Here we’re using hacking with a decidedly positive connotation.
In addition to some other useful upgrades and bug fixes, the big new feature this release adds is excellent syndication support for Micro.blog.
While many people use RSS feeds, JSONfeed, or other plugin methods for syndicating their WordPress website’s content to Micro.blog, this plugin now provides for a per-post decision about exactly what content to send to Micro.blog. It also naturally provides a syndication link from your site back to the Micro.blog post. To my knowledge no other method provides this syndication link functionality.
As I suspect many may already be aware, if your site supports Webmention (typically done with the Webmention and Semantic-linkbacks plugins), then Micro.blog will notify your site with replies and comments to your post as they appear on Micro.blog. This provides one the ability to do two-way communication between the two platforms.
If you don’t already have it, install the plugin and activate it, otherwise update it within your site’s administrative interface.
Add your Micro.blog account username to your user profile on your WordPress site. This is typically found at /wp-admin/profile.php. In my case I simply added c to the field labeled Micro.blog username.
Adjust your WordPress Syndication Links settings page (typically found at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links) to include Micro.blog by using the appropriate checkbox. Be sure to save the setting.
Remove, if necessary, any of the RSS, JSON, or other syndication feeds from your Micro.blog account so you’re not accidentally duplicating the syndication.
Add the JSONfeed URL from the bottom of the Syndication Links plugin settings page into your list of feeds at https://micro.blog/account/feeds.
Create a post, select Micro.blog as an endpoint in the relevant meta-box, and publish your post.
Once published, your post will ping Micro.blog’s server to indicate the new content which will then be displayed in your timeline. The Syndication Links plugin will then find the permalink URL of your post on Micro.blog and display it on your post (as per your settings) along with any other syndicated copies. This notification process is roughly real time, but may take a minute or two for your post to display and the syndication link to appear on your site based on the processing times on the relevant servers.
As an added bonus, Syndication Links plugin will also find the syndication links from Micro.blog in your current feed and add those to your original posts.
If you have any questions, need clarifications, or find bugs with regard to your set up, you can file issues for the plugin on GitHub.
The RSS icon and links are automatically generated for me by simply putting in any RSS feed that has a /feed/ path in its URL.
While this is great, clicking on the RSS icon link goes to a page with a hodgepodge of markup, content, and meta data and typically requires multiple additional steps and prior advanced knowledge of what those steps should be to do something useful with that link/page. In other words the UI around this (and far too many other RSS icons) is atrocious, unwelcoming, and generally incomprehensible to the general public. (Remember those long and elaborate pages newspapers and magazines had to define RSS and how to use it? It’s a HUGE amount of cognitive load compared to social media following UI in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. which just works™.)
Fortunately Julien Genestoux and friends have created an elegant solution in SubToMe, described as a Universal Follow button, that is open, non-intrusive, protects privacy, and works with virtually any feed reader. It uses some JavaScript to create a pop-up that encourages users to use any of various popular feed readers (or the one of their choice). The UI flow for this is far superior and useful for the casual web-user and has the potential to help along the renaissance of feed readers and consumption of web content in a way that allows readers more control over their reading than social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that mandate their own proprietary reading algorithms.
While one can embed SubToMe directly into a website (I do this with a Follow button in my site’s top right sidebar, for example) or using Julien and Matthias‘ WordPress plugin, I suspect it would be far easier if some of this functionality were built directly into WordPress core in some way. Or alternately, is there an easy way to put data into one of the common fields (or wrap it) in these social links menus, so that when a user clicks on the relatively ubiquitous RSS icon in those social links menus, that it triggers a SubToMe-like subscription workflow?
I would suspect that WordPress.com might try something like this and naturally recommend their own beautiful reader, which was relatively recently redesigned by Jan Cavan Boulas et al., using a bit of functionality which SubToMe kindly provides.
I think that the simplification of this RSS reader subscription workflow would go a LONG way toward making it more successful and usable. It could also provide massive influence on increasing the use of feed readers in general and the WordPress Reader in particular.
