For a post today, I wrote on my own site and syndicated it to Twitter and got a reply back via webmention through Brid.gy. This process happens for me almost every day, and this all by itself feels magical. The real magic however, and I don’t think I’ve done this before or seen it done, was that I replied to the backfed comment on my site inline and manually syndicated to Twitter using a permalink of the form http://www.example.com/standard-permalink-structure/?replytocom=57527#respond, where 57527 is the particular comment ID for my inline comment. (This comment ID can typically be found by hovering over the “Reply” or “Comment” button on one’s WordPress website in most browsers.)
When a reply to my second syndicated Twitter post came in, Brid.gy properly sent it as a comment to my comment AND nested it properly!
I’ve now got a nested copy of the conversation on my site that is identical to the one on Twitter.
I suspect that by carefully choosing the URL structure you syndicate to Twitter, you’ll allow yourself more control over how backfed comments from Brid.gy nest (or don’t) in your response section on your site.
Perhaps even more powerfully, non-WordPress-based websites could also use these permalinks structures for composing their replies to WordPress sites to have their replies nest properly too. I think I’ve seen Aaron Parecki do this in the wild.
Since the WordPress Webmention plugin now includes functionality for sending webmentions directly from the comments section, I’ll have to double check that the microformats on my comments are properly marked up to see if I can start leveraging Brid.gy publish functionality to send threaded replies to Twitter automatically. Or perhaps work on something that will allow automatic replies via Twitter API. Hmmm…
Despite the fact that this could all be a bit more automated, the fact that one can easily do threaded replies between WordPress and Twitter makes me quite happy.
Thread onward!
For more on my IndieWeb explorations with Twitter, see my IndieWeb Research page.
Replied to a tweet by William Ian O’Byrne (Twitter)
Ian, thanks for putting together all of these examples. I think my preference is for option three which provides the most context and seems easiest to read and understand. I like the way you’ve incorporated the blue arrow, which makes semantic sense as well.
I’m sure I’ve seen other versions, but Jon Udell has at least one example of some annotations on his own website like yours too.
When it comes to the “conversation” side of what you’re looking for, I think the biggest piece you’re really missing and which some on the Hypothes.is side (except perhaps for Nate who may have a stronger grasp of their value after the recent IndiewWeb Summit) are apt to miss is that Hypothes.is doesn’t support sending webmentions. Presently you’re putting your data out there in a one-sided manner and Hypothes.is isn’t pushing the other side or any of the follow up back to you. As a result it’s operating as a social silo the same way that sites like Facebook and Twitter do. Based on their GitHub repository, I know that they’ve considered webmentions in the past, but apparently it got put on a back burner and hasn’t been revisited.
Ideally they’d want to have webmentions work in two places. It would be great if they could send webmentions of annotations/highlights to the original page itself, so that the site owner is aware that their content is being marked up or used in this manner. This also means that Hypothes.is could be used as a full-blown and simple commenting system as well so that those who aren’t using their own sites to write replies could use Hypothes.is as an alternative. The second thing it might want to do is to send webmentions, particularly for replies, to the original page as well as to any URLs that are mentioned in the comment thread which appears on Hypothes.is. This would mean that you’d want to add the permalink to your post back to the copy you put on Hypothes.is so that you and your website stay in the loop on the entirety of the conversation. In many senses, this is just mirroring what is going on in threaded Twitter conversations that get mirrored back to your WordPress website. [I’ll note that I think I’ve got the last of the moving pieces for this Twitter/WordPress workflow properly linked up in the past week.] Since Twitter doesn’t support webmentions itself, Brid.gy is handling that part for you, but in Hypothes.is’ case you don’t have any of the details coming back for allowing you to display the discussion on your site except by doing so manually. Doing it manually for extended conversations is going to become painful over time.
