It’s been a while since I’ve actively read Om Malik‘s blog, but I noticed that he’s using graphical indicators that add some semantic detail about what each post is. It’s a design element I’ve only seen lately out of the IndieWeb community with plugins like the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress or done manually with emoji in post titles the way Aaron Davis has done relatively religiously, particularly on his “Collect” site.
Om Malik is using some graphical indicators to give quick additional semantic meaning to what he’s posting.
I highly suspect that he’s using the Post Formats functionality from WordPress core to do some of this using a custom theme. Sadly it’s generally fallen out of fashion and one doesn’t see it very often any more. I suspect that it’s because WordPress didn’t take the functionality to its logical conclusion in the same way that the Post Kinds Plugin does.
The way Aaron Davis uses emoji in his posts helps to provide additional context about what is being written about to indicate what is going on in a link before it’s clicked.
I think some of my first experience with its resurgence was as helpful UI I saw suggested by Tantek Çelik on the Read page of the IndieWeb wiki. I’ve been doing it a lot myself, primarily for posts that I syndicate out to micro.blog, where it’s become a discovery function using so-called tagmoji (see books, for example), or Twitter (reads, bookmarks, watches, listens, likes). In those places, they particularly allow me to add a lot more semantic meaning to short notes/microblog posts than others do.
I do wish that having emoji for read posts was more common in Twitter to indicate that people actually bothered to read those articles they’re sharing to Twitter, the extra context would be incredibly useful. I generally suspect that article links people are sharing have more of a bookmark sentiment based on their click-bait headlines. Perhaps this is why I like Reading.am so much for finding content — it’s material people have actually bothered to read before they shared it out. Twitter adding some additional semantic tidbits like these would make it much more valuable in my mind.
It doesn’t appear that Om has taken this functionality that far himself though (at least on Twitter). Perhaps if WordPress made it easier to syndicate out content to Twitter with this sort of data attached it would help things take off?
The concept of IndieWeb is something slightly different to many people and it’s ever evolving and changing, just like the internet itself.
Trying to define it is somewhat akin to trying to define America: while it has a relatively well-defined geographic border and place in time, its people, laws, philosophies, and principles, while typically very similar, can vary and change over time. What it is can be different for everyone both within it as well as outside of it. It can be different things to different people based on their place, time, and even mood. In the end maybe it’s just an idea.
A basic definition of IndieWeb
In broadest terms I would define being part of the IndieWeb as owning your own domain name and hosting some sort of website as a means of identifying yourself and attempting to communicate with others on the internet.
At its simplest, one could say they have an IndieWeb site by buying their own domain name (in my case: boffosocko.com) and connecting it to a free and flexible service like Tumblr.com or WordPress.com. Because you’ve got the ability to export your data from these services and move it to a new host or new content management system, you have a lot more freedom of choice and flexibility in what you’re doing with your content and identity and how you can interact online. By owning your domain and the ability to map your URLs, when you move, you can see and feel the benefits for yourself, but your content can still be found at the same web addresses you’ve set up instead of disappearing from the web.
If you wished, you could even purchase a new domain name and very inexpensively keep the old domain name and have it automatically forward people from your old links to all the appropriate links on your new one.
By comparison, owning your own domain name and redirecting it to your Facebook page doesn’t quite make you IndieWeb because if you moved to a different service your content might be able to go with you by export, but all of the URLs that used to point to it are now all dead and broken because they were under the control of another company that is trying to lock you into their service.
Some more nuanced definition
Going back to the analogy of America, the proverbial constitution for the IndieWeb is generally laid out on its principles page. If you like, the pre-amble to this “constitution” is declared on the IndieWeb wiki’s front page and on its why page.
Some people may choose to host the business card equivalent of a website with simply their name and contact information. Others may choose to use it as the central hub of their entire online presence and identity. In the end, what you do with your website and how you choose to use it should be up to you. What if you wanted to use your website like Twitter for short status updates or sharing links? What if you wanted to use it like Facebook to share content and photos with your friends and family? What if you want to host audio or video like Soundcloud, YouTube, or Vimeo allow?
The corporate social media revolution was a lovely and useful evolution of what the blogosphere was already doing. Thousands of companies made it incredibly easy for billions of people to be on the internet and interact with each other. But why let a corporation own and monetize your data and your ability to interact with others? More importantly, why allow them to limit what you can do? Maybe I want to post status updates of more than 280 characters? Maybe I want the ability to edit or update a post? Maybe I want more privacy? Maybe I don’t want advertising? Why should I be stuck with only the functionality that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn and thousands of others allow me to have? Why should I be limited in communicating with people who are stuck on a particular service? (Would you use your phone to only call friends who use AT&T?) Why should I have hundreds of social accounts and an online identity shattered like just so many horcruxes when I could have one that I can fully control?
By decentralizing things to the level of owning a domain and having a simple website with control of my URLs, I can move to cheaper or more innovative web hosts or service providers. I can move to more innovative content manage systems that allow me to do more and communicate better or more broadly with others online. As a side effect of empowering myself, I can help create more competition and innovation in the space to do things I might not otherwise be capable of doing solely by myself.
Web standards
Almost all of the people behind the IndieWeb movement believe in using some basic web standards as a central building block. Standards help provide some sort of guidance to allow sites to be easier to build and provide a simpler way for them to communicate and interact with each other.
Of course, because you have control of your own site, you can do anything you wish with it. (In our America analogy we could consider standards to be like speech. Then how might we define free speech in the IndieWeb?) Perhaps a group of people who want some sort of new functionality will agree on a limited set of new standards or protocols? They can build and iterate and gradually create new standards that others can follow so that the infrastructure advances and new capabilities emerge. Generally the simpler and easier these standards are to implement, the more adoption they will typically garner. Often simple standards are easier to innovate on and allow people to come up with new ways of using them that weren’t originally intended.
This type of growth can be seen in the relatively new W3C recommendation for the Webmention specification which grew out of the IndieWeb movement. Services like Facebook and Twitter have a functionality called @mentions, but they only work within their own walled gardens; they definitely don’t interoperate–you can’t @mention someone on Facebook with your Twitter account. Why not?! Why not have a simple standard that will allow one website to @mention another–not only across domain names but across multiple web servers and even content management systems? This is precisely what the Webmention standard allows. I can @mention you from my domain running WordPress and you can still receive it using your own domain running Drupal (or whatever software you choose). People within the IndieWeb community realized there was a need for such functionality, and so, over the span of several years, they slowly evolved it and turned it into a web standard that anyone (including Facebook and Twitter) could use. While it may have been initially meant as a simple notifications protocol, people have combined it with another set of web standards known as Microformats to enable cross-site conversations and a variety of other wonderous functionalities.
Some people in the IndieWeb might define it as all of the previous ideas we’ve discussed as well as the ability to support conversations via Webmentions. Some might also define an IndieWeb site as one that has the ability to support Micropub, which is a standard that allows websites to be able to accept data from a growing variety of applications that will allow you to more easily post different types of content to your site from articles and photos to what you’re drinking or reading.
