a mecca. I can't like, I don't even have any expectation that my students really know a mecca outside. Here's the guide for the troubleshooting things that always happen, you know, like with the images and things like that. So I don't know. I was kind of a ramble. Well, you know, one of the selfish reasons, another selfish reason that we did this community chat here is I'm taking notes, of course, and trying to, I'm going to say collect problems or, you know, not that we'll be able to solve or address all of them, but like full transparency, like we haven't recorded any of these sessions yet. They're about to be and they're guests on them. So we're going to focus on what they want to talk about first. But one of the things I'm interested in throughout this is to try and say, like, okay, like, like, what I just wrote down from what you just said, Shannon, is like a common problem. And because this is when I ran into two is like, I just want a single page website. And I agree, there isn't really a good tool for that, not that I've used regularly. I think hacks actually could potentially and doxify this could be an interesting one too. But like my ultimate, like if I had to invent a tool into existence, and I didn't have to make it myself, it would be like a literal one page CMS, where it's just like, you name, you make the index.html file, you click edit, and you can type it in there. And you hit save, and that's it. And I want to make it pretty too. It's like, that's the biggest thing is there's like, yeah, we could put up an HTML page, but you now need to know how to do that. Yeah, no, I want the simplicity of static HTML, but with like, it would look good and have a WYSIWYG editor, of course. Yeah, that is exactly it. Because always with all this, I've been interested in all this, those like static sites, but then you got to know markdown. And you need to do like, like, no, I don't want to know this. I want to, I want, I want like a square space, basically, right? You know, in some ways, it's like, could jump in, sit in there, do the things, make it pretty, put in my information and done. Yeah, and, and we're just like, none of the four tools we're going to talk about completely directly do that. But there kind of is sort of like, we'll, we'll talk about it. But like, you know, that that that is one for me that I wish, you know, like the, even if we could, if we could smush the two C panel tools together, the like site builder one, where it just ends up with like a template. And then the fact that in C panel, there's an editor, there is a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it is of course, like, no style information. So it's not really that useful in the whole scheme of things. That's what I want personally, but it's, it's also a little bit, you know, when you examine these things, it's a little bit harder, easier said than done in some ways. I think hacks is honestly close to that. But even that is kind of conceived as more of like a tool for making other little sites inside of it, right? So it's not completely what you are saying. But I will say, I have a GitHub issue on hacks that that's literally like, could this be a single page thing? And they're kind of like, that would be cool, but not right now, you know, which is fair enough. It's just not what that tool is directly for. But yeah, all right, yeah, who has the millions of dollars to invest in somebody just doing this right? Because I think that thing is that this tool that like in pilot just shared one, this tool exists, but not in an open source way, right? Like you can, right? It's always in that like, you got to pay. And I want to, I want it to be an option I can give students that they don't have to pay for, that I can also get in and help them with the things. So oh, yeah, Krista shared, I have used HTML five up for things like, which is actually kind of where I point people to if they want to do HTML and CSS JavaScript things, I'm like, go grab this template and edit it. And then I'll show you how to upload it to file manager. Yeah, you know, because that's that's one way to do it to like start with something somebody's already made and then edit to what your your needs are. But that that seems like a big lift for a lot of students. Unless that's what they're actually really particularly interested in is like, get learning to the code. Yeah, I will say like, I can third that idea. HTML five up is awesome. That's kind of like, it's so much easier to look at something and edit it. Like that was the game changer for me when I looked at HTML, because like, I before then had approached HTML as if it was a programming language. And I was like, I'm not a programmer. Like, I'll just never know that it's fine. And and then I looked at it and I was kind of like, Oh, looking at this completed thing, I can kind of see what's happening here. And you can, of course, edit it, change it, break it, you know, that's all great. But I agree, it's not quite, but it's not removing all the barriers you really wanted to remove. Yeah, yeah. I'm teaching teaching tool, but not necessarily like, Hey, whole class, we're all going to build websites. Like, I like, unless the fact their goal is to teach HTML CSS, it's like, you know, nobody wants that. I've long wanted to, and I wonder if this would be even easier now with WordPress, with the way the block editor works of making a WordPress template that like is a one pager WordPress site. And it's kind of weird because you're taking this tool that's designed for so much more and narrowing it down to like, okay, when you sign in, you're going to like get on the page edit, like, I don't, I don't even, I've never gone through and done it, but it seems possible to me to like, okay, well, we'd set up like a very basic thing and have a homepage, you know, not a blog role on the, or not a list of blog posts on the homepage. And then like, maybe I can come up with some way so that when you sign in, you get dropped right into the page editor. Yeah. I don't know. There may be a way to do that. But, but then it's like, okay, well, now like, I've simplified this, the starting of this tool, but then what about when they want a second page? And they kind of don't know anything about how WordPress works and how are they supposed to figure it out now? You know, so I don't know, it's hard. Yeah, I, I, this is, it's funny to say this, because I literally kind of just did, I kind of dropped a link in the chat did this where I needed to make a demo portfolio for this presentation we're going to do. And I've, Anders