I’ve tinkered a bit with CROWDLAAERS, but it’s always seemed to me geared toward a very niche audience including teachers potentially using it for grading? Perhaps I’m missing some more of its flexibility? Remi Kalir might be able to help elucidate it or indicate if he’s noticed anyone using it for off-label usage.
I might see it being more useful if one could analyze site-wide annotations on a domain with a wild-card search of this sort: https://tomcritchlow.com/*.
I have to imagine that it would be cool to see all the annotations and conversations across something like the New York Times with a data visualization tool like this.
Jon Udell and gang are aware of Webmention, but haven’t pulled the trigger (yet) on making the decision to build them in. I’ve outlined some methods for making their platform a bit more IndieWeb friendly by adding markup and some additional HTML to allow people to force the system to be able to send webmentions. I do frequently use Jon’s facet tool to check highlighting and annotation activity on my website.
I have found Crowdlaaers useful several times in that I’m aware that some pages are annotated, but they’re either not public or are part of other groups for which I’m not a member. An example of this is this page on my website which has one annotation which I can’t see, but by using Crowdlaaers, I can. Another example is viewing annotations on sites that have subsequently blocked Hypothes.is like this example. Of course, sometimes you’ll do this and find odd bugs floating around in the system.
Was going through some of my blog entries and was thinking about some of my frequent acronyms. Most of them are known, but still worth mentioning here. Many are hedges. IMHO: In My Humble Opinion I…
In applied linguistics and pragmatics (sub-fields of linguistics), hedges allow speakers and writers to signal caution, or probability, versus full certainty. Hedges can also allow speakers and writers to introduce or eliminate ambiguity in meaning and typicality as a category member. Hedging in category membership is used in reference to the prototype theory, to signify the extent to which items are typical or atypical members of different categories. Hedges might be used in writing, to downplay a harsh critique or a generalization, or in speaking, to lessen the impact of an utterance due to politeness constraints between a speaker and addressee. Typically, hedges are adjectives or adverbs, but can also consist of clauses such as one use of tag questions. In some cases, a hedge could be regarded as a form of euphemism. Linguists consider hedges to be tools of epistemic modality; allowing speakers and writers to signal a level of caution in making an assertion. Hedges are also used to distinguish items into multiple categories, where items can be in a certain category to an extent.
A few weeks ago, I made a post about how I got PESOS working for Facebook and Instagram using IFTTT. Now, I’ve gone ahead and done something similar with Pocket and IFTTT!
The code is similar to my linked post. As always, you’ll want to customize everything for your own needs, as well as add your own auth token.
So, I spend a long time trying to set up PESOS for individual silos on IFTTT, specifically Facebook and Instagram, because they are terrible. I’ve got it currently set up to publish my initial post, but no back feed support yet. Also, this is going to wordpress, but it shouldn’t matter (in theor...
This is some brilliant work. Thanks for puzzling it all out.
I do have a few questions/clarifications though so as not to be confused since there are a few pieces you’ve left out.
For the IndieAuth token, which is created at /wp-admin/users.php?page=indieauth_user_token one only needs to give it a title and the “create” scope?
For the “then” portion that uses IFTTT.com’s Webhooks service are the following correct?
The URL is (when used with WordPress) of the form: https://example.com/wp-json/micropub/1.0/endpoint
The Method is: POST
The Content Type I’m guessing based on the Body field you’ve included is: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
For your Pocket example, it looks like you’re using the Post Kinds Plugin, so I’m guessing that you could have gotten away without the {{Excerpt}} and {{Title}} portions and just have sent the URL which Post Kinds picks up and parses to give you your context portion with a title and an excerpt anyway?
It looks like part of the trouble of this PESOS set up is that you’re too reliant in the long run of relying on Pocket (or other services) being around in the long term. If Pocket disappears, then really, so does most of your bookmark, which ideally should point to the canonical URL of the content you’re bookmarking. Of course perhaps IFTTT may not give you that URL in many cases. It looks to me like the URL you’re bookmarking would make a more appropriate syndication link URL.
For most of my bookmarks, likes, reads, etc. I use a plugin that scrapes my post and saves a copy of the contents of all the URLs on my page to the Internet Archive so that even in the event of a site death, a copy of the content is saved for me for a later date.
