Category: Itch

Read Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence by Matt Webb (Interconnected, a blog by Matt Webb)
My take is that the web could feel warmer and more lively than it is. Visiting a webpage could feel a little more like visiting a park and watching the world go by. Visiting my homepage could feel just a tiny bit like stopping by my home. And so to celebrate my blogging streak reaching one year, this week, I’m adding a proof of concept to my blog, something I’m provisionally calling Social Attention.
You had me at “select text”…

If somebody else selects some text, it’ll be highlighted for you. ❧

Suddenly social annotation has taken an interesting twist. @Hypothes_is better watch out! 😉
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:03AM

How often have you been on the phone with a friend, trying to describe how to get somewhere online? Okay go to Amazon. Okay type in “whatever”. Okay, it’s the third one down for me…
This is ridiculous!
What if, instead, you both went to the website and then you could just say: follow me. ❧

There are definitely some great use cases for this.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:05AM

A status emoji will appear in the top right corner of your browser. If it’s smiling, there are other people on the site right now too. ❧

This is pretty cool looking. I’ll have to add it as an example to my list: Social Reading User Interface for Discovery.

We definitely need more things like this on the web.

It makes me wish the Reading.am indicator were there without needing to click on it.

I wonder how this sort of activity might be built into social readers as well?
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:13AM

If I’m in a meeting, I should be able to share a link in the chat to a particular post on my blog, then select the paragraph I’m talking about and have it highlighted for everyone. Well, now I can. ❧

And you could go a few feet farther if you added [fragment](https://indieweb.org/fragmention) support to the site, then the browser would also autoscroll to that part. Then you could add a confetti cannon to the system and have the page rain down confetti when more than three people have highlighted the same section!
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:18AM

I want the patina of fingerprints, the quiet and comfortable background hum of a library. ❧

A great thing to want on a website! A tiny hint of phatic interaction amongst internet denizens.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:20AM

What I’d like more of is a social web that sits between these two extremes, something with a small town feel. So you can see people are around, and you can give directions and a friendly nod, but there’s no need to stop and chat, and it’s not in your face. It’s what I’ve talked about before as social peripheral vision (that post is about why it should be build into the OS). ❧

I love the idea of social peripheral vision online.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:22AM

streak: New posts for 52 consecutive weeks. ❧

It’s kind of cool that he’s got a streak counter for his posts.
Annotated on March 28, 2021 at 10:24AM

Replied to Webmentions + Eleventy Talk by Sia KaramalegosSia Karamalegos (sia.codes)
Slides and resources from my talk at JamStack Toronto.
First there’s the details of her post in particular that are cool, but I like how Sia is leveraging Twitter as part of the commenting system on her blog using Webmention and Brid.gy. This way for people who aren’t replying or interacting with their own websites (yet!), they can still take part in the conversation, but she can own it all in one centralized place.

In particular take a look at the great, and intuitive UI she’s got at the bottom of her post:

Join the conversation on Twitter. Or, if you liked this article and think others should read it, please retweet it.

Just click on the link, reply and go. It would  be nice to see other social platforms allow this sort of interaction. Setting it up for Mastodon should also be pretty simple too.

Some modification ideas to the Curator’s Code Plugin

I quietly wonder what it would take to modify the zip file for the Curator’s Code Plugin to take advantage of Parse This to input a URL and parse back a small snippet of context for more easily giving credit to posts in the WordPress classic editor?

It looks like it used to be in the repository, but perhaps with the rise of Gutenberg, they opted not to maintain it? 

I follow most of the code there, but I’m thinking too much of the actual output is done via JS with tinyMCE, so maybe I’m missing some of the finer portions. It also needs some tweaks to redirect to maybe the Internet Archive since curatorscode.org no longer exists.

I’m thinking an output closer to the following for each type might still be simple, but provide some additional context, (presuming my microformats aren’t too horrific/mis-nested):

<p><small><cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">AuthorTK</span> <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-TK-TK</time>)</cite></small></p>

<p><small><cite class="h-cite ht"><abbr title="hat tip">↬</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">AuthorTK</span> <a class="u-url p-name" href="https://example.com/TK" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">TitleTK</a> (<time class="dt-published">2020-01-29</time>)</cite></small></p>

Hopefully the via and ht classes also give people enough to latch onto for doing some custom styling of the output if necessary.

With more prevalence of crediting like this, I also wonder how parsers might better display received webmentions for these types of notifications beyond the basic “Sue mentioned this”. Maybe a facepile of avatars under the heading “Inspired by this post”?  Though the way “via” is used in practice, it might also fit under the category of a repost?

Read Alternative Tweet Embedding by Stefan Bohacek (fourtonfish.com)
When you embed Tweets on your website, Twitter asks you to include their JavaScript code that adds images, number of likes, and loads their styles. But looking at the size of all the script files (yes, the one script tag loads multiple JavaScript files), does quite a bit more than that, including tracking your website’s users. And it has pretty negative impact on your site’s performance as measured by Google PageSpeed.
Update: This seems to have disappeared and roughly remapped to https://fourtonfish.com/project/tweet-embeds-wordpress-plugin/

Feature request: Recent Kinds Widgets and/or Now page aggregation

Filed an Issue Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress (GitHub)
adds support for responding to and interacting with other sites using the standards developed by the Indieweb Community - dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

Recent Kinds Widget

It’s a reasonably frequent design/functionality pattern to see widgets from social media services. (Goodreads is an example that provides a widget for recent reads. Twitter does so for notes. There are countless others.) 

