This is an open online course on Teaching with WordPress, running June 1-26, 2015. Join us to talk about and experiment with, among other things:
- open education, open pedagogy and design
- WordPress as a highly customizable framework for teaching and learning
- examples of instructors and learners using WordPress sites in many different ways for multiple purposes
- plug ins, applications and approaches for creating, discussing, sharing and interacting with each other
Throughout the course, you’ll be creating your own WordPress course site, so that by the end you’ll have a beginning structure to build on with your learners.
Category: WordPress
For IndieWebCamp Berlin 2 2019, I built this proof of concept feature in the WordPress Admin. It does actually work, but the functionality that enables the posting needs a lot more backend work before it will work properly. Problem is that the WordPress post endpoint does not allow you to set a t...
I’ve only come across one or two which archive.org didn’t crawl or didn’t have. Many of the broken links I’m able to link directly to archive copies on the same day I made them and my archive snapshots were the only ones ever made.
The home for design & development of a core WordPress REST API authentication solution - WP-API/authentication
Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:
Remember when we used to read each other’s individual blogs? I miss that.
I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.
If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.
I’m curious what feed reader you use for subscriptions? I wrote a short note the other day about some interesting new developments I’ve been seeing in the feed reader and discovery space.
And last, but not least, I followed both the IndieNews and This Week in the IndieWeb blogs via the main indieweb.org site as part of an effort to get more familiar with that community and technology.
If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.
In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.
And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.
If you’re interested, please do come join us and ask how!
According to GitHub, developers have contributed more than 1,200 Actions to GitHub Marketplace since GitHub Actions was released in beta last year. Our mission to craft tools for content creators — including developers — and our passion for open-source contribution led us to make a solution that uses GitHub Actions to radically streamline and simplify [...]
Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up and WordPress Lead Developer
An in-depth analysis of how Drupal's development was sponsored between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019.
I've been blogging - albeit not consistently on the same site - since 1998. That's a long time in internet years, and in human years, and over time I've conditioned out any self-editing impulse I might have. I write, hit publish, and share. Done. Because I'm fairly prolific, friends and colleagues o...
@daveymoloney’s microblog status page is most likely done by his having a page and menu link that displays the WordPress Post Format type “status” posts. (Incidentally you already have that page on your site, you just need to put it in a menu somewhere: http://willtmonroe.com/type/status/) I’d suspect that he took the RSS feed from that page and piped it into Micro.blog as well. Since you’re using Post Kinds plugin, you can do something similar using a URL format like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/ or for porting to micro.blog using a similar feed URL like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/feed/. You’d just need to put the names of the types you want to use/have in the list separated with commas.
Let me know if you need more help!
Warning: Use of undefined constant posthasteForm - assumed 'posthasteForm' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/narwhal-microblog/narwhal-microblog.php on line 265
Knowing that Posthaste was the underlying code, I suspect it’s an issue with php and the version in use. Apparently we’ve gotten to the version where posthasteForm is throwing the expected errors. 🙂
I’m not seeing any specific funcionality issues with the plugin, but it is throwing this error on the pages where Narwhal appears.
Narwhal Microblog Plugin for WordPress: Quickly Posting Notes to your IndieWeb Site
Not wanting to wait to see what David might come up with before the next couple of IndieWebCamps, I thought I’d at least do some research to see what was hiding in the good old WordPress repository. I found a few old plugins that were roughly the sort of idea I was looking for, but they were last maintained about 8-10 years ago.
Then I came across the Narwhal Microblogging plugin from Billy Wilcosky, which is being actively developed/maintained and has almost exactly what I’m looking for!
Apparently the plugin itself had an early simple start before the developer came across Jon Smajda’s plugin Posthaste which was apparently repurposed for the Prologue/P2 code that WordPress used for that product/theme. He’s since rewritten a large chunk of it based on Posthaste’s original code and added in some basic formatting options and the ability to add media, so one can post a quick note along with a photo.
