IndieWeb | Chris Aldrich

Update to the Syndication Links plugin for WordPress for Custom Endpoints

David Shanske has recently updated the Syndication Links plugin for WordPress that now allows users to add custom syndication endpoints to their websites so they can actually syndicate their content to external sites.

In particular, this now includes syndication endpoints like IndieWeb News and indieweb.xyz subs. Configuring the plugin with a syndication name, UID, and the appropriate URL will create additional endpoint checkboxes in the “Syndicate To” metabox. (The UID is simply a unique identifier that the plugin uses in conjunction with Micropub clients, and the URL is the appropriate full URL to the appropriate syndication target.)

If one wishes to test syndication out, I might suggest using the test endpoint provided by indieweb.xyz. The appropriate entries in the custom provider section at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links would be:

Name: xyz hottubs
UID: xyz-hottubs
URL: https://indieweb.xyz/en/hottubs/

Settings for configuring custom syndication endpoints in the Syndication Links plugin

For convenience, the settings page also allows the user to disable (via checkbox) endpoints they don’t use or don’t want to appear in their administrative meta boxes.

An example of the meta box that appears in the administrative interface when creating new posts. To syndicate your content to the desired sites using Webmention, just click the appropriate boxes.

Use with Micropub Clients

The update to the Syndication Links plugin also means that Micropub clients with appropriate support (like Quill, for example) will know about which syndication endpoints your site supports and will be able to include them in its checkbox list for auto-syndicating via Micropub.

Example Quill micropub interface with syndication endpoints configured within Syndication Links plugin

Naturally, people using these methods should be very careful about how they’re using them so that they aren’t abusing or spamming these channels. Those abusing these channels will certainly find their sites blocked from posting. Keep in mind that some of the syndication endpoints shown here are examples and that other endpoints exist or can be created on sites like indieweb.xyz.

Bridgy for WordPress

I’ll also note in passing that the syndication functionality to Twitter, Flickr, and GitHub that the Bridgy for WordPress Plugin provides is now also available within the Syndication Links plugin, so those who already have Brid.gy set up with their websites can easily and safely deactivate and uninstall that plugin. Doing this will prevent the duplication of meta boxes in one’s admin UI. Given the migration of some of its functionality, it is certainly possible in the future that this plugin may be deprecated or the Brid.gy set up portion of its functionality may be merged into another plugin like the IndieWeb plugin.

👤 Chris McLeod, Joe Jennett, and Khürt Williams may appreciate this the most for use with indieweb.xyz. It may be a minute too late for Brad Enslen however.

Replied to a post by

Khürt Williams (islandinthenet.com)

I have just installed the IndieNews plugin but … I don’t understand how to use it.

Syndicating Your Posts

The IndieNews plugin allows you to automatically syndicate your posts to the IndieNews and IndieWeb.xyz sites using webmention. You’ll notice on your posts that in your tags, in addition to the indieweb tag you’ve added, the plugin has automatically added additional tags which include #indienews and /en/indieweb which–instead of being wrapped with links to those tags on your website–are wrapped with links pointing to those websites along with the appropriate syndication markup. As a result, when you publish your posts and send webmentions, both of those services are posting to those services on your behalf.

I’d recommend care in syndicating to them using this plugin as this morning it might appear to some that you’re spamming those channels. I tag lots of things on my site as “IndieWeb” mostly for my own use, so I specifically don’t use the plugin for concern of overwhelming those other sites. Instead I typically cross-post to both services manually using their respective instructions: IndieWeb News and IndieWeb.xyz.

IndieNews Dashboard Widget

The other feature that the plugin does is add a small widget to your main /wp-admin/ dashboard page that also displays a feed of what appears on the IndieNews website for your convenience.

Example of what IndieNews widget looks like in your WordPress dashboard.

I’ll admit that the GitHub repo for the plugin doesn’t do as good a job of describing how to use it as it might. Perhaps we ought to file an issue to improve that?

A Sketch for an IndieWeb Bullet Journal

Over the past several weeks I’ve been thinking more and more about productivity solutions, bullet journals, and to do lists. This morning I serendipitously came back across a reply Paul Jacobson made about lab books on a post relating to bullet journals and thought I’d sketch out a few ideas.

I like the lab book metaphor! That’s probably why a notebook-note analogy appeals to me for my productivity tools. Paul Jacobson on A vague Notion of a more productive system.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that no one has created a bullet journal plugin for WordPress yet. Or maybe someone comes up with a bullet journal stand alone product a bit like Autommatic’s Simple Note? Last week after a talk I attended, someone came up to me who had self-published 400+ copies of a custom made bullet journal that they wanted to sell/market. I’ve also been looking at some bullet journal apps, but my very first thoughts were “Who owns this data? What will they do with it? What happens if the company goes out of business? Is there a useful data export functionality?” For one of the ones I looked at my immediate impression was “This is a really painful and unintuitive UI.”