From an IndieWeb perspective, you’re primarily implementing a PESOS workflow in which you post first on Hypothes.is and then send a copy of it to your own website. Naturally it would be better if you were posting all the details on your own website and using the Hypothes.is API to syndicate your copy there for additional public conversation outside of the readership of your website. Unfortunately building the infrastructure to do this is obviously quite daunting. Since they’ve got an API, you might be able to bootstrap something webmention-like onto it, but for your purposes it would obviously be easier if they had direct webmention support.
It would also be wonderful if Hypothes.is supported the micropub specification as well. Then you could ideally log into the system as your website and any annotations you made could be automatically be published to your website for later storage, display, or other use. In some sense, this is what I’m anticipating by making explicit standalone annotation and highlight post kinds on my website. In practice, however, like you, I’d prefer to have a read, like, or bookmark-type of post that aggregates all of my highlights, annotations, and marginalia of a particular piece for easier future use as well as the additional context this provides. I suspect that if I had the additional tag within the Hypothesis Aggregator plugin for WordPress that would let me specify the particular URL of an individual article, I would have most of the front side PESOS functionality we’re all looking for. The rest will require either webmention or a lot more work.
I may have mentioned it before, but in case you hadn’t found it I’ve got a handful of posts on annotations, many of which include some Hypothes.is functionality.
Not itemized in that list (yet?) are some experiments I’d done with the Rory Rosenzweig Center’s PressForward plugin for WordPress. It allowed me to use a simple browser bookmarklet to save a webpage’s content to my personal website with a rel=”canonical” tag for the page pointing at the original page. (Here’s a good example.) Because of the way the canonical set up works within Hypothes.is, I noticed that annotations I (and others) made on the original were also mirrored and available on my website as well. In my case, because PressForward was copying the entirety of the article for me, I used the <mark> HTML tag to make the highlights on my page, but with Hypothes.is enabled, it also shows the other public annotations as well. (Use of the title attribute adds some additional functionality when the mark tagged text is hovered over in most browsers.)
In another example, I annotated a copy of one of Audrey Watters’ articles (after she’d disabled the ability for Hypothesis to work on her site, but before she changed the Creative Commons licensing on her website). But here I added my annotations essentially as pull-quotes off to the side and syndicated copies to Hypothes.is by annotating the copy on my website. If you visit Audrey’s original, you’ll see that you cannot enable Hypothesis on it, but if you’re using the Chrome extension it will correctly indicate that there are five annotations on the page (from my alternate copy which indicates hers is the rel=”canonical”).
In any case, thanks again for your examples and documenting your explorations. I suspect as time goes by we’ll find a more IndieWeb-centric method for doing exactly what you’ve got in mind in an even easier fashion. Often doing things manually for a while will help you better define what you want and that will also make automating it later a lot easier.
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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 Show conditional Twitter intents with Eleventy by Sia Karamalegos (sia.codes)
This reminds me that I had done a portion of this sort of work for my site a while back as a proof of concept and particularly with relation to Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter. I had meant to finish the sketch and turn it into a WordPress plugin or possibly roll it up into the Syndication Links plugin. Perhaps that makes sense as I’m already using it to show where I’ve syndicated copies of my content and it will contain the appropriate tweet ID data. Similar UI could be added for content sent to Flickr, Instagram, and Mastodon presuming the provide similar actions. Perhaps this will be a mini project I can circle back around to during the pending holidays?
I love how Sia has implemented it on her static Eleventy site where she’s kept the UI nice and clean. I particularly like the way she’s done the design and layout and made it more like a call to action.
To take the Twitter actions a half-step further, she could URL wrap the word “liked” with the like action on Twitter.
In general, this reminds me a lot of the idea of webactions, though I don’t think that many have been experimenting with them as of late. Perhaps it’s because of the growth of Microsub-based feed readers that have built-in Micropub support?
Hat-tip:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Respond via Twitter:
Reply
Repost
Like
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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WordPress icon
Twitter icon
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Replied to a tweet by GSV Steen Comer [Shunn SMF] (Twitter)
I’d recommend taking a look at the Blogging Futures experiment using the blogchain idea.
