Category: Reply

Replied to a post by Mike Rockwell (mike.rockwell.mx)
Is there actually a benefit to showing the Webmention field on your site? Does it actually get used? It feels like all of the Webmentions are automated through the protocol/API, not manually by copy and pasting a link. I’ve turned it off for now. We’ll see.
There are some sites that have receiving implemented but not sending, and it was primarily meant for that. (This is probably most often people who are using webmention.io as their proxy endpoint by registering and adding a line of code to their header. Something I do with both a TiddlyWiki and MediaWiki installs that don’t have custom software/plugins yet.)

It also serves to help visually indicate that your site supports the protocol if you don’t have a button/badge for it that points to something like https://mike.rockwell.mx/wp-json/webmention/1.0/endpoint. For those that care or are in-the-know there are manual services like https://telegraph.p3k.io/send-a-webmention or http://mention-tech.appspot.com/ which could be used as well.

On some sites I follow, I use those boxes about once or twice a month. I use it a bit more frequently on my own site to manually send myself webmentions from other sites that don’t send them, but which I come across either randomly or via refbacks. 

Replied to a post by Ian Betteridge Ian Betteridge (microblog.ianbetteridge.com)
Something that I haven’t seen anywhere on the Indieweb: is there a simple guide for services which let you replace Twitter, Facebook, Insta, etc etc with more open alternatives? Preferably written with non-technical users in mind?

Micro.blog is one of the best IndieWeb friendly services out there to replace some of these platforms with a user friendly set up. https://indieweb.org/Quick_Start delineates some other services like i.haza.website, Pine.blog, and Typlog which have some great features too depending on what you’re looking for. If you’ve got someone with some modest technical chops to run a small service for you and some friends, Known can be an awesome option too.

 

Replied to a post by Mike Rockwell (mike.rockwell.mx)
I might go back to IFTTT. But I’m going to see how an alternative syndication service works first.

It requires appropriate mark up in your theme, but I like using the Syndication Links plugin for syndicating from my site to Twitter (using Bridgy publish), Micro.blog, Mastodon, and many others. It also advertises syndication endpoints for Micropub clients which can be powerful and convenient too.

Replied to a tweet by Alex Voss (Twitter)

Results were promised back in September. Any update on them? Some of us are anxious to see them.

Replied to What I want from a GLAM/Cultural Heritage Data Science Network by Jez CopeJez Cope (erambler.co.uk)
As I mentioned last year, I was awarded a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship to pursue the project of setting up a Cultural Heritage/GLAM data science network. Obviously, the global pandemic has forced a re-think of many plans and this is no exception, so I’m coming back to reflect on it and make sure I’m clear about the core goals so that everything else still moves in the right direction.

It warms my heart to see another person in the education/library space using Webmention on their site. Even more so when I think that Jez Cope is doing so while starting to build an online community. Being able to communicate from website-to-website this way while also being able to reach out to people who choose to use Twitter or Mastodon is a very powerful thing to see and is an incredible example within the Education, Domain of One’s Own, and Library Carpentry spaces.

So much of the tone of this piece has not only an IndieWeb feel, but also sounds like it could benefit from some of the organizational structure that I’ve seen the IndieWeb employ, particularly small scale events and collaborations I’ve seen at Homebrew Website Clubs. This may help to

“Organise less-formal learning and sharing events to complement the more formal training already available within organisations and the wider sector, including “show and tell” sessions, panel discussions, code cafés, masterclasses, guest speakers, reading/study groups, co-working sessions, …”

Replied to a tweet by Roam Hacker (Twitter)

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.

Replied to a post by Victoria DrakeVictoria Drake (victoria.dev)
Help me discover more awesome indie webmasters! @ me if you or your favorite blog supports webmentions!

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/

Replied to a post by Mike RockwellMike Rockwell (mike.rockwell.mx)
Does anyone have any experience with the whole IndieWeb thing? It feels more complicated than it’s worth. https://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.

Replied to Bookish, Chapter Type Theme by cogdogcogdog (Reclaim Hosting Community)
I’ve recently rescued the formatted version of my 1986 MS thesis (originally in Mac Word 3.0 files on floppy disks) with plans to publish in my domain. I know most people will just say “do Pressbooks” but I want my own site/theme w/o all that overhead. If anyone has a suggestion for a good clean WP theme for creating content organized into Chapters, let me know. Or maybe I should be doing in some kind of static generator.

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???)

 

Replied to IndieWeb is Too Complicated for It’s Own Good by Kevin TracyKevin Tracy (Kevin Tracy)
Evan Stoner has an incredibly well written (and very to-the-point) article about IndieWeb up on his site that needs more attention. As I mentioned last year, I’ve been playing around with int…

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.

Replied to First Frozen Beard Run of 2021 by Tim Nolte (Tim Nolte)
This morning was a longer interval run, and it it was a lot colder than it has been, thus the frozen beard. It tool me a bit to get going this morning but I fought the urge to go back to bed and got out there and got it done. #HWI #Run4Water #WhyIRun #RiverBankRun

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!

Replied to a tweet (Twitter)
Some call them hovercards. https://indieweb.org/hovercard has some research and good examples of these from across the web.
Replied to a tweet by Sia Karamalegos Sia Karamalegos (Twitter)

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.