Still others might want their own definition of IndieWeb to support the functionality of WebSub, MicroSub, IndieAuth, or even all of the above. Each small, free-standing piece expands the capabilities of what your personal website can do and how you can interact online. But since it’s your website and under your control, you have the power to pick and choose what and how you would like it to be able to do.
So what is the IndieWeb really?
Perhaps after exploring the concept a bit, most may not necessarily be able to define it concretely. Instead they might say–to quote United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart—“But I know it when I see it […]”.
The IndieWeb can be many different things. It is:
a website;
an independent network of websites;
an idea;
a concept;
a set of broad-based web standards;
a set of principles;
a philosophy;
a group of people;
a support network;
an organization;
an inclusive community;
a movement;
a Utopian dream of what the decentralized, open Internet could be.
In some sense it is all of these things and many more.
Here are my answers to Alan’s list of questions about my domain:
What is your domain name and what is the story, meaning behind your choice of that as a name?
I use the domain name BoffoSocko as my online identity.
I’ve spent 20+ years working in the entertainment industry in one way or another and was enamored of it long before that. Boffo and socko are slanguage from the trade magazine Variety essentially meaning “fantastically, stupendously outstanding; beyond awesome”, and used together are redundant. I was shocked that the domain name was available so I bought it on a whim expecting I’d do something useful with it in the future. Ultimately who wouldn’t want to be Boffo, Socko, or even both?
In my youth I think I watched Muppets Take Manhattan about 1,000 times and apparently always thought Kermit was cool when he said “Boffo Lenny! Socko Lenny!”
What was your understanding, experience with domains before you got one? Where were you publishing online before having one of your own?
Over the ages I’d had several websites of one stripe or another going back to the early/mid-90’s when I was in college and everyone was learning about and using the web together. Many of my domains had a ~ in them which was common at the time. I primarily used them to promote work I was doing in school or with various groups. Later I remember spending a lot of time setting up WordPress and Drupal sites, often for friends, but didn’t actually do much with my own. For me it was an entry point into working with coding and simply playing with new technology.
I didn’t actually begin putting a lot of material online until the social media revolution began in 2006/2007. In 2008, I purchased a handful of domain names, many of which I’m still maintaining now. Ultimately I began posting more of my own material, photos, and observations online in a now defunct Posterous account in early 2010. Before it got shut down I had moved back to WordPress which gave me a lot more freedom and flexibility.
What was a compelling feature, reason, motivation for you to get and use a domain? When you started what did you think you would put there?
When I bought my first handful of domains, it was primarily to begin to own and brand my own identity online. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do with them, but I was posting so much content to Facebook and Twitter I thought I ought to be posting it all (especially the longer form, and in my mind, more valuable content) to a site I owned and controlled and then syndicating the content to those other sites instead. Initially microblogging, bookmarking, posting checkins, and sharing photos made it easier to being writing and producing other things.
What kinds of sites have you set up on your domain since then? How are you using them? Please share URLs!
Most of my domains are personal and personal education related, though I do have a few for separate business/work purposes.
https://www.boffosocko.com is my primary, personal, catch-all domain run with WordPress. I can do almost anything and everything I want with it at this point.
I use it to (privately or publicly):
collect bookmarks of interesting things I see online or want to read in the future;
post about what I’m reading, watching, or listening to;
post what I’m eating, drinking, or places I’ve checked into, photos of things around me;
post podcasts and microcasts from time to time;
draft and synthesize big pieces of the above to write reviews or longer pieces (from articles to books) and publish them for others to read.
Generally I do everything others would do on any one of hundreds of other social media websites (and I’ve got all those too, though I use them far less), but I’m doing it in a centralized place that I own and control and don’t have to worry about it or certain pieces of functionality disappearing in the future.
In large part, I use my website like a modern day commonplace book. It’s where I post most of what I’m thinking and writing on a regular basis and it’s easily searchable as an off-board memory. I’m thrilled to have been able to inspire others to do much the same, often to the extent that many have copied my Brief Philosophy word-for-word to their “About” pages.
Almost everything I do online starts on my own domain now, and, when appropriate, I syndicate content to other places to make it easier for friends, family, colleagues, and others to read that content in other channels and communicate with me.
https://chrisaldrich.withknown.com — This is a WithKnown-based website that I used when I initially got started in the IndieWeb movement. It was built with IndieWeb and POSSE functionality in mind and was dead simple to use with a nice interface.
http://stream.boffosocko.com — Eventually I realized it wasn’t difficult to set up and maintain my own WithKnown site, and it gave me additional control. I made it a subdomain of my primary website. I’ve slowly been using it less and less as I’ve been able to do more and more with my WordPress website. Now I primarily use it for experiments as well as for quick mobile replies to sites like Twitter.
What helped you or would have helped you more when you started using your domain? What do you still struggle with?
Having more examples of things that are possible with a domain and having potential mentors to support me in what I was attempting to do. I wish I had come across the IndieWeb movement and their supportive community far earlier. I wish some of the functionality and web standards that exist now had been around earlier.
I still struggle with writing the code I’d like to have to create particular pieces of functionality. I wish I was a better UX/UI/design person to create some of the look and feel pieces I wish I had. Since I don’t (yet), I’m trying to help others maintain and promote pieces of their projects, which I use regularly.
I still wish I had a better/more robust feed reader more tightly integrated into my website. I wish there was better/easier micropub support for various applications so that I could more easily capture and publish content on my website.
What kind of future plans to you have for your domain?
I’d like to continue evolving the ability to manage and triage my reading workflows on my own site.
I’d like to be able to use it to more easily and prettily collect things I’m highlighting and annotating on the web in a way that allows me to unconditionally own all the relevant data without relying on third parties.
Eventually I’d like to be able to use it to publish books or produce and distribute video directly.
I’m also continuing to document my experiments with my domain so that others can see what I’ve done, borrow it, modify it, or more easily change it to suit their needs. I also do this so that my future (forgetful) self will be able to remember what I did and why and either add to or change it more easily.
Tomorrow I’m positive I’ll see someone using their own website to do something cool or awesome that I wish I had thought to do. Then I hope I won’t have to work too hard to make it happen for myself. These itches never seem to stop because, on your own domain, nearly anything is possible.
What would you say to other educators about the value, reason why to have a domain of your own? What will it take them to get going with their own domain?
Collecting, learning, analyzing, and creating have been central to academic purposes since the beginning of time. Every day I’m able to do these things more quickly and easily in conjunction with using my own domain. With new tools and standards I’m also able to much more easily carry on two-way dialogues with a broader community on the internet.
I hope that one day we’re able to all self-publish and improve our own content to the point that we won’t need to rely on others as much for many of the moving parts. Until then things continue to gradually improve, so why not join in so that the improvement accelerates? Who knows? Perhaps that thing you would do with your domain becomes the tipping point for millions of others to do so as well?
