I’ve previously written about setting up receiving Webmention for TiddlyWiki by logging into webmention.io and creating an account to delegate the receipt of the notifications.
Naturally, these notifications can be more fun for cross-site conversations if one has the ability to display the webmentions on the posts to which they relate. There are probably a number of ways of doing this, but following the TiddlyWiki advice of keeping Tiddlers as small as possible, it seemed like creating a tiddler for the response and then transcluding or embedding it into the original would be the best course of action.
At the recent Gardens and Streams: Wikis, Blogs, and UI—a pop up IndieWebCamp session there was some discussion on internal bi-directional linking in wikis, but I thought it would also be fun to show off bi-directional linking between my wiki and other websites. To do that will require displaying at least some Webmentions.
My wiki currently doesn’t have very many webmentions or incoming links, but after writing about a Bookmarklet for pasting content into TiddlyWiki, I got an email from Anne-Laure Le Cunff that she’d used some of the code to write a bookmarklet for Roam Research. Since her article didn’t send a webmention, I used Telegraph to manually force her article to send my wiki a Webmention so my account would have a record of it for the future for potential exporting or other use.
Now I’d like to display this webmention on that tiddler. Doing it automatically would be great, but I thought, since I don’t expect to receive many on my wiki that I ought to try out a manual set up to see how things might work and how I might display them if they were automated.
Since I had created that bookmarklet, I used it to copy and paste the text from Anne-Laure Le Cunff‘s website into a new tiddler. I then massaged it a bit to format it to look like a response and I’ve transcluded it into the original post under a heading of Responses.
The side benefit of doing this is that the stand alone tiddler that has the link and the context from her post also sits in my wiki as a bookmark of her post as well. As a result, I get a two-for-one deal: I get the bookmark of her post with some context I’m interested in, but my original post can now also display it as a response! Now I can also use that bookmark in other places in my website as well. If only one could do this so easily in other CMSes?!
I’ve yet to hear of another example of this in the wild, so unless I’m missing something, this may be the first displayed Webmention on a TiddlyWiki in the wild.
Next steps
Data formats
TiddlyWiki has lots of ways to display data in Tiddlers, so perhaps one might use various fields in a bookmark tiddler to create the necessary comment display. This could give a more standardized method of displaying them as well. It could be particularly useful if someone was using a microformats parser to import the data of such mentions. If this were the case, then the tiddler that is being commented on could do a filter/search for all tiddlers in the wiki that mention it and transclude the appropriate pieces in a list format with the appropriate mark up as well as links back to the individual tiddlers and/or the links to the sending site.
I’m curious if others have ideas about how to best/easiest implement the display portion of webmentions on a public TiddlyWiki? Since I’m also hosting my entire TiddlyWiki on GitHub pages, there might be other potential considerations if I were to be hosting it statically instead. This may require some experimentation.
I’ve got a few mental models about how one might implement showing Webmentions in TiddlyWiki, but it may take some more thinking to figure out which way may be the best or most efficient.
Automation
I don’t anticipate a lot of incoming webmentions to my wiki at present, but if they become more prevalent, I’ll want to automate the display of these notifications somehow. This will take some thought and coding as well as more knowledge of the internals of TiddlyWiki than I’ve currently got. If someone with the coding chops is interested, I could probably brainstorm a set up fairly quickly.
Microformats
It would also be nice to be able to have full microformats support in TiddlyWiki so that the stand alone “bookmark” mention works properly, but also so that the transcluded version might have the correct mark up. This may rely on the two things to be properly nested to make them work in both contexts.
For those who attended yesterday’s The Garden and the Stream IndieWebCamp session, thank you for participating! I honestly only expected 4 or 5 wiki fans to show up, so I was overwhelmed with the crowd that magically appeared from across multiple countries and timezones.
I’ve heard from many–both during the session and privately after–that it was a fantastic and wide-ranging conversation. (I never suspected memory palaces or my favorite 13th century Franciscan tertiary to be topics of discussion.) Several have suggested we host not only a continuation of the session, but that they’d be interested in other pop-up IndieWebCamp sessions. If you’re interested in future follow ups or sessions shoot me a quick email (you can find it on my home page) and I’ll be sure you get an invite. You can also follow future events via events.indieweb.org or find them in the IndieWeb’s weekly newsletter that is emailed out every Friday afternoon.
If you’re interested in hosting or suggesting other topics for future sessions, there’s a stub page on the IndieWeb wiki for doing so.
Our session went on far longer than I ever could have anticipated and I suspect we could have easily gone all day and still not touched on a fraction of all the topics we all outlined. Special thanks to the larger majority of those who were interested enough and had the free time to stay well past the hour mark and on to the end. I will say it’s nice to be able to cover so much ground and so many ideas without the threat of 5 more sessions following you.
If you write up any notes or posts about the session, do add a link to them in the IndieWebCamp Pop-Ups page under blog posts/articles or photos. If you can’t log into the wiki (with your own website), feel free to ping me with the URL and I’ll add them for you.
I’ll try to write up an organizer’s post-mortem with a few ideas about doing future sessions for others to consider. I hope to rewatch the session myself and add to the growing list of notes and thoughts about it.
Creators Challenge
Because this was just a single IndieWebCamp-style discussion session and we hadn’t specifically planned a traditional creator’s day or hack day, I did want to throw out a small challenge to those who either attended or who are interested in participating.
For most, the IndieWeb is more about creating something than just talking about it. So in that spirit, I’ll challenge everyone to spend a few hours today/tomorrow or sometime this week and create something on your website or wiki related to the session. It can be a summary of ideas, a blog post about wikis (or anything you like really), a small change you’ve always wanted on your site (a CSS improvement, adding bi-directional links to your wiki, Webmention support, etc.), or anything else you might have found interesting from the conversation. The best part is that you can choose what you create on your own site! Make something you’ll use or appreciate. Have fun!
My personal plan for the challenge is to continue some work to my TiddlyWiki to support bi-directional links using TiddlyBlink. I might also take a crack at doing some design and building work to show some incoming webmentions on my TiddlyWiki. (If anyone is interested in test-driving Mike Caulfield’s implementation of Wikity on WordPress in conjunction with Webmention, I could be game for that too!)
Once you’ve made your creation, post a link to your article or notes or make a quick 2-3 minute demo video of the new feature or write up a post about it and add them to the IndieWeb wiki page for Pop-up Session Demos. Again if you can’t log into the wiki with your own website yet, drop me a note and I’ll add them for you or you can ask for help on how to do it in the IndieWeb chat.
Thanks again everyone! I look forward to seeing what you come up with.
While reading The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, I ran across the phrase “descending from ‘generals’ to ‘specials'”and it reminded me of the Jesuit idea of “descending into the particular”.
