In the long run and for easier mass adoption, I’m hoping Manton can figure out how to parse RSS feeds in a simpler way so that users don’t need to do serious gymnastics to import their microblog posts from other sources. I’d imagine it’s far easier for him to adapt to the masses than for the masses to adapt to micro.blog. At the very worst, he could create a checkbox on the RSS import feeds to indicate which feeds are status updates and which aren’t and this would quickly solve the problem for the average user as most CMSes allow users to define custom feeds based on content type.
While there are a number of people doing things from simply adding date/time stamps (which micro.blog ignores) to functions.php tweaks to to custom plugins, some of which I’ve tried, I thought I’d come up with my own solution which has helped to kill two proverbial birds with one stone. (Note: I’ve listed some of these others on the Indieweb wiki page for micro.blog.)
The other day, I’d had a short conversation about the issue in the Indieweb chat with several people and decided I’d just give up on having titles in notes altogether. Most people contemplating the problem have an issue doing this because it makes it more difficult to sort and find their content within their admin UI dashboard which is primarily keyed off of the_title() within WordPress. I share their pain in this regard, but I’ve also been experiencing another admin UI issue because I’ve got a handful of plugins which have added a dozen or so additional columns to my posts list. As a result the titles in my list are literally about four characters wide and stretch down the page while knucklehead metadata like categories needlessly eat up massively wide columns just for fun. Apparently plugins aren’t very mindful of how much space they decide to take up in the UI, and WordPress core doesn’t enforce reasonable limits on these things.
So my solution to both problems? If found a handly little plugin called Admin Columns with over 80,000 users and which seems to be frequently updated that allows one to have greater simple control over all of the columnar UI interfaces within their sites.
In just a few minutes, I was able to quickly get rid of several columns of data I’ve never cared about, expand the title column to a reasonable percentage of the space so it’s readable, and tweak all the other columns to better values. Even better, I was able to add the slug name of posts into the UI just after the title columns, so I can leave status update titles empty, but still have a field by which I can see at least some idea of what a particular post was about.
Test from Quill quill.p3k.io to micro.blog.
I’m IndieWebbifying my blog. This is a test of a reply.
Title-less Status Updates for Micro.blog by Chris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)
I’m IndieWebifying my blog. This is a test of a reply.
@ChrisAldrich Out of curiosity, have you ever come across a plugin or function which automatically creates WordPress slugs for title-less posts, by trimming the_content? I am trying to avoid having to remember to manually create slugs.
boffosocko.com/2017/05/04/tit…
None that I’m aware of. It would be a nice feature. There are some micropub clients out there that will let you set the slug. Maybe that’s the easy answer?
Syndicated copies:
I can set the slug manually I was just trying to find a way not to have to, because every little bit I can shave off my cognitive load is one more bit of sanity. Haven’t found anything yet, though. Thanks!
David Shanske has done something like this before in Post Kinds Plugin within the admin UI. Perhaps he could add a similar option based on the first n letters of the_body or the_excerpt to set the permalink?
Syndicated copies:
@dshanske has done something like this before in Post Kinds Plugin within the admin UI. Perhaps he could add a similar option based on the first n letters of the_body or the_excerpt to set the permalink?
boffosocko.com/2017/05/04/tit…
Wow. This was a lot of work to support Manton’s shortsighted decisions.