Naturally my next thought was “how would the IndieWeb build such a thing?”

Perhaps there’s a lot of code to write, though I can imagine that simply creating Archive views of pre-existing data may be a good first start. In fact some good archive views would be particularly helpful if one is using a plugin like David Shanske’s Post Kinds which dramatically extends the idea behind Post Formats. This would make tracking things like eating, drinking, reading, etc. a lot easier to present visually as well as to track/journal. One could easily extend the functionality of Post Kinds to create “to do” items and then have archive views that could be sorted by date, date due, tags/categories for easier daily use. Since it’s all web-based, it’s backed up and available almost everywhere including desktop and mobile.

I know a few people like Jonathan LaCour and Eddie Hinkle have been tinkering around with monthly, weekly, or annual recaps on their websites (see also: https://indieweb.org/monthly_recap). Isn’t this what a lot of bullet journals are doing, but in reverse order? You put in data quickly so you can have an overview to better plan and live in the future? If you’re already using Micropub tools like teacup (for food/drink), OwnYourSwarm (for location), or a variety of others for bookmarking things (which could be added to one’s to-do list), then creating a handful of bullet journal-type views on that data should be fairly easy. I also remember that Beau Lebens had his Keyring project for WordPress that was pulling in a lot of data from various places that could be leveraged in much the same way.

In some sense I’m already using my own WP-based website as a commonplace book (or as Jamie Todd Rubin mentions on Paul’s post a (lab) notebook), so how much nicer/easier would it be if I could (privately) track to do lists as well?

Of course the hard part now is building it all…

Additional notes and ideas

I started thinking about some of this ages ago when I prototyped making “itches” for my own website. And isn’t this just a public-facing to-do list? I don’t immediately see a to-do list entry on the IndieWeb wiki though I know that people have talked about it in the past. There’s also definitely no bullet journal or productivity entries, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build them.

There are a lot of preexisting silos on the web that do to-do lists or which have productivity related personal data (Google notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc.), so there are definitely many UI examples of good and bad display. For distributed group task management I could easily see things being marked done or undone and webmentions handling notifications for these. I suspect for this to take off on a wide, distributed scale for company-wide project management however, more work would need to exist on the ideas of audience and private or semi-private posts. The smaller personal side is certainly much more easily handled.

As another useful sub-case for study, I’ll note that several within the IndieWeb are able to post issues on their own websites, syndicate to GitHub’s issue queue, and get replies back, and isn’t this just a simple example workflow of a to-do list as well?

Greg McVerry has also mentioned he’s tinkered around in this area before primarily using pre-existing functionality in WithKnown. In his case, he’s been utilizing the related idea of the Pomodoro Technique which is widely known in productivity circles.

I’d be thrilled to hear ideas, thoughts, additional brainstorming, or even prior art examples of this sort of stuff. Feel free to add your thoughts below.

Featured photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

Replied to Joe’s Syndicated Links Considered ‘Spam’ By Some Mastodon Instance by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)

I actually kind of understand this—only because I think Mastodon is at odds with the Indieweb.

I don’t think that what Joe is seeing is an anti-IndieWeb thing. It is something we’ve seen before from a handful of instances and will assuredly see again.

The other example of this behavior I’ve seen was when Greg McVerry, a college professor and member of the IndieWeb community, tried to join a Mastodon instance that was specific to researchers and professors in higher education. Sadly he found out, like Joe, that syndicating content from other locations was not acceptable there. As I recall, they also required an automatic content warning on almost everything posted to that particular instance which seemed an additional travesty to me. I think he ultimately joined mastodon.social and found he didn’t have any similar issues there and anyone who wanted to follow him from any other instances still could. I’m sure he can provide some additional details and may have posted about it sometime in the summer of 2018 when it happened.

The tough part is that each instance, though federated among many others, can have its own terms of service and set up. Some instances can be and certainly are run by their own tyrannical administrators, and I suppose that it’s their right since they’re paying for the server and the overhead. The solution is to do some research into some instances and find one that isn’t going to ban you for what would otherwise seem like average use to most. I’ve found mastodon.social to be relatively simple in its terms and its massive size also tends to cover up a lot of edge cases, so you’re unlikely to run into the same problems there. (It is also run by the creator of Mastodon, who has generally been IndieWeb friendly.)

The issue Joe has run into also points out a flaw of the overall Fediverse in that just like each real-world country can have its own laws and there is a broader general international law, the international laws aren’t as well codified or respected by each individual country. When you’re operating in someone else’s country, you’re bound to follow their local laws and even customs. Fortunately if you don’t like them there are lots of other places to live. And this is one of the bigger, mostly unseen, benefits of the IndieWeb: if you have your own website, you can create your own rules/laws and do as you please without necessarily relying as heavily on the rules of others.