I do note that there is a form of follow functionality built into WordPress.com-based websites, but that’s locked into the .com platform or needs a plugin for self-hosted sites. It also only benefits the WordPress.com reader rather than other readers in the space. Some of the issue here is to fix the NASCAR problem of needing dozens of plugin solutions and widgets to have what amounts to the same functionality on each platform in existence. I think it’s far more important for the open web to be able to do these sorts of simple functionalities in a more standardized way to give users more freedom, flexibility and choice. The standardization makes it easier for competition in a market economy to gradually improve this sort of user interface over time.
If someone did undertake some development in this area, I’d give bonus development points on this for:
/category/feed/ and /tag/feed/ taxonomy feeds on posts to allow for subscriptions to niche areas of websites that cover multiple broad topics? I know David Shanske has done some work on feed discovery in WordPress recently for the Yarns Microsub Server that may be useful here.I wonder if Jeffrey Paul, Jeremy Felt, Matthias Pfefferle, Jeffrey Zeldman or others may have some ideas about broader implementation and execution of something like this for improved UI in these areas?
Todd Conaway (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)We should make some agreements about our focus.
- Are we continuting with various tools and sharing them on this site?
- Should we focus more on building out our own domains and share that process?
- Both? Other?
- Where shall we go?
If you’re thinking about doing something like WithKnown (aka Known, the CMS your post is on), and interested in the WordPress portion, you might consider doing a full/partial Domain of One’s Own program through Reclaim Hosting or even rolling your own. Even if you go small with just a few classes, you might consider adapting the Homebrew Website Club model at your site where you invite students to tinker around, help each other out, and then show off or demonstrate their work. The related IndieWeb wiki and online chat are free to join and can provide a wealth of information and help for students (and educators!) working at owning their own domains.
Incidentally, if you’re unaware, WordPress now has a suite of plugins that will allow it to have a lot of the site-to-site communication capabilities that Known does. I’ve not done it before, but I’m fairly certain you could run it on a multiuser installation of WordPress much the same way you’re using http://janevangalen.com/cms/.
Another interesting option would be to have students try out accounts on micro.blog which are relatively inexpensive, though I suspect if you touched base with Manton Reece and explained what you were doing, he might offer free or significantly reduced hosting for a reasonable period of time. I know he’s given away a year of free hosting to attendees of IndieWebCamps who are starting out with their own domains. If he did then you might be able to use some institutional funds to purchase domains for students to get them started.
I’m happy to spitball ideas in these areas if you’re interested. I’m glad to see others experimenting around with the ideas around DoOO and IndieWeb for Education!
By the way, good on you for opening up your planning process for teaching and learning on the open web. It certainly sets a useful example for others who are exploring and following in your footsteps.
Jane Van Galen (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)We talked in our group last week about the time that it requires to develop course websites and "open" assignments, and to make new tech function as it should when there may not be enough support, and when these sorts of investments may not be valued in faculty reviews.
I talked briefly about the "innovation" part is often simply building off the work of others, when so many faculty now share their work on the open web.
A great example of this just came through my Twitter feed. I have a column set up in Tweetdeck where I'm following the # Domains19 conference. With a Tweetdeck column, I can just glance or scroll for a minute between other things I'm doing, to see if anything looks interesting. People at this conference are working on open pedagogies, particularly via the Domains of Ones Own work we've talked about. Most sessions are being live-tweeted, with a rich trove of links.
One attendee Chris Aldrich, has created a Twitter list of past attendees at the conference and others who do work related that that presented at this meeting. I can skim this to find new people from whom to learn. I can follow them and then, as I have time, check their Twitter feeds for updates on what they're doing. If I don't find myself learning from these new follows, I just unfollow and move on.
And inevitably, over months and years, I'll find people who will generously invest in teaching me and others about the work they're doing, about why they're doing it, and about how that work is recieved by their students.
This is the open web I hope we're teaching our students about -- place of innovation, generosity, value-driven discourse and always, always, something new to learn.
