You can tweet to my website.
One of my favorite things about the indieweb is how much less time I spend on silo sites like Facebook and Twitter. In particular, one of my favorite things is not only having the ability to receive comments from many of these sites back on the original post on my own site, but to have the ability for people to @mention me from Twitter to my own site.
Yes, you heard that right: if you @mention me in a tweet, I’ll receive it on my own website. And my site will also send me the notification, so I can turn off all the silly and distracting notifications Twitter had been sending me.
Below, I’ll detail how I set it up using WordPress, though the details below can certainly be done using other CMSes and platforms.
rel=“me”
On my homepage, using a text widget, I’ve got an h-card with my photo, some basic information about me, and links to various other sites that relate to me and what I’m doing online.
One of these is a link to my Twitter account (see screenshot). On that link I’m using the XFN’s rel=“me” on the link to indicate that this particular link is a profile equivalence of my identity on the web. It essentially says, “this Twitter account is mine and also represents me on the web.”
Here’s a simplified version of what my code looks like:
<a href="https://twitter.com/chrisaldrich" rel=“me">@chrisaldrich</a>
If you prefer to have an invisible link on your site that does the same thing you could alternately use:
<link href="https://twitter.com/twitterhandle" rel=“me">
Similarly Twitter also supports rel=“me”, so all I need to do there is to edit my profile and enter my website www.boffosocko.com into the “website” field and save it. Now my Twitter profile page indicates, this website belongs to this Twitter account. If you look at the source of the page when it’s done, you’ll see the following:
<a class="u-textUserColor" title="http://www.boffosocko.com" href="https://t.co/AbnYvNUOcy" target="_blank" rel="me nofollow noopener">boffosocko.com</a>
Though it’s a bit more complicated than what’s on my site, it’s the rel=“me” that’s the important part for our purposes.
Now there are links on both sites that indicate reciprocally that each is related to the other as versions of me on the internet. The only way they could point at each other this way is because I have some degree of ownership of both pages. I own my own website outright, and I have access to my profile page on Twitter because I have an account there. (Incidentally, Kevin Marks has built a tool for distributed identity verification based on the reciprocal rel=“me” concept.)
Webmention Plugin
Next I downloaded and installed the Webmention plugin for WordPress. From the plugin interface, I just did a quick search, clicked install, then clicked “activate.” It’s really that easy.
It’s easy, but what does it do?
Webmention is an open internet protocol (recommended by the W3C) that allows any website to send and receive the equivalent of @mentions on the internet. Unlike sites like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Google+, Instagram, etc. these mentions aren’t stuck within their own ecosystems, but actually work across website borders anywhere on the web that supports them.
The other small difference with webmention is instead of using one’s username (like @chrisaldrich in my case on Twitter) as a trigger, the trigger becomes the permalink URL you’re mentioning. In my case you can webmention either my domain name http://www.boffosocko.com or any other URL on my site. If you really wanted to, you could target even some of the smallest pieces of content on my website–including individual paragraphs, sentences, or even small sentence fragments–using fragmentions, but that’s something for another time.
Don’t use WordPress?
See if there’s webmention support for your CMS, or ask your CMS provider or community, system administrator, or favorite web developer to add it to your site based on the specification. While it’s nice to support both outgoing and incoming webmentions, for the use we’re outlining here, we only need to support incoming webmentions.
Connect Brid.gy
Sadly, I’ll report that Twitter does not support webmentions (yet?!) otherwise we could probably stop here and everything would work like magic. But they do have an open API right? “But wait a second now…” you say, “I don’t know code. I’m not a developer.”
Worry not, some brilliant engineers have created a bootstrap called Brid.gy that (among many other useful and brilliant things) forces silos like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Flickr to send webmentions for you until they decide to support them natively. Better, it’s a free service, though you could donate to the ASPCA or EFF in their name to pay it forward.
So swing your way over to http://brid.gy and under “Get started” click on the Twitter logo. Use OAuth to log into Twitter and authorize the app. You’ll be redirected back to Brid.gy which will then ensure that your website and Twitter each have appropriate and requisite rel=“me”s on your links. You can then enable Brid.gy to “listen for responses.”
Now whenever anyone @mentions you (public tweets only) on Twitter, Brid.gy will be watching your account and will automatically format and send a webmention to your website on Twitter’s behalf.
On WordPress your site can send you simple email notifications by changing your settings in the Settings >> Discussion dashboard, typically at http://www.exampl.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php. One can certainly use other plugins to arrange for different types of notifications as well.
Exotic Webmentions
A bonus step for those who want more control!
In the grand scheme of things webmentions are typically targeted at specific pages or posts on your site. General @mentions on Twitter not related to specific content on your site will usually be sent to your homepage. Over time, this may begin to get a bit overwhelming and may take your page longer to load as a result. An example of this is Kevin Marks’ site which has hundreds and hundreds of webmentions on it. What to do if this isn’t your preference?
In my case, I thought it would be wise to collect all these unspecific or general mentions on a special page on my site. I decided to call it “Mentions” and created a page at http://boffosocko.com/mentions/.
Update
While the code snippet just below should work, as of the 3.3.0 update of the Webmention Plugin, there is now an automatic setting at /wp-admin/options-discussion.php that will allow you to use a dropdown UI box to choose the page on your site to which homepage webmentions will be directed.
Then I inserted a small piece of custom code in the functions.php file of my site’s (child) theme like the following:
// For allowing exotic webmentions on homepages and archive pages
function handle_exotic_webmentions($id, $target) {
// If $id is homepage, reset to mentions page
if ($id == 55669927) {
return 55672667;
}
// do nothing if id is set
if ($id) {
return $id;
}
// return "default" id if plugin can't find a post/page
return 55672667;
}
add_filter("webmention_post_id", "handle_exotic_webmentions", 10, 2);
This simple filter for the WordPress Webmention plugin essentially looks at incoming webmentions and if they’re for a specific page/post, they get sent to that page/post. If they’re sent to either my homepage or aren’t directed to a particular page, then they get redirected to my /mentions/ page.