Noren, who makes a bunch of themes that are beautiful also does block themes now too. And like this default theme like has like, is laid out kind of just like the, the front page is, I didn't even make a page. I actually just edited the, the themes front page template and got this, like, and didn't do any other under other work, but it's like, I see more and more theme developers kind of doing that, like making that front page kind of its own, like already designed thing. And you don't even, I was like, I could not even ever add any more content and do it almost right in there, especially those linking to other places. And then I'm just using the theme editing thing. It just felt, it was like, I was like, okay, like, I had to like, let go of the WordPress and be like, actually it works for this, this really well to get like that design piece that a lot of times people are really looking for. You could do that on pages and stuff, but like doing it within the temple, it lets you fully control. I mean, that comes with its own problems, because if you build out your site and you, oh, that's what you've done. That's not best practice, but that's all you need. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it worked pretty well. Like I made that, that, that little thing in like in 30 minutes. It was like really simple to do. Yeah. And it looks nice, right? Like, you know, and the, you know, the advantage then too is again, if it, if it, you are using WordPress, then the sky's the limit from there too, right? So that has its advantages too. I don't know. I think it's very circularly. I always think myself in a circle on things like this. Yeah, we have two minutes left. So now's the perfect time for me to introduce a new thing that just Taylor, what you put in the chat and what we've been talking about with HTML5 up and card and stuff that you can bring to people and spots and stuff you can bring to people to just get them started thinking about open publishing for an individual versus for a group and going back to why you might want press books or why press books might be overkill. One of the things is that press books is at its core, a WordPress multi site. So it's designed to have lots of users who can collaborate on lots of sites. But if what you want is I'm the only person who's really going to be working on this and I want someone to be able to, you know, fork it and do their own thing on it, but not, they're not going to touch, they're not going to touch my work. They're going to take my work and build their own thing off of it. Press books is not, but it has features for that, but it's way more than you need. But the idea of scope is not quite the word that I want. But what does a student need who's students making their own an open tool for a student putting their stuff out versus faculty or institutional or group or individual projects? I don't have a thesis. It's just a discussion topic for the last negative, yeah, the last 30 seconds of this time of our time. I have to run to a digital storytelling class, but I did want to ask if anybody's been playing with AI and asking it after having a chat, asking it to outline the chat and then asking it to take the outline and convert it to markdown and then taking the markdown and dropping it into a concept mapping tool. And you can do all that in about five minutes. So, and as you said, Taylor, it's much better when you've got the markdown in front of you to then edit it. And if you have a tool where you can visualize it, then you can go back and edit it really, because I'm not a programmer, even though I did write a Fortran program on an IBM 360. Anyway, I got to run. Thanks for this, and I'll see you in class. Thanks. Yeah, Chris Blott is so cool to me. It's not something I've explored a lot, but I've looked at it more than once and been like, I want this. But I can't remember is Blott one of the ones that is has a self-hostable version or not, but there's a couple tools that are kind of similar, like take a folder of files and make it a website. And I want to say one of them had a self-hostable version, but it was so early they were like, don't use this yet. I was like, oh, okay. Their source code is on GitHub. Okay. Maybe it was Blott. Maybe it's come some age, but it's easy enough that, you know, most of the simple editors like Google Docs will let you edit it and save it. And then suddenly there's your page. Yeah. Okay. I'm looking at the Blott right now. Yeah, that may be something interesting to see how, you know, how easily that could be run. But yeah, I will say, I think Google Docs is published. Button is possibly underrated. There's so many problems with it, like in terms of you don't own the URL and all this stuff, right? But it's amazing to me, especially having worked in K12 briefly, like how much use that thing, including myself at that time, how much use that button got. And it's like, yeah, I'm going to publish this Google Doc as a webpage. It's like, if I could do that and map it to a domain easily, that would work for a lot of people with all of the caveats and problems that has that, okay, now it's a Google Doc and not something that you really own. But yeah, now I'm thinking I don't like Google sites. When Carlson picked up Domain of One Zone, one of the things that we did was we moved not all, but a lot of the WordPress sites that we had in WordPress multi-site to Domain of One Zone and that worked because WordPress is open source and you can install it on Cpanel and things like that. But we also got people going, oh, will you bring in my Google site site? And we had to go- Not even Google can do that. They have two copies. No. If you want to set up WordPress and copy paste all of your content and rebuild your site and make it look nice, then you can do that. But we're not Google site drives me crazy. As far as I can tell, especially Google site drives me crazy, as a person who's been doing more with flattening and archiving recently too, as far as I can tell, the new Google sites is intentionally designed so that it could never be archived because the way it loads in content just doesn't, it's like a hack. It's bizarre. So yeah, I wish, I mean, I think the experience of using Google sites is not bad, but as a citizen of the web, I get so mad at it. Well, we're a couple minutes early, or a couple minutes over, sorry, not early, but as always, I really appreciate the conversation and everyone showing up. So we'll have, we'll have recording up soon and hope to see everyone at the, in the Discord or at the Flux course, so. Bye.