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While most of its ecosystem revolves around methods for running the program locally (and often privately) or in Google or Dropbox storage, I’ve come across a growing number of people hosting their instances on their own servers and using them publicly as a melange of personal websites, blogs, and wikis.
Has anyone tried hosting one (particularly the newer TW5) through Reclaim before? Of the many methods, I’m curious which may be the easiest/simplest from a set up perspective?
Here are some interesting examples I’ve come across:
* “A Thesis Notebook” by Alberto Molina
* PESpot Lesson Planner by Patrick Detzner (this one seems to be heavily modified)
* sphygm.us
Special thanks to Aaron Parecki for leaving some breadcrumbs to follow to make it possible.
Sebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)Quite a while I wrote about building a social reader[^ Then called IndieWeb reader, but social reader is the better term.], but these days I have to admit it went nowhere. The biggest problem with it being that I myself don’t really use any reader to consume stuff: I was not used to keeping up wit...
With the idea of Micropub allowing the ability to create updates, why couldn’t one build (or even modify) a Micropub client to create an interface to write relatively short updates with (date and timestamps to appear in the text) that, when published, concatenated that new piece of content into a longer piece of running text to send an updated Micropub request to an article or note on a site to allow that article to become an updating liveblog post?
I’m a bit shocked that no one has done it before now, and I suspect that one of the pre-existing micropub clients out there could probably add the functionality as a one day project at an upcoming IndieWebCamp.
I don’t suspect it was the sort of Micropub functionality that Kevin Marks was thinking about doing this weekend, but Noter Live comes pretty close to having a lot of this sort of UI already. Instead of just doing a single Micropub post at the end of a Twitter thread, why couldn’t it do an initial post at the beginning and then update the site with subsequent updates as it goes along while also acting as a means of syndicating the posts to Twitter and then returning those Twitter permalinks as syndication links on the user’s own site?
A lot of the changes seem to be related to people who are shifting from one shiny toy or project to another. They all seem to say something like:
Hey Mom! Look at my fancy new static site that builds in 0.001 seconds!
Can you believe what Drupal supports in the IndieWeb now? See ya!
I’ve moved back to good ol’ WordPress. Ahhh…
Micro.blog is awesome and requires such little maintenance. I migrated… while on vacation… in the wilderness… from my cell phone!!!
Wheee!
They’re often redirecting all their old URLs to the new site, but the one URL they commonly neglect is to create a redirect for their primary RSS, Atom, JSON or other feeds to their new feed structure. This means that the feed goes dead, and I (and others) have to notice it, then revive it. For some who simply have h-feed structures on their home page things may continue apace, particularly for the Microsub readers out there, though I haven’t been using those for as long to see as many issues.
Why are you doing all that work and making your followers do the extra manual work to go back and resubscribe?! Over the past four or five years there have been fifty or more people I’ve seen do this dance (some multiple times and even a few every 4 months or so). I totally get why they do it (because why not?!) But there should be a better way of keeping track of our major URLs and redirecting them properly.
From a continuity or even business perspective, this could be an even bigger thing as sites will likely spend a lot of time building an audience and could potentially throw it all away with the flip of a switch. I’ll be the first to admit that most of these people may not have a lot of people following them via RSS or similar means, but still?! It seems like at least once a week there’s some big newspaper, magazine, or corporate site I want to follow and I have to complain about finding their feeds. Why would you want to start all over again?
If a social media framing is easier for some, it’s the equivalent of changing your Twitter handle for your account with a hundred thousand followers to something new with no followers instead of creating a dummy account and swapping the usernames so you can have the new name, but keep all your followers.
There are also a few serial bloggers/writers who will start up a project for 3-6 months and build a following only to shut things down though they’ll keep the domain name. Why not redirect that primary domain to one of their other or newer projects and redirect those feeds as well? You’ve spent the time building an audience, why wouldn’t you want to keep it? Am I missing something fundamental here?
We often say, own your online identity, own your domain, and own your data. Perhaps we need to remember to also “own” our friends, family, followers, our community, or more broadly our audience?