In an IndieWeb world, it would be nice to highlight what one has recently read, watched, or listened to (as examples). Towards this functionality, it would be nice if Post Kinds could provide the ability to add widgets for a variety of the post kinds to sidebars or footers.

As a baseline I could envision each widget having:

  • a configurable title (“Recently read”, “Food diary” for eats & drinks, “Microblog” for recent notes, bookmarks, etc.)
  • a chooser for one (or more) of the many various (enabled) kinds
  • a variable N to allow for display of the N most recent of the chosen kinds; 5 or 10 might be a reasonable default; a time-based variable to run across the post within a recent period (days, weeks, months) might be a an interesting alternative as well

For display of a single kind, the widget might default to displaying:

  • a heading made of the post kind icon along with “Recent [Post Kind Name plural]”
  • Response Property Name (wrapped with the original permalink if it exists) by Author name (if it exists)
  • An optional published date for the original content (if it exists) or the date the site owner published the post kind (if it exists) (the original content date would be better for context, I think)
  • A fleuron (❧) or hash (#) which could be wrapped with the permalink of the original Post Kind post.

UI example: 

 

If the chooser in the widget allows for displaying multiple kinds at the same time, then one could have a widget for “Recent Media Consumed” or for displaying a sidebar microblog that could include Notes, bookmarks, reads, etc. (Making it similar to embedding one’s Twitter feed into a sidebar.

For encouraging outside consumption, the widget could also have a small RSS icon with a link to that Kind’s (or Kinds’) feed.

Naturally there could be some configuration for reasonable display defaults for some of the various Post Kinds./

Now archive page

Given some of the potential similarity of the widget work above, it would also be fun to have Post Kinds generate an archive page that shows by kind either the N most recent posts for each kind or all the posts within the last M days, O weeks, or P months.

This could be used to automatically generate the idea of a Now page that gives a quick overview of what a person has been up to over a relatively recent time period. A month of posts would be a good default.

One might also be able to use a solution like How to Add WordPress Widgets in Post and Page Content as a means of embedding the widgets into such a Now-type page, which could give the user the ability to pick and choose which order to place the particular kinds into based on the site owner’s discretion.

Read Automatically sending Webmentions from a static website by James Mead (jamesmead.org)
Using Actionsflow to automate the sending of Webmentions using webmention.app
This is an interesting way for static sites to automatically send webmentions using RSS.

Perhaps it’s something I might use in conjunction with my work with TiddlyWiki, MediaWiki, or my Obsidian.md notebook projects.

Replied to Feature Request (Reclaim Hosting Community)
Have anything you would like to see happen in Reclaim Cloud? Maybe you want to see an application in the Marketplace? A feature in the Dashboard? Share your thoughts here!
I could see a potential demand (beyond me) for a one-click install of Hypothesis, the open source, web annotation, highlight, and bookmarking service. It’s got a number of moving pieces and should be ideal for such a cloud-based use case and likely has a significant overlap with the customer base for Reclaim.

Main company site: https://web.hypothes.is/ 2
GitHub repositories: Hypothesis · GitHub 3
Documentation for set up using docker: Installation guide — The Hypothesis Annotation Framework 0.0.2 documentation 1

Given what it offers, I could see people also potentially using it as a CMS, blogging platform, or social bookmarking platform:

Read Blog graph by Dima GerasimovDima Gerasimov (beepb00p.xyz)

This is an experiment, an alternative way to represent blog posts, as a graph. Click this if you want to get back to the plain list.

The idea is that if you encounter a blog, it's often unclear how to start reading it: typically it's an overwhelming linear list of posts, ordered by date. (thanks Jonathan for bringing my attention to it!)

Representing as a graph allows to relax this linear structure by introducing a partial order (shown by edges). You can start reading from a title that seems most interesting to you, and keep exploring the related posts.

  • clicking on a post title brings you to the post
  • clicking on a tag will bring you to the description of the tag
  • clicking on a date will highlight all connections to the corresponding post, to make the navigation easier
  • clusters correspond to 'themes' (although it's pretty fuzzy)

If you have any ideas on improving this page, or notice any problems, please let me know! You can find the source here.

An interesting visualization for the content in a blog. Somewhat reminiscent of the modus operandi of TiddlyMap. 

This is the sort of thing that Maggie Appleton and the digital gardens gang would appreciate.

Read RSS is not dead you know (nor is Atom) by Sebastiaan AndewegSebastiaan 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...
I need to do some deep thinking and design layout of the feed reader I’d like to have. Something like a cross between some of the traditional readers like Inoreader and Fraidy.cat which has some of the time-based and social sorting that Ton has suggested in the past.
Read Fun synonyms for art museum guards by Matt Maldre (Spudart)
I’m brainstorming ways of describing art museum guards.  Art museum security guardArt protectorGallery attendantLaw enforcementMuseum access controlMuseum patrolMuseum protectorObserver of visitorsParcel inspectorPolicy enforcerPreventer of suspicious actionsPreventer of touchingProper propriety maintainerProperty guardProtection services officerSecuritySecurity officerVandalism deterrent My favorite might be the last one, Vandalism deterrent. It’s so true, but also feels so odd to describe that …
I like the idea of having a generator for tangential taxonomies for improving search. How could I build this into my website?