In my case above, my homepage has an id of 55669927 and my mentions page has an id of 55672667, you should change your numbers to the appropriate ids on your own site when using the code above. (Hint: these id numbers can usually be quickly found by hovering over the “edit” links typically found on such pages and posts and relying on the browser to show where they resolve.)
Tip of the Iceberg
Naturally this is only the tip of the indieweb iceberg. The indieweb movement is MUCH more than just this tiny, but useful, piece of functionality. There’s so much more you can do with not only Webmentions and even Brid.gy functionality. If you’ve come this far and are interested in more of how you can better own your online identity, connect to others, and own your data. Visit the Indieweb.org wiki homepage or try out their getting started page.
If you’re on WordPress, there’s some additional step-by-step instructions: Getting Started on WordPress.
likes @Mentions from Twitter to My Website
@Mentions from Twitter to My Website Cool description of @mentions, and a nice tip on setting up a special mentions page in WordPress.
@Mentions from Twitter to My Website
April 16th, 2017
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a WordPress site.
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a WordPress site.
@Mentions from Twitter to My Website
In reply to @Mentions from Twitter to My Website: Chris, thanks for the detailed instructions. I had most of this set up. Just had to add a page and that bit of code for exotic mentions. Only thing I can’t figure is the ID of my home page so I left that bit out for now.
There are many methods for doing this, a couple are outlined here:https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/display-wordpress-post-page-ids/
Brilliant article, Chris! Had to tweak the code slightly to auto fetch my homepage Id, but worked like a charm! Also looking forward to your ‘read’ plugin!
Responding to @Mentions from Twitter to My Website
Twitter
Working my way through Chris Aldrich’s guide to bringing Twitter @mentions home, and while the WP site is not responding, this #WithKnown site is. But, in the absence of a /mentions page, where on Earth are those backlinks going? And can I display them?
Bye-bye, Google+ — but what next? by John Carlos Baez(Google+)
Mastodon
I’ve been watching or on Mastodon since about October of last year. While it does have some interesting/useful features that differentiate it from the rest of the corporate silos, in some senses it’s got worse problems.
Average users are still putting blind trust in the (mostly/completely anonymous) administrators of the individual federated versions–and these are even more likely than well financed corporations, which have some reputation to maintain, to do questionable things with your data. These individuals are also taking on the financial burden of hosting and storing all their users’ data in addition to continually building and maintaining the platform itself. As a result, you’re setting yourself up for potential disappointment yet again, unless you’re going to set up and run your own Mastodon instance. (Especially since there’s no contract for them to maintain their instance on your behalf–they could literally turn it off tomorrow if they liked. Here’s link to a great article comparing and contrasting how well or poorly some communities are run to give you an idea of how drastically different they can be.)
Micro.blog
Since January I’ve also been following a project called Micro.blog which is expected to be released in Beta next Monday, April 24th to its Kickstarter backers. It’s an inexpensive paid service that will provide a domain and hosting to those who don’t want to manage those things themselves. Most importantly, it is built on open protocols with a decentralized architecture which will give you greater control of both your identity online, but also ownership of your data. Because of its structure, it’ll also be inter-operable with other platforms like WordPress. In some senses, it takes the Mastodon federation structure and flattens it down an addition level to the point that it’s much easier for the average user to have their own personal version of the service so they’re more self-reliant in many respects and far less reliant on corporate entities. Since it’s a paid service, the level of service will likely be better than the free services offered by silos like G+ where the user (and their data) ultimately become the product.
Indieweb
This said, I still believe a more future-proof long-term alternative is to have your own domain and post your content on it first. This will still allow you to syndicate it out to one or more social media silos to reach individual audiences who still choose to use them. Because it’s your own site, you’re far less constrained by what an outside corporation might dictate, and you have a lot more freedom and control.
John, since I’d mentioned the indieweb movement to you last, it’s come a long way, particularly on CMS platforms like WordPress and Known which both support the W3C spec for webmentions (you can now use your own website to @mention people all across the web who also support the spec), and can use Brid.gy to backfeed all the interactions (comments, likes) you have on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Flickr back to your original post so it appears the entire conversation around your content is on your own site. Last week I actually wrote a small piece about setting up functionality for having @mentions from Twitter come back to my own website, which is just a small piece of this type of functionality.
When you (or others) have time to chat about potentially implementing something like this, I’m happy to walk you though a few demos and help you set things up to better support all this new open technology.
If anyone wants to test-drive WithKnown, I’ve set up an open instance at http://known.boffosocko.com where you can register and try out some of the basic functionality. I haven’t completely finished setting up all the configuration options for the major social media sites including a new one for Mastodon, but the settings should allow one to OAuth with Twitter to cross-post content there and then one can register (in the settings) with Brid.gy to backfeed replies and likes. I’ll also recommend installing the browser bookmarklet to make interacting with it easier for bookmarking and replying to things.
Related
Author: Chris Aldrich
I’m a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
Replied to Bye-bye, Google+ — but what next? by John Carlos Baez (Google+)
Mastodon
I’ve been watching or on Mastodon since about October of last year. While it does have some interesting/useful features that differentiate it from the rest of the corporate silos, in some senses it’s got worse problems.
Average users are still putting blind trust in the (mostly/completely anonymous) administrators of the individual federated versions–and these are even more likely than well financed corporations, which have some reputation to maintain, to do questionable things with your data. These individuals are also taking on the financial burden of hosting and storing all their users’ data in addition to continually building and maintaining the platform itself. As a result, you’re setting yourself up for potential disappointment yet again, unless you’re going to set up and run your own Mastodon instance. (Especially since there’s no contract for them to maintain their instance on your behalf–they could literally turn it off tomorrow if they liked. Here’s link to a great article comparing and contrasting how well or poorly some communities are run to give you an idea of how drastically different they can be.)
