I’ve wanted @mention/Webmention support on Hypothes.is for a long time. I had URL hacked my way into a solution a while back but never wrote about it.
I was reminded today that one can subscribe to an RSS/ATOM feed of annotations on their site (or any site for that matter) using the feed format https://hypothes.is/stream.rss?wildcard_uri=https://www.example.org/* and replacing the example.org URL with the desired one. Nota bene: the /* at the end makes the query a wildcard to find anything on your site. If you leave it off you’ll only get the annotations on your homepage.
If you’re using Hypothes.is in an off-label use case as a commenting system on your website, this can be invaluable. I recall Tom Critchlow and CJ Eller trying this out in the past.
To go a step further, one can also use this scheme to get a feed of @mentions of their Hypothes.is username too. If I’m not mistaken, based on some preliminary tests, this method should work for finding username both with and without the @ being included.
These are a few interesting tidbits for those who are using Hypothes.is not only for the social annotation functionality, but as a social media site or dovetailing it with their own websites and related workflows.
The IndieWeb is a toolkit. A collection of ideas, technologies, and services that can help you solve some particularly tricky problems. If you're wanting to get involved in the IndieWeb, the first question you need to ask is: what problem do I have?
For the masses, we’re going to need more providers who are ethically working toward IndieWeb as a Service (IaaS). Companies willing to allow people to be the customer rather than exploiting them as the product.
Of course, if you’re running WithKnown, you’re already there with all the trimmings. If you’re on WordPress or Drupal with your own domain, you’re already there too, but you can add lots of additional interactive functionality with a few plugins. There are dozens of available platforms that will do the job and each one has a multitude of options and configurations.
All that choice comes with a spectacular amount of complexity. Hopefully some clever companies will narrow down some popular options and make them available to large numbers of people for a reasonable price.
(Personally I wonder what things might look like if your online social IndieWeb infrastructure was run by your local public library or your local newspaper?)
The community has and continues to do a lot of incredibly difficult work to make dramatically different websites be able to interoperate and communicate with one another. Many of the roads are well worn now, we need others to come and pave them to be as equitable and easy-to-use for the rest of humankind.
All this said, of course we still also have additional complex problems like privacy, safety, anti-bullying, etc. to conquer so that we don’t end up with a decentralized version of Facebook and continue repeating the same problems of the past.
Many of us are content with small, organic growth. Massive overnight growth is often a myth, and if it does happen, you can have unmanageable and unanticipated problems seen in situations like the “eternal September“.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
I'm p sure a little RSS reader that has a little comment box and a “like” button under each item that send little web mentions would be the perfect set up for a wholesome, self-owned network
— I was raised by a cup of internet (@DavidWolfpaw) February 25, 2021
Can’t wait to try out Velox as an IndieWeb friendly theme!
Listened toEpisode 2 - Zines! by This Is Altadena from This is Altadena (Podomatic)
What is a zine? The name "zine" is a shortened version of "fanzine" which is a portmanteau of the word "fan" and "magazine". Most people that think of zines think of punk rock and the punk community, where the DIY (do-it-yourself) ethos is more than just a slogan, it's a way of life. In truth, "zines" have been around for centuries, going back to Thomas Paine's famous pamphlet "Common Sense". These homemade publications can be about anything their creators desire - music, art, politics, or something personal. Chloe Cavelier sits down for a conversation with library staffer and resident zine expert Alice Wynne to discuss the past, present and future of zines and Altadena Public Library's very own zine collection. Later Chloe speaks with Bob Lucas Branch manager Diana Wong to discuss Bob's new and improved demonstration garden. Subscribe to This Is Altadena at any and all of the places you get podcasts including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
I got a copy of the library’s zine last Friday. This is such a cool project. They’ve reached out to me briefly as a steward of a Little Free Library, but I’ll have to stop in and pick up a few copies to have in my library.
I’d like to join the next session to see what I might add to help people bring their zines into online spaces as well. I see a lot of overlap here with some of my work with the IndieWeb.
Corporate social platforms extract a heavy and often hidden price from teachers and students. Lack of privacy, encouraging abuse, context collapse, and surveillance capitalism are a few of the harms we face. They also expose us to a wider variety of publics than we would choose in which to practice and share our learning.
We must take back ownership and control of our content and interactions online (Çelik 2019). This hands-on workshop will help those with domains of their own expand them into healthier and safer communication tools.
