👓 Indie Web Dose / Rainy Day | myravery

Replied to Indie Web Dose / Rainy Day by Miriam AveryMiriam Avery (myravery)
I’ve flipped, tweaked and punched more toggles and valves under the hood. This little blog just took a great many time-release IndieWeb vitamins. Watch out, my dosage may soon reach therapeut…
Congratulations on all the tweaks!

It took me a while to puzzle it out when I first ran across it, but the text just underneath your title: <SPAN CLASS='P-AUTHOR H-CARD'>MIRIAM AVERY</SPAN> is occurring because you’re using the microformats 2 plugin which tries to inject the p-author h-card portion into your page, but it’s having a conflict with your theme which is escaping the output for that author section. (More details on this known issue here.)

Chances are pretty good that you could deactivate the microformats plugin to fix the cosmetic issue without causing other major issues. Depending on your theme’s native microformats markup, you may likely find that you don’t see or experience any other major issues with any of the other technology. The one issue I’ve seen people come across here is if they’re using Brid.gy to syndicate their content via webmention to Twitter, in which case having stronger markup becomes much more important. Hopefully this will at least help you track down and either fix the issue or figure out the best way around it for your particular needs.

The best long term solution would be to add the proper microformats markup directly into the theme itself.

A hashtag functionality hiding with the ActivityPub for WordPress Plugin

I discovered yesterday that when I added a # (or hash, pound sign, octothorpe, et al.) in front of any word on my site, it created a native version of something akin to Twitter’s functionality, but it was working on my own website. The primary difference was that the hashed word on the page was, upon publishing the post, automatically wrapped with a URL for that tag on my own website, and it was also automatically added to the list of tags for the post. (As an illustrative example, I’m doing the same thing with the word hashtag earlier in this paragraph.)

I had previously considered adding this type of functionality myself to make syndicating posts (via POSSE) from my own website to sites like Twitter or Mastodon easier. There are a small handful of plugins in the WordPress repository that will add that type of functionality already, but I had eschewed them generally, not wanting yet-another-plugin.

I spent some time trying to track down the plugin that was effecting this change. I couldn’t remember having installed something that would have done this sort of functionality, and I had noticed it only by complete happenstance. I eventually gave up my search halfway through only to later get a message from Matthias Pfefferle that his ActivityPub plugin was the likely culprit. I probably should have guessed as I had literally spent part of that very day looking at the code in his IndieWeb News plugin on GitHub which had code that essentially did the exact same thing, but for a narrower set of results.

The upside of the entire process is that the functionality is now built into a plugin which I’d be using otherwise. As of today’s update, there’s now also a setting for the plugin that will allow one to turn the functionality on or off–I, for one, am definitely keeping it. Of course if you’re looking for the functionality without the extra overhead of the ActivityPub code, I believe you can use Matthias’ WordPress hashtags plugin which does only this.

I’ve never quite liked that Twitter uses @names highlighted within posts. All the additional cruft in Twitter like the “@” and “#” prefixes, while adding useful functionality, have always dramatically decreased the readability and enjoyment of their interface for me. So why not just get rid of them?!

Of course I also remember myself railing against the addition of the symbols @ and # in general text not too long ago, so I’m also now brainstorming and contemplating how one might more quickly (and even in a DRY manner) do this sort of tagging using some other (probably easily accessed, but infrequently used) symbol which could be hidden visually, but which would allow one to add these sorts of tags and the appropriate microformats markup. I suspect there may be some sort of clever CSS I may be able to use too, though it would be better not so that it works easily via syndication and in feed readers with different styling. The goal should be that it would work as plain text from a Micropub client too. With any good luck someone may have thought of it already, otherwise I may be able to hack something simple together to do roughly what I want. The upside would be that simply by writing your post, you could simultaneously be tagging it as well and not need to bother going in and separately adding additional tags!

On This Day functionality for WordPress

Last night while catching up on some of my feeds and I ran across a new WordPress plugin for creating On This Day-type functionality from Alan Levine.

Having enjoyed the mobile app TimeHop and its functionality for a long time, I’d spent a long time a while back searching for what I was sure would be multiple WordPress plugins that might offer such functionality. At the time I could only find one and seemed deeply hidden: the Room 34 Presents On This Day plugin which has served my needs for a while.

While the two are implemented somewhat differently and have different levels of UI features, it’s nice that there’s now a bit of competition and options available in the space. Alan’s excellent version is a shortcode-based plugin with some options for configuring the output and he’s got lots of additional details for customizing it. The Room 34 version creates an archive view of most of its data and also includes  a widget for adding the output to various widget locations.