Micro.blog
Since January I’ve also been following a project called Micro.blog which is expected to be released in Beta next Monday, April 24th to its Kickstarter backers. It’s an inexpensive paid service that will provide a domain and hosting to those who don’t want to manage those things themselves. Most importantly, it is built on open protocols with a decentralized architecture which will give you greater control of both your identity online, but also ownership of your data. Because of its structure, it’ll also be inter-operable with other platforms like WordPress. In some senses, it takes the Mastodon federation structure and flattens it down an addition level to the point that it’s much easier for the average user to have their own personal version of the service so they’re more self-reliant in many respects and far less reliant on corporate entities. Since it’s a paid service, the level of service will likely be better than the free services offered by silos like G+ where the user (and their data) ultimately become the product.
Indieweb
This said, I still believe a more future-proof long-term alternative is to have your own domain and post your content on it first. This will still allow you to syndicate it out to one or more social media silos to reach individual audiences who still choose to use them. Because it’s your own site, you’re far less constrained by what an outside corporation might dictate, and you have a lot more freedom and control.
John, since I’d mentioned the indieweb movement to you last, it’s come a long way, particularly on CMS platforms like WordPress and Known which both support the W3C spec for webmentions (you can now use your own website to @mention people all across the web who also support the spec), and can use Brid.gy to backfeed all the interactions (comments, likes) you have on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Flickr back to your original post so it appears the entire conversation around your content is on your own site. Last week I actually wrote a small piece about setting up functionality for having @mentions from Twitter come back to my own website, which is just a small piece of this type of functionality.
When you (or others) have time to chat about potentially implementing something like this, I’m happy to walk you though a few demos and help you set things up to better support all this new open technology.
If anyone wants to test-drive WithKnown, I’ve set up an open instance at http://known.boffosocko.com where you can register and try out some of the basic functionality. I haven’t completely finished setting up all the configuration options for the major social media sites including a new one for Mastodon, but the settings should allow one to OAuth with Twitter to cross-post content there and then one can register (in the settings) with Brid.gy to backfeed replies and likes. I’ll also recommend installing the browser bookmarklet to make interacting with it easier for bookmarking and replying to things.
Syndicated copies to: WordPress
Syndicated copies:
Early in 2017, I consciously decided to consolidate all my social accounts and use my website as the main ‘vehicle’ for online interactions. While exploring options, I chanced upon the Indieweb philosopy which seemed to resonate quite a lot with my thoughts. Over the next few weeks I started taking steps to eventually migrate my publishing platform to a more robust framework. Below is a rough outline of what I have in place so far. I’ll try to keep this article live with updates as I work on enhancements.
Core framework:
This website is built with WordPress and is currently hosted on DigitalOcean [DO] fired-up by ServerPilot. I upgraded to DO early in 2017 from a shared server and I’m enjoying the tremendous benefits that comes with it. More on that is here.
Interaction with Silos:
While I’m not quite an online dweller on social networks, I do post once a while on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Over the last few years, I’ve syndicated my posts to these networks on and off using various plugins. But none of those had features to fetch the interactions or responses back to my portal. Something that I really ‘craved’ for. While looking for better alternatives, I chanced upon the concept of webmentions. Meandering through the gamut of options, I eventually found a few tweaks that would work best for my publishing workflow.
The first step was to get my wordpress install talk indieweb. The WP starter page and the Advanced WP setup page on the Indieweb wiki were good places to get the wheels rolling and setup a base framework. Since I predominantly publish or draft articles while commuting, I was exploring options to post from a mobile device (iPhone). I lost my trust on the official wordpress app after it lost a couple of my drafts. And then I chanced upon Workflow which looked reliable and seemed to fit all my needs. Outlined below is a rough note on how I interact with the three silos using the workflow app on my iPhone and some custom functions in my WP install.
The general idea was to collect, process and publish. Based on the desired action (Post a status or activity update, Bookmark a link, Reply to a post and Publish a photo) I designed workflows to process the information and push it over to the WordPress action. One minor issue was that the post-kinds plugin sets up and uses a wordpress taxonomy called ‘kind’ to hand-shake with the micropub server. Since the WP action in Workflow did not accept entries for taxonomies, I had to create a ‘latch’ to identify the posts that I create via my workflows and map them to the corresponding ‘kind’ taxonomy. A few trials and I figured I could use a ‘custom field’ in the workflow app with some custom code in my functions plugin to map this out for me. The other minor tweak was to make my posts microformat compliant for the webmentions to work their magic. To get this working all I had to do was to feed the requisite html corresponding to that specific action into markdown just before passing it to the wordpress action in workflow. Once that was done posting from my phone became a lot more easier (and fun!).
I chose to rely on a couple of slick plugins to post to the silos. SNAP helps me push notes out to twitter and I use a tag ‘trigger’ in my workflow to decide which posts I do not want publish on to twitter. I also use some custom code to add webactions to my twitter specific posts. And then followed Chris Aldrich’s tweak to collect twitter mentions on a specific page. To handle Instagram, I use the Dsgnwrks Instagram Importer to consume photos (and their reactions). Ownyourgram for some reason wasn’t pushing photos to my server.
Intents and desires:
While the current publishing workflow works like a charm, I do need to do a few more tweaks to make this a more seamless process. Few things to note in no particular order:
‘Sync’ desktop and mobile workflows. Currently I’ve different workflows while posting from these platforms. I use the Indieweb Pressthis bookmarklet while on the desktop and the ‘workflow’ app while posting from my iPhone.
Design a platform independent workflow. With workflow’s recent acquisition by apple, I’m skeptical of the outcome and need to come up with something that’s more resilient. Shouldn’t be dang difficult to spin a quick PWA or tweak some of the nifty tools that folks have already built.
Make my PeriRSS feed reader ‘talk’ to my portal. Basically enhance it with webactions.
Talk better with microformats.
