They’d previously been working, but for some reason, with the setting set to facepile all the RSVP types in settings, none of the RSVPs are facepiling like they’re supposed to now.
@chrisaldrich did you document anywhere how to change the default image associated with posts? At the moment it is using my profile pic, which does not work.
Also on: Twitter
Associated how? In the webmentions you send? Typically the receiving site will parse your page to find the h-card and pull out the u-photo for it, so depending on your theme or a custom marked up h-card, that will dictate the photo that shows up.
I have been noticing some issues recently with a lot of photos not showing up in webmentions I receive. Typically they’re for WordPress or micro.blog sites which may mean issues for Gravatar-based images.
@photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions. https://t.co/Lt6cpWwkuj
There’s a part of me that wants links to come back first class and be added to Calypso (with some Reader integration). That’d be a nice thing for IndieWeb and indie ed-tech movements. Also, an easier IndieWeb onboarding experience. Gimme an IndieWeb toggle on .com.
There's an open web and ownership moment happening right now. It's pretty cool. The flow is rough, though. One small but impactful example: title-less microblogging means an interface full of (no title) in Calypso.
Oh there’s just so much to say about the start of this thread, and it gives me so much hope for the open web as well as potential growth for WordPress.
Link Manager Update
The Link Manager still seems relatively solid and much of the infrastructure still works well, despite the warnings and lack of updates over the past several years. It would be nice to see it make a comeback and I can personally see many ways it could come back as a means of allowing people to better own their personal social graph as well as dovetail with readers. (This could also be the cornerstone of helping to make WordPress it’s own decentralized social network so that those who want to leave Facebook, Twitter, et al. could more easily do so and maintain their own data and infrastructure.)
If it were being updated, here are a few things that I might suggest as being imminently useful:
Add in additional microformats support, particularly for display. Things like h-card, u-url, u-photo, etc. could make displaying these more useful for the growing number of microformats parsers. I also suspect that having OPML subscription support could be a major boon to the feed reader resurgence that is happening with the split of the server side/display side split occurring with the improving Microsub spec which now has one server implementation with several more coming and at least three front end implementations. I know of one person building a Microsub server for WordPress already.
It’s non-obvious where one’s OPML file lives within the plugin or that one can have or target OPML files by category. Making this more apparent from a UI perspective would be both useful and help adoption.
Provide a bookmarklet or browser extension to make it easier to scrape data off of someone’s homepage (or any page for that matter) and put it into the Links Manager data fields. This would allow people to do a one (or two click) solution for quickly and immediately following someone, saving their data into their site, and then via OPML subscription, they’ll automatically be following that feed in their reader of choice.
For doing the parsing portion of this, I might recommend the parsing algorithm being used by the Post Kinds Plugin, which parses a web page and searches for microformats, open graph protocol, and one or two other standards to return all or most all of the data that would be needed to fill out the data Links Manager can take. As I recall, this parser was being discussed by Kraft for potential inclusion into the Press This bookmarklet functionality to expand on what it had already provided.
From a UI perspective this would allow people to follow friends or others via a WordPress workflow almost as easily as any of the social media silos.
Another UI approach for comparison can be found by looking at the SubToMe universal follow button which was developed by Julien Genestoux (also of PubSub/WebSub fame). This version also uses some of the standard feed discovery mechanisms which a bookmarklet would want to be able to do as well.
As Ryanindicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.3
As for the title-less post types that are proliferating by the independent microblogging community (including the recent micro.blog as well as post types in the vein of likes, favorites, reads, replies, etc. which mimic functionality within the broader social space), the so-called (no title) problem can be somewhat difficult since so many things are built to expect a title. Many feed readers don’t know how to react to them as a result. The Post Kinds Plugin faced a similar issue and recently pushed an update so that within the admin UI at /wp-admin/edit.php the title field would still indicate (no title) but it would also include a 28 character synopsis from the_body or the_excerpt to provide at least some indication of what the post was about. This also seems to be a potential issue in other areas of WordPress including widgets like “Recent Posts” which want to display a title where none exists. As the aside post format can attest, not all themes deal with this well, though there are other alternate methods for displaying some useful data.
Articles 1, 5, and 6 in this highlighted series for Twitter will get you most of the functionality (and then some). However once you’ve enabled some of these related plugins, you can also do so much more than just use your site to interact with Twitter.
FollowedDavid Shanske(David Shanske | The Definitive Location)
WordPress and IndieWeb developer, genius, good friend
I’ve actually been following David for ages, but since he’s slipped some following code into Syndication Links, I thought I’d send him the first follow post to attempt to take advantage of the functionality. Can’t wait to see what it looks like on his site.
When the dashboard redesign is officially added to WordPress core, it looks like it will be missing a widget that’s been with the software since 2005 when the Dashboard feature was introduced…
I can think of some interesting uses for this… perhaps worth tinkering?
To keep everyone aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress contributor teams, I’ve reached out to each team’s listed representatives. I asked each of them to share their Top Priority (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest Wins and Worries. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.
Always interesting to read high level quarterly updates of organizations like this to see where they’re at and what they’re having trouble with.
Yesterday after discovering it on Xavier Roy’s site I was reminded that the Post Kinds Plugin is built on a custom taxonomy and, as a result, has the ability to output its taxonomy in typical WordPress Tag Cloud widget. I had previously been maintaining/displaying a separate category structure for Kinds, which I always thought was a bit much in my category area. While it’s personally nice to have the metadata, I didn’t like how it made the categories so overwhelming and somehow disjointed.