If you appreciated that bit of trickery, you might better appreciate a more open web version of the same with respect to the following page I made of various people and publications I’m following in my various feed readers. It provides OPML feeds so others can easily import them into their feed readers as well. You can find some additional documentation about it here.
Here’s some additional reading and links for background, if you’re interested.
Dr. Ryan Straight (Twitter)Has anyone gathered a collection of interesting and/or unexpected ways of using @hypothes_is beyond its standard use case? @xolotl #SquadGoalsNetwork
— Dr. Ryan "Rebel Without a Clause" Straight (@RyanStraight) December 7, 2019
Greg McVerry, Ian O’Byrne, and I have integrated Hypothes.is into our digital/online commonplace books in different ways. Greg’s are embedded at https://jgregorymcverry.com/annotations, Ian discusses his process on his site, while mine show up as annotation or highlight posts.
I’ve not published the full idea yet, but I’ve spent some time contemplating using Hypothes.is as a blogging platform/CMS. It might require a bit of flexibility, but it generally has reasonable support for:
I have been personally using Hypothes.is to follow the public feed, several tag feeds, and several friends’ specific feeds as a discovery tool for finding interesting content to read.
And a final off-label use case that could be compelling, but which could have some better UI and integration would be to use Hypothes.is as an embeddable commenting system for one’s own website. It has in-line commenting in much the same way that Medium does, but the entire thing could likely be embedded into a comment section under a traditional blog post and be used in much the same way people use Disqus on blogs. I’ll note that in practice, I find Hypothes.is far faster than Disqus ever was. I’ve yet to see anyone offloading the commenting functionality of their blog this way, but I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that someone could hack it together as a simple iframe or via the API pretty quickly and with solid results.
And naturally I’m missing many, potentially including some I’ve thought about before. Maybe worth checking the old Hypothes.is tag in my digital notebook?
If people have others, I’m enamored to hear them.
I could also appreciate it parsing a page and allowing me to use an h-card to quickly create a follow post and automatically add a page’s feed to my feed reader.
Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass) (Twitter)As a personal project, I want to build my own application that will help me plan my wedding. Basically an online wedding binder. I know there are sites and apps out there but I want to build my own. What all could/should it do?
— your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass (@allie_nimmons) December 4, 2019
I had thought of doing some of this ages ago to own this sort of great nostalgic data on my own website. Sadly I couldn’t get it up due to other work commitments. I now really wish I had.
At the moment, the only direct wedding-related page on the IndieWeb wiki is a snarky definition for engagement. When I’m done, I’ll create a stub for wedding with the following brainstorm.
Of course if you’re looking for general inspiration, the prior artwork of Pinterest, various registries, and other wedding sites will naturally be useful. But I think there are a number of IndieWeb building blocks that can be leveraged to accomplish a lot of what these sites do.
I think if I were doing it today, I’d meld some of the work from bookmarks and photos to create a Pinterest-esqe post type (probably by extending the Post Kinds Plugin, maybe with a custom wedding type with a custom display).
There is lots of prior art on the registries front on the wiki under wish or wish lists. To goose things a bit, I’d definitely add referral links from places like Amazon.com, etc. and use the money either to make a donation to a charity in honor of the event or to defray honeymoon costs. If you want to encourage direct donations or funding mechanisms, there’s also some interesting prior art at the payment wiki page.