The IndieWeb is using the idea of Webmention to allow site-to-site communication and commenting. This allows interesting things like Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter. Here’s a good recent example with the copy on my website and a separate copy on Twitter.
And finally there’s an interesting wiki experiment that Kicks Condor and friends are doing that is worth checking out if you didn’t dig deep enough into @AGWilsonn’s links to see it. (See the comments on that link for more details.)
Syndicated copies to: Twitter icon
I do that! Try Micropub plugin + Syndication Links plugin + Quill or any of the other micropub clients that support posting notes and syndication endpoints.
Reach out if you need help to get it set up.
If you want to go crazy and thread your Twitter conversations, that’s possible too…
I need to go back and revise it a bit, but I built a bit of UI for doing just this with Webmention: https://boffosocko.com/2017/12/24/adding-simple-twitter-response-buttons-to-wordpress-posts/
The other piece requires being able to thread conversations. Details for that here: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
Very cool!
And for WordPress you can already use the Webmention plugin and optionally the Semantic Linkbacks plugin to implement sending and receiving them for your own site.
In many cases, sites sending these notifications with the proper microformats mark up means that you can get some really beautiful replies to show up in your comments section (esp. in relation to how the old linkbacks/trackbacks looked). Webmention also has some structure as well as potential extensions to prevent the spam that the prior implementations encouraged.
If you reply to my syndicated copy of this post on Twitter, I’m also using the free service Brid.gy to have Twitter send these notifications to my personal website, so I’ll see your reply on my original post without actually needing to visit Twitter directly. This means that not only can I do threaded replies between my site and another WordPress site (or any other site that supports Webmention), but I can do threaded conversations between my site and Twitter.
Now if you want to take this the next few logical steps, add Micropub support to your website, and start using a social reader like Indigenous. That will let you write replies to content in your reader that will automatically post those repsonses/replies to your website, but then your site can ping the site you were responding to! The specifications allow a true social media experience between websites running different software on different URLs. Some documentation for the WordPress side of things: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started_on_WordPress
The more sites that support these specifications, the richer the ecosystem becomes.
If you like, you could use Brid.gy to get comments and reactions back from Twitter with Webmention support for your site. I’ve outlined some of it for how I’m doing it on WordPress, but the idea is very adaptable for any website out there, and there’s a growing list of pre-existing code one could leverage.
(Hint: this also works for other common social platforms which Bridgy supports. As examples, I’ve got two-way communication set up between my site and Github and Mastodon just to name a few, so I don’t need to actively visit those sites on a regular basis. I pipe most of the content into a social reader like Monocle or Indigenous and reply directly from there.)
Webmention can be used as some of the community glue for things you’ve mentioned in your thread as well. As an example, I can post on my website and syndicate that content to IndieWeb.xyz (using Webmention) where others can discover it (perhaps by category) and interact with it using their own websites. If they have Webmention support as well we can have a site to site conversation that could potentially all be mirrored on IndieWeb.xyz which acts as a conversation and discovery hub.
This ecosystem is slowly growing and flourishing, but we still need work on making it all easier and more accessible as well as helping to guard against potential abuses and bad actors to make things safer for bigger public communities at scale. (I notice you’ve got a great site, that touches on and covers some of these topics like security and identity.)
Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter by Chris Aldrich (boffosocko.com)
The whole idea behind IndieWeb is that you can use your website to own all your content on a domain you own/control. You’ve got a site with webmentions set up, so we could be having this whole conversation from site to site. Instead, I’m choosing to syndicate/POSSE my replies from my site(s) to Twitter, to meet you where you’re currently at. Integrating my site with Brid.gy allows me to get your responses from Twitter back to my website. Here’s some more on threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter that may help frame what you’re attempting. (It also includes a link of WordPress to WordPress or other site conversations as well.)
I’m pretty sure that many within the IndieWeb space have got this working with a variety of software, particularly using Bridgy for the responses. Here’s an outline of how I do it with WordPress https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
I’m always curious to see other implementations.