Yates indicates, I think rightly, that this is:
a notion implicit in Lullism as it ascends and descends on the ladder of being [scala naturae] from specials to generals and from generals to specials. This terminology is specifically used of memory in Lull’s Liber ad memoriam confirmandam in which it is stated that memory is to be divided into specials and generals, the specials descending from the generals.
This seems like it is very closely associated with the Jesuit’s concept of “descending into the particular” (or the specials) within their teaching on thinking. (For those unfamiliar, I recall that Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting podcast episode within Revisionist History on this area of moral reasoning.)
Given that Raymond Lull (c. 1232 – c. 1315) has significant philosophical and religious sway in his lifetime, it is highly likely that the Jesuits (founded 1535) may have picked up the foundation of the concept from him. Yates writes this section in Chapter X, in relation to the ideas of memory with respect to Lullism which assuredly influenced Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and his ideas of memory.
I can’t help but think about why the Jesuits didn’t also include the idea of ascension into their philosophy? Perhaps some additional research into the topic will reveal some more direct associations. I think Yates’ link between Lullism and Ramism are pretty solid. I’d like to see some more direct evidence between Lullism and the Jesuits. I’d love to delve into the use of the art of memory within the Jesuit tradition as well.
The scala naturae or great chain of being has had a profound effect (not necessarily a positive one) on religion and modern culture. Far too many people are completely ignorant of what it is or what it entails, yet it underpins a huge swath of Western thought.
Scala Naturae or Ladder of Being in Breviculum ex artibus Raimundi Lulli electum – St. Peter perg. 92 [page 13 (5r)]
There has been some sporadic conversation about doing impromptu IndieWebCamp sessions and thus far we’ve yet to organize one. Given our physical distancing and the dearth of bigger IndieWebCamps, I thought I would propose this single topic stand alone camp session to get something rolling. I’d invite others to propose and schedule others in the future.
This is an online only event. We will provide a Zoom video conference link 30 minutes before the session here and in the IndieWeb chat.
Session Topic
We’ll be discussing and brainstorming ideas related to wikis and the IndieWeb, user interfaces, functionalities, examples of wikis and how they differ from blogs and other social media interfaces, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your ideas and let’s discuss.
This is just a single one hour IndieWebCamp-like session (though we have the option to go over a bit since there isn’t a session following us) where we’ll brainstorm and discuss a particular topic. Hopefully the weekend time will be convenient for a wide range of people in Europe and North America who have previously shown interest in the topic. Everyone is welcome to attend.
Resources
To prepare for the session we’ll be using the following:
If your website supports it, post an indie RSVP. Or, log in to indieweb.org and click “I’m Going”. (And if none of that means anything to you, don’t worry about it; just show up!)
Webmention is a relatively recent web standard (or W3C recommendation) that allows notifications when one website mentions a URL on another website. Think of it like @mentions on social platforms, but instead of just working within a particular website from one account to another, they work across websites. Your website can now @mention my website!
The goal is for other websites to be able to reference content in my TiddlyWiki website, and if those websites support sending the notifications as either webmentions (or the older pingbacks), I’ll get a notification that my content was referenced elsewhere on the web. This is just the beginning of allowing two way communication between websites.
My exploration today is how to quickly get these up and running on a public TiddlyWiki instance. The public part is important because webmentions won’t work for non-public URLs which includes private TiddlyWikis. If you’re wondering how to self-host a TiddlyWiki on your own domain, I’ve recently written up a tutorial for doing just that. At the end of this article, I’ll make a few notes about how one might use webmentions, particularly in a TiddlyWiki ecosystem.
I’ll start out by saying that writing a full JavaScript implementation of the Webmention spec is beyond my capabilities presently, but it could be something that TiddlyWiki core might implement in the future. (Maybe something like Lazymention which is written in node.js might be leveraged?)
Here I’m going to focus on using a third party service to do all of the heavy lifting and code our behalf. It’s relatively common, especially in the static website space, for websites to rely on third party or publisher services to either send or receive Webmentions on their behalf. Given my current knowledge of TiddlyWiki and how its internals work and my knowledge of Webmention services, I thought it would be quickest and easiest to look at using the Webmention.io service to handle receiving these @mentions from other sites on my behalf.
While this article may seem long, I’m hoping it’s detailed enough for those who are code averse to follow the recipe and do this themselves. If you can create a Tiddler, cut and paste some text, and follow the tutorial you won’t need to know anything about code. I did the entire thing myself in about five minutes from start to finish.
Receiving Webmention notifications for your TiddlyWiki
As a quick overview, we’re going to cut and paste a few lines of code into a special tiddler of our TiddlyWiki based website. This will allow us to do two things:
Log into Webmention.io to create an account
Allow other sites that send webmentions to us to find an endpoint on our TiddlyWiki website that accepts them on our behalf.
We’ll then rely on the Webmention.io dashboard to show us our notifications or received webmentions.
Logging into Webmention.io
Webmention.io requires you to log in with your domain name/URL and relies on you being able to authenticate yourself using it. Since I’m not aware of an IndieAuth or equivalent mechanism for using TiddlyWiki to log into Webmention.io, the quickest method to accomplish this is to rely on RelMeAuth using IndieAuth.com to log into Webmention.io using either a Twitter or GitHub account. From a non-technical perspective, we’ll be using either our Twitter or GitHub account and it’s OAuth2 security to log into the service.
First we want to put a link to our public TiddlyWiki website into the website field on either Twitter or GitHub using the profile settings of one of those services. Here’s what mine looks like on GitHub:
Next we want to place a corresponding link to the relevant service into the <head> of our TiddlyWiki site using one (it’s okay to use both) of the the following lines of code:
where you will replace the username in these links with the respective usernames of your accounts. (I’ll note that you don’t need to do this for both accounts, you can use either Twitter or GitHub.)
Then cut and paste one or both of these links as appropriate into this tiddler and save it (and your TiddlyWiki).
You should now be able to go to webmention.io and enter the URL for your TiddlyWiki into the web sign in box and click “sign in”. The service will parse your website’s page, find the link to either Twitter or GitHub and present you with the appropriate sign in button for one or both of those services. Click on the button for your chosen service. IndieAuth.com will then take you to that service to log into it, or, if you’re already logged in, it will take you back to webmention.io to your new account.
Creating your Webmention endpoint
Within webmention.io you can now go to the “settings” page which will give you two more links which are your webmention and pingback endpoints. They will look something like this:
where example.com will be replaced with the URL for your website.
Now you should cut and paste these two <link>s into the same tiddler you created above: $:/plugins/indieweb/core/rawMarkup. Now save the Tiddler and your TiddlyWiki. (Be sure to leave the previous links in case you need to log back into webmention.io in the future.)
You’re done!
That hopefully wasn’t too hard.
But what does this do? When another website links to your website and sends you a notification, the code on your page will delegate the receipt of the webmention to webmention.io which will verify that the sending site has your URL on a publicly viewable page (this helps to cut down on spam problems that pingbacks used to have). It will then store the notification for you.