I’ll note that some in the IndieWeb (Aaron Parecki, Ryan Barrett, Mathias Pfefferle, Jacky Alcine, et al.) have been playing around with or thinking about adding the ActivityPub protocols so that their own websites act as stand-alone members of the Fediverse. Since I know Joe has recently moved to WordPress, I’ll mention that there are two separate projects to help WordPress sites federate:
* ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from Mathias Pfefferle
* Bridgy Fed from Ryan Barrett

Naturally neither of these (yet) supports all of the protocols so some functionality one would find on Mastodon won’t necessarily work, but I suspect that over time that they eventually will. It’s been a while since I tried out BridgyFed, but I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin set up for a bit and have noticed a lot of recent work by Mathias Pfefferle to use it for himself. I still have to tweak around with some of my settings, but so far it provides some relatively useful results. The best part is that I don’t need to syndicate content to Mastodon, but users there can subscribe to me at @chrisaldrich@boffosocko.com, for example, instead of @chrisaldrich@mastodon.social. The results and functionality aren’t perfect yet, but with some work we’ll get there I think.

Good luck finding (or creating) an instance that works for you!

The more I see, read, and hear about the vagaries of social media; the constant failings and foibles of Facebook, the trolling dumpster fire that is Twitter, the ills of Instagram; the spread of dark patterns; and the unchecked rise of surveillance capitalism, and weapons of math destruction the more I think that the underlying ideas focusing on people and humanity within the IndieWeb movement are its core strength.

Perhaps we need to create a new renaissance of humanism for the 21st century? Maybe we call it digital humanism to create some intense focus, but the emphasis should be completely on the people side.

Naturally there’s a lot more that they–and we all–need to do to improve our lives. Let’s band together to create better people-centric, ethical solutions.

🎧 Triangulation 380 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism | TWiT.TV

Listened to Triangulation 380 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Leo Laporte from TWiT.tv

Shoshana Zuboff is the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. She talks with Leo Laporte about how social media is being used to influence people.

Links

Shoshana Zuboff

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

Shoshana Zuboff on Twitter

Even for the people who are steeped in some of the ideas of surveillance capitalism, ad tech, and dark patterns, there’s a lot here to still be surprised about. If you’re on social media, this should be required listening/watching.

I can’t wait to get the copy of her book.

Folks in the IndieWeb movement have begun to fix portions of the problem, but Shoshana Zuboff indicates that there are several additional levels of humane understanding that will need to be bridged to make sure their efforts aren’t just in vain. We’ll likely need to do more than just own our own data, but we’ll need to go a step or two further as well.

The thing I was shocked to not hear in this interview (and which may not be in the book either) is something that I think has been generally left unmentioned with respect to Facebook and elections and election tampering (29:18). Zuboff and Laporte discuss Facebook’s experiments in influencing people to vote in several tests for which they published academic papers. Even with the rumors that Mark Zuckerberg was eyeing a potential presidential run in 2020 with his trip across America and meeting people of all walks of life, no one floated the general idea that as the CEO of Facebook, he might use what they learned in those social experiments to help get himself (or even someone else) elected by sending social signals to certain communities to prevent them from voting while sending other signals to other communities to encourage them to vote. The research indicates that in a very divided political climate that with the right sorts of voting data, it wouldn’t take a whole lot of work for Facebook to help effectuate a landslide victory for particular candidates or even entire political parties!! And of course because of the distributed nature of such an attack on democracy, Facebook’s black box algorithms, and the subtlety of the experiments, it would be incredibly hard to prove that such a thing was even done.

I like her broad concept (around 43:00) where she discusses the idea of how people tend to frame new situations using pre-existing experience and that this may not always be the most useful thing to do for what can be complex ideas that don’t or won’t necessarily play out the same way given the potential massive shifts in paradigms.

Also of great interest is the idea of instrumentarianism as opposed to the older ideas of totalitarianism. (43:49) Totalitarian leaders used to rule by fear and intimidation and now big data stores can potentially create these same types of dynamics, but without the need for the fear and intimidation by more subtly influencing particular groups of people. When combined with the ideas behind “swarming” phenomenon or Mark Granovetter’s ideas of threshold reactions in psychology, only a very small number of people may need to be influenced digitally to create drastic outcomes. I don’t recall the reference specifically, but I recall a paper about the mathematics with respect to creating ethnic neighborhoods that only about 17% of people needed to be racists and move out of a neighborhood to begin to create ethnic homogeneity and drastically less diversity within a community.

Also tangentially touched on here, but not discussed directly, I can’t help but think that all of this data with some useful complexity theory might actually go a long way toward better defining (and being able to actually control) Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand.”