Publish my code / workflows so others can easily tweak or adapt them for their use.
like reply repost
like reply repost
Syndicated copies:
Early in 2017, I consciously decided to consolidate all my social accounts and use my website as the main ‘vehicle’ for online interactions. While exploring options, I chanced upon the Indieweb philosopy which seemed to resonate quite a lot with my thoughts. Over the next few weeks I started taking steps to eventually migrate my publishing platform to a more robust framework. Below is a rough outline of what I have in place so far. I’ll try to keep this article live with updates as I work on enhancements.
Core framework:
This website is built with WordPress and is currently hosted on DigitalOcean [DO] fired-up by ServerPilot. I upgraded to DO early in 2017 from a shared server and I’m enjoying the tremendous benefits that comes with it. More on that is here.
Interaction with Silos:
While I’m not quite an online dweller on social networks, I do post once a while on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Over the last few years, I’ve syndicated my posts to these networks on and off using various plugins. But none of those had features to fetch the interactions or responses back to my portal. Something that I really ‘craved’ for. While looking for better alternatives, I chanced upon the concept of webmentions. Meandering through the gamut of options, I eventually found a few tweaks that would work best for my publishing workflow.
The first step was to get my wordpress install talk indieweb. The WP starter page and the Advanced WP setup page on the Indieweb wiki were good places to get the wheels rolling and setup a base framework. Since I predominantly publish or draft articles while commuting, I was exploring options to post from a mobile device (iPhone). I lost my trust on the official wordpress app after it lost a couple of my drafts. And then I chanced upon Workflow which looked reliable and seemed to fit all my needs. Outlined below is a rough note on how I interact with the three silos using the workflow app on my iPhone and some custom functions in my WP install.
The general idea was to collect, process and publish. Based on the desired action (Post a status or activity update, Bookmark a link, Reply to a post and Publish a photo) I designed workflows to process the information and push it over to the WordPress action. One minor issue was that the post-kinds plugin sets up and uses a wordpress taxonomy called ‘kind’ to hand-shake with the micropub server. Since the WP action in Workflow did not accept entries for taxonomies, I had to create a ‘latch’ to identify the posts that I create via my workflows and map them to the corresponding ‘kind’ taxonomy. A few trials and I figured I could use a ‘custom field’ in the workflow app with some custom code in my functions plugin to map this out for me. The other minor tweak was to make my posts microformat compliant for the webmentions to work their magic. To get this working all I had to do was to feed the requisite html corresponding to that specific action into markdown just before passing it to the wordpress action in workflow. Once that was done posting from my phone became a lot more easier (and fun!).
I chose to rely on a couple of slick plugins to post to the silos. SNAP helps me push notes out to twitter and I use a tag ‘trigger’ in my workflow to decide which posts I do not want publish on to twitter. I also use some custom code to add webactions to my twitter specific posts. And then followed Chris Aldrich’s tweak to collect twitter mentions on a specific page. To handle Instagram, I use the Dsgnwrks Instagram Importer to consume photos (and their reactions). Ownyourgram for some reason wasn’t pushing photos to my server.
Intents and desires:
While the current publishing workflow works like a charm, I do need to do a few more tweaks to make this a more seamless process. Few things to note in no particular order:
‘Sync’ desktop and mobile workflows. Currently I’ve different workflows while posting from these platforms. I use the Indieweb Pressthis bookmarklet while on the desktop and the ‘workflow’ app while posting from my iPhone.
Design a platform independent workflow. With workflow’s recent acquisition by apple, I’m skeptical of the outcome and need to come up with something that’s more resilient. Shouldn’t be dang difficult to spin a quick PWA or tweak some of the nifty tools that folks have already built.
Make my PeriRSS feed reader ‘talk’ to my portal. Basically enhance it with webactions.
Talk better with microformats.
Publish my code / workflows so others can easily tweak or adapt them for their use.
like reply repost
like reply repost
Syndicated copies:
An outline of how I used Indieweb technology to let Twitter users send @mentions to me on my own website.You can tweet to my website.One of my favorite things about the indieweb is how much less time I spend on silo sites like Facebook and Twitter. In particular, one of my favorite things is not only having the ability to receive comments from many of these sites back on the original post on my own site, but to have the ability for people to @mention me from Twitter to my own site.Yes, you heard that right: if you @mention me in a tweet, I’ll receive it on my own website. And my site will also send me the notification, so I can turn off all the silly and distracting notifications Twitter had been sending me.Below, I’ll detail how I set it up using WordPress, though the details below can certainly be done using other CMSes and platforms.rel=”me”On my homepage, using a text widget, I’ve got an h-card with my photo, some basic information about me, and links to various other sites that relate to me and what I’m doing online.One of these is a link to my Twitter account (see screenshot). On that link I’m using the XFN’s rel=”me” on the link to indicate that this particular link is a profile equivalence of my identity on the web. It essentially says, “this Twitter account is mine and also represents me on the web.”Here’s a simplified version of what my code looks like:<a href=”https://twitter.com/chrisaldrich” rel=”me”>@chrisaldrich</a>If you prefer to have an invisible link on your site that does the same thing you could alternately use:<link href=”https://twitter.com/twitterhandle” rel=”me”>Similarly Twitter also supports rel=”me”, so all I need to do there is to edit my profile and enter my website http://www.boffosocko.com into the “website” field and save it. Now my Twitter profile page indicates, this website belongs to this Twitter account. If you look at the source of the page when it’s done, you’ll see the following:<a class=”u-textUserColor” title=”http://www.boffosocko.com” href=”https://t.co/AbnYvNUOcy” target=”_blank” rel=”me nofollow noopener”>boffosocko.com</a>Though it’s a bit more complicated than what’s on my site, it’s the rel=”me” that’s the important part for our purposes.Now there are links on both sites that indicate reciprocally that each is related to the other as versions of me on the internet. The only way they could point at each other this way is because I have some degree of ownership of both pages. I own my own website outright, and I have access to my profile page on Twitter because I have an account there. (Incidentally, Kevin Marks has built a tool for distributed identity verification based on the reciprocal rel=”me” concept.)Webmention PluginNext I downloaded and installed the Webmention plugin for WordPress. From the plugin interface, I just did a quick search, clicked