Until then, I’m still flailing away out here. Manually changing your feeds in my reader…
IndieWebCamp London 2020 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
I’ll be attending remotely from Los Angeles as best as I can given the time difference and hope to get some fun new things working on my website this weekend. The etherpad for session proposals is already up for those who want to start posting their discussion ideas.
Terence Eden (shkspr.mobi)Someone took a nice photo of me recently. I'd like to use it as my avatar photo everywhere to present a consistent image. This is not easy to do. I've had to manually change it on a dozen different Slacks, a bunch of social networks, a few forums, all my email accounts, and I'm still not done. I jus...
My favorite solution to this problem and a few related others (like updating my bio and where you can find me on social media) is the meta data route using something like Microformats. Since I provide an h-card on my website’s homepage, it should be relatively easy for any service to take my URL as my identity (rather than one of my thousands of email addresses) parse my page and find my name, photo, bio, etc. and display them.
Nearly every social silo on the planet wants all of these details, so why should I need to incessantly have to input them manually much less keep them up to date? And I’ve yet to see a social service in the wild that hasn’t asked for my URL, so it’s obviously pretty universal.
Jeremy Keith‘s Huffduffer is a great example of something that already uses this data nicely. It doesn’t pull in my photo (though I think at one time he did have a set up that would poll Flickr avatars?) or my bio, but the “Elsewhere” section of my Huffduffer account lists where you can find me on dozens of social media accounts as well as my own websites. Huffduffer can do this because I gave it my domain name and the service parses my page looking for the rel="me" tags on my homepage. It could easily pull in my other provided data.
Incidentally Kevin Marks has also proposed a distributed verification system (remember the problem that Twitter had of attempting this?) that uses the rel="me" idea.
I’ll note that my own website will parse yours to pull in the author name, URL, and avatar to display a reply context for this response on my website! So hooray for microformats! (Though I’ll note that I did modify them a tad for my own idiosyncrasies.) My site does this with David Shanske‘s excellent Post Kinds plugin uses Parse This, which parses for microformats, JSON-LD, and then, if nothing is found it falls back to Open Graph Protocol. He’s been extending it lately to cover a handful of the bigger snowflake services like YouTube, IMDb, etc. to cover some additional edge cases that don’t have good mark up. Incidentally Aaron Parecki has a version of something like this called X-ray, which he uses for various things including microsub readers, not to mention the variety of other parsers available.
I’m sure there may be other versions of this in the wild, but it would be cool to see more social services provide functionality like this.
Maybe the EdTech, Open Pedagogy, and Domain of One’s Own crowds could use the opportunity to brainstorm remote class attendance and owning their own teaching/pedagogy/content on their websites?
Flickr is a great place to find photos to use. Many photographers assign their photos with a Creative Commons license, so any can use the … Idea: a script to find Flickr photos being used online... Read More »
Clicking through to the photo, there is no mention of this image appearing on this important announcement. Perhaps the author privately contact the photographer about using his image. Since Ken Doctor is so incredible with his media experience (i’m being serious), I’m fairly certain someone from his team would have contacted the photographer to give him a heads up. ❧
I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I maintain that if the source of the article and the target both supported the Webmention spec, then when a piece used an image (or really any other type of media, including text) with a link, then the original source (any website, or Flickr in this case) would get a notification and could show—if they chose—the use of that media so that others in the future could see how popular (or not) these types of media are.
Has anyone in the IndieWeb community got examples of this type of attribution showing on media on their own websites? Perhaps Jeremy Keith or Kevin Marks who are photographers and long time Flickr users?
Incidentally I’ve also mentioned using this notification method in the past as a means of decentralizing the journal publishing industry as part of a peer-review, citation, and preprint server set up. It also could be used as part of a citation workflow in the sense of Maria Popova and Tina Roth Eisenberg‘s Curator’s Code[1]set up, which could also benefit greatly now with Webmention support.
Annotated on March 09, 2020 at 12:18PM
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