This session will be code-free. It’s presented at the level of a person who is able to log into their site, write a post, and publish it.
We’ll outline and install WordPress* plugins (IndieWeb 2021) to allow participants to make the open web their learning network. Participants can use their extended domains in classrooms, with personal and professional learning networks, or in their daily lives. We encourage more technical participants to partner with others for help. Community-based support is available following the conference.
When we’re done, participants should be able to:
– subscribe to each others’ websites;
– read subscriptions in a social reader (Parecki 2018);
– reply to posts by publishing on their domains using open standards (Parecki 2017a);
– send notifications to each other (Aldrich 2018) using open standards (Parecki 2017b).
The session will end with questions and discussion. We’ll focus on how to use our domains in ethical ways that enable an atmosphere of care. We want to ensure this system and its use don’t re-create the toxicity of the platforms it replaces.
Participants will leave with resources for how they might extend their independent network. Our domains can also interact with other social media using these new tools.
* This session will focus on WordPress as an example platform. We’ll provide resources for people using other content management systems. Everyone should be able to follow along, ask questions, and take part, either in real time or with follow up after-the-fact.
To the extent possible, the materials, resources, and video generated will be shared on the author’s domain with a CC0 license. Syndicated copies will be available on the IndieWeb.org community wiki and the Internet Archive.
To the extent possible under law, Chris Aldrich has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to A Twitter of Our Own: A workshop proposal for the Domains Track of OERxDomains21 Conference in April 2021. This work is published from: United States.
I’ve been thinking about an broad idea for over two years and have distilled it down to this important and pressing question for society:
Online - 21-22 April 2021
Organised by the Association for Learning Technology and partnership with Reclaim Hosting’s Domains Conference, this special edition of the much loved event is the 12th annual conference for Open Education research, practice and policy. We are proud to incorporate a special strand hosted by the Domains Conference - bringing our two communities closer together in 2021.
OER AND Domains?! I’m totally in for this.
Anyone want to collaborate on a slate of IndieWeb-related topics to submit for this? Proposals are due in late January and it would be interesting to have a handful of IndieWeb tech and some of our experiments discussed at this conference.
I'd be happy to discuss cognitive stuff any day. Also very interested in the idea of linking digital gardens - have been discussing some prototype with @JoelChan86 using webmentions, and actually tried building something 7 yrs ago based on PhD students reading identical papers.
We totally need to schedule a follow up to the IndieWeb Gardens & Streams session from early 2020 to discuss the efflorescence of platforms in this space. I’d love to see more of them supporting Webmention for garden-to-garden interactions.
My poor little website passed 23,000 comments/replies/reactions yesterday. This is in tremendous part due to webmentions and the ability to collect the conversation about my content across social spaces.
I’m wondering when comments will pass the number of posts (currently 27,648)?
It’s metacrap–I know, I know–but I’ve been thinking about easy ways to use Open Graph Protocol meta data to add contextual Twitter cards to some of my content when syndicating posts to Twitter. My goal is to leverage the speed and ease-of-use of Micropub clients while doing as little as possible manually, but achieving as much parity between posts on multiple sites.
I’m particularly keen to do this to syndicate/share more of the articles I read and post about on my site without adding additional manual work on my own part.
Outline of Some Resources
The Post Kinds plugin for WordPress parses URLs for me and pulls in data to create reply contexts for a variety of posts like bookmarks, reads, watches, listens, etc. Since Post Kinds doesn’t display featured images (yet), I’ve also been using the External Featured Image plugin to display the featured images from the original to add to the reply context of my posts as well.
In addition to all these I’ve been using the All in One SEO plugin to easily add an SEO layer to posts without having to do much thinking about it. AIOSEO recently upgraded their UI and features in the last year, and yesterday I upgraded to the newest v4.0+. One of the new features it’s got is the ability to add default fields or pull in pre-existing custom fields to output OGP meta data.
Start of a Solution
So I got the idea that since Post Kinds and External Featured Image plugins are pulling in and displaying the sort of data I’d like to show in Twitter cards, I figured why not use them? While metacrap is a DRY violation, the fact that it’s automated for me and is based on data I’m actually showing visually on my website makes it feel much less dirty. It also has the benefit that it helps make some of my syndicated content look and feel on Twitter, more like it does on my website. This is also a problem since Twitter hampers how much data I can syndicate in a single post.