In that case, maybe this?
@ThreadReaderApp has support for the Micropub Spec so you can publish Twitter threads directly to your blog. (Or perhaps do both methods?)
(boffosocko.com/2022/06/21/558…)
boffosocko.com/2020/05/28/thr…
@kfitz It looks like you’ve found at least one option for archiving your Tweets on your own site, but do watch out for the archived t.co shortlinks which may not survive if Twitter were to disappear altogether.
I suspect that some version of this option I’ve done before will work, though I haven’t tried updating it recently: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
Our friend @jimgroom@social.ds106.us has recently written up some details that get around the t.co shortener problems: https://bavatuesdays.com/archiving-twitter/
I’ve also heard that @darius@friend.camp is working on something for a public release soon: https://friend.camp/@darius/109521972924049369. He may still be looking for beta testers if you’re interested.
@kfitz Oops, my version had the wrong initial link, it should be https://boffosocko.com/2016/12/05/how-to-own-display-your-twitter-archive-on-your-website-in-under-10-minutes/. But perhaps it will go to your “other” question, whose answer is coming shortly, and perhaps with a small experiment that’s demonstrated here.https://boffosocko.com/2022/12/17/55812895/?replytocom=400346#respond
How to Own & Display Your Twitter Archive on Your Website in Under 10 Minutes
@kfitz I’m not sure that the straightforward functionality you’re looking for exists within the ActivityPub plugin (yet), but it’s certainly something you could potentially file as a feature request.
Since you have other Fediverse accounts you’re using, you might be able to follow the same general pattern I’d documented with Twitter for threading comments between my site and Twitter: https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/
Generally, you’d post on your site where it’s seen in the Fediverse via the ActivityPub plugin and/or optionally boosted by your native Mastodon account. Replies to your post (on Mastodon) show up on your site as comments and you reply to them there in your site’s comments section. Then you manually copy/paste the text of your reply from your website into your native Mastodon account and include the comment/reply permalink in that reply. If you’ve got Webmention set up with Brid.gy for Mastodon, replies to your replies on Mastodon should then make their way back to the proper threaded spot in your website’s comments section.
An example of this at work can be seen on my earlier mistake:
The original post on my site;
My own reply on my site;
My manually copied reply on Mastodon;
My Mastodon reply shows up on my site via Brid.gy;
A like of that Mastodon reply shows up on my site (also courtesy of Brid.gy via Webmention).
Related, I’ve been playing around with mirroring my WP site as an instance with the ActivityPub plugin and have boosted posts with my more broadly followed mastodon.social account the same way you mentioned that you were doing with yours. Somehow I’m anecdotally finding that I get more responses/reactions with native posts that with these boosts. I’m curious what your experience has been with this strategy so far? I’m still just starting my experimentation here, but I do like the fact that I’m able to include richer presentation of wrapped links in my WordPress native posts which are seen in the Fediverse while Mastodon seems to strip them out or not allow them (see an example of this in the post above this reply).
After a bit of experimentation and tinkering tonight, it appears that one can use their #WordPress website to create threaded conversations on #Mastodon (and likely other portions of the #Fediverse) using the IndieWeb syndication strategy of POSSE with backfeed of comments using #Webmention and Brid.gy. I’d outlined the process using Twitter in the past, and the same principles seem to work well for Mastodon. #IndieWeb #FTW #FediTips
@liztai while there aren’t a lot of guides for WP.com, part of the reason is that by the time you’ve paid for an account capable of having plugins/extensions you can probably pay someone to do the work.
Hmm this could be a potentially useful guide for brid.gy. Whatever it is, maybe I need to flex my #TechnicalWriting skills by writing a dumb-as-a-rock guide for wordpress.com users, because that’s what they need. I find tonnes of guides for static websites and WP.org, but not many for wp.com. The users for the latter are really not coders, so a guide would be very important.
#Indieweb #Blogging #Websites
https://boffosocko.com/2018/07/02/threaded-conversations-between-wordpress-and-twitter/