Morten Rand-Hendriksen (Twitter)I've long felt that webmentions would be a perfect fit for #WordPress core. This article makes me even more sure. Let's get to work! https://t.co/hBofSwJruR
— Morten Rand-Hendriksen (@mor10) July 23, 2018
wordpress-indieauth - IndieAuth for WordPress
More meaningfull linkbacks
Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)@chrisaldrich did you document anywhere how to change the default image associated with posts? At the moment it is using my profile pic, which does not work. Also on: Twitter
I have been noticing some issues recently with a lot of photos not showing up in webmentions I receive. Typically they’re for WordPress or micro.blog sites which may mean issues for Gravatar-based images.
If you want to fix them manually, a recent update allows this.
Ryan Boren (Twitter)@photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions. https://t.co/Lt6cpWwkuj
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018So... should I “update” the link manager? On one hand, it has a 2-year warning. On the other, do we want it to show prominently in search?
— Andrew Nacin (@nacin) July 17, 2018There’s a part of me that wants links to come back first class and be added to Calypso (with some Reader integration). That’d be a nice thing for IndieWeb and indie ed-tech movements. Also, an easier IndieWeb onboarding experience. Gimme an IndieWeb toggle on .com.
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018There's an open web and ownership moment happening right now. It's pretty cool. The flow is rough, though. One small but impactful example: title-less microblogging means an interface full of (no title) in Calypso.
— Ryan Boren (@rboren) July 17, 2018
The Link Manager still seems relatively solid and much of the infrastructure still works well, despite the warnings and lack of updates over the past several years. It would be nice to see it make a comeback and I can personally see many ways it could come back as a means of allowing people to better own their personal social graph as well as dovetail with readers. (This could also be the cornerstone of helping to make WordPress it’s own decentralized social network so that those who want to leave Facebook, Twitter, et al. could more easily do so and maintain their own data and infrastructure.)
If it were being updated, here are a few things that I might suggest as being imminently useful:
As Ryan indicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.3
As for the title-less post types that are proliferating by the independent microblogging community (including the recent micro.blog as well as post types in the vein of likes, favorites, reads, replies, etc. which mimic functionality within the broader social space), the so-called (no title) problem can be somewhat difficult since so many things are built to expect a title. Many feed readers don’t know how to react to them as a result. The Post Kinds Plugin faced a similar issue and recently pushed an update so that within the admin UI at /wp-admin/edit.php the title field would still indicate (no title) but it would also include a 28 character synopsis from the_body or the_excerpt to provide at least some indication of what the post was about. This also seems to be a potential issue in other areas of WordPress including widgets like “Recent Posts” which want to display a title where none exists. As the aside post format can attest, not all themes deal with this well, though there are other alternate methods for displaying some useful data.
Unix Sys Admin (Twitter)@jgmac1106 Out of interest what are you using to generate 'pingbacks' from Tweets to your website? #seemsneat
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018These are called webmentions they are the glue of the #IndieWeb https://t.co/p3TnFqXuD5 (https://t.co/Iv1xaki5t6)
— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) July 17, 2018Do you need to manually paste your URL into the tweets or is there a plug-in for browsers?
— Unix Sys Admin (@UnixSysAdmin) July 17, 2018
WordPress and IndieWeb developer, genius, good friend
When the dashboard redesign is officially added to WordPress core, it looks like it will be missing a widget that’s been with the software since 2005 when the Dashboard feature was introduced…
To keep everyone aware of big projects and efforts across WordPress contributor teams, I’ve reached out to each team’s listed representatives. I asked each of them to share their Top Priority (and when they hope for it to be completed), as well as their biggest Wins and Worries. Have questions? I’ve included a link to each team’s site in the headings.
For others who haven’t realized the functionality is hiding in the Post Kinds Plugin, here are some quick instructions for enabling the tag cloud widget:
Appearance » Widgets in the menu structure.Kinds.You’ll end up with something in your widget area that looks something like this (depending on which Kinds you have enabled and which options you chose):
If you’re interested in changing or modifying the output or display of your tag cloud, you can do so with the documentation for the Function Reference wp tag cloud in the WordPress Codex.
