Small Pieces Still Loosely Joined, Integrated, Federated

The web gray heads will remember the rallying cries of SPLJ from David Weinberger’s book championing a unified theory of the web being a shift away from enterprise platforms and tools made for us to ones we all stitched together ourselves. How far as edtech strayed from this ideal?

Alas, I am not here to wax nostalgic, but to look forward, and remind you that all remains possible and even more now in 2025. The basic glue of RSS still not only works, but works fantastically, reliably– the next time someone quips that “Google killed RSS” or “RSS is dead” ask them how they automatically get new podcast episodes. The feed reader that so many have tossed for the drip feed of social media remains the one technology that is not lying about saving time.

I will show you how a mixture of old school social bookmarking drives automated cross connecting separate spaces, using the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress to federate to Mastodon (e.g. for the DS106 Daily Create as well as the OEGlobal Voices podcast), posting to and from Discourse forums. I will show how I make use of Integrator services, just the simple IFTTT, but also Make and Zapier as a no-code route for joining small web pieces.

Raise your rally flag for small pieces loosely joined.