install, then clicked “activate.” It’s really that easy.It’s easy, but what does it do?Webmention is an open internet protocol (recommended by the W3C) that allows any website to send and receive the equivalent of @mentions on the internet. Unlike sites like Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Google+, Instagram, etc. these mentions aren’t stuck within their own ecosystems, but actually work across website borders anywhere on the web that supports them.The other small difference with webmention is instead of using one’s username (like @chrisaldrich in my case on Twitter) as a trigger, the trigger becomes the permalink URL you’re mentioning. In my case you can webmention either my domain name http://www.boffosocko.com or any other URL on my site. If you really wanted to, you could target even some of the smallest pieces of content on my website–including individual paragraphs, sentences, or even small sentence fragments–using fragmentions, but that’s something for another time.Don’t use WordPress?See if there’s webmention support for your CMS, or ask your CMS provider or community, system administrator, or favorite web developer to add it to your site based on the specification. While it’s nice to support both outgoing and incoming webmentions, for the use we’re outlining here, we only need to support incoming webmentions.Connect Brid.gySadly, I’ll report that Twitter does not support webmentions (yet?!) otherwise we could probably stop here and everything would work like magic. But they do have an open API right? “But wait a second now…” you say, “I don’t know code. I’m not a developer.”Worry not, some brilliant engineers have created a bootstrap called Brid.gy that (among many other useful and brilliant things) forces silos like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, and Flickr to send webmentions for you until they decide to support them natively. Better, it’s a free service, though you could donate to the ASPCA or EFF in their name to pay it forward.So swing your way over to http://brid.gy and under “Get started” click on the Twitter logo. Use OAuth to log into Twitter and authorize the app. You’ll be redirected back to Brid.gy which will then ensure that your website and Twitter each have appropriate and requisite rel=”me”s on your links. You can then enable Brid.gy to “listen for responses.”Now whenever anyone @mentions you (public tweets only) on Twitter, Brid.gy will be watching your account and will automatically format and send a webmention to your website on Twitter’s behalf.On WordPress your site can send you simple email notifications by changing your settings in the Settings >> Discussion dashboard, typically at http://www.exampl.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php. One can certainly use other plugins to arrange for different types of notifications as well.Exotic WebmentionsA bonus step for those who want more control!In the grand scheme of things webmentions are typically targeted at specific pages or posts on your site. General @mentions on Twitter not related to specific content on your site will usually be sent to your homepage. Over time, this may begin to get a bit overwhelming and may take your page longer to load as a result. An example of this is Kevin Marks’ site which has hundreds and hundreds of webmentions on it. What to do if this isn’t your preference?In my case, I thought it would be wise to collect all these unspecific or general mentions on a special page on my site. I decided to call it “Mentions” and created a page at http://boffosocko.com/mentions/.Then I inserted a small piece of custom code in the functions.php file of my site’s (child) theme like the following:// For allowing exotic webmentions on homepages and archive pagesfunction handle_exotic_webmentions($id, $target) {// If $id is homepage, reset to mentions pageif ($id == 55669927) {return 55672667;}// do nothing if id is setif ($id) {return $id;}// return “default” id if plugin can’t find a post/pagereturn 55672667;}add_filter(“webmention_post_id”, “handle_exotic_webmentions”, 10, 2);This simple filter for the WordPress Webmention plugin essentially looks at incoming webmentions and if they’re for a specific page/post, they get sent to that page/post. If they’re sent to either my homepage or aren’t directed to a particular page, then they get redirected to my /mentions/ page.In my case above, my homepage has an id of 55669927 and my mentions page has an id of 55672667, you should change your numbers to the appropriate ids on your own site when using the code above. (Hint: these id numbers can usually be quickly found by hovering over the “edit” links typically found on such pages and posts and relying on the browser to show where they resolve.)Tip of the IcebergNaturally this is only the tip of the indieweb iceberg. The indieweb movement is MUCH more than just this tiny, but useful, piece of functionality. There’s so much more you can do with not only Webmentions and even Brid.gy functionality. If you’ve come this far and are interested in more of how you can better own your online identity, connect to others, and own your data. Visit the Indieweb.org wiki homepage or try out their getting started page.If you’re on WordPress, there’s some additional step-by-step instructions: Getting Started on WordPress.http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/15/mentions-from-twitter-to-my-website/
Pingbacks: hiding in plain sight by Ian Guest (Marginal Notes)
I’m finding your short study and thoughts on pingbacks while I was thinking about Webmentions (and a particular issue that Aaron Davis was having with them) after having spent a chunk of the day remotely following the Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
It’s made me realize that one of the bigger values of the iteration that Webmentions has over its predecessor pingbacks and trackbacks is that at least a snapshot of the content has captured on the receiving site. As you’ve noted that while the receiving site has the scant data from the pingback, there’s not much to look at in general and even less when the sending site has disappeared from the web. In the case of Webmentions, even if the sending site has disappeared from the web, the receiving site can still potentially display more of that missing content if it wishes. Within the WordPress ecosystem simple mentions only show the indication that the article was mentioned, but hiding within the actual database on the back end is a copy of the post itself. With a few quick changes to make the “mention” into a “reply” the content of the original post can be quickly uncovered/recovered. (I do wonder a bit if you cross-referenced the Internet Archive or other sources in your search to attempt to recover those lost links.)
I will admit that I recall the Webmention spec allowing a site to modify and/or update its replies/webmentions, but in practice I’m not sure how many sites actually implement this functionality, so from an archiveal standpoint it’s probably pretty solid/stable at the moment.
Separately, I also find myself looking at your small example and how you’ve expanded it out a level or two within your network to see how it spread. This reminds me of Ryan Barrrett’s work from earlier this year on the IndieWeb network in creating the Indie Map tool which he used to show the interconnections between over three thousand people (or their websites) using links like Webmentions. Depending on your broader study, it might make an interesting example to look at and/or perhaps some code to extend?
