An edit (AKA diff, change) is a special type of reply that indicates a set of suggested changes to the post it is replying to. A collection of (presumably related) suggested edits in open source is often called a patch or pull request.
In part out of laziness and lack of an easy way to implement a workflow and mark up, I will post content (bookmarks or notes) to my website and (pseudo-)syndicate all or portions of it to the IndieWeb wiki as either edits or as links to See Also sections of pages. “Pseudo” because the content isn’t always a 1 to 1 match.
To document the change, I’ll include a syndication link on my website to the permalink for the edit on the wiki. Having subscribed to feeds of wiki changes/edits before the user interfaces are far less than useful/ideal, so having a better contextual bookmark on my website makes more sense for readers while somewhat reformatting things for the readers of the wiki (a related but somewhat different context) works better for that, but still provides bi-directional links and references.
Perhaps I’ll create an edit post kind in the future? For the moment I’ll just post some (like this one) as an annotation? Small steps…
In addition to some other useful upgrades and bug fixes, the big new feature this release adds is excellent syndication support for Micro.blog.
While many people use RSS feeds, JSONfeed, or other plugin methods for syndicating their WordPress website’s content to Micro.blog, this plugin now provides for a per-post decision about exactly what content to send to Micro.blog. It also naturally provides a syndication link from your site back to the Micro.blog post. To my knowledge no other method provides this syndication link functionality.
As I suspect many may already be aware, if your site supports Webmention (typically done with the Webmention and Semantic-linkbacks plugins), then Micro.blog will notify your site with replies and comments to your post as they appear on Micro.blog. This provides one the ability to do two-way communication between the two platforms.
Set up and configuration for Micro.Blog syndication
If you don’t already have it, install the plugin and activate it, otherwise update it within your site’s administrative interface.
Add your Micro.blog account username to your user profile on your WordPress site. This is typically found at /wp-admin/profile.php. In my case I simply added c to the field labeled Micro.blog username.
Enter your Micro.blog username (not the full URL) in the appropriate field and save your profile.
Adjust your WordPress Syndication Links settings page (typically found at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links) to include Micro.blog by using the appropriate checkbox. Be sure to save the setting.
I obviously have a lot of syndication targets. Micro.blog is always one of them. If you’re also using Micropub clients like Quill that support the feature, you can choose Micro.blog as a syndication target in those interfaces.
Remove, if necessary, any of the RSS, JSON, or other syndication feeds from your Micro.blog account so you’re not accidentally duplicating the syndication.
Add the JSONfeed URL from the bottom of the Syndication Links plugin settings page into your list of feeds at https://micro.blog/account/feeds.
Create a post, select Micro.blog as an endpoint in the relevant meta-box, and publish your post.
Once published, your post will ping Micro.blog’s server to indicate the new content which will then be displayed in your timeline. The Syndication Links plugin will then find the permalink URL of your post on Micro.blog and display it on your post (as per your settings) along with any other syndicated copies. This notification process is roughly real time, but may take a minute or two for your post to display and the syndication link to appear on your site based on the processing times on the relevant servers.
Here’s an example of what Syndication Links looks like on a post recently syndicated to Micro.blog. This example was syndicated to both Micro.blog and Twitter.
As an added bonus, Syndication Links plugin will also find the syndication links from Micro.blog in your current feed and add those to your original posts.
If you have any questions, need clarifications, or find bugs with regard to your set up, you can file issues for the plugin on GitHub.
This morning I set up an IndieWeb Magazine on Flipboard. While it is “yet another silo”, it’s one that I can easily and automatically syndicate content from my site (and others) into. I’ve already seeded it with some recent posts for those who’d like to start reading.
Until more tools and platforms like micro.blog exist to make it easy for other Generation 2+ people to join the IndieWeb, I thought it made at least some sense to have some additional outreach locations to let them know about what the community is doing in a silo that they may be using.
While I’ll syndicate articles of a general and how-to nature there, I’m likely to stay away from posting anything too developer-centric.
If you’d like to contribute to the magazine there are methods for syndicating content into it via POSSE, which I’d recommend if you’re able to do so. Otherwise they have some useful bookmarklets, browser extensions, and other manual methods that you can use to add articles to the magazine. Click this link to join as a contributor. For additional information see also Flipboard Tools.
As part of my evolving IndieWeb experience of owning all of my own internet-based social data, last year I wanted a “quick and dirty” method for owning and displaying all of my Twitter activity before embarking on a more comprehensive method of owning all of my past tweets in a much more comprehensive way. I expected even a quick method to be far harder than the ten minute operation it turned out to be.
Back in early October, I had also replied to a great post by Jay Rosen when he redesigned his own blog PressThink. I saw a brief response from him on Twitter at the time, but didn’t get a notification from him about his slightly longer reply, which I just saw over the weekend:
I don’t like the way tweets displayed on a blog look. I am fussy about that. Would I like to have a searchable archive in my possession so I don’t lose it all when Twitter goes under? I would.