I’ve added some of these examples and links to the On This Day page of the IndieWeb wiki, so that others looking for UI examples, options, and brainstorming for their WordPress-based or other sites might have an easier time tracking them down and building additional iterations or coming up with new ideas.

These sorts of plugins provide some useful functionality commonly found in other social media sites, including Facebook which allow you to go back in time. I find they’re even more valuable on my own site as my content here is generally far richer and more valuable to me than it is on other social sites which often have a “throw away” or a more ephemeral feel to some of their content. It’s nice to be able to look back at old thoughts, revisit them, possibly reshape them, or even see how far I’ve come in some of my thinking since those older days.

Now, if we could only get Timehop to dovetail with the WordPress API so that they could add WordPress websites to their offerings…

Update to the Syndication Links plugin for WordPress for Custom Endpoints

David Shanske has recently updated the Syndication Links plugin for WordPress that now allows users to add custom syndication endpoints to their websites so they can actually syndicate their content to external sites. 

In particular, this now includes syndication endpoints like IndieWeb News and indieweb.xyz subs. Configuring the plugin with a syndication name, UID, and the appropriate URL will create additional endpoint checkboxes in the “Syndicate To” metabox. (The UID is simply a unique identifier that the plugin uses in conjunction with Micropub clients, and the URL is the appropriate full URL to the appropriate syndication target.)

If one wishes to test syndication out, I might suggest using the test endpoint provided by indieweb.xyz. The appropriate entries in the custom provider section at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links would be:

  • Name: xyz hottubs
  • UID: xyz-hottubs
  • URL:  https://indieweb.xyz/en/hottubs/
Settings for configuring custom syndication endpoints in the Syndication Links plugin

For convenience, the settings page also allows the user to disable (via checkbox) endpoints they don’t use or don’t want to appear in their administrative meta boxes.

An example of the meta box that appears in the administrative interface when creating new posts. To syndicate your content to the desired sites using Webmention, just click the appropriate boxes.

Use with Micropub Clients

The update to the Syndication Links plugin also means that Micropub clients with appropriate support (like Quill, for example) will know about which syndication endpoints your site supports and will be able to include them in its checkbox list for auto-syndicating via Micropub.

Example Quill micropub interface with syndication endpoints configured within Syndication Links plugin

Naturally, people using these methods should be very careful about how they’re using them so that they aren’t abusing or spamming these channels. Those abusing these channels will certainly find their sites blocked from posting. Keep in mind that some of the syndication endpoints shown here are examples and that other endpoints exist or can be created on sites like indieweb.xyz. 

Bridgy for WordPress

I’ll also note in passing that the syndication functionality to Twitter, Flickr, and GitHub that the Bridgy for WordPress Plugin provides is now also available within the Syndication Links plugin, so those who already have Brid.gy set up with their websites can easily and safely deactivate and uninstall that plugin. Doing this will prevent the duplication of meta boxes in one’s admin UI. Given the migration of some of its functionality, it is certainly possible in the future that this plugin may be deprecated or the Brid.gy set up portion of its functionality may be merged into another plugin like the IndieWeb plugin.


👤  Chris McLeodJoe Jennett, and Khürt Williams may appreciate this the most for use with indieweb.xyz. It may be a minute too late for Brad Enslen however.

👓 “K” Theme Update 24-Jan-2019 | Mr.Kapowski

Read “K” Theme Update 24-Jan-2019 by Chris McLeodChris McLeod (Mr.Kapowski)
I’ve been chipping away at several things over the last two weeks, mostly focussing on markup, presentation, and theme file organisation. I want to get these finalised before I look at theme customisation options. If you’ve visited the home page, you might have noticed the display of certain pos...
New IndieWeb friendly themes for WordPress are always a welcome thing. I hope he’s open-sourcing it for others to tinker with as well.

A Sketch for an IndieWeb Bullet Journal

Over the past several weeks I’ve been thinking more and more about productivity solutions, bullet journals, and to do lists. This morning I serendipitously came back across a reply Paul Jacobson made about lab books on a post relating to bullet journals and thought I’d sketch out a few ideas.

I like the lab book metaphor! That’s probably why a notebook-note analogy appeals to me for my productivity tools. Paul Jacobson on A vague Notion of a more productive system.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that no one has created a bullet journal plugin for WordPress yet. Or maybe someone comes up with a bullet journal stand alone product a bit like Autommatic’s Simple Note? Last week after a talk I attended, someone came up to me who had self-published 400+ copies of a custom made bullet journal that they wanted to sell/market. I’ve also been looking at some bullet journal apps, but my very first thoughts were “Who owns this data? What will they do with it? What happens if the company goes out of business? Is there a useful data export functionality?” For one of the ones I looked at my immediate impression was “This is a really painful and unintuitive UI.”

