Filed an Issue [Narwhal Microblog] Support (wordpress.org)
Using v2.1 of Narwhal Microblog on WordPress 5.2.4 and PHP v7.2 I get the following error:

Warning: Use of undefined constant posthasteForm - assumed 'posthasteForm' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/narwhal-microblog/narwhal-microblog.php on line 265

Knowing that Posthaste was the underlying code, I suspect it’s an issue with php and the version in use. Apparently we’ve gotten to the version where posthasteForm is throwing the expected errors. 🙂

I’m not seeing any specific funcionality issues with the plugin, but it is throwing this error on the pages where Narwhal appears.

Manually reconstructed Bridgy URLs redirect to silos

Filed an Issue snarfed/bridgy (GitHub)
Bridgy pulls comments and likes from social networks back to your web site. You can also use it to publish your posts to those networks.
It’s mentioned in the documentation that one can reconstruct URLs to allow manually resending webmentions for missed backfeed. However, it appears this may no longer work(?) as these reconstructed URLs, which used to be static are now automatically redirecting to their siloed instances.

Example: https://brid.gy/post/twitter/schnarfed/476408043819659264
redirects to https://twitter.com/schnarfed/status/476408043819659264

Separately, though related, the example in the documentation for Instagram no longer seems to exist and could be replaced and the example for Google+ could be removed as the service no longer exists.

No webmentions to original URLs that include emojis

Filed an Issue snarfed/bridgy (GitHub)
Bridgy pulls comments and likes from social networks back to your web site. You can also use it to publish your posts to those networks.
I’ve found a few instances in which Brid.gy will apparently fail to send a webmention (and/or fail to find a target) when the original URL contains an emoji(s). I’d suspect it’s a quirky encoding issue of some sort. I’m sure I’ve seen this issue before on Instagram where it’s probably more likely as the result of emojis in Instagram “titles” when using PESOS methods.

When I subsequently remove the emoji from the permalink, and reprocess Bridgy then has no problem finding the URL and sending the webmention. So at least there’s a “fix” on the user’s side for those experiencing this issue, but only if they’re aware it exists and have the means of executing it.

Example of failed webmention:

(I’ll note that it’s also got a fragment # in the URL, but don’t think this is a part of the issue)

Original: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/29/%F0%9F%93%85-virtual-homebrew-website-club-meetup-on-may-15-2019/?replytocom=262215#respond

Syndicated copy that was liked: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1129124049068498944#favorited-by-14591484

Bridgy Log: https://brid.gy/log?start_time=1558056830&key=aglzfmJyaWQtZ3lyTAsSCFJlc3BvbnNlIj50YWc6dHdpdHRlci5jb20sMjAxMzoxMTI5MTI0MDQ5MDY4NDk4OTQ0X2Zhdm9yaXRlZF9ieV8xNDU5MTQ4NAw

Example of previously failed webmention that ultimately went through following emoji removal:

Original: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/29/%F0%9F%93%85-virtual-homebrew-website-club-meetup-on-may-15-2019/?replytocom=262215#respond

Syndicated copy: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1129124049068498944#favorited-by-19844672

Bridgy Log: https://brid.gy/log?start_time=1558714459&key=aglzfmJyaWQtZ3lyTAsSCFJlc3BvbnNlIj50YWc6dHdpdHRlci5jb20sMjAxMzoxMTI5MTI0MDQ5MDY4NDk4OTQ0X2Zhdm9yaXRlZF9ieV8xOTg0NDY3Mgw

Another potential example from Instagram

Done via PESOS from Instagram which I’m sure missed webmentions (though too far back to find the specific logs):
https://boffosocko.com/2017/10/15/docteur-jerry-et-mister-love-%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F%E2%9A%97%EF%B8%8F%F0%9F%91%93%F0%9F%8E%ACi-found-this-original-french-one-sheet-47-x-63-after-the-move-will-have-to-get-it-mounted-and-fram/

Extension of the Insights » Posting Activity functionality

Filed an Issue Automattic/jetpack (GitHub)
Increase your traffic, view your stats, speed up your site, and protect yourself from hackers with Jetpack.
I’ve been enjoying the idea that JetPack is providing a Github contributions-like functionality at https://wordpress.com/stats/insights/example.com under the heading Posting Activity.

Orderly grid of squares representing dates which are grouped by month with a gradation of colors on each square that indicate in heat map fashion how frequently I post to my website.

Seeing this naturally provides me some additional motivation to post more often, which is generally a good thing for the platform. It also dovetails in visually with the “you have posted X days in a row” notifications sent by the mobile app.

I’m sure it all may be on the roadmap somewhere, but in case it’s not I thought I’d leave a few ideas about continuing to extend this awesome functionality and related UI features.