If you need a reminder to check them occasionally, maybe you could add a Tiddler with the link to your dashboard to appear on your wiki when you open it next.
Perhaps in a future tutorial I’ll delve into the specifics of actually showing these mentions directly within your TiddlyWiki on the Tiddlers to which they relate.
Optional Webmention badge
Some may notice that I’ve put a small Webmention badge into the footer of my TiddlyWiki site to visually indicate to human readers that the site accepts webmentions. You can optionally do this for fun if you’d like.
Sending Webmentions with TiddlyWiki
Sending Webmentions seems to be an issue as the fragment-based URLs that TiddlyWiki uses as permalinks using JavaScript seem to cause an issue with many receivers. They apparently have problems resolving and parsing pages due to js;dr related issues. I would send webmentions manually, but most receivers I’m aware of have this js;dr problem. I’m not sure if there is an easy way around this issue.
Hyperchats, Wikis, and Open Educational Resources
What’s interesting about supporting Webmention, particularly from a TiddlyWiki perspective, is that if my TiddlyWiki is notified of mentions of it from outside sources, I can quickly cut and paste those responses directly into my Wiki pages in a pseudo-comment section similar to the comments section on this post which could serve as a model. If those mentions of a particular Tiddler are from other TiddlyWikis, I could also choose to drag-and-drop (or import) them into my TiddlyWiki!
If I want to go a step further, I could transclude those imported Tiddlers into the Tiddler that they’re in reference to. Perhaps I might do this under a heading of “@mentions” or perhaps “Comments” and suddenly I’ve got a way of displaying two-way conversations on my own TiddlyWiki site.
As is mentioned in Kicks Condor’s post about Hyperchat Modality, one could potentially use custom theming information (cleverly named “whostyles” in that post) from imported Tiddlers (or themes from other platforms) to identify the web identities of the sites they’re received from. I’ll also mention Kicks’ post about Hypertexting which is related and forms an interesting melange of websites, blogs, wikis, and hypertext of all kinds to form a more interesting web medium.
For the broader information collecting and building or academic communities (and here I can’t help thinking about the Open Educational Resources space that uses Creative Commons licensing to build their teaching resources), one could use these webmentions as a means of notifying sites that their content has been used, changed, or updated (typically those using Creative Commons will credit their source using a link). Then the receiver of the notification could optionally add to or change their version or even just collect the changes. This becomes particularly useful when the Tiddlers can be easily dragged and dropped between TiddyWikis!
As an explicit example, imagine a professor who wanted to build a textbook anthology, but who could do so by dragging and dropping a variety of Tiddlers from one site to another to create a quick textbook or reader for their students. This idea is particularly exciting to me when combined with the idea behind TW5-powered ebooks!
What could you imagine doing with webmention notifications on your TiddlyWiki site?
I’m still spending lots of time trying to figure out how TiddlyWiki works, so some of this may seem hack-y, but it seems to get the job done. I’d love it if others who are using their TiddlyWikis as their primary website (and who have more experience than I) weighed in with their expertise or experience.
One of the core IndieWeb building blocks is having an h-card on your website to establish one’s identity, either for others to read or for computers and parsers to know who you are.
A valiant first attempt
To start out, I created an About Tiddler with the appropriate h-card and other microformats mark up and then put it into a tab in my right sidebar to make it easy to find.
Naturally, I ran into a problem when trying to throw this into indiewebify.me. Since TiddlyWiki websites are generated primarily by JavaScript and thus suffer from the js;dr problem, figuring out where to put and display an h-card was going to be an issue. I even tried throwing it into the Site Title in the control panel and hoped for the best, but in the end, the site title is really the shadow Tiddler $:/SiteTitle and like all the rest of the page is generated by JavaScript.
I muddled around a bit and even tried to add an h-card using a <link> in the <head>, but nothing seemed to work.
A hackable solution?
Ultimately, in frustration, I simply threw a simple h-card into the <head> just to see what would happen. It wasn’t terrible—the parser found it and displayed it as a success. Unfortunately I discovered that TiddlyWiki displayed my photo and name at the bottom of my page in the browser. I didn’t expect this, but at least it was a start.
Since this method seemed to work, I thought I’d continue the cheat and just throw in some in-line CSS so that the muddled h-card wouldn’t actually show on my page. I’d use this coded h-card in my <head> for computers and keep the somewhat more elaborate one for people in my about page.
What I did
So, for those who’d like the entirety of the solution, here’s what I did:
Again, this works, but seems very hack-y to me. If you’ve managed to get a h-card into your TiddlyWiki in a different or more elegant way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Thoughts on delegated h-cards
Given the difficulty and trouble of all this, I’m sort of left wondering why–particularly since I’m using this site as a secondary one to my primary site–I couldn’t just throw in a link to the h-card for my primary site and call it a day? Unless I’m missing something, for some reason the way that representative h-cards are defined, they expect the h-card to point to the site they’re actually on.
Why couldn’t/shouldn’t I delegate my h-card on subdomains or other personal sites to point to the representative h-card on my primary site? What if parsers could follow other rel=”me” links on my site to find/intuit a representative h-card from one of those? While I could have lots of domains to better differentiate my online identity, why couldn’t I do that, but still have the same primary identity?
TiddlyWiki is most often used as a private wiki for personal note taking and creating private journals.
Because it is a single text file usually named index.html written in HTML, CSS and some JavaScript, I thought it would make an ideal candidate for a simple-to-use personal website that can be hosted on one’s own domain. As a researcher who appreciates the IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own philosophies and uses my personal website as a commonplace book for both work and personal reasons, how could I resist?
TiddlyWiki
TiddlyWiki is easy to use, highly flexible, modifiable, and can be easily copied, backed up, and shared. There’s an active community of users and developers for the platform which dates back to 2004. There are a variety of examples and documentation online and plugins are literally as simple as dragging and dropping some files from one source directly into your own Wiki. For those interested in the OER movement, individual Tiddlers (TiddlyWiki’s name for cards or discrete entries within the wiki) can be easily dragged and dropped from other TiddlyWikis to copy them!
There are some useful instructions for hosting it almost everywhere–except on one’s own domain name.
The few easy options I’ve found for hosting a TiddlyWiki publicly online as a website were rely on someone else’s service as a subdomain. As much as I like the idea of TiddlySpot I really wanted to use my own domain name (not to mention that it’s non-obvious how to host a newer TiddlyWiki version 5 (TW5) instance there). I’d also seen TiddlySpace shut down a few years ago and didn’t want to deal with that potentiality—though I will admit that exporting would be as simple as downloading and moving a single file!
So after a month or so at tinkering around at several complicated solutions that always seemed beyond my grasp, I went back to IndieWeb basics. What is their recommendation for the easiest way to get a website up and running? The fact that an empty TiddlyWiki file is named index.html gave me my answer: set up a GitHub Pages-based website and simply connect it to my domain!
