Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)AKA the answer to all those people who ask "why isn't there an International Men's Day?" on International Women's Day. Guess what: there is, and it's today. In the list of identities I carry, being a man isn't something I think about most of the time. Which, of course, is part of the hidden privileg...
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)I've been blogging - albeit not consistently on the same site - since 1998. That's a long time in internet years, and in human years, and over time I've conditioned out any self-editing impulse I might have. I write, hit publish, and share. Done. Because I'm fairly prolific, friends and colleagues o...
willtmonroe (micro.blog)@daveymoloney I like what you've done with your WP site using the Autonomie theme to implement IndieWeb principles. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions for you that I couldn't quite figure out. First, how are you able to selectively post from WP to Micro.blog? I know that Micro.blog allows a user to publish feeds from other sources. But you mentioned that you "some of what you post on your Microblog Statuses timeline" is also posted on Micro.blog. I'd love to know how you do that! As you know, Bridgy allows you to choose which posts to syndicate to sites like Twitter. But I've seen no way to accomplish the same thing with Micro.blog yet. Second, how did you create the Microblog Statuses timeline using Autonomie? I know that Autonomie, Indepdendent Publisher and other Indieweb-friendly themes allow for "post kinds" show up on separate pages. But you seem to be combining several "kinds" on the Microblog Statuses page. I'd love to know how you did this. My overall goal is to combine my "stream" page with my main website. But until now, I haven't seen a good way to accomplish the kind of control over my short-form posts that you have. Thanks for such a great example!
@daveymoloney’s microblog status page is most likely done by his having a page and menu link that displays the WordPress Post Format type “status” posts. (Incidentally you already have that page on your site, you just need to put it in a menu somewhere: http://willtmonroe.com/type/status/) I’d suspect that he took the RSS feed from that page and piped it into Micro.blog as well. Since you’re using Post Kinds plugin, you can do something similar using a URL format like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/ or for porting to micro.blog using a similar feed URL like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/feed/. You’d just need to put the names of the types you want to use/have in the list separated with commas.
Let me know if you need more help!
Bix (Twitter)Just briefly, I feel compelled to point out that the “small pieces loosely joined” which Chris Aldrich mentions and which CJ Eller notes was a David Weinberger thing for which I once ran a “gang blog”. https://t.co/CErkZ2GrhT
— Bix (@bixtweets) November 20, 2019
I am the Assistant Director for Instructional Technology at the Louisiana State University Law Center. I also teach courses in the College of Human Sciences and Education at Louisiana State University. And I earned a doctorate in educational leadership and research with a concentration in educational technology from Louisiana State University.
My community, university, and professional service keeps me busy. I serve on the Board of Directors at the Louisiana Partnership for Children and Families. I also serve as Co-Chair of the Advisory Board for the School of Library and Information Science and as a peer reviewer for Codex, the Journal of the Louisiana Chapter of the ACRL. I am involved in a variety of campus committees including the LSU Learning and Teaching Collaborative and Academic Technologies Advisory Committee. I have presented at national and international conferences.
I love teaching! I designed and continue to teach Introduction to Classroom Technology (ELRC 2507). In this course, we create professional websites, use Creative Commons licenses to share content, and use digital storytelling for educational purposes. I also designed and teach Information Literacy Instruction (LIS 7807). In this course, online graduate students in the Library and Information Science program use systematic instructional design to help library patrons with information needs. During the Fall 2019 Semester, I will be facilitating a course the focuses on the development of multimedia for learning scenarios. I have also taught Program Evaluation (CIED 7355) in the College of Education at Sam Houston State University.
My family and I live in Baton Rouge, LA. We love to travel together and are always making plans to do so. But I also enjoy watching films when I can and swimming as much as possible.
I’ll agree that there is no silver bullet, but one pattern I’ve noticed is that it’s the “small pieces, loosely joined” that often have the greatest impact on the open web. Small pieces of technology that do something simple can often be extended or mixed with others to create a lot more innovation.
I want to emphasize the “loosely joined” part of the above from Chris' comment. We need more people loosely joining software together in ways that create more possibility for writing on the web. In his talk “Don't Make Things”, Darius Kazemi phrased it as “Don't Create, Mutate” – to not think about building from the ground up but extending and remixing what's already there.
Wednesday on the NewsHour, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland shares explosive testimony during the fourth day of the impeachment inquiry’s public hearings. Plus: Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway and Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., respond to Sondland’s claims and a preview of the Wednesday night debate among 2020 Democrats.
Malcolm Gladwell speaks with Oprah Winfrey about his new book Talking to Strangers, the one mystery he hopes might be resolved in our lifetimes, and the ways we could all benefit from a little more patience and humility when judging people we don’t know.
Warning: Use of undefined constant posthasteForm - assumed 'posthasteForm' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/narwhal-microblog/narwhal-microblog.php on line 265
Knowing that Posthaste was the underlying code, I suspect it’s an issue with php and the version in use. Apparently we’ve gotten to the version where posthasteForm is throwing the expected errors. 🙂
I’m not seeing any specific funcionality issues with the plugin, but it is throwing this error on the pages where Narwhal appears.
A strange chain of events preceded the shoot-down, and people in the intelligence business turned to a rising star in the Defense Intelligence Agency, Ana Montes. Montes was known around Washington as the “Queen of Cuba” for her insights into the Castro regime.