Now that the IndieWeb has some very solid support for events and RSVPs, I might even try doing an online wedding invitation and collecting RSVPs. I’ve recently seen Jacky Alcine’s website leveraging CommentPara.de to connect to Quill for comments/replies, and it would be cool to get Quill to also add RSVP functionality to allow those without their own websites to RSVP using the non-anonymous functionality in CommentPara.de. I suspect that since many people have trouble getting RSVP functionality into their sites, that Aaron Parecki might be Tom Sawyered into providing that functionality as a quick and easy win for the broader community. (I’m not immediately aware of any other Micropub tools that do RSVPs though I may be wrong.) Of course potentially expanding it with meal options would be a lovely bonus so people can choose meat/vegetarian/other options. I’ll also mention that gRegor Morill has been tinkering with RSVPs using Webmention on Twitter. As a minimal fallback, you can also allow people to respond directly in the built-in commenting system in WordPress, but if you’re going to do it…)
The biggest piece that would be fun to figure out would be to see how to get things set up to receive social media related wedding photos of the pre-, during, and post-event stuff back to my website from friends and family. Using Brid.gy with Twitter to pull back photos that tag your twitter user name is fairly straightforward, but I’m not sure that services like Flickr or Instagram may work as easily. This may require some thought and programming, but being able to backfeed social photos to your site or even providing friends and family a serviceable photo upload functionality to your site so you can document and keep photos from the event in real-time would be a cool win and could likely be a great feature for any event-related website to have built in or widgetized. It’s usually weeks or months for paid wedding photos to show up and it’s generally a big hassle finding all the online social photos, much less keeping copies of them, so having this could be both fun and useful, particularly for looking back on the event years later.
Naturally, being a WordPress person, I’m sure there may be some interesting prior art in the plugin repository, but I think it would be far cooler to IndieWebify this sort of data and functionality for the broader world.
Depending on the wedding date, this general topic (even for other non-wedding related events) would be an awesome one to look at and explore during an upcoming IndieWebCamp. Perhaps someone is up for it at San Francisco this weekend? (I suspect they’ll have some good live-streaming options for those who aren’t local.)
Given her weddings/events background and web-based work, perhaps Liz Coopersmith (t) might be someone interesting to collaborate with on something like this?
Similarly, I recall a great presentation by Brianna Privett at WordCamp US 2017 called The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse. She may have some useful tidbits and advice in there as well.
Featured photo: Wedding cake. flickr photo by THEMACGIRL* shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license
Jim Groom from bavatuesdays
Tomorrow at 12 PM Eastern/ 9 AM Pacific I’ll be be hosting a Connected Courses discussion that will explore the IndieWeb movement as a people-centered response to the corporate web. How do core IndieWeb principles such as owning your content, remaining better connected, and redefining control online intersect with the values of connected learning? Take a bit of time tomorrow and join myself, Mikhail Gershovich, Ben Werdmuller, Erin Jo Richey, and Simon Thomson to find out more.
[Withknown is] the posterchild of the IndieWeb.
— Jim Groom
I’ll agree that it is pretty darn awesome!
Some slight rephrasings from Ben in the video that I thought were spot on:
IndieWeb: allowing people to connect online without caring about what platforms or services they’re using.
IndieWeb puts the learner first. The LMS, which primarily serves an administrative function, should not be the center of the process.
Within the code at class-syn-link-domain-icon-map.php, I added the following two lines to the obvious spot in the list within the code to fix the icon issues I was having:
'chrisaldrich.wordpress.com' => 'wordpress',
'reading.am' => 'book',
I then reuploaded the edited file to my server. Essentially I’m hard-coding the domain name and the default icon I’d like to have the plugin display.
If the plugin is updated, I’ll obviously have to manually add them again, but the disappearance of the icons again will be pretty obvious and this post will document the necessary changes.
Although upon tweaking this I’m noticing that the reading.am icon isn’t working (I also tried ‘website’ instead of ‘book’ but that didn’t work either). Perhaps the .am tld is causing an issue? Alas…
I suspect that there’s some other bug hiding in the works as one or both of the two types of links above should default to the generic ‘website’ icon when a syndication link exists, but the system isn’t able to specify a particular icon. There may be some small if/else bug hiding in the logic of the plugin.
I’ve been thinking through how to leave Facebook’s Instagram service since June, when I finally deleted my central Facebook account. This should be easy, because I don’t post that much on Instagram, but it always seems hard because it’s the best user experience (IMO) on mobile for writing a ...
Prior to that I’d always been a big fan of Aaron Parecki’s OwnYourGram, though I understand that Instagram was limiting his crawler, so the service may not be taking new accounts.