However, as simple as this pathway may seem to some, I thought I’d briefly document the process I took so others can do the same for themselves.
First I’ll presume you’ve got a domain name and a host that will allow you to change the CNAME for where your domain name is pointed. (If you don’t, check out https://indieweb.org/personal-domain for details.)
In short, you’re going to upload a single file to your GitHub account and then point your domain name at it.
The idea of GitHub may scare a lot of people, but you won’t need to use git, know any git commands, or even know how git works since I’ll describe steps that entirely use the graphical user interface and don’t come anywhere near using the command line or any complicated GitHub applications. It’ll be as easy as dragging and dropping.
Let’s start!
Step-by-Step Tutorial
Get TiddlyWiki
Go to https://tiddlywiki.com/ and click on the “Download Empty” button on their homepage. This will allow you to save a file called index.html to a convenient place on your computer.
This one file is the entirety of your future website! Guard it well.
You’ll use this account and their free GitHub Pages service to host your website for free as long as the project folder (also known as a repository) you are hosting is public.
Name it username.github.io, where username is your username (or organization name if you’re doing it for your organization) on GitHub.
Give your repository an optional descriptive name. I named mine “A TiddlyWiki commonplace book”
Choose the “Public” option, otherwise no one will be able to visit your new website.
Click “Create Repository”
Upload your TiddlyWiki to your new repository
In the Quick Set Up box click on the link for “uploading an existing file”.
On the subsequent page you can either drag and drop the empty TiddlyWiki index.html file you saved on your computer or you can click “choose your files” to find and upload the file.
If you like, you can optionally add any additional README, License, or gitignore files as necessary. If you don’t know what these are you can safely skip them or revisit doing this later.
Under “Commit changes” give your upload a short title; the suggested “Add files via upload” is fine. You can add an optional extended description if you like.
Click on the “Commit Changes” button.
P.S.: If you haven’t done so before you’ve just made your first Git commit. Congratulations!!
Here you may need to consult with the the instructions your specific domain name registrar or host has for pointing your domain name (or subdomain) at your new GitHub Pages website. Usually they will have step by step instructions for doing this, but they can also often do it for you via email or phone support if you prefer.
Scroll down the page to the “GitHub Pages” section
In the “Custom Domain” section enter your domain name example.com into the field and click the “Save” button.
Setting up your website
It may take a while for the DNS system to propagate the changes from your host, but you should be able to visit your website and see your empty TiddlyWiki online. Congrations! You’ve got a new website.
You’ll notice in the TiddlyWiki documentation that the first rule of TiddlyWiki is to always save or back up your wiki!
(The second rule, in true Fight Club fashion, is–let’s say it together–to always save or back up your wiki!)
Since our wiki is on GitHub, we’ll want to use the Save to a Git Service instructions. Once set up, the changes to our TiddlyWiki should automatically self-save (this can be changed within your wiki’s Control Panel too) or they can be saved manually using the TiddlyWiki checkmark save functionality.
I’ll note that you can presently use your GitHub password in these settings, but this isn’t quite as secure as generating a custom token (or password), and sometime in late 2020, GitHub won’t allow you to use your basic account password this way, so you may as well set up the personal access token now.
Setting up Personal Access Tokens
You will need a Personal Access Token (essentially a password that will be specific to your TiddlyWiki account) in order to save your TiddlyWiki file.
On GitHub, click on your user icon, select “Settings”, then “Developer Settings”
Next click on the “Personal Access Tokens” tab and then click “Generate new token”
Give your token a descriptive name like “TiddlyWiki”
Under scopes, select “repo” (and all of its sub-scopes)
Click the “Generate Token” button at the bottom of the page.
Once created, immediately copy this string somewhere safe since navigating away from the page will not allow you to recover it. (If you do, you’ll need to regenerate a new token.)
Finally copy the text of your token into the Tiddler noted above in place of your password. There’s no explicit save button, just ‘X’ out of the settings control panel and click your TiddlyWiki’s main save button.
Your token value should be stored in browser local storage.
Now you can edit any Tiddler and save it.
After edits to your wiki, you’ll see that the checkmark icon on the page is red (depending on your theme), indicating changes to save. You can click on it to force a save.
I’ve found it convenient to wait for the TiddlyWiki to schedule the save on its own, however, make sure you’ve saved any changes you want before closing your browser tab.
Sometimes saves aren’t always successful and you’ll see error warnings, but usually they’ll clear themselves up on subsequent auto saves.
If necessary, you can visit your GitHub repository for your wiki and it will indicate the interval of time since the last save.
We’re done!
Everything after this you may be able to either handle yourself by poking around your new wiki or you can find lots of help in the two Google Groups listed above or by searching around online, in fora, or even step-by-step videos on YouTube.
If you’ve done this as part of the IndieWeb or A Domain of One’s Own, be sure to log yourself into the IndieWeb wiki and add yourself to the examples on their TiddlyWiki page where you might also find some other useful ideas.
If you like, you can delve deeper into GitHub and use one of their apps or command line functionality to regularly back up your website to your desktop, or you can make branches of your site on your local computer and then push those changes up to the cloud.
If you find problems or encounter issues, feel free to drop me a line or catch me or others in the IndieWeb chat.
I looked at their website, and it also looks like they support a few other IndieWeb building blocks including WebSub and RelMeAuth by leveraging Twitter and GitHub. (The developer indicated they supported IndieAuth, but I highly suspect it’s just RelMeAuth, which is still a solid option for many IndieWeb tools.)
Having just put together a Quick Start IndieWeb chart that includes services like micro.blog, i.haza.website, and pine.blog, I was immediately intrigued. This new platform (proprietary and not self-hostable, but very similar to the others) looks like a solid looking little platform for hosting one’s personal website (or podcast) that includes some IndieWeb building-blocks.
It’s got a 7 day free trial, so naturally I spun up a quick website. With just a few simple defaults, I had something pretty solid looking in only a few minutes with a pleasant on-boarding experience.
I’ll note that some functionality like importing content from WordPress, Tumblr, Ghost, or a podcast feed requires an actual subscription. Once you’ve finally subscribed, there are instructions to set it up to use your own domain name. However, most of the basic functionality is available in the trial. Another important indie feature is that it has a built-in export using JSON format, so that one can take their domain and content to another service provider if they wish.
It looks like it’s got a ton of common useful features! This includes support for podcasting, password protected posts, scheduling posts, membership posts, and integrations for Stripe, CloudFlare, Google Analytics, and MailChimp among many others. The platform is built with some basic and beautiful page templates and prefers to have markdown in the editor, but seems to work well with raw HTML.
They also allow adding custom code into <header> and <footer> so it should be straightforward to add support Microsub to one’s site using a service like Aperture so that you can have (feed) reader support.