To get going it only takes some desire. There are hundreds of free or nearly free services you can utilize to get things rolling. If you need help or a mentor, I’m happy to serve as that to get you going. If you’d like a community and even more help, come join the IndieWeb chat room. You can also look for a local (or virtual) Homebrew Website Club; a WordPress Meetup or Camp, or Drupal Meetup or Camp; or any one of dozens of other groups or communities that can help you get moving.
One of my favorite parts of the Post Kinds plugin isn’t just that it provides me the flexibility to add a huge variety of post types to my website or the semantic HTML and microformats it provides to help my site dovetail into the IndieWeb. It’s that it allows me to quickly and easily provide very rich reply contexts to my posts so that I more easily know what I’ve bookmarked, liked, favorited, read, or replied to online. In some sense it helps guard against some of the problem of context collapse found in many social media sites on the internet. As my friend and foodie extraordinaireJeremy Cherfashas said, “a reply without context is like an egg without salt.”
For a long time I had been wanting a bit more control of how the Post Kinds plugin presented some of the data it allows.1,2 After one inputs a URL, the plugin uses several methods to scrape the related web page and returns a lot of metadata about it including the title, a summary, the site name, tags, a featured image, publication date and time, the author and author’s website among others. The data returned depends on how the page is marked up and is generally based on available microformats or open graph protocol data when they’re provided.
The plugin has a setting to “Embed Sites into your Response” on its settings page, and this is generally okay, but it relies on sites to have some sort of oEmbed set up predefined. For bigger sites like YouTube and WordPress, this is generally alright, but it’s not always the case that any data is provided by the external site. Even in YouTube’s case you’ll only display the video with no other meta-data about it. As a result I leave it turned off.
Let’s take a quick look at what some of these default outputs for the reply context with a short comment underneath them look like.
This is the default Post Kinds output for an automatically parsed YouTube video with the embed function off. While it’s a good start, it’s not necessarily inspiring or a good reminder of the content you watched. One could manually change or add some of the fields for additional data, but we would still be a bit limited.This is what Post Kinds outputs for an automatically parsed YouTube video with the embed function turned on. It’s nice to have an embedded copy of the video, but where did it come from? What is it about? Why should we care? Is there any other metadata we can display?
With the embed option turned off the plugin will return a “Summary” of the parsed website page. This too is generally well supported in 90% of websites in my experience. But the data it returns is (smartly) filtered using wp_kses for security so that a malicious page couldn’t inject random html or code into your page. This means that useful functionality is often being stripped out of the “Summary/Quote” field in the reply context. I’d prefer to have the ability to have text with links, video, and audio to appear in-line in these contexts so that there’s a better representation of the actual post I’m reacting to.
The question then, is how can I make this happen?
In older versions of the plugin there was a setting for this feature, but it wasn’t well documented and most people didn’t know what the setting was or what it meant. For simpler UI and support it was ultimately stripped out although the raw code for it was left in. In fact, it’s literally the first short block of code within the plugin’s main code! It looks like this:
To enable the ability to manually add arbitrary html, links, audio, video, etc. you can go to your main administrative user interface in WordPress and go to Plugins >> Edit and then choose the Post Kinds option in the drop down selector in the top right hand corner and click select. Search for the code listed above (it should be right at the top, underneath the title and details for the plugin) and change the single word false to true. Next scroll down the page and click the Update File button.
Now you should be able to manually change any of the fields within the Response Properties metabox and they’d display in full HTML as you’d expect them to. (Caveat: because you’ve disabled a small layer of security, you should keep a close eye on what data appears in your “Summary/Quote” field and make sure you’re not allowing your site or your readers to be led astray or hacked. In my case, I’m almost always modifying it by hand, so it’s not a big issue. Your mileage may vary depending on what you’re posting.)
This is what Post Kinds outputs for a parsed YouTube video with the embed function off. We’ve gone in and manually tweaked the author name, URL, and photo and added manual HTML to render a sysnopsis with links and an in-line playable iframed embed of the video. This is a much richer reply context! It doesn’t get much better than this. Thanks Post Kinds!!
Updates
But wait… What happens when I update the plugin? Won’t the update overwrite the change? Yes, you’re absolutely correct. You’ll have to remember to go back and make this change any time the plugin updates. To prevent this, you could instead modify your wp-config.php file in the root folder of your WordPress install. To do this add the following lines of code to the bottom of this file:
/** Sets up initial variable for the Post Kinds plugin to not filter the Summary/Quote field */
if ( ! defined( 'POST_KINDS_KSES' ) )
define(' POST_KIND_KSES', true );
Next save the file and upload it to your WordPress install. Now you should be all set.
The Post Kinds plugin, essentially an extended version of WordPress’s core Post Formats functionality, allows one to make a variety of types of posts on one’s website that mirrors the functionality provided in a huge variety of social media platforms. This is useful if you’re owning all of your own data and syndicating it out to social silos, but it’s also great for providing others better user interface for reading and consuming what you’re posting.
I’ve documented and written about it quite a bit in the past and am obviously a big fan. In addition to most of the default post types (notes, favorites, likes, bookmarks, reads, listens, etc.), my personal site also supports follows, eat, drink, wishes, acquisitions, exercise, and chickens! Wait a second… CHICKENS?!?
One of the nice benefits of the plugin is that it’s fantastically modular and extensible. As an exercise a few months back I thought I would take a shot at adding chicken post support to my website. Several years ago in the IndieWeb, partly as an educational exercise and partly for fun, several people thought it would be nice to add a post type of “chicken” to their sites. What would it look like? What would it entail? How might it evolve? Since then interest in chicken related posts has naturally waned, but it does bring up some interesting ideas about potential new pieces of functionality that one might want to have on their personal websites.
While I currently support many post types, I’ve discovered recently that I have a variety of notes and checkins that relate to items I’ve purchased or acquired. I thought it might be worthwhile to better keep track on my own website of things I acquired in a more explicit way to make posting them and searching for them a lot easier. But how could I do this myself and potentially contribute it back to a broader base of other users? I started with a bit of research on how others have done this in the past and tried to document a lot of it on the Indieweb wiki. I eventually asked David Shanske to reserve the idea of acquisitions within the Post Kinds plugin, which he did, but I wondered how I might have done some of that work myself.
So below, as an example, I thought I’d write up how I’ve managed to add Chicken posts to my website. To a great extent, I’m using data fields and pieces already built into the main plugin, but in doing this and experimenting around a bit I thought I could continue to refine chicken posts until they did what I wanted, after which, I could do a pull request to the main plugin and add support for others who might want it. Hopefully the code below will give people a better idea about how the internals of the plugin work so that if they want to add their own pieces to their sites or contribute back to the plugin, things might be a tad easier.