With particular regard to your paragraph under “Wait! Aren’t you researching Twitter?” I thought I’d point you to a hybrid approach of melding some of Twitter and older/traditional blogs together. I personally post everything to my own website first and syndicate it to Twitter and then backfeed all of the replies, comments, and reactions via Brid.gy using webmentions. While there aren’t a lot of users on the internet doing something like this at the moment, it may provide a very different microcosm for you to take a look at. I’ve even patched together a means to allow people to @mention me on Twitter that sends the data to my personal website as a means of communication.
After a bit of poking around, I was also glad to find a fellow netizen who is also consciously using their website as a commonplace book of sorts.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
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I’m finding your short study and thoughts on pingbacks while I was thinking about Webmentions (and a particular issue that Aaron Davis was having with them) after having spent a chunk of the day remotely following the Dodging the Memory Hole 2017 conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
It’s made me realize that one of the bigger values of the iteration that Webmentions has over its predecessor pingbacks and trackbacks is that at least a snapshot of the content has captured on the receiving site. As you’ve noted that while the receiving site has the scant data from the pingback, there’s not much to look at in general and even less when the sending site has disappeared from the web. In the case of Webmentions, even if the sending site has disappeared from the web, the receiving site can still potentially display more of that missing content if it wishes. Within the WordPress ecosystem simple mentions only show the indication that the article was mentioned, but hiding within the actual database on the back end is a copy of the post itself. With a few quick changes to make the “mention” into a “reply” the content of the original post can be quickly uncovered/recovered. (I do wonder a bit if you cross-referenced the Internet Archive or other sources in your search to attempt to recover those lost links.)
I will admit that I recall the Webmention spec allowing a site to modify and/or update its replies/webmentions, but in practice I’m not sure how many sites actually implement this functionality, so from an archiveal standpoint it’s probably pretty solid/stable at the moment.
Separately, I also find myself looking at your small example and how you’ve expanded it out a level or two within your network to see how it spread. This reminds me of Ryan Barrrett’s work from earlier this year on the IndieWeb network in creating the Indie Map tool which he used to show the interconnections between over three thousand people (or their websites) using links like Webmentions. Depending on your broader study, it might make an interesting example to look at and/or perhaps some code to extend?
With particular regard to your paragraph under “Wait! Aren’t you researching Twitter?” I thought I’d point you to a hybrid approach of melding some of Twitter and older/traditional blogs together. I personally post everything to my own website first and syndicate it to Twitter and then backfeed all of the replies, comments, and reactions via Brid.gy using webmentions. While there aren’t a lot of users on the internet doing something like this at the moment, it may provide a very different microcosm for you to take a look at. I’ve even patched together a means to allow people to @mention me on Twitter that sends the data to my personal website as a means of communication.
After a bit of poking around, I was also glad to find a fellow netizen who is also consciously using their website as a commonplace book of sorts.
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It’s not the bigger Twitter quit I’ve been debating for a while, but I’ve just taken the intermediate step of removing the Twitter app and its notifications from my phone. I’m going to be using a handful of feed readers to more purposefully consume curated content in the coming year.
I’ll still syndicate content into Twitter and can use my own website to receive @mentions, comments, and likes, so I won’t really be going anywhere. But I will be leaving behind a lot of the curation, maintenance, poor trained/engrained behaviors, as well as a lot of content that really isn’t doing me much good.
In particular, leaving behind a lot of the toxic content makes me feel lighter and happier already.
h/t Richard MacManus and Jonathan LaCour in the past few hours among many, many others in the near past.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
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I don’t post “notes” to Facebook often, but I’d noticed a few weeks ago that several pieces I’d published like this a while back were apparently unpublished by the platform. I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Facebook about them being unpublished or having issues, so I didn’t realize the problem until I randomly stumbled back across my notes page.
They did have a piece of UI to indicate that I wanted to contest and republish them, so I clicked on it. Apparently this puts these notes into some type of limbo “review” process, but it’s been a few weeks now and there’s no response about either of them. They’re still both sitting unseen in my dashboard with sad notes above them saying:
There is no real indication if they’ll ever come back online. Currently my only option is to delete them. There’s also no indication, clear or otherwise, of which community standard they may have violated.
I can’t imagine how either of the posts may have run afoul of their community standards, or why “notes” in particular seem to be more prone to this sort of censorship in comparison with typical status updates. I’m curious if others have had this same experience?
We’re reviewing these posts against our Community Standards.This is just another excellent example of why one shouldn’t trust third parties over which you have no control to publish your content on the web. Fortunately I’ve got my own website with the original versions of these posts [1][2] that are freely readable. If you’ve experienced this or other pernicious problems in social media, I recommend you take a look at the helpful IndieWeb community which has some excellent ideas and lots of help for re-exerting control over your online presence.
Notes Functionality
Notes on Facebook were an early 2009 era attempt for Facebook to have more blog-like content and included a rather clean posting interface, not un-reminiscent of Medium’s interface, that also allowed one to include images and even hyperlinks into pages.
The note post type has long since fallen by the wayside and I rarely, if ever, come across people using it anymore in the wild despite the fact that it’s a richer experience than traditional status updates. I suspect the Facebook black box algorithm doesn’t encourage its use. I might posit that it’s not encouraged as unlike most Facebook functionality, hyperlinks in notes on desktop browsers physically take one out of the Facebook experience and into new windows!
The majority of notes about me are spammy chain mail posts like “25 Random Things About Me”, which also helpfully included written instructions for how to actually use notes.
Most of my published notes were experiments in syndicating my content from my own blog to Facebook (via POSSE). At the time, the engagement didn’t seem much different than posting raw text as status updates, so I abandoned it. Perhaps I’ll try again with this post to see what happens? I did rather like the ability to actually have links to content and other resources in my posts there.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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I don’t post “notes” to Facebook often, but I’d noticed a few weeks ago that several pieces I’d published like this a while back were apparently unpublished by the platform. I hadn’t seen or heard anything from Facebook about them being unpublished or having issues, so I didn’t realize the problem until I randomly stumbled back across my notes page.