Unfortunately it looks like there’s no Micropub support yet. I suspect that Typlog would be quite pleased to have a number of posting applications for both desktop and mobile available to it by adding this sort of support.
Also on testing, it looks like while the platform supports incoming Webmention, it doesn’t seem to be sending webmentions to links within posts. (Perhaps they’re batch processed asynchronously, but I haven’t seen anything yet.)
The platform seems to do really well for posting articles and podcasts and even has a custom template for reviews, but all of the user interface I’ve seen requires one to add a title on all posts, so it doesn’t lend itself to adding notes (status updates) or other indie-like posts like bookmarks, likes, or simple replies. It has a minimal built in h-card, but it could be expanded a bit for sending webmentions.
The pricing for the service starts at a very reasonable $4/month and goes up to $12/month with some additional discounts for annual payments.
In sum, I love this as another very indy-flavored web hosting service and platform for those looking to make a quick and easy move into a more IndieWeb way of hosting their website and content. While services like micro.blog and i.haza.website may be ahead of it on some technical fronts, like pine.blog, Typlog has a variety of different and unique features that many are likely to really appreciate or wish that other services might have. I imagine that over time, all of them will have relative technical parity, but will differentiate themselves on user interface, flexibility, and other services. I could definitely recommend it to friends and family who don’t want to be responsible for building and managing their websites.
One of my favorite parts of Typlog is that the company building it is based in Japan, where I’ve seen a little bit of development work for IndieWeb, but not as much as in portions of Europe, America, or Australia. It’s been great seeing some growth and spread of IndieWeb philosophy and platforms in Asia, Africa, and India recently.
And of course, who couldn’t love the fact that the developer is obviously eating their own cooking by using the platform to publish their own website! I can’t wait to see where Typlog goes next.
For those searching for links and help from tonight’s online meetup. If Meetup.com isn’t up to the task, I happen to have a WordPress website that can do the job.
19:02:08 From Jason Orellana : Hey Everyone!
19:02:22 From Connie Nassios : Hi!
19:02:22 From Wafic : Hi everyone
19:03:56 From BreAnn Mueller : Hi!! 🙂 🙂
19:04:27 From Grace C : Hello!!
19:04:32 From J.H. : Hi all
19:06:23 From Connie Nassios : You can do it, Alex!!
19:06:34 From Chris Aldrich : I’m hosting an online WordPress Homebrew Website Club meetup on Thursday: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/04/wordpress-indieweb-online-meetup-NjCeyH2w2kSI
19:06:43 From Sean Conklin : WordCamp Santa Clarita (virtual being planned for two weeks out) http://2020.santaclarita.wordcamp.org
19:06:48 From Grace C : Don’t see raise hand function
19:07:50 From Sean Conklin : WP Santa Clarita Meetup is here (March meetup postponed): https://www.meetup.com/wordpressscv/
19:08:53 From BreAnn Mueller : Grace—click on “participants” on the bottom, and a side-panel will pop up with a list of all the people on the call—and look on the bottom and there is a “raise hand” option there
19:09:38 From BreAnn Mueller : Alex—btw, I think if you stop sharing your screen, we have the ability to change our view so we can see everybody in a big grid
19:09:40 From Saied Abbasi : Wafic will not be silenced
19:10:19 From Grace C : Thank you BreAnn
19:10:25 From James White : Can we see all the participants at once? Maybe if Alex makes the presenter area smaller?
19:10:59 From Wafic : Saied, That’s Right. You cannot silence the Media!!! Or silence the truth!
19:11:50 From Chris Charlton : Zoom attendee “gallery” view is only available when no screen is being shared.
19:12:38 From Chris Aldrich : You should be able to stretch the screen from the share to see everyone in gallery view.
19:13:02 From Chris Aldrich : (Though that may require the client and not the webbrowser version.)
19:13:42 From BreAnn Mueller : Alexxxxx! stop sharing your screen (pretty please) 🙂
19:14:21 From James White : There we go!
19:14:23 From James White : ty!!!
19:14:30 From BreAnn Mueller : Thank you!! Hurray!!
19:16:18 From Chris Aldrich : Here’s the non CMS specific HomeBrew Website Club tomorrow night: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/04/online-homebrew-website-club-west-coast-JsujusQZLM7Z
19:17:19 From Ray Scarpa : I’m Ray with NINJA Mobile, so high tech I haven’t figured out how to get my 10 year old webcam mic to work after installing it 15 minutes ago. We’re just building wordpress sites for clients to supplement mobile apps and Roku/Amazon Fire TV channels. Sure that I’ll learn something just listening in. Thanks for doing this!
19:21:00 From Chris Aldrich : Anyone notice that https://alexhasnicehair.com/ doesn’t seem to be diminished at all by the headphones? 🙂
19:22:23 From Grace C : haHaha…very true about Alex’s hair 🙂
19:23:17 From Alexander vasquez : haha
19:23:20 From BreAnn Mueller : hahaha Chris!
19:24:18 From Wafic : Where is Saied? He seems to be in a remote area in the mopuntains
19:24:32 From Wafic : Hello, what about ME?
19:27:31 From Joe Davenport : Matomo
19:28:49 From steve : I use StatCounter.com
19:29:50 From Chris Aldrich : There’s a handful of ideas for analytics here: https://indieweb.org/website-analytics (I’ve run piwik/matomo before, but not really using much now.)
19:30:16 From Chris Charlton : Thanks, Steve
19:30:21 From Chris Charlton : Thanks, Chris
19:31:09 From Chris Aldrich : Woo(t) Woo(t)!
19:31:18 From Wafic : Hi Sean
19:31:38 From Joe Davenport : https://matomo.org/
19:31:53 From Chris Aldrich : It’s never too late to have a child theme!
19:32:09 From Joe Davenport : https://goaccess.io/
19:32:19 From Linda Horan : Where is the icon to raise hand?
19:32:47 From Chris Charlton : The ‘Raise Hand’ button is available in the Participants window, if that helps
19:33:01 From Sean Conklin : Or use Customizer to add CSS and code snippets to activate custom PHP functions. Child themes are necessary when overriding template files from plugins.
19:34:31 From Jason Orellana : Alex, I believe you can mute everyone and use the zoom push to talk feature which I believe is just press the spacebar.
19:35:09 From Sean Conklin : Code Snippets plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/code-snippets/
19:35:29 From Joe Davenport : Woody snippits
19:35:34 From Joe Davenport : https://wordpress.org/plugins/insert-php/
19:38:32 From Connie Nassios : https://wordpress.org/plugins/child-theme-configurator/
19:38:57 From Linda Horan : For a newbie, is it recommended to stick with a WordPress them as opposed to a third party theme?
19:39:05 From Linda Horan : WordPress theme…
19:39:20 From Alexander vasquez : Linda, we’ll get to your q question.