Pieces for a new Post Kind in WordPress
Adding a new Post Kind primarily consists of three broad pieces which I’ll address below. The modularity of the plugin makes adding most of the internals for a new kind far simpler than one might imagine.
Adding Taxonomy Support
New kinds in general will require a small handful of properties which include:
a name (as well as its singular, plural, and verb forms);
a format, so that the plugin can map the new post kind to a particular Post Format type within WordPress core so that themes which use these can be properly set when needed. Format options include: aside, image, video, quote, link, gallery, status, audio, and chat. Some post kinds may not have an obvious mapping, in which case the value can be left as empty;
a generic description for display within the admin user interface as well as for the archive pages for the type which are auto-generated;
a description-url, typically this is a link to the IndieWeb wiki that has examples and details for the particular post kind. If there isn’t one, you could easily create it and self-document your new use case. It could even be empty if necessary;
A show setting with a value of true or false to tell the plugin to default to showing the kind in the Post Kinds “Kinds” metabox so that the new kind will show up and be choose-able from within the interface when creating new posts.
Code to include these pieces of data will need to be added to the /includes/class-kind-taxonomy.php folder/file path within the plugin so that the plugin knows where it needs to be found.
As an example, here’s what the code looks like for the bookmark kind:
'bookmark' => array(
'singular_name' => __( 'Bookmark', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // Name for one instance of the kind
'name' => __( 'Bookmarks', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // General name for the kind plural
'verb' => __( 'Bookmarked', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // The string for the verb or action (liked this)
'property' => 'bookmark-of', // microformats 2 property
'format' => 'link', // Post Format that maps to this
'description' => __( 'storing a link/bookmark for personal use or sharing with others', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ),
'description-url' => 'http://indieweb.org/bookmark',
'show' => true, // Show in Settings
),
For direct comparison, and as an explicit example for my chicken post kind, here’s the block of code I inserted within the class-kind-taxonomy.php file immediately below the section for the acquisition type:
'chicken' => array(
'singular_name' => __( 'Chicken', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // Name for one instance of the kind
'name' => __( 'Chickens', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // General name for the kind plural
'verb' => __( 'Chickened', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ), // The string for the verb or action (liked this)
'property' => 'chicken-of', // microformats 2 property
'format' => 'image', // Post Format that maps to this
'description' => __( 'Owning all the chickens. Welcome to my chicken feed.', 'indieweb-post-kinds' ),
'description-url' => 'https://indieweb.org/chicken',
'show' => true, // Show in Settings
),
You’ll probably notice that beyond the simple cut and paste, I haven’t really changed much. Syntax aside, most of these pieces are relatively obvious and very straightforward, but I’ll add some commentary about a few parts and what they do which may not be as obvious to the beginner. When creating your own you can copy and paste this same block into the code at the bottom of the list of other types, but you’ll want to change only the data that appears within the single quotes on each of the nine lines for the various settings.
For those not familiar with microformats you may be asking yourself what snippet to add for the property setting. The best bet is to take a look at the microformats wiki or look for possible examples of people doing the same type of post you’re doing and copy their recommended microformat. For extremely new and likely experimental edge cases, chances are that you’ll need to choose your own experimental microformat name. In these instances you can use prior microformats as examples and potentially follow the format. In my case I knew about the bookmark-of, like-of, favorite-of, and the experimental read-of, listen-of, and watch-of microformats, so I followed the pattern and chose chicken-of for my experimental chicken posts. One could also potentially ask for recommendations within either the microformats IRC/chat channel or the IndieWeb chat. If you create a new and experimental one, take a few moments to document your use case in the IndieWeb and/or Microformats wikis for others who come after you. Keep in mind that if you change the property name at a later date you will need to go into your database and change the wp_postmeta database meta_key field from mf2_property1 to mft_property2 so that WordPress will know where the appropriate data is stored to be able to display it.
Our new chicken post kind is available in the post editor because show is set to true
The show setting is fairly straightforward, but may not be as obvious to some. It has either a value of true or false. If the value is false, the new post kind won’t be displayed in the radio button options within the admin UI for creating new posts. If the value is true, then it will be available. The Post Kinds plugin has a number of reserved post kinds which aren’t displayed by default on most sites–primarily because they do not have appropriate views or data fields defined–but they could be enabled by changing the show flag from false to true. Most often we recommend you only show those kinds that you’re actively using.
Additional examples of the dozen or more standard post kinds can be found within the code to provide some additional potential clarity on what types of data each of them are expecting.
I debated a while on making the verb ‘chickened out’ instead of ‘chickened,’ but I chickened out thinking that it would make my posts something wholly different. Obviously you can now make your own choice.
With this chunk of code saved into the plugin, it is now generally aware of the new post kind and can save the appropriate data for this new kind of post.
Template/View Support
Now you’ll want to add some code to the plugin to tell the plugin how it should display the data it’s saving for your posts. The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste the code from one of the many default views already in the plugin and just change a few small pieces of data to match your post kind. This code can be created as a new file with your new matching post kind name (the one at the top of your code snippet above that appears on line 1 before the word ‘array’) in one of two places. If you put it in the views folder in the plugin, you may need to re-add it later on if the plugin updates. Otherwise you can add the code into a file which can be placed into a folder named kind_views in either the folder for your theme (or your child theme, if you have one.) We recommend placing it in your child theme, so if the parent theme updates, your code won’t accidentally be lost.
There are a variety of views for many post kinds available to stand as examples, so you can look at any of these and tweak them as you wish to get the output you desire. For more complicated output displays it might certainly help to have some PHP coding skills. For my chicken post kind I simply copied and pasted the code for the bookmark kind view and pasted it into a file named kind-chicken.php following the naming convention of the other files.
Below is a copy of the code I added for the chicken post kind which is nearly identical to the bookmark view with exception of changing the name of the template, adding u-chicken-of and changing the get_before_kind to chicken instead of bookmark. Note that because the chicken-of microformat is wrapped on a URL, it has the u- prefix, otherwise if it were on plain text it would have been p-chicken-of using the standard microformat h-, u-, p-, and e- syntax.
I also put both the u-chicken-of and the u-bookmark-of microformats in the view so that sites using the post type discovery algorithm that don’t recognize the chicken-of microformat won’t choke on the proverbial chicken bone, but will default back to thinking this post is of the bookmark type. I suspect that I could also have left the u-bookmark-of off and many would have defaulted to thinking this post was a simple note as well. You can make your own choice as to which you prefer as a default.
Finally, you’ll want to include the appropriate svg icon within the plugin so that it will display on the post (if the appropriate settings are chosen within the plugin’s settings interface: either “icon” or “icon and text”), and within the Kinds metabox in the post editor.
You’ll want to have one icon named kindname.svg in the svgs folder and another named kinds.svg in the plugin’s root folder. The kinds.svg is a special ‘master’ svg of all of the kinds icons bundled together. If it helps in matching the icon set, all of the current kind icons are made with Font Awesome icons which have the appropriate licensing for distribution.