Naturally my next thought was “how would the IndieWeb build such a thing?”

Perhaps there’s a lot of code to write, though I can imagine that simply creating Archive views of pre-existing data may be a good first start. In fact some good archive views would be particularly helpful if one is using a plugin like David Shanske’s Post Kinds which dramatically extends the idea behind Post Formats. This would make tracking things like eating, drinking, reading, etc. a lot easier to present visually as well as to track/journal. One could easily extend the functionality of Post Kinds to create “to do” items and then have archive views that could be sorted by date, date due, tags/categories for easier daily use. Since it’s all web-based, it’s backed up and available almost everywhere including desktop and mobile.

I know a few people like Jonathan LaCour and Eddie Hinkle have been tinkering around with monthly, weekly, or annual recaps on their websites (see also: https://indieweb.org/monthly_recap). Isn’t this what a lot of bullet journals are doing, but in reverse order? You put in data quickly so you can have an overview to better plan and live in the future? If you’re already using Micropub tools like teacup (for food/drink), OwnYourSwarm (for location), or a variety of others for bookmarking things (which could be added to one’s to-do list), then creating a handful of bullet journal-type views on that data should be fairly easy. I also remember that Beau Lebens had his Keyring project for WordPress that was pulling in a lot of data from various places that could be leveraged in much the same way.

In some sense I’m already using my own WP-based website as a commonplace book (or as Jamie Todd Rubin mentions on Paul’s post a (lab) notebook), so how much nicer/easier would it be if I could (privately) track to do lists as well?

Of course the hard part now is building it all…

Additional notes and ideas

I started thinking about some of this ages ago when I prototyped making “itches” for my own website. And isn’t this just a public-facing to-do list? I don’t immediately see a to-do list entry on the IndieWeb wiki though I know that people have talked about it in the past. There’s also definitely no bullet journal or productivity entries, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build them.

There are a lot of preexisting silos on the web that do to-do lists or which have productivity related personal data (Google notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc.), so there are definitely many UI examples of good and bad display. For distributed group task management I could easily see things being marked done or undone and webmentions handling notifications for these. I suspect for this to take off on a wide, distributed scale for company-wide project management however, more work would need to exist on the ideas of audience and private or semi-private posts. The smaller personal side is certainly much more easily handled.

As another useful sub-case for study, I’ll note that several within the IndieWeb are able to post issues on their own websites, syndicate to GitHub’s issue queue, and get replies back, and isn’t this just a simple example workflow of a to-do list as well?

Greg McVerry has also mentioned he’s tinkered around in this area before primarily using pre-existing functionality in WithKnown. In his case, he’s been utilizing the related idea of the Pomodoro Technique which is widely known in productivity circles.

I’d be thrilled to hear ideas, thoughts, additional brainstorming, or even prior art examples of this sort of stuff. Feel free to add your thoughts below.

Featured photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

Default avatars for refbacks

Filed an Issue Refbacks for WordPress by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (GitHub)
Contribute to dshanske/wordpress-refback development by creating an account on GitHub.
Refbacks in conjunction with the Webmention plugin and Semantic Linkbacks plugin don’t have as solid a parity with webmentions as they show up in the comments section as text instead of as an avatar. Perhaps it would be prettier if refbacks were given a default system avatar (possibly modifiable) for display?

Setting to discard self-refbacks

Filed an Issue Refbacks for WordPress. by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (GitHub)
Contribute to dshanske/wordpress-refback development by creating an account on GitHub.
Given the tremendous number of self-refbacks, it would be nice to have a setting that would allow the plugin to silently discard refbacks to one’s own website. Since adding the plugin I’d estimate that 99.9% of the refbacks I get are from people clicking links on my own website rather than external links others.

This should be separate from preventing self-webmentions as I (and I suspect others may) want to have those show up to cross link or cross reference posts on their own sites.

Replied to A new interview with Manton Reece of Micro.blog for 2019 by Colin DevroeColin Devroe (cdevroe.com)
Colin, thanks for the great interview and the overview of where Micro.blog is going.

I’m noticing in the responses section of your site (and on this particular post) that you’ve got a “Mentions” section, and that when I click on some avatars I get the original post while others (for Twitter) link to the profile page. This isn’t the typical Webmention plugin for WordPress behavior, so I’m curious what particular lines you’ve changed in the plugin and how as I’d love to have this behavior instead of the less useful links to the profiles that the plugin typically gives. Thanks!