There’s just so much to consider here that it’s going to take several revisits to the ideas and some additional research to tease this all apart.

Dividing and Conquering the IndieWeb Related Content on My Website

Both for my own benefit as well as for that of others who may be following along, I realize that I’ve been tagging a lot of material on my site with the broad category of “IndieWeb”. Some of it is definitely more significant and content rich than others, but in aggregate it may often seem like a firehose. If you’re following the community relatively closely already, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of redundant material.

As a result, and since it’s easy to do, I’m only going to categorize a much smaller segment of the richer material that I write or which is I deem to be extremely broadly appealing with the IndieWeb category. The remainder of smaller pieces by others, bookmarks, short replies, or other tangential related things (UX, UI, silos, silo quits, etc.) I’m going to use the alternate and separate IndieWeb tag.

Thus if you’re active in the IndieWeb community and only want my IndieWeb related materials then follow the category and not the tag. If you’re not closely following the community and want everything then I recommend following the content from both the category and the tag.

With the subtle change this may also help IndieWeb related planets like Aaron Parecki’s https://stream.indieweb.org/ or Malcolm Blaney’s https://unicyclic.com/indieweb/ pick up relevant data without needing to do heavy de-duplication for fear of spamming various channels.

In the coming days/weeks I’ll try to go back into my backlog of posts and re-categorize and re-tag things based on this general scheme.

My direct content:
Category Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/

Miscellaneous bookmarks, replies, other content I collect for my commonplace book, etc:
Tag Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/

The firehose of everything IndieWeb related from my site:
Category AND/OR Tag | feed: https://boffosocko.com/?s=indieweb&feed=rss2

And of course I still try to aggregate and orient most of the important pieces in my IndieWeb Collection.

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 13 Lacking a Theme

Episode 13: Lacking a Theme

Running time: 1h 25m 29s | Download (25.5MB) | Subscribe by RSS |

Huffduff

Summary: David Shanske and I reunite for the first episode of 2019. Special apologies to Jeremy Cherfas, as the recording equipment was not working to specifications this week.

Recorded: January 2019

Shownotes

Read The Real Roots of American Rage (The Atlantic)

The untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives—and what we can do about it.

🔖 Personal sites are awesome

Bookmarked Personal sites are awesome by Andy Bell (personalsit.es)

Personal sites are awesome, so this site was built so we can all discover each others. All the links are by folks that want to share their site with the world.

If you want your site to appear on here, go ahead and submit it on GitHub, or drop me an email.

I just ran across this interesting version of a directory which is being built based on a GitHub repo and deployed to https://personalsit.es/.

It’s built by Andy Bell who has been building his own website and is at least IndieWeb aware. I’ve added the example to the IndieWeb wiki page for directories. While interesting and useful, like some of the other directories I’ve seen floating around, there is a small hurdle that one needs to be able to fork a GitHub repo, edit it, and send a PR to be included, though I do like that he has an email option to bring the technical hurdle down. The other benefit is that it allows people to modify or delete their data as well. I do like the decentralized nature of of it, but I wonder about scale and search-ability.

I can’t help but wonder about building a similar directory site that aggregates its data by Webmention and uses the h-cards from websites to automatically update itself. Naturally having an OPML file(s) (think various versions that are sortable using tags/categories) or some other exportable and/or subscribe-able ability for feed readers would be highly useful.

In addition to resources like chat-names, Indie Map‘s list, as well as some planets, OPML resources like my own IndieWeb list, and the IndieWeb web ring, this could be another interesting directory creation method for IndieWeb-specific websites.

👤 Kicks Condor; Brad Enslen;

Replied to Feed page by

Andy Bell (Andy Bell)

Let’s make 2019 the year of personal sites and the IndieWeb.

Thanks for the awesome feed page and congratulations on launching into the IndieWeb in 2019!

If it helps, Max Böck recently wrote some excellent articles (with code examples) on using Eleventy to easily syndicate content to Twitter as well as to add Webmention functionality. If you haven’t seen them yet, they may help you along your journey a bit more quickly. Both can be found at: https://indieweb.org/Eleventy

👓 Static Indieweb pt2: Using Webmentions | Max Böck

Read Static Indieweb pt2: Using Webmentions by Max Böck (Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer)

How to pull interactions from social media platforms like Twitter back to your own site, using Webmentions, webmention.io and Bridgy.

Clear and lucid tutorial for adding Webmention to one’s Eleventy-based static site.

👓 Static Indieweb pt1: Syndicating Content | Max Böck

Read Static Indieweb pt1: Syndicating Content by Max Böck (Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer)

How to automatically publish content from a static site on Twitter, using Eleventy and Netlify's lambda functions.

A nice little article with some excellent code examples for those who want to follow along.