In my chicken example, I opted for the feather icon since Font Awesome didn’t have an actual chicken available.
Naturally some people may want to display particular exotic kinds which might not extend to the broader public. A chicken post type certainly falls under this umbrella as I wouldn’t expect that other than for novelty, obsessive IndieWeb post kinds completeness, or for a very small handful of specialized farming, juggling, or comedy websites that anyone else in their right mind would really want to be doing a lot of posting about chickens on their site.
David Shanske, the plugin’s creator, has made it possible to create a sub-plugin of sorts so that one can add one-off support to these types using a variety of filters and functions. This could be useful so that updates to the plugin don’t overwrite one’s work and require adding the pieces outlined above back in again. Sadly, this is a tad beyond my present abilities, so I won’t address it further at the moment other than to say that it’s possible and perhaps someone might document it for others to use a similar template in the future.
Try it yourself
Now that you’ve got the basics, it should be relatively easy to add many of your own new post kinds.
Exercise One
If you want a simple exercise, you should be able to go into the code and manually change the show flags for the eat and drink kinds from their default false to true to enable posting food to create a food diary on your website. (These have a reasonable default view and icons already built in.)
Exercise Two
With slightly more work you can change the show flag on the follow kind and copy a view based on the bookmark view to make a follow view to make follow posts. (Here’s a link to my version.) Similarly other hidden kinds like wishes and acquisitions can be enabled easily as well. These also have default icons already built in, but just need a view defined to show their data.
Exercise Three
If you want a slightly larger challenge that uses all of the above, why not attempt adding the appropriate machinery to create a want post?
Exercise Four
Though David has often said before that he wouldn’t build in support for multi-kinds, some people may still want them or think they need them. If you’re exceptionally clever, you might be able to create your own explicit multi-kind by mixing up the details above and creating a kind that mixes a variety of the details and creates a view that would allow the specific multi-kind you desire. Caveat emptor on this approach if you should take it.
Share your ideas
Now that you’ve got the general method, what kinds are you going to deploy in the future? What have you already created? Feel free to reply with your ideas and thoughts below in the comment section or send us a webmention from your own site with what you’ve done. Maybe consider doing a pull request on the plugin itself to add the functionality for others?
I’ve been meaning to write regular updates to highlight some of the useful changes in the functionality of the IndieWeb suite of WordPress plugins, but never gotten around to it. There’s been a few really interesting ones lately, so I thought I’d start. Observant watchers who read through either the code or even the scant change logs before they update their code may catch some of these features, but sometimes interesting tidbits can slip by the most vigilant. Here are some interesting recent ones:
Display of Reads, Listens, and Watches in comments sections
David Shanske’s excellent Post Kinds Plugin allows one to post what they’re reading, listening to, or watching in simple IndieWeb fashion. (Examples of these on my site: read posts, listen posts, watch posts.) These posts types automatically include the appropriate microformats classes so the user doesn’t need to bother doing them manually. For a long time when replying to another’s site, bookmarking it, or even mentioning it when also using the Webmentions plugin would send the site a Webmention that would generally cause it to show up as a native comment, bookmark or mention. With an update late last year, from within the Discussion settings in WordPress, one could set toggles so that many of these webmentions could be displayed as facepiles. Other broadly unsupported post types would typically default to a simple mention.
Recently David Shanske and I started a podcast, and he thought it would be useful if his site could accept listen posts and show them visually within his comments section just like these replies, bookmarks, and mentions. Thus over the past month he’s added code to the Semantic Linkbacks Plugin to add the functionality for these types of posts to properly render showing facepiles for listens, reads, and watches.
This is what webmentions of listen posts look like on his site in his comments section:
User Interface example of how listen posts on David Shanske’s podcast appear on his site
What’s happening
Listen (or scrobble) posts can send webmentions (or notifications) to the original content potentially with the experimental listen-ofmicroformat. In the case of scrobbles of podcasts, these webmentions could be displayed as “Listens” which would provide the canonical copy of the podcast some indicator of its popularity and actual audience. It is tremendously difficult to obtain data on the actual number of listens within most of the podcast community and typically a fraction of the number of downloads must be used as an indicator of the actual reach. Being able to display listens could potentially be a boon to the podcasting market, particularly with respect to advertising as this type of open social web functionality spreads.
Similarly read posts with the read-of microformat and watches with watch-of will be accepted and show up within the comments section. Like the previous types, they can be set to display as facepiles within the user interface.
From the Discussion options settings page (typically at: /wp-admin/options-discussion.php#semantic_linkbacks) one can choose the mention types one wants to have appear as facepiles within their comments section.
Knowing that this read functionality would be available, this week I helped ColoradoBoulevard.net set up their site to be able to accept and display reads of their articles. Here’s an example from their site:
The display of a read post on ColoradoBoulevard.net
I haven’t yet seen one for watches in the wild yet, but maybe you’ll be either the first to send or receive one?
The microformats on these posts is generally considered to be experimental, but with the ~500+ users of this suite of tools as well as others who are already using them on other sites, they’ve now taken a dramatic step into the open internet and more widespread use and potential official adoption.
Editable Webmention Types and Avatars
Webmention Types
Just yesterday, I spent a few minutes in the IndieWeb chat helping someone to laboriously delve into their mySQL databaset and find a particular snippet of data so they could manually change a received webmention from being a simple mention to being a reply so that it would display as a native comment on their website. I’ve often done this to take what sometimes seem like simple mentions and change them to replies to reveal the richer content they often contain for the broader conversation. Sadly the process is boring, laborious, and fraught with potential ways to mess things up.
As of this weekend, this process is no longer necessary. One can now go to the admin interface for their comments and webmentions (found at the path /wp-admin/edit-comments.php), click on edit for the particular comment they’re changing and then scroll down to reveal a droplist interface to be able to manually change the webmention type.
Samantic Linkbacks Data metabox within the comment editing interface on WordPress. One can use the dropbox to change the webmention type as well as manually update the commenter’s avatar.
As another example of a use for this functionality, perhaps you’ve received a listen mention on one of your podcast episodes that has a lot of useful notes or commentary germane to your episode? Instead of hiding it as a simple listen, why not change the type to reply to allow a richer conversation around your content? After all, with a reasonable reply it will be implicit that the commenter actually listened to the episode, right?
Avatars
Because there is currently no functionality in WordPress for saving or caching the avatars of commenters via webmention, when users change their profile images on siloed services like Facebook, Twitter, et al. the link to their old avatars quits working and they were displaying blank spaces. This is an unfortunate form of linkrot, but one that can become more visually apparent over time.
Likes and Reposts concatenated on my site now after converting them into facepiles. They still give the social “proof” and indicate the interaction, but don’t interfere in the conversation now–especially when there are hundreds of them.