While I know some of the people behind Pixelfed and generally trust them, I don’t think I would use it as a solution unless I was standing up my own instance of the service. Far too many Mastodon instances have gone down for me to trust a particular sites’ admins. Apparently Mastodon has made it easier to move from one instance to another, but I’m not sure how this may or may not apply to Pixelfed.
Presently, my money is on Matthias Pfefferle’s ActivityPub plugin which adds support to a WordPress site to act as a stand-alone member of the Fediverse. While it’s beta software, it works fairly well and is evolving impressively over the past year or so. I suspect that photo support will improve to put it on par with solutions like Pixelfed, particularly when combined with the ease of use of some of the Micropub photo posting applications that are out there.
I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention that another option for exiting Instagram (or at least backing it up to your own site even if you don’t leave completely) is to try Beau Lebens’ Keyring Social Importers plugin. I know a few who have used and liked it for its Instagram and other social silo support.
I’m sure there are other methods out there as well and many might be found on the IndiwWeb wiki pages for “Instagram” or “photo”.
I started some research and work into creating a plugin to effectuate making “vias” and “hat-tips” easier to create on my site since I often use them to credit some of my sources. I was a bit surprised not to see any prior art in the WordPress repository. Sadly, there’s nothing concrete to show off just yet. I think I’ve got a clear concept of how I want it to look and what will go into the first simple iteration. It will be my first “real” WordPress plugin, so there’s some interesting learning curve along the way.
On a more concrete front, I made a handful of CSS tweaks and fixes to the site, and particularly to some of my annotation/highlighting related posts, that I’ve been meaning to take care of for a while. Now on read posts where I’ve aggregated some annotations/highlights, the highlighted portions should appear in yellow to better differentiate them in portions of text and represent them as highlights. This prevents me from creating a read post for the content and one or dozens of related, but completely separate, follow-up annotation posts. Now they’re combined, and I think they provide a bit more contextualization for the original, but still include the timestamps for the annotations. I’m sure there’s some more I can do to tweak these, but I like the result a bit better than before. Today’s post about a research paper I read on food is a good example of to highlight (pun intended) some of the changes. Ideas for further improvements are most welcome.
I also slightly tweaked and then further experimented with some of the CSS for my reply contexts. I’ve been considering reformatting them a tad to try to highlight the fact that the content within them is context for my responses. In some sense I’m looking at making the context look more card-like or perhaps oEmbed-esque. I still haven’t gotten it the way I’d ultimately like it, but perhaps one day soon? I played around with changing the size of the context with respect to my content as well as adding some outlines and shadows to make the context look more like cards, but I haven’t gotten things just right. Perhaps some more research looking at others’ sites will help? Which sites do you think do reply contexts incredibly well?
I’m glad there’s a holiday coming up so I can spend a bit of time catching up on some of the sessionsand notes and hopefully see some of the demos from the camp.
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Last year, on a whim, I left social media on Thanksgiving, and didn't return until January 1st. It led to massive improvements in my mental and physical health, overall happiness, attention span, and engagement with the world. This year I've been with my mother while she spent months in the hospital...
I’ve been thinking about this since last night and am half-tempted just to give it up all together and go full indie, but I would be cutting out far too many people that I really like and get a lot out of. However, I’ve been slowly moving further and further away from the toxicity of corporate platforms in any case, so, like Ben, I’ll declare myself all-in on boycotting the attention economy in December.
In my case, this primarily means giving up Twitter since I’ve long since jettisoned Facebook (and really don’t miss it) and it’s been ages since I’ve scrolled through my heavily pared down Instagram account which I now only access through a feed reader to cut out ads. So as to not cut myself off completely, I’ll still interact with others online with my own IndieWeb website and through a small handful of excellent feed readers where I have complete control over what I see and when.
I’ll start to prep for the cleanse today by removing the Twitter app from my phone.
And none of this even touches on the excellent continuing work on Microsub readers which continues to astound me. Even with all of this activity, I’m sure I’m missing some fun little gems, so please don’t hesitate to mention them.