In any case, I do like this method if one can get it working. For some PESOS sources, I’ve used IFTTT before, though typically with RSS feeds if the silo provides them. Even then I’m often saving them directly to WordPress as drafts for later modification if the data that IFTTT is providing is less than ideal. Sometimes worse, using RSS doesn’t allow one to use Post Kinds URL field and parsing functionality the way your webhook method does.
I’ve spent most of my time in the IndieWeb on backfeed: sending interactions from social networks back to your web site. Bridgy, the service we built, has served that need wel...
I’ve obviously read this before, but somehow I’ve now got some new respect for the basis of the broader underlying idea.
Fifteen years ago, on a bit of a whim, I decided it would be fun to have a Web Standards version of something like the Perl Advent calendar. A simple website with a new tip or trick each day leading the readers through December up until Christmas.
I emailed a bunch of friends that kept web design an...
It’s no secret that bloggers, vloggers and pretty much anyone on social media tend to ‘bend the truth’ a little bit. There are countless apps you can download to turn your very average photo into what looks like photographic gold. With a little tweaking and cropping, a few saturation and contrast adjustments, you can fake just about anything. This may have become a trend that caught on a little too well. Johanna Olsson is one of the many bloggers who have photoshopped her images to suit the theme of her page. In an attempt to gain points for her reputation, her photo-shopping mishap caused her more publicity than she could have ever imagined. However, it was not for the reasons she was hoping.
Rather interestingly, Instagram Blogger Rianne Meijer indulged in a meaningful and unique project. She put together some photos of herself that looked like something out of Vogue, and then placed a more natural picture right next to it, giving viewers a whole different perspective.
While written for the clicks, this article has an important message about social media.
How a propaganda war by the private sector led to a decline of trust in government.
As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, OTM is using its podcast feed for a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy — and what to do about it. Bob himself is one of the Purple Project organizers. We recommend that you listen to this four-part mini-series in order. In this third episode he explores some of the causes for disaffection.
One of the reasons so many Americans have lost trust and faith is democratic institutions is simple misunderstanding about how the system is designed to work. Another, however, is familiarity with how the system does work— which isn’t exactly of, by and for the People. Anand Giridharadas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. He says the founders also didn’t plan on politicians constantly trash-talking government itself and that a decline in trust in government is the result of a concerted, private sector propaganda war waged over the last four decades.
On the press's role to educate the public about participating in democracy.
As part of a month-long campaign called the Purple Project for Democracy, (a strictly non-partisan, apolitical effort that a number of other large news organizations have also contributed to) we are featuring a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith and devotion by Americans for American democracy — and what to do about it. Bob is one of the Purple Project organizers. In episode four, Bob examines the media’s responsibility for instilling devotion, or at least perspective, for our democracy.
A 2014 National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, showed only 23 percent of eighth graders in the United States attained “proficient” status in civics. A 2011 Newsweek survey found that 70 percent of Americans didn’t even know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. And only 26% of those surveyed in 2017 by the University of Pennsylvania could name all three branches of government. And no wonder: with STEM curriculum and standardized testing squeezing the school day, civics has become the snow leopard of the social studies curriculum.
So if the knowledge vacuum is otherwise filled by misinformation and disinformation, and the result is a loss of faith and trust in democracy itself, who is left to intervene? Jan Schaffer — ombudsman for the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, Pulitzer Prize–winning former journalist and founder of The Institute for Interactive Journalism — talks to Bob about what responsibility the media have to become educators, and maybe even re-assurers, of last resort.
Scones and tea seems like a good breakfast for today.
I’ve had Webmentions enabled on this site for some time now. Sending a Webmention is pretty straightforward thanks to plugins like Webmention for WordPress and Semantic-Linkbacks. The question is how to send Webmentions in comments when someone replies to one of my posts?
Okay, this gives a lot more context!
It looks like you’re 90% of the way there. I suspect the last piece you’re missing are the proper microformats either in your theme or in the_body of your specific reply. I suspect you know what microformats are Paul, but for context and the benefit of others reading, they’re bits of metadata added into HTML as classes that provide computers additional information about what is in your post and what each part represents.