Replied to Joe’s Syndicated Links Considered ‘Spam’ By Some Mastodon Instance by Kicks Condor (kickscondor.com)
I actually kind of understand this—only because I think Mastodon is at odds with the Indieweb.
I don’t think that what Joe is seeing is an anti-IndieWeb thing. It is something we’ve seen before from a handful of instances and will assuredly see again.

The other example of this behavior I’ve seen was when Greg McVerry, a college professor and member of the IndieWeb community, tried to join a Mastodon instance that was specific to researchers and professors in higher education. Sadly he found out, like Joe, that syndicating content from other locations was not acceptable there. As I recall, they also required an automatic content warning on almost everything posted to that particular instance which seemed an additional travesty to me. I think he ultimately joined mastodon.social and found he didn’t have any similar issues there and anyone who wanted to follow him from any other instances still could. I’m sure he can provide some additional details and may have posted about it sometime in the summer of 2018 when it happened.

The tough part is that each instance, though federated among many others, can have its own terms of service and set up. Some instances can be and certainly are run by their own tyrannical administrators, and I suppose that it’s their right since they’re paying for the server and the overhead. The solution is to do some research into some instances and find one that isn’t going to ban you for what would otherwise seem like average use to most. I’ve found mastodon.social to be relatively simple in its terms and its massive size also tends to cover up a lot of edge cases, so you’re unlikely to run into the same problems there. (It is also run by the creator of Mastodon, who has generally been IndieWeb friendly.)

The issue Joe has run into also points out a flaw of the overall Fediverse in that just like each real-world country can have its own laws and there is a broader general international law, the international laws aren’t as well codified or respected by each individual country. When you’re operating in someone else’s country, you’re bound to follow their local laws and even customs. Fortunately if you don’t like them there are lots of other places to live. And this is one of the bigger, mostly unseen, benefits of the IndieWeb: if you have your own website, you can create your own rules/laws and do as you please without necessarily relying as heavily on the rules of others.

I’ll note that some in the IndieWeb (Aaron Parecki, Ryan Barrett, Mathias Pfefferle, Jacky Alcine, et al.) have been playing around with or thinking about adding the ActivityPub protocols so that their own websites act as stand-alone members of the Fediverse. Since I know Joe has recently moved to WordPress, I’ll mention that there are two separate projects to help WordPress sites federate:
* ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from Mathias Pfefferle
* Bridgy Fed from Ryan Barrett

Naturally neither of these (yet) supports all of the protocols so some functionality one would find on Mastodon won’t necessarily work, but I suspect that over time that they eventually will. It’s been a while since I tried out BridgyFed, but I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin set up for a bit and have noticed a lot of recent work by Mathias Pfefferle to use it for himself. I still have to tweak around with some of my settings, but so far it provides some relatively useful results. The best part is that I don’t need to syndicate content to Mastodon, but users there can subscribe to me at @chrisaldrich, for example, instead of @chrisaldrich. The results and functionality aren’t perfect yet, but with some work we’ll get there I think.

Good luck finding (or creating) an instance that works for you!

❤️ Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try | David Shanske

Liked Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
Over the last months, one of the regular problems mentioned with the Indieweb on WordPress is the lack of compatible themes. Most themes do not properly mark up their content in microformats, or support some of the customizations that would integrate with Indieweb plugins. I had already been working...

👓 PBE: Shortcode to set post format · Issue #240 · Automattic/jetpack | Github

Read PBE: Shortcode to set post format · Issue #240 · Automattic/jetpack (GitHub)
Add a shortcode to the PBE parser to allow author to set Post Format via e-mail. Ported from https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2055 See: 2443-wpcom
Sad that this is marked as wontfix

Testing out Posting to WordPress via email

I haven’t posted to my WordPress site via email in a long time, so I thought I’d give it another try to see what has changed. I’m also curious about how this might work best in an IndieWeb setting and how these pieces dovetail with things like Post Kinds, potential syndication methods, and other tidbits I’ve got set up on my website.

Let’s see how it goes?

👓 Post by Email | WordPress

Read Post by Email (Jetpack)
Post by Email is a way of publishing posts on your blog using your email. Any email client can be used to send the email, allowing you to publish quickly and easily from devices such as cell phones if you don’t have the WordPress mobile app installed. This module can be enabled by switching on “...

👓 How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition | David Shanske

Read How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
This is an update to my 2018 article on how I set up my WordPress site. Standard Plugins EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading Pushover Notifications(Link)or the forked alternative Pushbullet Notifications(Link) for WordPress – This plugin sends n...
I ought to write up a version of what I’m using that does something like this. It’s always nice to see an extensive colophon like this for people’s websites.