I’m watching this with high hopes something similar would work with @obsdmd. Come to think if it, if such an app were a Micropub client and these platforms all supported publishing via Micropub, then the one application would work across more platforms.
Category: Reply
Mine does. I also keep a list of people who have IndieWeb sites and most (though not all) will support Webmentions: https://boffosocko.com/about/following/
Most under the IndieWeb and some under the IndieWeb for Education and Blogger headings will support webmentions.
You can find others by browsing through Brid.gy users, the vast majority of whom will support it as will users of Micro.blog. Another good source of discovery is the IndieWeb webring: https://🕸💍.ws.
If you’d like, you can add a Webmention button to your site to visually indicate that you support it.
Update: Also, if you want to meet some “in person”, I’d welcome you to join one of our virtual meetups coming up: https://events.indieweb.org/
In addition to what’s on the IndieWeb wiki, I’ve written quite a bit: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.
If you have specific questions, there are a lot of us who can help in the IndieWeb chat or WordPress specific chat.
A lot of it depends on what you what to do with it—which features and functionalities. Hopefully one or even a few of the plugins with minimal configuration will get you what you want.
Syndicating content can be a bit more involved, but only because there are so many methods depending on the level of control you want for the output and what sort of results you may want back from social silos.
Alan,
Did I hear someone whisper “Book SPLOT”?!
There are a few examples of this sort of publishing pattern at https://indieweb.org/academic_samizdat and https://indieweb.org/book that use a variety of technologies.
The easiest method is obviously to publish a .pdf copy and simply link it. If you have a text version of it and want .epub or .mobi files for e-readers I’ve got infrastructure for converting text into those I could put into service for you. I’ve done it in the past for Stommel and Morris’s Urgency of Teachers. (I have a small publishing house on the side and can help you out with ISBN numbers for much cheaper than usual if you like.)
@kfitz has done it a few times during the process of writing and subsequently publishing books, so she may have ideas/opinions. If I’m not mistaken, she used CommentPress, so that may be most comfortable for you from within the WordPress world.
Jeremy Keith has an awesome example at https://resilientwebdesign.com/ and if you pinged him, he may have a flat html file “shell” that you could cut and paste into. (Or you could view source and manually get the same result.)
Amy Guy’s example on Github which she published using Github Pages is nice and could make a fun little project for you as well.
It would be so much nicer if there were a one click install of PressBooks, but I’ve quit holding my breath on that front. (Maybe it’s a future possibility for Reclaim Cloud though???)
Kevin, I understand a lot of the complications for attempting to set up an IndieWeb site for a static site generator like Evan. A lot of IndieWeb tech is harder to do with SSG’s since a lot of the functionality is anything but static—yet it still works. Hopefully the small handful of plugins for WordPress are much easier, particularly for someone as adept as you. I’ll admit there’s a microformats issue for dovetailing WordPress themes properly, but that should only get better with time. We could definitely use some developers and designers to help lighten the load to make it easier for everyone. Some platforms like WithKnown have it all out of the box while Drupal and WordPress have either one or a several plugins. Evan’s set up is about as complicated as they could come.
Since you mention some of your problems, a few things you might appreciate for making your own personal use easier for WordPress are the large number of Micropub clients you could be using to post to your website. They’re way easier than dealing with the Classic editor, Gutenberg, or the mobile interface. I really enjoy using Quill and Omnibear (a browser extension) myself, but for food you might enjoy Teacup and for memes there’s Kapowski. If you want a crash-course on micropub for a non-developer, I did a WordCamp session on it a while back. Since most of them are open source, I’d imagine with your experience, if necessary, you could modify them to suit your specific needs without a lot of work.
If you want to go a step further, you could set up a social reader for subscribing to and reading other sites as well as using their built in micropub functionality to reply to posts directly from your reader.
You’re right that the ecosystem does seem overly-complicated on first view, but it’s taken almost a decade of work by hundreds and thousands of people to attempt to make a set of standards that are as simple as possible for building into almost any platform out there. Further work will only serve to make things even easier and more usable over time.
Of course if one wants an easier solution (especially for the completely non-technical person who is looking for a Twitter-like replacement), there are a few IndieWeb as a Service platforms out there. One of the best I’ve seen so far is micro.blog. You can’t beat its clean interface or ease-of-use as a service and it has pretty much everything built in out of the box. As time goes by it’ll be great to see other services like this that offer the interoperability without the heartache that Evan has seen.
If you’ve got ideas about how the WordPress parts could be improved, do pass them along.
Coming back to this after-the-fact, I’m realizing that it’s a pretty cool way to do exercise posts. I used to have a better way of doing these myself, and this is a great reminder. You should definitely post the example to the IndieWeb wiki when you get a chance: https://indieweb.org/exercise.
When you’ve got a chance, take a look at your h-card so that when you end up sending webmentions to others your name, website, and avatar parse and show up correctly. You can test with https://indiewebify.me/
Glad to have another WordPress IndieWeb site in the world!
Sometimes Brid.gy can miss tweets. Here I suspect it’s because of the t.co wrapping as well as searching the entirety of the stream for your URL since it wasn’t a direct reply to your original tweet. Ryan Barrett may have more info.
In this case, I was able to re-force it to send by putting the permalink for the missing tweet into the Resend for Post
field at https://brid.gy/twitter/TheGreenGreek. Hopefully it shows up for you on rebuild.
Based on your request tweet, I thought you had wanted your original Tweet to show up in your comment thread, which might be useful in some cases. And perhaps you do want that too, though to my knowledge Brid.gy doesn’t do that. I have a set up on my site that sends refbacks which then parse and display as native comments much the same way webmentions do. Generally this drives me nuts, and I always hide these refbacks from syndicated copies of my content as they look like duplicates.

Newsletters; or, an enormous rant about writing on the web that doesn’t really go anywhere and that’s okay with me
Robin wins the internet today. What a great post, but all the better for the custom design and story telling layered on top!
RSS, Atom, and even h-feed are great ways to subscribe to web content. Sadly the UI has been lacking. I always appreciated Julien Genestoux‘s solution with subtome.com over the more roundabout solutions like Matt Webb’s aboutfeeds.com.
People know what a feed is, what subscription is, what a stream of content is, they just need it to be way simpler, like the click of a button that says “follow” or subscribe”.
Give it a whirl!
Or better, yet…
You asked - we delivered!
— WP Buffs (@thewpbuffs) January 4, 2021
We almost had @DavidWolfpaw on the WPAMA a few weeks ago, but had to cancel last minute. But his topic was SO popular, we rescheduled!
Coming your way this Wednesday, David and @allie_nimmons talk all things #IndieWeb!https://t.co/t7y3uuwIZM
This should be fantastic! I can’t wait.
AMP it down a bit would you please?
I take it you didn’t try the Sherman phrase “If drafted, I will not run; if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve.”
w4rner, I’m replying to your personal site on micro.blog from my site on WordPress and sending you a webmention. Hopefully you’ll see the reply somewhere within the m.b. interface, but not sure if/how it will display in the timeline. I’m guessing that since I’m not syndicating it directly into the timeline myself that it won’t appear there and may only appear on your page if your settings and set up allow it. (I see the conversation.js on your page, so I’m guessing it will.) I would suspect it should appear in your @mentions tab and you should be able to reply to it from there though.
Let me know what you find…
We totally need to schedule a follow up to the IndieWeb Gardens & Streams session from early 2020 to discuss the efflorescence of platforms in this space. I’d love to see more of them supporting Webmention for garden-to-garden interactions.
It might be interesting to see them build out some UI to make a less corporate Goodreads-esque site as well.