They did have a piece of UI to indicate that I wanted to contest and republish them, so I clicked on it. Apparently this puts these notes into some type of limbo “review” process, but it’s been a few weeks now and there’s no response about either of them. They’re still both sitting unseen in my dashboard with sad notes above them saying:
There is no real indication if they’ll ever come back online. Currently my only option is to delete them. There’s also no indication, clear or otherwise, of which community standard they may have violated.
I can’t imagine how either of the posts may have run afoul of their community standards, or why “notes” in particular seem to be more prone to this sort of censorship in comparison with typical status updates. I’m curious if others have had this same experience?
We’re reviewing these posts against our Community Standards.
This is just another excellent example of why one shouldn’t trust third parties over which you have no control to publish your content on the web. Fortunately I’ve got my own website with the original versions of these posts [1][2] that are freely readable. If you’ve experienced this or other pernicious problems in social media, I recommend you take a look at the helpful IndieWeb community which has some excellent ideas and lots of help for re-exerting control over your online presence.
Notes Functionality
Notes on Facebook were an early 2009 era attempt for Facebook to have more blog-like content and included a rather clean posting interface, not un-reminiscent of Medium’s interface, that also allowed one to include images and even hyperlinks into pages.
The note post type has long since fallen by the wayside and I rarely, if ever, come across people using it anymore in the wild despite the fact that it’s a richer experience than traditional status updates. I suspect the Facebook black box algorithm doesn’t encourage its use. I might posit that it’s not encouraged as unlike most Facebook functionality, hyperlinks in notes on desktop browsers physically take one out of the Facebook experience and into new windows!
The majority of notes about me are spammy chain mail posts like “25 Random Things About Me”, which also helpfully included written instructions for how to actually use notes.
Most of my published notes were experiments in syndicating my content from my own blog to Facebook (via POSSE). At the time, the engagement didn’t seem much different than posting raw text as status updates, so I abandoned it. Perhaps I’ll try again with this post to see what happens? I did rather like the ability to actually have links to content and other resources in my posts there.
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@dajbelshaw Noterlive is primarily a posting interface to Twitter (mostly for livetweeting though it could continue to add some of that functionality in the future) that gives you back your data. You would still want to pay some attention to your account for side conversations and replies as well as other conference activity. In many cases I use it primarily as a note taking tool to keep content for archival purposes after the fact.
For additional two-way interaction you could use WordPress plugins like Webmention and Brid.gy Publish to get the comments, likes, etc. back to your website. I’ve outlined a piece of that type of workflow here: http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/15/mentions-from-twitter-to-my-website/ (This might also be useful to you if you’ve left Twitter, but still want to know when you’re being mentioned without needing to log into Twitter to check it.)
Otherwise, you might also consider going full IndieWeb, in which case you could post everything directly from your website and syndicate to Twitter and then getting all the responses directly back to your site. Some of this depends on how much work you want to do to get the moving pieces working properly. You’ll notice this is roughly what I’m doing on my own site with you now. Example: http://stream.boffosocko.com/2018/dajbelshaw-in-future-if-you-prefer-to-keep-your-content
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Replied to Why Not Blog? by Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)
I really like where you’re coming from on so many fronts here (and on your site in general). Thanks for such a great post on a Friday afternoon. A lot of what you’re saying echos the ideas of many old school bloggers who use their blogs as “thought spaces“. They write, take comments, iterate, hone, and eventually come up with stronger thoughts and theses. Because of the place in which they’re writing, the ideas slowly percolate and grow over a continuum of time rather than spring full-formed seemingly from the head of Zeus the way many books would typically appear to the untrained eye. I’ve not quite seen a finely coalesced version of this idea though I’ve seen many dance around it obliquely. The most common name I’ve seen is that of a “thought space” or sometimes the phrase “thinking out loud”, which I notice you’ve done at least once. In some sense, due to its public nature, it seems like an ever-evolving conversation in a public commons. Your broader idea and blogging experience really make a natural progression for using a website to slowly brew a book.
My favorite incarnation of the idea is that blogs or personal websites are a digital and public shared commonplace book. Commonplaces go back to the 15th century and even certainly earlier, but I like to think of websites as very tech-forward versions of the commonplaces kept by our forebears.
I’ve seen a few educators like Aaron Davis and Ian O’Byrne take to the concept of a commonplace, though both have primary websites for writing and broader synthesis and secondary sites for collecting and annotating the web. I tend to aggregate everything (though not always published publicly) on my primary site after having spent some time trying not to inundate email subscribers as you’ve done.
There’s also a growing movement, primarily in higher education, known as A Domain of One’s Own or in shortened versions as either “Domains” or even #DoOO which is a digital take on the Virgina Woolf quote “Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days.”
There are a growing number of educators, researchers, and technologists reshaping how the web is used which makes keeping an online commonplace much easier. In particular, we’re all chasing a lot of what you’re after as well:
To me, this sounds like one of the major pillars of the IndieWeb movement which is taking control of the web back from corporate social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et. al. Through odd serendipity, I came across your micro.blog account this morning which led me to your website. A lot of the underpinnings of micro.blog are informed by the IndieWeb movement. In many subtle ways, I might suspect the two had a lot of influence on your particular choice of WordPress theme.
Tonight I’ve also seen your reply to Dan Cohen’s question:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I had previously replied to Dan’s original question, but somehow missed your side thread at the time. I suspect you didn’t see our branch of the conversation either.