As one can see in the image for the commenting edit box above, the field for the Avatar is now editable. This means one can update out-of-date or blank avatars. One now also has the ability to moderate/edit or easily remove/switch avatars if users are sending inappropriate photos for one’s site’s audience.
I’ve spent some time over a few days this month to help IndieWeb-ify my local Pasadena online newspaper ColoradoBoulevard.net. They can now send and receive webmentions and can backfeed their comments, likes, and other responses from their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
They can stand to improve their support for microformats v2 and do some more work on their h-cards and other related metadata, but the editor seems thrilled with the initial results–particularly having their conversations in other areas of the internet come back to the original article.
I know that individual journalists have brought their personal websites into the IndieWeb fold, but this may be one of the first online newspapers/magazines I’m aware of to begin using some of these principles and tools. With any luck and some testing, they could be one of the first journalistic enterprises to begin receiving “Read” posts of their articles via webmention! Update: read posts are working! See the first example here.
I’d like to get them to a place where they can automatically syndicate to social silos and display their syndication links properly. In the end it would be really nice if their writers could own their own articles on their personal websites, syndicate them to the newspaper itself (as the rel=”canonical” link), and then both parties to be able to receive the appropriate backfeed, but this is a nice new baby step on the way to bigger and better things.
I did run across one interesting identity related issue that may need some addressing within this particular space. Some of their journalists prefer not to display photos (or even names) so that they’re not easily (or as easily) identified in person for the sake of doing online reviews or other sensitive reporting assignments.
Are you building your own website? Indie reader? Personal publishing web app? Or some other digital magic-cloud proxy? If so, come on by and join a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Bring your friends who want to start a personal web site. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project…
Everyone of every level is welcome to participate! Don’t have a domain yet? Come along and someone can help you get started and provide resources for creating the site you’ve always wanted.
This virtual HWC meeting is for site builders who either can’t make a regular in-person meeting or don’t yet have critical mass to host one in their area. It will be hosted on Google Hangouts.
4:30 – 5:30 pm (Pacific): (Optional) Quiet writing hour
Use this time to work on your project, ask for help, chat, or do some writing before the meeting.
5:30 – 7:00 pm (Pacific): Meetup
More Details
Join a community of like-minded people building and improving their personal websites. Invite friends that want a personal site.
Work with others to help motivate yourself to create the site you’ve always wanted to have.
Ask questions about things you may be stuck on–don’t let stumbling blocks get in the way of having the site you’d like to have.
Finish that website feature or blog post you’ve been working on
Burn down that old website and build something from scratch
What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is fine when you’re given all the functionality and control you need or want. It’s when you have additional needs and desires than the tools allow that WYSIWYG becomes a problem.
Social media WYSIWYG platforms like SnapChat, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, et al. have become a problem as they’re not allowing us the control, flexibility, and privacy we would all like to have while they pursue their own agendas.
In these terms, the general mission of the IndieWeb movement is to be the proverbial simple text editor meant to give everyone increasingly easier, direct control over their own identity and communication on the open internet.
I’ve seen a bunch of new folks coming into the IndieWeb community recently who are a bit overwhelmed with the somewhat steep learning curve of both new jargon as well as new ideas and philosophies of what it means to have one’s own domain and presence on the internet.
While parts of the IndieWeb’s overall idea are quite simple, where the actual rubber meets the road things can be a bit overwhelming, and more so if you’re a non-technical person. This doesn’t have to be the case. Generally I’d recommend to people to begin attending local Homebrew Website Clubs or, even better, to attend an IndieWebCamp in person to get a one day crash course followed by a day of building and help. Sadly, life can intervene making these not as quick and immediate a reality as one might otherwise like.
So toward the end of making the crash course to explain in relatively broad terms some of the basic terminology as well as some of the bigger individual pieces and what’s happening when using an IndieWeb site with most of the major new functionality built in, I’ve made a short pencast of what is going on. Naturally there’s still a tremendous amount to learn and do, and a million things which could always be better or improved, but if you’re setting up a site using WordPress this overview will hopefully get you a lot further a lot faster. (It may also be useful for those setting up Known or even something for micro.blog, though those will have different plugins and other small quirks that aren’t covered here.)
What is a Pencast?
Pencast?! What is that? It’s a technology that has been around for a while courtesy of Livescribe.com digital pens which not only record an audio file of what is being said, but also record penstroke by penstroke what is being written. Even better the audio and the penstrokes are crosslinked, so you can more easily jump around within a lecture or talk.
To do this you should download the version of the notes in Livescribe’s custom Pencast .pdf format. This seems like a standard .pdf file but it’s a bit larger in size because it has an embedded audio file in it that is playable with the free Adobe Reader X (or above) installed. With this version of the notes, you should be able to toggle the settings in the file (see below) to read and listen to the notes almost as if you were sitting with me in person and I was drawing it out in front of you as I spoke. You can also use your mouse to jump around within the pencast by touching/mousing to particular areas or by jumping forward and back by means of the audio bar. If you need to, also feel free to zoom in on the page to have a closer look.
Pencast PDF is a new format of notes and audio that can play in Adobe Reader X or above.
You can open a Pencast PDF as you would other PDF files in Adobe Reader X. The main difference is that a Pencast PDF can contain ink that has associated audio—called “active ink”. Click active ink to play its audio. This is just like playing a Pencast from Livescribe Online or in Livescribe Desktop. When you first view a notebook page, active ink appears in green type. When you click active ink, it turns gray and the audio starts playing. As audio playback continues, the gray ink turns green in synchronization with the audio. Non-active ink (ink without audio) is black and does not change appearance.
Audio Control Bar
Pencast PDFs have an audio control bar for playing, pausing, and stopping audio playback. The control bar also has jump controls, bookmarks (stars), and an audio timeline control.
Active Ink View Button
There is also an active ink view button. Click this button to toggle the “unwritten” color of active ink from gray to invisible. In the default (gray) setting, the gray words turn green as the audio plays. In the invisible setting, green words seem to write themselves on blank paper as the audio plays.
If you have comments or feedback, I’m thrilled to receive it. Feel free to comment below, or if you’ve already IndieWebified your site, write your comment there and send it to me via webmention, or add your permalink to the box below. Ideally this version of the pencast is a first draft and I’ll put something more polished together at a later date, but I wanted to get this out there to have a few people test-drive it to get some feedback.
I spent some time this morning doing a dry run through setting up a suite of IndieWeb plugins on a fresh WordPress installation. Going off of a scant outline I talked for almost two hours describing IndieWeb functionality as I set it all up. Hopefully it will provide a useful guide to newcomers to the space until I can write up a more solid outline and take a more polished approach. Apologies in advance for the roughness of the audio, lack of quality, and even live mistakes. Hopefully folks won’t mind suffering through until we can come up with some better tutorials.
As prerequisites, I assume you’ve already got your own domain and have installed WordPress on a server or other host. I actually finish setting up the WordPress install as I start the video and then sign in for the first time as we begin.