So, for his benefit as well as others who are interested in the ability to do something like this quickly and easily, I thought I’d write up a short outline of what I’d originally done so that without spending all the time I did, others can do the same or something similar depending on their needs.
Near the bottom of the page you should see a “Your Twitter archive” section
See the Request your archive button? Click it.
After a (hopefully) short wait, a link to your archive should show up in your email associated with the account. Download it.
Congratulations, you now own all of your tweets to date!
You can open the index.html file in the downloaded folder to view all of your tweets locally on your own computer with your browser.
Click the button to request your Twitter archive be emailed to your account email address.
Display your Twitter archive
The best part is now that you’ve got all your tweets downloaded, you can almost immediately serve them from your own server without any real modification.
Simply create an (accessible–use the same permissions as other equivalent files) folder named twitter on your server and upload all the files from your download into it. You’re done. It’s really that simple!
In my case I created a subfolder within my WordPress installation, named it “twitter”, and uploaded the files. Once this is done, you should be able to go to the URL http://example.com/twitter and view them.
The twitter folder in my WordPress directory with all of the downloaded files.
Alternately one could set up a subdomain (eg. http://twitter.example.com) and serve them from there as well. You can change the URL by changing the name of the folder. As an alternate example, Kevin Marks uses the following: http://www.kevinmarks.com/tweets/.
When you’re done, don’t forget to set up a link from your website (perhaps in the main menu?) so that others can benefit from your public archive. Mine is tucked in under the “Blog” heading in my main menu.
The user interface of your Twitter archive.
Caveats
Unfortunately, while you’ve now got a great little archive with some reasonable UI and even some very powerful search capabilities, most of the links on the archive direct back to the originals on Twitter and don’t provide direct permalinks within the archive. It’s also a static archive, so you’ve periodically got to re-download and upload to keep your archive current. I currently only update mine on a quarterly basis, at least until I build a more comprehensive set up.
Current Set Up
At the moment, I’m directly owning all of my Twitter activity on my social stream site, which is powered by Known, using the POSSE philosophy (Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). There I compose and publish all of my Tweets and re-Tweets (and even some likes) directly and then I syndicate them to Twitter in real-time. I’ve also built and documented a workflow for more quickly tweeting using my cell phone in combination with either the Twitter mobile app or their mobile site. (Longer posts here on BoffoSocko are also automatically syndicated (originally with JetPack and currently with Social Network Auto-Poster, which provides a lot more customization) to Twitter, so I also own all of that content directly too.)
You’ll notice that on both sites, when content has been syndicated, there’s a section at the bottom of the original posts that indicates to which services the content was syndicated along with permalinks to those posts. I’m using David Shanske’s excellent Syndication Links plugin to do this.
The syndication block that follows posts on my site so one can easily/quickly see alternate versions in other social silos.
Ultimately, I’d like to polish the workflow a bit and post all of my shorter Twitter-like status updates from BoffoSocko.com, but I still have some work to do to better differentiate content so that my shorter form content doesn’t muddy up or distract from the people who prefer to follow my longer-form content. Based on his comment, I also suspect that this is the same semantic issue/problem that Jay Rosen has. I’d also like to provide separate feeds/subscription options so that people can more easily consume as much or as little content from my site as they’d like.
Next steps
For those who are interested in more comprehensive solutions for owning and displaying their Tweets, I’ve looked into a few WordPress-based possibilities and like the following two which could also be potentially modified for custom display:
Ozh’ Tweet Archiver (Separately available on GitHub with scripts [.csv, JSON] for importing more than 3200 Tweets limit imposed by Twitter API; it also has a custom “Twitter” theme available; for additional support and instructions there are additional blogposts available. [1][2]
Both of these not only allow you to own and display your tweets, but they also automatically import new Tweets using the current API. Keep in mind that they use the PESOS philosophy (Post Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site) which is less robust than POSSE, mentioned above.
I’ll note that a tremendous number of WordPress-based plugins within the plugin repository that are Twitter related predate some of the major changes in Twitter’s API in the last year or two and thus no longer work and are no longer supported, so keep this in mind if you attempt to explore other solutions.
Those with more coding ability or wokring on other CMS platforms may appreciate a larger collection of thought and notes on the Twitter wiki page created by the IndieWeb Community. [3]
Thoughts?
Do you own your own Tweets (either before or after-the-fact)? How did you do it? Feel free to tell others about your methods in the comments, or better yet, write them on your own site and send this post a webmention (see details below).
The IndieWeb movement is coding, collecting, and disseminating UI, UX, methods, and opensource code to help all netizens to better control their online identities, communicate, and connect themselves to others at IndieWeb.org. We warmly invite you to join us.