Interestingly, your presumption that the replies/notifications stay within their own domains isn’t necessarily fait accompli, at least not any more. There’s a new web specification in the past few years called Webmention that allows notifications and replies to cross website boundaries unlike Twitter @mentions which are permanently stuck within Twitter. Interestingly, because of the way you’ve set up your WordPress website to dovetail with micro.blog you’re almost 90 percent of the way to supporting it easily. If you add and slightly configure the Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins, the asides and other content you’re syndicating into micro.blog will automatically collect the related conversation around them back to your own posts thus allowing you to have a copy of your content on your own website as well as the surrounding conversation, which is no longer as diffuse as you imagined it needed to be. Here’s an example from earlier this evening where I posted to my site and your response (and another) on micro.blog came back to me. (Sadly there’s a Gravatar glitch preventing the avatars from displaying properly, but hopefully I’ll solve that shortly.)
This same sort of thing can be done with Twitter including native threading and @mentions, if done properly, by leveraging the free Brid.gy service to force Twitter to send your site webmentions on your behalf. (Of course this means you might need to syndicate your content to Twitter in a slightly different manner than having micro.blog do on your behalf, but there are multiple ways of doing this.)
I also notice that you’ve taken to posting copies of your tweeted versions at the top of your comments sections. There’s a related IndieWeb plugin called Syndication Links that is made specifically to keep a running list of the places to which you’ve syndicated your content. This plugin may solve a specific need for you in addition to the fact that it dovetails well with Brid.gy to make sure your posts get the appropriate comments back via webmention.
I’m happy to help walk you through setting up some of the additional IndieWeb tech for your WordPress website if you’re interested. I suspect that having the ability to use your website as a true online hub in addition to doing cross website conversations is what you’ve been dreaming about, possibly without knowing it. Pretty soon you’ll be aggregating and owning all of your digital breadcrumbs to compile at a later date into posts and eventually articles, monographs, and books.
Perhaps more importantly, there’s a growing group of us in the education/research fields that are continually experimenting and building new functionalities for online (and specifically academic) communication. I and a plethora of others would welcome you to join us on the wiki, in chat, or even at upcoming online or in-person events.
In any case, thanks for sharing your work and your thoughts with the world. I wish more academics were doing what you are doing online–we’d all be so much richer for it. I know this has been long and is a potential rabbithole you may disappear into, so thank you for the generosity of your attention.
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This Article was mentioned on kimberlyhirsh.com
Replied to a tweet by Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass) (Twitter)
This was an inspiring question to me, so I thought I’d spitball a few ideas for doing this in an IndieWeb way. Personal events like this are an excellent use case with respect to personal websites!
I had thought of doing some of this ages ago to own this sort of great nostalgic data on my own website. Sadly I couldn’t get it up due to other work commitments. I now really wish I had.
At the moment, the only direct wedding-related page on the IndieWeb wiki is a snarky definition for engagement. When I’m done, I’ll create a stub for wedding with the following brainstorm.
Of course if you’re looking for general inspiration, the prior artwork of Pinterest, various registries, and other wedding sites will naturally be useful. But I think there are a number of IndieWeb building blocks that can be leveraged to accomplish a lot of what these sites do.
I think if I were doing it today, I’d meld some of the work from bookmarks and photos to create a Pinterest-esqe post type (probably by extending the Post Kinds Plugin, maybe with a custom wedding type with a custom display).
There is lots of prior art on the registries front on the wiki under wish or wish lists. To goose things a bit, I’d definitely add referral links from places like Amazon.com, etc. and use the money either to make a donation to a charity in honor of the event or to defray honeymoon costs. If you want to encourage direct donations or funding mechanisms, there’s also some interesting prior art at the payment wiki page.
Now that the IndieWeb has some very solid support for events and RSVPs, I might even try doing an online wedding invitation and collecting RSVPs. I’ve recently seen Jacky Alcine’s website leveraging CommentPara.de to connect to Quill for comments/replies, and it would be cool to get Quill to also add RSVP functionality to allow those without their own websites to RSVP using the non-anonymous functionality in CommentPara.de. I suspect that since many people have trouble getting RSVP functionality into their sites, that Aaron Parecki might be Tom Sawyered into providing that functionality as a quick and easy win for the broader community. (I’m not immediately aware of any other Micropub tools that do RSVPs though I may be wrong.) Of course potentially expanding it with meal options would be a lovely bonus so people can choose meat/vegetarian/other options. I’ll also mention that gRegor Morill has been tinkering with RSVPs using Webmention on Twitter. As a minimal fallback, you can also allow people to respond directly in the built-in commenting system in WordPress, but if you’re going to do it…)
The biggest piece that would be fun to figure out would be to see how to get things set up to receive social media related wedding photos of the pre-, during, and post-event stuff back to my website from friends and family. Using Brid.gy with Twitter to pull back photos that tag your twitter user name is fairly straightforward, but I’m not sure that services like Flickr or Instagram may work as easily. This may require some thought and programming, but being able to backfeed social photos to your site or even providing friends and family a serviceable photo upload functionality to your site so you can document and keep photos from the event in real-time would be a cool win and could likely be a great feature for any event-related website to have built in or widgetized. It’s usually weeks or months for paid wedding photos to show up and it’s generally a big hassle finding all the online social photos, much less keeping copies of them, so having this could be both fun and useful, particularly for looking back on the event years later.
Naturally, being a WordPress person, I’m sure there may be some interesting prior art in the plugin repository, but I think it would be far cooler to IndieWebify this sort of data and functionality for the broader world.
Depending on the wedding date, this general topic (even for other non-wedding related events) would be an awesome one to look at and explore during an upcoming IndieWebCamp. Perhaps someone is up for it at San Francisco this weekend? (I suspect they’ll have some good live-streaming options for those who aren’t local.)
Given her weddings/events background and web-based work, perhaps Liz Coopersmith (t) might be someone interesting to collaborate with on something like this?
Similarly, I recall a great presentation by Brianna Privett at WordCamp US 2017 called The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse. She may have some useful tidbits and advice in there as well.
Featured photo: Wedding cake. flickr photo by THEMACGIRL* shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
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not working yet.
currently furiously reading through this gem i found, by
@ChrisAldrich
https://boffosocko.com/2017/04/15/mentions-from-twitter-to-my-website/