While many of the core plugins are straightforward, there is a huge amount of leeway in how folks can choose (or not) to syndicate to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others. Here I make the choice to use the Bridgy Publish plugin and only demonstrate it with Twitter. With one example shown, hopefully other silos can be set up with Brid.gy as well. The IndieWeb wiki details other options for those who want other methods.
At the end I walk through creating and syndicating a post to Twitter. Then I demonstrate commenting on that post using another CMS (WithKnown) from a separate domain.
I do my best to provide verbal descriptions and visual examples, but these can certainly be supplemented with further detail on the IndieWeb wiki. I hope to come back and add some diagrams at a later date, but this will have to suffice for now.
For those who would like an audio only version of this talk, you can listen here (.mp3):
I’ll start off with the fact that I’m a big fan of The Gillmore Gang and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the very bleeding edge of the overlap of technology and media. I’ve been listening almost since the beginning, and feel that digging back into their archives is a fantastic learning experience even for the well-informed. Most older episodes stand up well to the test of time.
The Problem
In the Doc Soup episode of The Gillmor Gang on 5/13/17–right at the very end–Steve Gillmor reiterated, “This isn’t a podcast. This was a podcast. It will always be a podcast, but streaming is where it’s at, and that’s what we’re doing right now.” As such, apparently Tech Crunch (or Steve for that matter) doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to have any sort of subscribe-able feed for those who prefer to listen to a time shifted version of the show. (Ironically in nearly every other episode they talk about the brilliance of the Apple TV, which is–guess what?–a highly dedicated time shifting viewing/listening device.) I suppose that their use of an old, but modified TV test pattern hiding in the og:image metadata on their webpages is all-too-apropos.
It’s been several years (around the time of the Leo Incident?) since The Gillmor Gang has reliably published an audio version, a fact I find painful and frustrating as I’m sure many others do as well. At least once or twice a year, I spend an hour or so searching around to find one, generally to no avail. While watching it live and participating in the live chat may be nice, I typically can’t manage the time slot, so I’m stuck trying to find time to watch the video versions on Tech Crunch. Sadly, looking at four or more old, wrinkly, white men (Steve himself has cautioned, “cover your eyes, it’ll be okay…” without admitting it could certainly use some diversity) for an hour or more isn’t my bailiwick. Having video as the primary modality for this show is rarely useful. To me, it’s the ideas within the discussion which are worthwhile, so I only need a much lower bandwidth .mp3 audio file to be able to listen. And so sadly, the one thing this over-technologized show (thanks again TriCaster!) actually needs from a production perspective is a simple .mp3 (RSS, Atom, JSON feed, or h-feed) podcast feed!
Solutions
In recent batches of searching, I have come across a few useful resources for those who want simple, sweet audio out of the show, so I’m going to document them here.
In addition to this, one might also use other search methods, but this should give one most of the needed weekly content. Sadly IA doesn’t provide a useful feed out…
To create a feed quickly, one can create a free Huffduffer account. (This is one of my favorite tools in the world by the way.) They’ve got a useful bookmarklet tool that allows you to visit pages and save audio files and metadata about them to your account. Further, they provide multiple immediate means of subscribing to your saves as feeds! Thus you can pick and choose which Gillmor Gang episodes (or any other audio files on the web for that matter) you’d like to put into your feed. Then subscribe in your favorite podcatcher and go.
For those who’d like to skip a step, Huffduffer also provides iTunes and a variety of other podcatcher specific feeds for content aggregated in other people’s accounts or even via tags on the service. (You can subscribe to what your friends are listening to!) Thus you can search for Gillmor Gang and BOOM! There are quick and easy links right there in the sidebar for you to subscribe to your heart’s content! (Caveat: you might have to filter out a few duplicates or some unrelated content, but this is the small price you’ll pay for huge convenience.)
My last potential suggestion might be useful to some, but is (currently) so time-delayed it’s likely not as useful. For a while, I’ve been making “Listen” posts to my website of things I listen to around the web. I’ve discovered that the way I do it, which involves transcluding the original audio files so the original host sees and gets the traffic, provides a subscribe-able faux-cast of content. You can use this RSS feed to capture the episodes I’ve been listening to lately. Note that I’m way behind right now and don’t always listen to episodes in chronological order, so it’s not as reliable a method for the more avid fan. Of course now that I’ve got some reasonable solutions… I’ll likely catch up quickly and we’re off to the races again.
Naturally none of this chicanery would be necessary if the group of producers and editors of the show would take five minutes to create and host their own version. Apparently they have the freedom and flexibility to not have to worry about clicks and advertising (which I completely appreciate, by the way) to need to capture the other half of the audience they’re surely missing by not offering an easy-to-find audio feed. But I’m dead certain they’ve got the time, ability, and resources to easily do this, which makes it painful to see that they don’t. Perhaps one day they will, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it.
I’ve made requests and been holding my breath for years, but the best I’ve done so far is to turn blue and fall off my chair.
I noticed a few days ago that professor and writer John Naughton not only has his own website but that he’s posting both his own content to it as well as (excerpted) content he’s writing for other journalistic outlets, lately in his case for The Guardian. This is awesome for so many reasons. The primary reason is that I can follow him via his own site and get not only his personally posted content, which informs his longer pieces, but I don’t need to follow him in multiple locations to get the “firehose” of everything he’s writing and thinking about. While The Guardian and The Observer are great, perhaps I don’t want to filter through multiple hundreds of articles to find his particular content or potentially risk missing it? What if he was writing for 5 or more other outlets? Then I’d need to delve in deeper still and carry a multitude of subscriptions and their attendant notifications to get something that should rightly emanate from one location–him! While he may not be posting his status updates or Tweets to his own website first–as I do–I’m at least able to get the best and richest of his content in one place. Additionally, the way he’s got things set up, The Guardian and others are still getting the clicks (for advertising sake) while I still get the simple notifications I’d like to have so I’m not missing what he writes.
His site certainly provides an interesting example of either POSSE or PESOS in the wild, particularly from an IndieWeb for Journalism or even an IndieWeb for Education perspective. I suspect his article posts occur on the particular outlet first and he’s excerpting them with a link to that “original”. (Example: A post on his site with a link to a copy on The Guardian.) I’m not sure whether he’s (ideally) physically archiving the full post there on his site (and hiding it privately as both a personal and professional portfolio of sorts) or if they’re all there on the respective pages, but just hidden behind the “read more” button he’s providing. I will note that his WordPress install is giving a rel=”canonical“ link to itself rather than the version at The Guardian, which also has a rel=”canonical” link on it. I’m curious to take a look at how Google indexes and ranks the two pages as a result.
In any case, this is a generally brilliant set up for any researcher, professor, journalist, or other stripe of writer for providing online content, particularly when they may be writing for a multitude of outlets.
I’ll also note that I appreciate the ways in which it seems he’s using his website almost as a commonplace book. This provides further depth into his ideas and thoughts to see what sources are informing and underlying his other writing.