For implementing Webmention with WordPress, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin has a built in parser that looks at the microformats of the incoming webmentions and uses that data to decide what to display in your comments section. The first part it looks for is an h-card which is a microformats version of a business card that generally includes the post author’s name, photo/avatar, and URL. This is how the system determines the avatar and name to use.
The second part it’s looking for in the received webmention is an h-entry (or hentry in the older microformats v1 specification). This defines the broader body of the comment that it will display. And the last big part that the parser is looking for is what kind of response was sent. Was it a simple reply, like, a bookmark, a read, a listen, etc.? If it can’t figure out what the specific reply may have been it defaults to a simple “mention” which is the response that you’re seeing in your example Paul.
The positive part of this system is that WordPress already has some reasonable support for microformats v1 built into core and many themes even extend on it relatively well. Sadly, WordPress doesn’t support microformats v2, which would make it a far better IndieWeb friendly platform. Fortunately most themes have h-card or hcard along with the related microformats that go on the names, URLs, and avatars. Unfortunately they don’t have the microformats that indicate the response types.
To fix this many people IndieWeb-ifying a site use a theme with strong Microformats v2 mark up like SemPress (or one of its children) and they’re doing it in combination with the Post Kinds plugin which adds the microformats to the response to indicate the proper type. Post Kinds, a dramatic expansion of the idea of Post Formats by the way, also has a built in parser which kindly provides a reply context for your posts as well.
A screenshot of a reply context (highlighted in yellow) which indicates the post is about a favorite of Huffduffer which includes a blockquote from the Huffduffer site to show what the site is about. My commentary about the favorite appears beneath the reply context.
If you’re not using (or don’t want to use) Post Kinds you can manually add the required mark up in your posts to indicate the type. Most of these are documented on the IndieWeb wiki, here’s an example for a typical “reply“:
<div class="h-entry">
<a href="http://example.com/note123" class="u-in-reply-to">Some note with a point</a>
<div class="p-name p-content">Good point! Now what is the next thing we should do?</div>
</div>
In this example the important microformats are the u-in-reply-to and the p-namep-content. Generally most WordPress themes will add either h-entry (or hentry) in the theme, so you just need the u-in-reply-to piece.
Again, most people get around the need to add these microformats by using Post Kinds plugin while others use a version of the old core Press This bookmark functionality that was adopted for use as IndieWeb Press This. IndieWeb Press this bookmarklet will take a page you want to reply to, like, or bookmark, then create a post with the requisite microformats, and finally allow you to write your reply and publish pretty quickly.
Yet another method to get around some of the required microformats is to publish using a Micropub client in combination with the WordPress Micropub plugin.
The upshot is that once you’ve arranged the basic pieces, your publishing process proceeds apace as before.
And of course, to be even more upfront, I’ll mention that some of the replies I’ve sent to Paul in the past (and you can see this in the example screenshot he includes) mistakenly include my reply context to his post in them. This is a result of my having overwritten some theme changes in my site that once upgraded my lowly mf1 hentry to the better mf2 h-entry. As a result the parser inside the Semantic Linkbacks plugin falls back to parsing as microformats version 1 and includes the context instead of stripping it out and just sending only the piece that is the intended reply. The reply that should have shown up on Paul’s post was the portion he outlined in red. I’ll try to fix this again shortly.
For those looking to help spread the ideas and functionality of the IndieWeb within WordPress, we’d all love help to:
Improve WordPress’ core support for Microformats version 2
Better support for Microformats v2 in more Themes
I and others have documented some other subtleties and resources for microformats with respect to WordPresss and themes on the IndieWeb wiki which should be of help for those of a variety of development levels. Obviously we still have a way to go towards making all this more intuitive, obvious, and user friendly, but we’re getting there day by day. Any extra help and feedback is always helpful.
If you’ve got questions, need help, or have suggestions, feel free to hop into the IndieWeb WordPress chat and we can try to get you up to speed.
Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently published work which breaks continuity with the former.
I’ve known of the concept for a long time, but I’ve only seen this word for the first time today.
Hungry Bread Elevator (Twitter)
Alexandre Enkerli
Charlotte Allen
Charlotte Allen
Ryan Barrett
Drew McLellan
Paul Jacobson