19:39:24 From Connie Nassios : Yes – stick with a WP theme….my 2-cents
19:41:13 From Sean Conklin : I’ve heard it’s required in UK to not track until agreed, but for here CCA only applies to larger entities.
19:41:33 From Chris Charlton : Best to be safe, right, Sean
19:42:01 From Steve Shorr : https://www.npr.org/2019/12/30/791190150/california-rings-in-the-new-year-with-a-new-data-privacy-law
19:42:17 From Wafic : Cookies from me to all of you. Who wants to offer coffee?
19:42:18 From Steve Shorr : https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/privacy-laws
19:42:28 From Steve Shorr : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Privacy_Protection_Act
19:42:32 From Connie Nassios : Chocolate chip?
19:42:55 From ferrisgluck : where is the hand raising function? I don’t see it
19:43:58 From Ray Scarpa : Seeing the Raise Hand on my window it’s right above the chat to the left, along a set of icons
19:44:39 From Sean Conklin : Free official themes: https://github.com/Automattic/themes
19:44:48 From ferrisgluck : definitely not on my screen; oh well 🙁
19:45:02 From BreAnn Mueller : Ferris—if you click on “participants” on the bottom, a panel pops up on the right side with a list of all the people—and on the bottom there is a raise hand optin
19:45:34 From Alexander vasquez : https://wordpress.org/themes/
19:45:56 From ferrisgluck : Aha!! Thanks, BreAnn!!! 🙂
19:46:06 From BreAnn Mueller : No prob! 🙂
19:48:20 From Steve Shorr : https://www.keycdn.com/support/wordpress-retina
19:48:52 From Grace C : https://www.greengeeks.com/tutorials/article/support-retina-display-images-wordpress/
19:49:01 From Steve Shorr : https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/make-images-retina-ready/
19:49:16 From Alexander vasquez : Thanks, BreAnn!
19:50:36 From Chris Gomez : https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/make-images-retina-ready/
19:52:52 From Linda Horan : Should 2020 be avoided?
19:53:04 From Chris Aldrich : No, it’s a great little theme.
19:53:13 From Alexander vasquez : The theme is great.
19:53:17 From Alexander vasquez : The year not so much. =)
19:53:38 From Chris Charlton : I’m in the future: my theme is 3020
19:54:58 From Steve Shorr : I thought Open graph was only for Facebook
19:55:39 From Grace C : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Graph
19:57:21 From Chris Charlton : OpenGraph is NOT only for Facebook. It’s used for many sites, any engine that displays “Rich Snippets” (previews) of your content (image, headline, summary, etc.)
19:58:02 From Grace C : https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/o/open-graph.htm
19:58:26 From Wafic : Who are the SEO folks in the room?
19:59:07 From Chris Aldrich : http://www.kevinmarks.com/partialsilos.html
19:59:43 From Chris Aldrich : That post is a good example of the sorts of tricks one can play with various meta data ^^
20:04:27 From BreAnn Mueller : Gotta jump off the call here! Thanks so much alex and everybody, great to see you all! 🙂
20:04:47 From Wafic : Bye BreAnn
20:05:12 From Ray Scarpa : Same here, really appreciate everyone’s time!
20:05:23 From Alexander vasquez : By BreAnn!
20:05:42 From Connie Nassios : https://wordpress.org/plugins/getwid/
20:05:56 From Sean Conklin : I used Gutenberg on my home page https://codedcommerce.com along with the JetPack blocks (contact form) and WooCommerce blocks (product categories). I recommend installing the Gutenberg plugin so you get the latest version.
20:06:07 From Connie Nassios : https://wordpress.org/plugins/kadence-blocks/
20:07:03 From Jason Orellana : WordPress.org/plugins/ultimate-addons-for-Gutenberg/
20:07:13 From Alexander vasquez : https://woocommerce.com/storefront/
20:07:38 From Grace C : https://www.wpbeginner.com/showcase/gutenberg-friendly-wordpress-themes/
20:07:47 From Jason Orellana : https://plugins/atomic-blocks
20:07:58 From Connie Nassios : https://www.kadencewp.com/product/virtue-free-theme/
20:11:31 From Alexander vasquez : https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-media-auto-publish/
20:11:48 From Chris Aldrich : Here you go Wafik: https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-networks-auto-poster-facebook-twitter-g/
20:17:46 From Wafic : NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster is untested with the current WordPress version
20:18:48 From ferrisgluck : Thank you Sean!!!!
20:19:40 From Chris Charlton : @Jason I would consider an LMS = Learning Management System over a CMS
20:20:40 From Chris Charlton : I rescind my answer; Alex’s suggestions were good
20:21:05 From Sean Conklin : https://senseilms.com is by Automattic, worth a look.
20:21:10 From Steve Shorr : bye great meeting and I saved 2 hours driving
20:23:36 From Grace C : https://alternativeto.net/software/meetup/?license=opensource
20:25:40 From Grace C : Thank you all, this was all very informative.
20:26:21 From Wafic : Are we going for tacos?
20:26:38 From Sharon Stuewe : I really enjoyed this type of meeting! Let’s Zoom again.
20:26:38 From Wafic : 🙂
20:26:47 From Linda Horan : I got a lot of really helpful info that I’ll be following up on for a while
20:26:51 From Jason Orellana : virtual tacos and beer
20:26:55 From Connie Nassios : Alex – you’re the best!!
20:27:01 From Saied Abbasi : Thank you Alex!! And everybody
20:27:03 From Wafic : Great hair Alex
20:27:14 From Grace C : Thank you, Alex for putting this together.
20:27:16 From ferrisgluck : Thank you Alex & everybody else! Alex rocks!!
20:27:29 From James White : 👋🏼
20:27:31 From Michael Kieley : Thanks, Alex
20:27:34 From Sean Conklin : Great leading Alex! It’s not easy, and we appreciate you 🙂
20:27:34 From Chris Gomez : thank you!
20:27:52 From Alexander vasquez : https://github.com/ahmadawais/corona-cli
20:28:40 From Wafic : https://www.coloradoboulevard.net/updated-covid-19-cases-amongst-our-neighbors-friends-and-families-in-greater-pasadena-area/
Abstract: With growing support for the W3C Webmention spec, teachers can post assignments on their own websites & students can use their sites to respond and interact. Entire classes can have open discussions from site-to-site owning all their data and eschewing corporate surveillance capitalism.
Missed my presentation for PressEdConf20on Twitter earlier and want to read it all bundled up instead? The “article” version appears blow. You can also enjoy the Twitter moment version if you like.
Hello everyone! My name is Chris Aldrich. I’m an independent researcher in a variety of areas including the overlap the internet and education. You can find more about me on my website https://boffosocko.com
Today I’ll be talking about Webmentions for open pedagogy.
For a variety of reasons (including lack of budget, time, support, and other resources) many educators have been using corporate tools from Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others for their ease-of-use as well as for a range of functionality that hadn’t previously existed in the blogosphere or open source software that many educators use or prefer.