For others who haven’t realized the functionality is hiding in the Post Kinds Plugin, here are some quick instructions for enabling the tag cloud widget:
In the administrative UI, go to Appearance » Widgets in the menu structure.
Drag the “Tag Cloud” widget to one of your available sidebars, footers, headers or available widget areas.
Give the widget a title. I chose “Post Kinds”.
Under the “Taxonomy” heading choose Kinds.
If you want to show tag counts for your kinds, then select the checkbox.
If necessary, select visibility if you want to create conditions for which pages, posts, etc. where the widget will appear.
Finally click save.
You’ll end up with something in your widget area that looks something like this (depending on which Kinds you have enabled and which options you chose):
The tag cloud for the Post Kinds plugin data
If you’re interested in changing or modifying the output or display of your tag cloud, you can do so with the documentation for the Function Reference wp tag cloud in the WordPress Codex.
Clutter, noise, distraction. What you get is interspersed with many things that are outside your interests, rants, yelling, silly gifs. That’s a lot of filtering.
You Miss It, You Lose it. Social media is focused at the head of the stream. While you sleep or actually do something productive away from social media, it all flows away. Yes, maybe your network can signal with repeating important things, but its spotty.
Duplication You have no means to quickly know what you have already looked at, and you see may the same story multiple times.
You Are Subject to Algorithms Especially on facebook, what you see is determined by the mysteries of an algorithm. Sure you choose sources by followers, but the means by which information is presented is determined by some outside automated entity.
This activity brings you an exception to the technology as time-saving lie; it’s old tool that many people have abandoned. I will wade carefully through the acronym jargon jungle, but we are talking about using an RSS Feed Reader to monitor the most recent news, blog posts, data from sources you choose to follow, not ones dished out by some company’s algorithm.
RSS is incredibly valuable as is OPML.
I had used Feedly for several years, but made the switch to Inoreader last year, in part because it has one additional useful feature that Feedly doesn’t: OPML subscription. While it’s nice to be able to import and export OPML files, needing to remember to update them can be an unnecessary step, particularly if 20+ people need to do the update to capture all the new RSS feeds added. (As an example, say one or two students join a class late and everyone has already got the original OPML export and now needs to update to add a few more feeds to keep track of classroom activity.) OPML subscription improves this by allowing the subscription to an OPML link with multiple feeds in it. If the original OPML file updates with new feeds, then the reader automatically updates them and pushes them out to everyone subscribed to that OPML file!
Think of an OPML subscription as an updating subscription to a bundle of RSS feeds which all also provide their own individual updates. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of individual feeds, you can subscribe to whole bundles of feeds.
For those looking for some sample OPML links to subscribe to, try some of mine which are listed at the bottom of the linked page. For some ideas about building your own data stores with OPML links for WordPress, try my Following Page solution. WordPress’s old Link Manager described on that page will provide the ability to store the data and provide the OPML links, the rest of the page discusses publishing it on one’s site so that it’s publicly available if you wish. URL schemes for sub-categories are discussed separately.
I am adding in information associated with author and source, however this is not being displayed when published.
@mrkrndvs This is because the photo template doesn’t call these particular details even though they may be provided. I could see an occasional use for including them, particularly to give credit to a photo that was taken by someone else, while in practice most may not use this because they’re posting their own photos.
In the meanwhile, it may not be too tough to cut/paste bits of appropriate code from other templates to get these to display the way you want them when they exist. You can create a custom photo template named kind-photo.php and put it in a folder entitled kind_views in either your theme or (preferably) in your child theme so it isn’t overwritten on plugin update.
I do still wish there were a master template in the set (heavily commented and unused) that used every variation of data that could be displayed (or perhaps even calculated for display) so that non-programmers could attempt to more easily cut/paste templates to get them to do what they wanted.
A URL parser that takes an input URL and tries to extract it into structured data
Enhancements to the Post Editor to add additional structured data to the post object
A Taxonomy that takes that structured data and classifies it and dictates behavior
A rendering piece that takes the structured data stored in post meta and displays it using templates that can be overridden in the theme by including them in a subdirectory called kind_views
This is a great short description from a WordPress developer perspective of what the Post Kinds Plugin does
wordpress-semantic-linkbacks - More meaningfull linkbacks
On the /wp-admin/comment.php admin page when manually editing a comment to change any of the common fields (author, email, the comment itself) and saving, everything saves as expected except for the avatar within the Semantic Linkbacks portion. If the avatar was changed (or one was added) things are saved properly, but when updating other fields and not changing the avatar itself, the avatar field data seems to be deleted on saving, thus making the author images disappear.
Did you know that the Incoming Links and the two WordPress news Dashboard widgets are just RSS readers? Click “configure” in the upper right corner of each widget, and you’ll be able to change the feed to one that you choose.
Apparently this functionality got ripped out long ago because of it’s primary use. It would have been better to keep it for the feed reader portion of things though…
It’s the missing reader that’s always made WordPress a 4th class citizen in the social world.
With the launch of WordPress 5.0 drawing near, it’s more important than ever to get ready for Gutenberg’s arrival. One plugin that aims to help you do this is Gutenberg Ramp. This enables you to selectively use the new editor on specific sections of your site, to help you get acquainted with the...
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Ryan Boren (Twitter)
Unix Sys Admin (Twitter)