Settings for the plugin are hiding in Settings << Writing
admin interface (or at the path /wp-admin/options-writing.php
on your website) which includes the ability to choose which pages to display the “widget” and allowing one to hide the title, tags, categories, draft seclector, one’s Gravatar, and the Greeting and Links. I’d personally pare my version down to just provide tags, categories, and the draft options to keep the interface as clean as possible.
Finally the developer notes that within the user interface “if you leave the ‘Category:’ box at its default setting it posts to your default category. However… If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles into the ‘asides’ category even if you do not explicitly specify the ‘asides’ category in the dropdown. You can then style them as asides.”
Benefits
I’ve already discussed some of the immediate benefits for easily and quickly posting directly from my own website. Just below I’ll add a few others.
Most importantly for me at the moment, the plugin works with the Classic Editor in WordPress. The interface also only shows up when one is logged into their website, so visitors won’t ever see it.
Titleless posts
The plugin automatically takes the first 40 characters of your note and posts that into the title field, so you don’t have to bother with it. Sadly, this means that feed readers and other services will take your status updates and give them a title. (Though in the wild, most feed readers do something like this anyway. I am hearing strong rumors that Inoreader is about to have better support for social media-like posts soon.) For those using the plugin for IndieWeb use and prefer to keep their notes/asides/status updates titleless, you can spelunk into the code pretty easily and make a quick change which the developer kindly documents in his support page:
But, if you want to modify the title character limit it is easy to do.
- Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
- In this file you will see a line for this max character limit and you will see the number 40. You could just increase it to something like 100, 3500, or 999999. Depending on how long you are willing to let your titles get.
In my case, I think I’ll just decrease the character limit to 0 and then rely on the Post Kinds plugin to add it’s customary pseudo-title to the admin interface on my back end so that I can distinguish my posts in the posts pages.
UI suggestions
The category chooser could be a little cleaner and provide a dropdown of all my pre-existing categories with the ability to select multiple ones. I suspect that somewhere in the WordPress universe there’s a way to do this even if it means swiping a snippet of code from core’s editor.
The basic text box for entering text could be a bit smaller on the page to accept 2-4 lines of text since it’s meant for short posts. As it stands now, it defaults to 10, but it also smartly already has a slider that appears when you type more than the available number of lines and it also has a handle in the corner to allow you to increase the boxes size.
I’ve mentioned doing natively titleless notes above, but to make things a bit more user friendly, it would be nice to have the ability in the settings page to enter a number for the text excerpt, so that users could configure it without needing code. I suspect that most in the IndieWeb space would set the title excerpt to zero so as to not have titles on their notes.
It will take me some time to dig into it, but it would be nice if the developer had some notes about the CSS classes used in the plugin so that one might more easily style the display of the output on one’s website. Fortunately the defaults to match one’s current theme seem relatively solid.
At present, there isn’t any UI for including syndication targets to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. It would be nice if there was some tie into syndication services or functionality like that provided with Syndication Links plugin and brid.gy publish or brid.gy fed if those pieces are present.
The last dovetail that would be nice to have, particularly within an IndieWeb framing, would be to have better direct integration of this plugin with the Post Kinds plugin. This could extend to auto-setting the post kind to “note”, which should in turn allow the automatic setting of Post Formats to either “status” or “aside”.
Summary
In sum, this plugin is really fantastic for allowing a simple and lightweight means of posting quick status updates or notes to one’s WordPress website! It’s the next best thing to using any of the variety of Micropub clients, particularly when you already happen to be at your own site.
I suspect this plugin is the sort of thing that many within the IndieWeb and WordPress communities will love using–and at least one person in the chat has already said they think it’s a great find. There are currently less than 10 active installations of the plugin, but I think it deserves a magnitude or more. Let’s see what we can do about that!
Have you tried it? What do you think of the idea?
The limit is for the post title. After you post, the plugin takes your post and creates a title using the first 40 characters of your post. This is for speed, so you don’t have to create a title. But, the content of your post does not have a character limit.
But, if you want to modify the title character limit it is easy to do.
- Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
- In this file you will see a line for this max character limit and you will see the number 40. You could just increase it to something like 100, 3500, or 999999. Depending on how long you are willing to let your titles get.