I’ve still got some issues about how to deal with the Post Kinds data, but after a bit of digging around, I discovered the image URL for External Featured Image plugin is hiding in the _dcms_eufi_img field. So I can make the default Twitter settings in AIOSEO pull the external image by setting Default Post Image Source to Image from Custom Field and set the Post Custom Field Name to _dcms_eufi_img.
Since a lot of my posts are reads, bookmarks, etc., this works well, but I can easily override the settings for articles or other custom posts which I make less frequently.
Hopefully I can figure out the settings for Post Kinds to get the rest of the default fields to map across. I’m happy to hear ideas on what field names I’d need to use to get the Post Kinds Name and Summary/Quote fields to map over for the og:title and og:description respectively. Ideally I can manage to get it done without needing to get a subscription to the pro version of AIOSEO which also has support for custom taxonomies which is how Post Kinds works.
Since my theme has relatively solid microformats support, and I have plugin infrastructure to allow easy syndication from my website to Twitter through micropub clients, this last bit for creating Twitter reply contexts helps close some of the loop for me in my syndication workflow while keeping as much context across platforms.
Example
Here’s a visual example of a native post on my site and the corresponding syndicated copy on Twitter. There are some differences, mostly because I don’t have as much control of the appearance on Twitter as I do on my own site, but they’re about as close as I can get them with minimal work.
I just ran across Contently, a silo-based service specifically made for journalists, freelancers, and writers to aggregate their content into a portfolio as well as to help them with their careers. An intriguing concept that can use some additional UI research for integrating into an author platform.
I wish the indieweb had more content that wasn’t about the indieweb
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
The hard part of making cool websites isn’t the tech, it’s the content! Of course I fall into the trap of writing a new ssg every six months as well because it’s easier and safer than writing or drawing or playing music or something interesting and exciting
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
If possible, attempt to read the word “content” in these posts without the unsavory connotations with which the last couple of years have saddled that word
— simulacrum party (@simulacrumparty) December 19, 2020
The point of having a website is putting something interesting on it right?
The IndieWeb wiki does tend toward the technical, but many of us are working toward remedying that. For those who haven’t found them yet, there are some pages around a variety of topics like poetry, crafts, hobbies, music, writing, journalism, education, and a variety of other businesses and use cases. How we don’t have one on art (yet) is beyond me… Hopefully these might help us begin to use our sites instead of incessantly building them, though this can be a happy hobby if you enjoy it.
I have come to suspect that slowly redesigning your website (forever) provides almost exactly the same kind of light absorption & calm satisfaction as knitting or embroidery
— Robin Sloan (@robinsloan) December 13, 2020
If you’ve got an IndieWeb friendly site, why not use it to interact with others? Help aggregate people around other things in which you’re interested. One might interact with the micro.blog community around any of their tagmoji. (I’m personally hoping there will be one for the stationery, pen, and typewriter crowd.) One might also find some community on any of the various stubs (or by creating new stubs) on IndieWeb.xyz.
For more practical advice and to borrow a proverbial page from the movie Finding Forrester, perhaps reading others’ words and borrowing or replying to them may also help you along. I find that starting and ending everything from my own website means that I’m never at a loss for content to consume or create. Just start a conversation, even if it’s just with yourself. This started out as a short reply, but grew into a longer post aggregating various ideas I’ve had banging around my head this month.
Rachel Syme recently made me think about “old school blogs”, and as interesting as her question was, I would recommend against getting stuck in that framing which can be a trap that limits your creativity. It’s your site, do what you want with it. Don’t make it a single topic. That will make it feel like work to use it.
If you started a niche blog (and I mean old school geocities/Wordpress/blogger blog, not a newsletter) right now, what would it be about? Don’t overthink it.
— rachel syme (@rachsyme) December 8, 2020
The ever-wise Charlie Owen reminds of this and suggests a solution for others reading our content.
Having said that, I’m gonna update my website soon two that you can filter the RSS feed by tag, eliminating shit you don’t wanna see.
I can do that because I own my website, unlike on this hellhole where we’re beholden to twitters awfulness. #indieweb
— Charlie Don’t Surf (@sonniesedge) December 19, 2020
Of course if building websites is your passion and you want to make a new one on a new platform every week, that’s cool too. Perhaps you could document the continuing refreshing of the process each time and that could be your content?
Murray Adcock
Andy Bell