This leaves us and our students open to the vagaries and abuses that those platforms continually allow including an unhealthy dose of surveillance capitalism.
In the intervening years since the blogosphere and the rise of corporate social media, enthusiasts, technologists and open source advocates have continued iterating on web standards and open protocols, so that now there are a handful of web standards that work across a variety of domains, servers, platforms, allowing educators to use smaller building blocks to build and enable the functionalities we need for building, maintaining, and most importantly owning our online courseware.
Some of these new W3Cspecs include Webmention, Micropub, WebSub, IndieAuth, and Microsub. Today I’ll talk abut Webmentions which are simply site-to-site @mentions or notifications which don’t involve corporate social media silos.
Many common content management systems support Webmention either out of the box or with plugins including: our friend WordPress, Drupal, WithKnown, Grav, and many others.
WordPress can use this new standard with the Webmention plugin. (Surprise!) I also highly recommend the Semantic Linkbacks plugin which upgrades the presentation of these notifications (like Trackback, Pingback, or Webmention) to more user-friendly display so they appear in comments sections much like they do in corporate social media as comments, reposts, likes, and favorites, detected using microformats2 markup from the source of the linkback.
Another plugin I love is Post Kinds Plugin (Classic editor only at present) which automatically parses URLs I want to reply to, like, bookmark, etc. and saves the reply context to my website which helps prevent context collapse. My commentary and notes then appear below it.
(I also use a plugin that saves the content of URLs on my site to the Internet Archive, so I can reference them there later if necessary.)
These plugins with WordPress allow teachers to post course content and students can then post their responses on their own sites and send notifications that they’ve read, listened to, or watched that content along with their ideas and commentary.
Notice the listen webmention in the comments which links to my listen response at: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/06/2toponder-episode-one-intertextrevolution/ where I own a copy of the context and my own response. As a student, even if the originals disappear, I’ve got the majority of the important content from the course.
When the course is over, the student has an archive of their readings, work, and participation (portfolio anyone?) on a site they own. They can choose to leave it public or unpublish it and keep private copies.
[Copies for Facebook, Google+ or Big EdTech Giants? They can ask for them nicely if they want them so desperately instead of taking them surreptitiously.]
By taking the content AND the conversation around it out of the hands of “big social media” and their constant tracking and leaving it with the active participants, we can effect far more ethical EdTech.
[No more content farming? What will the corporate social media silos do?]
Imagine Webmentions being used for referencing journal articles, academic samizdat, or even OER? Suggestions and improvement could accumulate on the original content itself rather than being spread across dozens of social silos on the web.
[Webmentions + creativity: How might you take their flexibility and use it in your online teaching practices?]
There’s current research, coding work, and thinking going on within the IndieWeb community to extend ideas like private webmentions and limiting audience so that this sort of interaction can happen in more secluded online spaces.
I’ve also been able to use my WordPress website to collect posts relating to my participation in conferences like PressEdConf20 or Domains 2019 which included syndicated content to Twitter and the responses from there that have come back to my site using Brid.gy which bootstraps Twitter’s API to send Webmentions back to my website.
If Twitter were to go away, they may take some of my connections, but the content and the conversations will live on in a place under my own control.
Thanks for your time and attention! I’m around on Twitter–or better: my own website!–if you have any questions.
My friend (and phenomenal teacher) Mari Pfeiffer is stuck at home like the rest of us, but she’s putting her web development and business growth talents to work for those who are interested.
She’s holding a free live session tomorrow at 10 am on YouTube geared toward a beginner audience who either already have websites or are beginning to consider designing and building one for their business.
Several people have asked for help or advice on their business websites and so I thought, we’re all home, why not do this live? I’ll be talking about crafting a clear message that attracts and converts, and show how to put it together on your home page. I’ll also be taking any questions about website development in general.
Create a Message that attracts and converts website visitors into loyal customers
Last year I thought it would be fun to outline how people might use their #WordPress websites to actively participate in #PressEdConf20 by posting content on their WordPress website and syndicating copies to Twitter for those following that way.
(Meta: Welcome to my talk: I know it’s cheating & early, but I’m hoping a few presenters will borrow this method.)
My general thought was:
The only thing better than A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter would be A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference using WordPress itself!
(Meta: Sure, post it to Twitter: but why not own a copy of your presentation on your own website when you’re done?)
So let’s give it a spin by providing an outline for how to accomplish it in true #IndieWeb & #DoOO fashion? Perhaps a few people might trying doing this year’s conference this way? Here’s an early #PressEdConf20 presentation to get the juices flowing.
(Meta: Hint for those on Twitter: I’m including links to my website, so you can get just a little bit more information than Twitter limits me to–oh, the fringe benefits of having one’s website where they’re not censored by the confines of the platform on which they’re creating!)
First, we’ll start off by making the humble presumption that you’ve got your own domain and an install of WordPress running on it. Hopefully this covers most #PressEdConf20 attendees.
(Meta: If it doesn’t there are lots of options: You could do something similar a bit more manually if you like using WordPress.com. You’ve also got a great community of people who could help you to better own your online identity and domain right here! I’ll bet our friends at Reclaim Hosting could help as well.)
Next we’ll want the Webmention Plugin (+Semantic Linkbacks) which will let our site communicate with other websites as well as to receive replies and reactions on Twitter with the help of Brid.gy. Install and activate both.
One could manually syndicate content from WordPress to Twitter, but there are multiple plugins and ways to syndicate it. My favorite is the Syndication Links plugin, which we can use for syndicating to other services. Install and activate.
Next we’ll want an account on Brid.gy for Twitter. This will allow us to publish from our website to Twitter; it will also allow us to reverse syndicate reactions from #PressEdConf20 on Twitter back to our posts using Webmention.
(Meta: Publishing this way will require Microformats: Your theme will need the proper microformats support to use this method, but again other methods are available.)
Authenticate your website and Twitter account with Bridgy and enable Bridgy publish on your account page: https://brid.gy/twitter/username.
In Syndication Links settings at example.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links
(Meta: Syndication Links Settings: These will help you set up syndication targets on other platforms and can be configured for a variety of social media.)
Now write all of your posts in your presentation as status updates (without titles) and include any media (photos, videos, etc.) making sure to mark up the photos with a class of u-photo in the HTML. Don’t forget the hashtag #PressEdConf20.
Set posts for one every minute. Use the SL Syndicate To meta box to syndicate your Twitter account and to the indieweb.xyz sub where everyone can find them (if they’re not following the proceedings via Twitter).
Others at #PressEdConf20 with Webmentions can reply to your posts on their sites. Replies will show up in comments depending on settings. Bridgy will also find responses to your content on Twitter & syndicate those back to your website automatically.
(Meta: Give it a whirl!: Reply to this post on Twitter to see it boomerang back to the comment section of my website.)
