When Hossein Derakshan came back on-line after a 6 year absence in 2015, he was shocked to find how the once free flowing web ended up in walled gardens and silo’s. Musing about what he presented at State of the Net earlier this month, I came across Frank Meeuwsen’s postingabout the IndieWeb Summit starting today in Portland (livestream on YT). That send me off on a short trip around the IndieWeb and related topics.
Looks like you’ve also managed to add webmentions and a few other goodies too! Your theme also reminds me that I want to finish up on my microformats v2 fork of the Twenty Twelve theme.
The other two are where the open web is severely lacking: The seamless integration into one user interface of both reading and writing, making it very easy to respond to others that way, or add to the river of content.
As I read this I can’t help thinking about my friend Aaron Davis (h) a member of the IndieWeb, whose domain name is appropriately https://readwriterespond.com/.
Thank you Chris, for the feedback. Yes, I added WebMention earlier this year, as a replacement for pingback. Just yesterday came across Webmention.io to deal with legacy pingbacks, so will add that too.
I’ve been reading some of your recent thoughts on webmentions and getting some of the IndieWeb pieces working. It looks like you’ve got a grasp on some of the microformats pieces now and likely realize that your reply to me would have shown up as a “plain vanilla” mention rather than a reply because you didn’t wrap the link to my post with the microformat “u-in-reply-to”. Fortunately with recent changes, I can easily go in and edit the webmention to change it from
mentiontoreply, so it shows up on my site properly.Because some on WordPress can find that manually adding the proper microformats for particular posts can be trying at best, David Shanske has built a plugin called Post Kinds that allows you to easier post a variety of post types which are similar to those in many social media sites. In addition to adding the proper microformats for individual posts the plugin also does a good job of parsing websites to provide you (and your readers) with some contextual indication of what is being discussed within your post.
If it helps, about a month ago I made a two hour video walk through and set up of a WordPress install for IndieWeb use with some reasonable overview of what is happening in the process and how some of the plugins interact.
It looks like you’ve made some significant progress in puzzling out many of the pieces. Thanks for taking them for a spin. Many of us are continually trying to make them easier to use and more self-explanatory along the way. We’re happy to help if you have questions or problems.