People will claim they can replace RSS Readers with social media streams like twitter. While we do get many key resources and news stories via social media, let’s dispute that claim:
- Clutter, noise, distraction. What you get is interspersed with many things that are outside your interests, rants, yelling, silly gifs. That’s a lot of filtering.
- You Miss It, You Lose it. Social media is focused at the head of the stream. While you sleep or actually do something productive away from social media, it all flows away. Yes, maybe your network can signal with repeating important things, but its spotty.
- Duplication You have no means to quickly know what you have already looked at, and you see may the same story multiple times.
- You Are Subject to Algorithms Especially on facebook, what you see is determined by the mysteries of an algorithm. Sure you choose sources by followers, but the means by which information is presented is determined by some outside automated entity.
This activity brings you an exception to the technology as time-saving lie; it’s old tool that many people have abandoned. I will wade carefully through the acronym jargon jungle, but we are talking about using an RSS Feed Reader to monitor the most recent news, blog posts, data from sources you choose to follow, not ones dished out by some company’s algorithm.
I had used Feedly for several years, but made the switch to Inoreader last year, in part because it has one additional useful feature that Feedly doesn’t: OPML subscription. While it’s nice to be able to import and export OPML files, needing to remember to update them can be an unnecessary step, particularly if 20+ people need to do the update to capture all the new RSS feeds added. (As an example, say one or two students join a class late and everyone has already got the original OPML export and now needs to update to add a few more feeds to keep track of classroom activity.) OPML subscription improves this by allowing the subscription to an OPML link with multiple feeds in it. If the original OPML file updates with new feeds, then the reader automatically updates them and pushes them out to everyone subscribed to that OPML file!
Think of an OPML subscription as an updating subscription to a bundle of RSS feeds which all also provide their own individual updates. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of individual feeds, you can subscribe to whole bundles of feeds.
For those looking for some sample OPML links to subscribe to, try some of mine which are listed at the bottom of the linked page. For some ideas about building your own data stores with OPML links for WordPress, try my Following Page solution. WordPress’s old Link Manager described on that page will provide the ability to store the data and provide the OPML links, the rest of the page discusses publishing it on one’s site so that it’s publicly available if you wish. URL schemes for sub-categories are discussed separately.
I am adding in information associated with author and source, however this is not being displayed when published.
In the meanwhile, it may not be too tough to cut/paste bits of appropriate code from other templates to get these to display the way you want them when they exist. You can create a custom photo template named kind-photo.php and put it in a folder entitled kind_views in either your theme or (preferably) in your child theme so it isn’t overwritten on plugin update.
I do still wish there were a master template in the set (heavily commented and unused) that used every variation of data that could be displayed (or perhaps even calculated for display) so that non-programmers could attempt to more easily cut/paste templates to get them to do what they wanted.
Post Kinds consists of a few elements
- A URL parser that takes an input URL and tries to extract it into structured data
- Enhancements to the Post Editor to add additional structured data to the post object
- A Taxonomy that takes that structured data and classifies it and dictates behavior
- A rendering piece that takes the structured data stored in post meta and displays it using templates that can be overridden in the theme by including them in a subdirectory called kind_views
wordpress-semantic-linkbacks - More meaningfull linkbacks
/wp-admin/comment.php admin page when manually editing a comment to change any of the common fields (author, email, the comment itself) and saving, everything saves as expected except for the avatar within the Semantic Linkbacks portion. If the avatar was changed (or one was added) things are saved properly, but when updating other fields and not changing the avatar itself, the avatar field data seems to be deleted on saving, thus making the author images disappear.Did you know that the Incoming Links and the two WordPress news Dashboard widgets are just RSS readers? Click “configure” in the upper right corner of each widget, and you’ll be able to change the feed to one that you choose.
It’s the missing reader that’s always made WordPress a 4th class citizen in the social world.