Webmention rocks
Those who are paying attention at #PressEdConf20 will see the value in webmention for allowing cross-site interactions without the need for “social media”. WithKnown, Drupal, Grav, and other CMSs are capable of doing this too.
(Meta: Ownership of your Open Pedagogy Anyone? Who needs invasive corporate social media to interact online now?)
With luck, I’ll have created this entire #PressEdConf20 presentation on my own website and syndicated it to Twitter without actually needing to visit Twitter itself. I’m around for questions. Thank you for your time and attention. [more…]
I’m also happy to help people set things up and make alternate suggestions via video chat or you can find online help in the IndieWeb WordPress chat.
P.S. There’s still some time to submit your talk for #PressEdConf20. Since it’s all designed to be online from the start, I’m hoping it won’t be cancelled like all the other events lately.
(Meta: PressEdConf 2020: A WordPress and Education, Pedagogy and Research Conference on Twitter March 26, 2020)
I’d looking into maintaining a wiki a while back and have recently been determined to get back to it. As a result, I’ve been looking at TiddlyWiki since that’s what some of Kicks Condor‘s group has been using. (Yep, I’ve still got that tab opened and am tinkering away slowly on the ideas–but mostly the technology.)
I’ve been having some issues in self-hosting a TiddlyWiki the way I’d like to. If anyone has any clear cut documentation on how to host a TiddlyWiki on one’s own domain name, I’d appreciate it. The documentation doesn’t seem as clear as I would expect (or perhaps more likely my server is having issues propagating/connecting?). If anything it’s muddled by the fact that they can seemingly be hosted in dozens of places one might not otherwise expect. My primary reservation is that it looks to me like they’re designed as single user instances, so I’m not exactly sure how Kicks et al. are effectuating their hyperconversations. Part of my issue is my mental model of some of the wikis involved in addition to the busy-ness of the sites’ themes, not to mention some of the non-standard conversational style on some. (I’ll get there eventually.)
I’ve also been using the IndieWeb’s MediaWiki for several years, so I’ve become much better at how it works as well as the ins-and-outs of the markup and how to do some slightly more advanced things using it. I’d set one up nearly a year ago this month and used it sporadically at best.
One of the bigger problems with my MediaWiki install was that somehow I wasn’t able to log into the primary account to do some of the necessary administrative functions. Today I got fed up with being hampered a bit and went spelunking into my install to see where things went wrong, suspecting that it was a one button install issue.
After digging through some documentation, I dug into the mySQL database and found a daunting looking [Blob] in the user_email field. Why couldn’t it be an easy-to-edit field? I not knowing anything better to do, I downloaded it, opened it up in my text editor, and discovered that I’d managed to leave a letter out of my own name in the email address! No wonder it wouldn’t work and the system wouldn’t let me reset my email address or password. A quick text edit later, the email was fixed, I uploaded the (now less intimidating) [Blob], and did a reset of the password in the admin interface, and we’re back in business! I’m always glad not to have borked the entire database and site.
If nothing else, it’ll help me in my explorations. Onward.
I’ve been thinking about Twitter threads, tweetstorms and liveblogging for the better part of the week, and last night I had an idea that has stuck with me.
With the idea of Micropub allowing the ability to create updates, why couldn’t one build (or even modify) a Micropub client to create an interface to write relatively short updates with (date and timestamps to appear in the text) that, when published, concatenated that new piece of content into a longer piece of running text to send an updated Micropub request to an article or note on a site to allow that article to become an updating liveblog post?
I’m a bit shocked that no one has done it before now, and I suspect that one of the pre-existing micropub clients out there could probably add the functionality as a one day project at an upcoming IndieWebCamp.
I don’t suspect it was the sort of Micropub functionality that Kevin Marks was thinking about doing this weekend, but Noter Live comes pretty close to having a lot of this sort of UI already. Instead of just doing a single Micropub post at the end of a Twitter thread, why couldn’t it do an initial post at the beginning and then update the site with subsequent updates as it goes along while also acting as a means of syndicating the posts to Twitter and then returning those Twitter permalinks as syndication links on the user’s own site?
Every four months or so I go through and tidy up many of my feeds. Invariably a dozen or so feeds die out, but I’m noticing a recurring quirk. Most of them are within my IndieWeb folder!
A lot of the changes seem to be related to people who are shifting from one shiny toy or project to another. They all seem to say something like:
Hey Mom! Look at my fancy new static site that builds in 0.001 seconds!
Can you believe what Drupal supports in the IndieWeb now? See ya!
I’ve moved back to good ol’ WordPress. Ahhh…
Micro.blog is awesome and requires such little maintenance. I migrated… while on vacation… in the wilderness… from my cell phone!!!
Wheee!
They’re often redirecting all their old URLs to the new site, but the one URL they commonly neglect is to create a redirect for their primary RSS, Atom, JSON or other feeds to their new feed structure. This means that the feed goes dead, and I (and others) have to notice it, then revive it. For some who simply have h-feed structures on their home page things may continue apace, particularly for the Microsub readers out there, though I haven’t been using those for as long to see as many issues.
Why are you doing all that work and making your followers do the extra manual work to go back and resubscribe?! Over the past four or five years there have been fifty or more people I’ve seen do this dance (some multiple times and even a few every 4 months or so). I totally get why they do it (because why not?!) But there should be a better way of keeping track of our major URLs and redirecting them properly.
From a continuity or even business perspective, this could be an even bigger thing as sites will likely spend a lot of time building an audience and could potentially throw it all away with the flip of a switch. I’ll be the first to admit that most of these people may not have a lot of people following them via RSS or similar means, but still?! It seems like at least once a week there’s some big newspaper, magazine, or corporate site I want to follow and I have to complain about finding their feeds. Why would you want to start all over again?
If a social media framing is easier for some, it’s the equivalent of changing your Twitter handle for your account with a hundred thousand followers to something new with no followers instead of creating a dummy account and swapping the usernames so you can have the new name, but keep all your followers.
There are also a few serial bloggers/writers who will start up a project for 3-6 months and build a following only to shut things down though they’ll keep the domain name. Why not redirect that primary domain to one of their other or newer projects and redirect those feeds as well? You’ve spent the time building an audience, why wouldn’t you want to keep it? Am I missing something fundamental here?
We often say, own your online identity, own your domain, and own your data. Perhaps we need to remember to also “own” our friends, family, followers, our community, or more broadly our audience?
Until then, I’m still flailing away out here. Manually changing your feeds in my reader…
(Meta: Hint for those on Twitter: I’m including links to my website, so you can get just a little bit more information than Twitter limits me to–oh, the fringe benefits of having one’s website where they’re not censored by the confines of the platform on which they’re creating!)
(Meta: Syndication Links Settings: These will help you set up syndication targets on other platforms and can be configured for a variety of social media.)