Alas, if only the rest of the world used the web this way…
Within the social media space there’s a huge number of services that provide a variety of what I would call bookmark-type functionality of one sort or another. They go under a variety of monikers including bookmarks, likes, favorites, stars, reads, follows, claps, and surely many quirky others. Each platform has created its own semantics which don’t always overlap with the others.
Because I’m attempting to own all of my own data, I’ve roughly mapped many of these intents into my own website. But because I have the ultimate control over them, I get to form my own personal definitions. I also have a lot more control over them in addition to adding other metadata to each for better after-the-fact search and use within my personal online commonplace book. As such, I thought it might be useful to lay out some definitions (both for myself and others) for how I view these on my website.
At the basest level, I look at most of these interactions simply as URL permalinks to interesting content and their aggregation as a “linkblog”, or a feed of interesting links I’ve come across. The specific names given to them imply a level of specificity about what I think exactly makes them interesting.
In addition to a bookmark specific feed, which by itself could be considered a “traditional” linkblog, my site also has separate aggregated feeds for things I’ve liked, read, followed, and favorited. It’s the semantic reasons for saving or featuring these pieces of content which ultimately determine which names they ultimately have. (For those interested in subscribing to one or or more, or all of these, one can add /feed/ to the ends of the specific types’ URLs, which I’ve linked, for an RSS feed. Thus, for example, http://boffosocko.com/type/link/feed/ will give you the RSS feed for the “Master” linkblog that includes all the bookmarks, likes, reads, follows, and favorites.)
On my site, I try to provide a title for the content and some type of synopsis of what the content is about. These help to provide some context to others seeing them as well as a small reminder to me of what they were about. When appropriate/feasible, I’ll try to include an image for similar reasons. I’ll also often add a line of text or two as a commentary or supplement to my thoughts on the piece. Finally, I add an icon to help to quickly visually indicate which of the types of posts each is, so they can be more readily distinguished when seen in aggregate.
In relative order of decreasing importance or value to me I would put them in roughly the following order of importance (with their attached meanings as I view them on my site):
Favorite – This is often something which might easily have had designations of bookmark, like, and/or read, or even multiple of them at the same time. In any case they’re often things which I personally find important or valuable in the long term. There are far less of these than any of the other types of linkblog-like posts.
Follow – Indicating that I’m now following a person, organization, or source of future content which I deem to have enough regular constant value to my life that I want to be able to see what that source is putting out on a regular basis. Most often these sources have RSS feeds which I consume in a feed reader, but frequently they’ll appear on other social silos which I will have ported into a feed reader as well. Of late I try to be much more selective in what I’m following and why. I also categorize sources based on topics of value to me. Follows often include sources which I have either previously often liked or bookmarked or suspect I would like or bookmark frequently in the future. For more details see: A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) and the actual Following page.
Read – These are linkblog-like posts which I found interesting enough for one reason or another to have actually spent the time to read in their entirety. For things I wish to highlight or found most interesting, I’ll often add additional thought or commentary in conjunction with the post.
Like – Depending on the content, these posts may not always have been read in their entirety, but I found them more interesting than the majority of content which I’ve come across. Most often these posts serve to show my appreciation for the original source of the related post as a means of saying “congratulations”, “kudos”, “good job”, or in cases of more personal level content “I appreciate this”, “you’re awesome”, or simply as the tag says “I liked this.”
Bookmark – Content which I find interesting, but might not necessarily have the time to deal with at present. Often I’ll wish to circle back to the content at some future point and engage with at a deeper level. Bookmarking it prevents me from losing track of it altogether. I may optionally add a note about how the content came to my attention to be able to better remember it at a future time. While there are often things here which others might have “liked” or “favorited” on other social silos, on my site these things have been found interesting enough to have been bookmarked, but I haven’t personally read into them enough yet to form any specific opinion about them beyond their general interest to me or potentially followers interested in various category tags I use. I feel like this is the lowest level of interaction, and one in which I see others often like, favorite, or even repost on other social networks without having actually read anything other than the headline, if they’ve even bothered to do that. In my case, however, I more often than not actually come back to the content while others on social media rarely, if ever, do.
While occasionally some individual specimens of each might “outrank” others in the category above this is roughly the order of how I perceive them. Within this hierarchy, I do have some reservations about including the “follow” category, which in some sense I feel stands apart from the continuum represented by the others. Still it fits into the broader category of a thing with a URL, title, and high interest to me. Perhaps the difference is that it represents a store of future potentially useful information that hasn’t been created or consumed yet? An unseen anti-library of people instead of books in some sense of the word.
I might also include the Reply post type toward the top of the list, but for some time I’ve been categorizing these as “statuses” or “note-like” content rather than as “links”. These obviously have a high priority if lumped in as I’ve not only read and appreciated the underlying content, but I’ve spent the time and thought to provide a reasoned reply, particularly in cases where the reply has taken some time to compose. I suppose I might more likely include these as linkblog content if I didn’t prefer readers to value them more highly than if they showed up in those feeds. In some sense, I value the replies closer on par to my longer articles for the value of not only my response, but for that of the original posts themselves.
In general, if I take the time to add additional commentary, notes, highlights, or other marginalia, then the content obviously resonated with me much more than those which stand as simple links with titles and descriptions.
Perhaps in the near future, I’ll write about how I view these types on individual social media platforms. Often I don’t post likes/favorites from social platforms to my site as they often have less meaning to me directly and likely even less meaning to my audiences here. I suppose I could aggregate them here on my site privately, but I have many similar questions and issues that Peter Molnar brings up in his article Content, Bloat, privacy, arichives.
I’m curious to hear how others apply meaning to their linkblog type content especially since there’s such a broad range of meaning from so many social sites. Is there a better way to do it all? Is it subtly different on sites which don’t consider themselves (or act as) commonplace books?
I don’t really think of it as a “podcast” per se, but since I make “listen” posts of all the various podcasts and audio I listen to and the vast majority of those posts include direct links to the audio files, my own listen feed essentially becomes a self-published podcast of all the stuff I’m listening to that others could potentially consume. Maybe I should call it a faux-cast?
Perhaps one day I’ll do more with feed validation and submit it to various distribution channels to make searching/subscribing easier, but since I’m not really “promoting” it as anything other than a means of discovery (or extreme stalker behavior) I won’t take the time now.
As I think about creating “want” posts in the near term, perhaps I’ll create a feed of want-to-listen-to items as another discovery channel option as well. In some sense, this is how I use my Huffduffer.com account. It has a subscribe-able list of audio items I want to listen to at some point in the future. Since I can add my Huffduffer feed (or those of others) to my podcatcher, it helps enable me to easily get the content to my phone or other devices to listen to a variety of new things. There’s no reason not to do all of this on my own site explicitly.
Now if only podcatchers could support micropub for more easily creating scrobbles or “listens”…