Not wanting to wait to see what David might come up with before the next couple of IndieWebCamps, I thought I’d at least do some research to see what was hiding in the good old WordPress repository. I found a few old plugins that were roughly the sort of idea I was looking for, but they were last maintained about 8-10 years ago.
Then I came across the Narwhal Microblogging plugin from Billy Wilcosky, which is being actively developed/maintained and has almost exactly what I’m looking for!
Apparently the plugin itself had an early simple start before the developer came across Jon Smajda’s plugin Posthaste which was apparently repurposed for the Prologue/P2 code that WordPress used for that product/theme. He’s since rewritten a large chunk of it based on Posthaste’s original code and added in some basic formatting options and the ability to add media, so one can post a quick note along with a photo.
Settings for the plugin are hiding in Settings << Writing admin interface (or at the path /wp-admin/options-writing.php on your website) which includes the ability to choose which pages to display the “widget” and allowing one to hide the title, tags, categories, draft seclector, one’s Gravatar, and the Greeting and Links. I’d personally pare my version down to just provide tags, categories, and the draft options to keep the interface as clean as possible.
Finally the developer notes that within the user interface “if you leave the ‘Category:’ box at its default setting it posts to your default category. However… If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles into the ‘asides’ category even if you do not explicitly specify the ‘asides’ category in the dropdown. You can then style them as asides.”
I’ve already discussed some of the immediate benefits for easily and quickly posting directly from my own website. Just below I’ll add a few others.
Most importantly for me at the moment, the plugin works with the Classic Editor in WordPress. The interface also only shows up when one is logged into their website, so visitors won’t ever see it.
The plugin automatically takes the first 40 characters of your note and posts that into the title field, so you don’t have to bother with it. Sadly, this means that feed readers and other services will take your status updates and give them a title. (Though in the wild, most feed readers do something like this anyway. I am hearing strong rumors that Inoreader is about to have better support for social media-like posts soon.) For those using the plugin for IndieWeb use and prefer to keep their notes/asides/status updates titleless, you can spelunk into the code pretty easily and make a quick change which the developer kindly documents in his support page:
But, if you want to modify the title character limit it is easy to do.
- Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
- In this file you will see a line for this max character limit and you will see the number 40. You could just increase it to something like 100, 3500, or 999999. Depending on how long you are willing to let your titles get.
In my case, I think I’ll just decrease the character limit to 0 and then rely on the Post Kinds plugin to add it’s customary pseudo-title to the admin interface on my back end so that I can distinguish my posts in the posts pages.
The category chooser could be a little cleaner and provide a dropdown of all my pre-existing categories with the ability to select multiple ones. I suspect that somewhere in the WordPress universe there’s a way to do this even if it means swiping a snippet of code from core’s editor.
The basic text box for entering text could be a bit smaller on the page to accept 2-4 lines of text since it’s meant for short posts. As it stands now, it defaults to 10, but it also smartly already has a slider that appears when you type more than the available number of lines and it also has a handle in the corner to allow you to increase the boxes size.
I’ve mentioned doing natively titleless notes above, but to make things a bit more user friendly, it would be nice to have the ability in the settings page to enter a number for the text excerpt, so that users could configure it without needing code. I suspect that most in the IndieWeb space would set the title excerpt to zero so as to not have titles on their notes.
It will take me some time to dig into it, but it would be nice if the developer had some notes about the CSS classes used in the plugin so that one might more easily style the display of the output on one’s website. Fortunately the defaults to match one’s current theme seem relatively solid.
At present, there isn’t any UI for including syndication targets to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. It would be nice if there was some tie into syndication services or functionality like that provided with Syndication Links plugin and brid.gy publish or brid.gy fed if those pieces are present.
The last dovetail that would be nice to have, particularly within an IndieWeb framing, would be to have better direct integration of this plugin with the Post Kinds plugin. This could extend to auto-setting the post kind to “note”, which should in turn allow the automatic setting of Post Formats to either “status” or “aside”.
In sum, this plugin is really fantastic for allowing a simple and lightweight means of posting quick status updates or notes to one’s WordPress website! It’s the next best thing to using any of the variety of Micropub clients, particularly when you already happen to be at your own site.
I suspect this plugin is the sort of thing that many within the IndieWeb and WordPress communities will love using–and at least one person in the chat has already said they think it’s a great find. There are currently less than 10 active installations of the plugin, but I think it deserves a magnitude or more. Let’s see what we can do about that!
Have you tried it? What do you think of the idea?
The limit is for the post title. After you post, the plugin takes your post and creates a title using the first 40 characters of your post. This is for speed, so you don’t have to create a title. But, the content of your post does not have a character limit.
But, if you want to modify the title character limit it is easy to do.
- Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
- In this file you will see a line for this max character limit and you will see the number 40. You could just increase it to something like 100, 3500, or 999999. Depending on how long you are willing to let your titles get.
Love the idea, but as it right now, I can’t use it. I’m getting an error message after I create a post.
Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)I check my blog every day, not through vanity (I don't have stats) but out of interest to see what's in the "on this day" section. It's why I added it after all. There has been discussion for some time about how the default, reverse chronological view isn't very effective as we just funnel readers t...
A personal blog is an online journal, your day to day thoughts published on the web rather than in (or in addition to) a physical notebook. It is an unfinished story, a scratch pad, an outboard brain; and while there are highlights it is more the journey that’s the important aspect.
Colin nibbles around the edges of defining a digital public commonplace book and even the idea of “though spaces” though without tacitly using either phrase.
–November 20, 2019 at 09:20AM