  • It would be nice to be able to display more than one calendar year of activity. Perhaps a tabbed UI could provide access to prior years while still being relatively compact? (This could be similar to “All Time Views” just below it which has button (aka tab) options for “Months and Years” or “Average per Day”.
    A visual representation of the button/tabbed functionality for "All Time Views" described in the text.
  • While hovering over a particular square representing a date provides some useful information like the number of posts on a particular date, it would be awesome if clicking on that date would take one to the correct archive page for that date. This is not too dissimilar to from GitHub’s functionality and the permalinks for each day should already exist in core. Example: https://example.com/2019/04/17 to show all of that day’s posts.
  • Similar to the functionality for posts, it would be interesting to have a similar set up for comments to allow sorting through those visually as well.
  • It would be awesome to have all of the above rolled up into a widget that would allow one to post the visual data for several months and/or years visually on a sidebar, footer, or other widgetizeable area. This also provides site readers the ability to quickly jump to a particular date and/or set of posts much like the Archives widget allows, but with a more visual interface.
  • If there is a widget, while I’m sure that many will love the blue WordPress-based color scheme, many will want to key their colors off of their theme as a customizable widget option.
  • Given the infrastructure for creating a lot of the above functionality, one could go a half step further and create an “On this Day” feature similar to that of Facebook, Timehop, and many others which allow one to create archive page views for what happened on this same day a year ago, two years ago, three, four, etc. This could be wonderfully useful for a wide variety of sites to look back at birthdays, anniversaries, and red letter dates as well as the average Tuesday. To my knowledge there is only one old plugin that I was able to find after some serious search that has somewhat similar functionality: Room 34 presents On This Day. There is also some similar functionality like this recently built into the Post Kinds Plugin which creates archive views for several date-based permalinks. This would be all the better if there is a better API for such an endpoint so that it could be tied into third party platforms like Timehop which are overly focused on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc., but which could include WordPress-based websites.

Also as I post this, and as I’m thinking the functionality is relatively new, I notice that my JetPack enabled .org site only has Posting Activity that goes back to mid-October 2018 (despite the fact that it should go back much further), while my wordpress.com site has data that goes far back beyond that date. Is this a potential bug, or could it be the case that my self-hosted site hasn’t been parsed back far enough to cover more time yet? It may also be related to the fact that I’ve recently (this week) disconnected and reconnected JetPack to do some troubleshooting.

Scrolling error on Annual Site Stats page

Filed an Issue Automattic/jetpack (GitHub)
Increase your traffic, view your stats, speed up your site, and protect yourself from hackers with Jetpack. - Automattic/jetpack
Perhaps this is a native WP.com issue, but I suspect it’s JetPack functionality as it occurs both with a .org connected account as well as an example.wordpress.com domain both of which have a “Powered by JetPack” logo on the bottom of the page.

Steps to reproduce the issue

  1. Go to https://wordpress.com/stats/day/annualstats/example.com
  2. Scroll down the page (zoom in if necessary so that the table fills the entire screen; the error isn’t as or won’t be obvious on a new account or if one doesn’t have several years worth of data to view)

What I expected

I expected the entire chart and page to scroll down.

What happened instead

The Year column stayed fixed and the remainder of the chart scrolls down the page instead. Without zooming in/out on the entire page, one can’t visualize the data or have it align properly.

Screenshots
Here’s a shot of the misaligned static year column versus the remainder of the chart which scrolls up/down.
On a multi-column display the year column doesn't scroll in alignment with the remainder of the chart

PubMed parsing

Filed an Issue Parse This Parsing Library for WordPress (GitHub)
Can Act as a Standalone Plugin - dshanske/parse-this
I would think that a major information hub like PubMed would have better metadata given its position in the research space but apparently not. It returns very little data, but could be way better.

Example page: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17083004

Proper tagging on upper case vs lower case

Filed an Issue ActivityPub for WordPress. (GitHub)
Contribute to pfefferle/wordpress-activitypub development by creating an account on GitHub.
Not quite sure what may be causing it, but I’ve noticed on my site that I get a properly tagged but don’t get it properly tagged when I use lower case . Is this to be expected or something in the line of a regex issue?

Examples: [1] [2]

Improve instructions for use

Filed an Issue Automatically send mentions to IndieNews. (GitHub)
Contribute to pfefferle/wordpress-indienews development by creating an account on GitHub.
Some who come across the plugin who are relatively IndieWeb-aware don’t know how to use the plugin:
eg: https://islandinthenet.com/saturday-16-february-2019-1017am/ which has resulted in some unintended spam in the IndieNews feed.

What exactly are the triggers for syndicating to IndieWeb News and Indieweb.xyz? Is it just having a tag indienews, indieweb, or even indie* where * is a wildcard? Are there others I may be missing?

Can one target other subs within indieweb.xyz (examples: /en/longreads or /en/games/) or just the /language/indieweb/ sub with the plugin? How is differentiating them done from the user’s perspective? I do see a reference to the /hottubs/ sub in the code, but I’m not following all the logic there.

I suspect it would also be nice to have some details about the dashboard widget and news feeds as well as listing a requirement for the Webmention plugin which some might not know about.

I’m happy to modify the readme’s with better instructions if I can be a bit more clear on some of what the code is doing with regard to the above.

A few display quirks in the Syndication Links plugin

Filed an Issue Add and Display Syndication Links. (GitHub)
Contribute to dshanske/syndication-links development by creating an account on GitHub.
With the most recent update I’m noticing a few small edge case quirks that seem to have popped up:

For syndication to indieweb.xyz the displayed result (set for icon only) is giving a relatively interesting “info” icon,which is a reasonable proxy, but sadly the hover text is also “info” instead of a more useful or expected “indieweb.xyz”.

For syndications to reading.am (which I’m guessing still doesn’t have a service specific icon) instead of giving the old default image of a globe icon, it’s not displaying anything at all. I haven’t tested specifically, but are unmapped urls still given that old default icon?

I’m still seeing issues with my chrisaldrich.wordpress.com URL. Previously it displayed a blank space (presumably not able to understand the inpub), but the newer version is displaying the word “WordPress” even when I’m using icons only. (Example: https://boffosocko.com/2019/02/14/a-sketch-for-an-indieweb-bullet-journal/#Syndicated%20copies) My initial inclination is that the two instances of “WordPress” at https://github.com/dshanske/syndication-links/blob/057733d921b485cf8f0eb98b28b104ccb708bd21/includes/class-syn-meta.php#L333 are both CamelCase when all the other examples around/near that segment of code are all lower case.

Default avatars for refbacks

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

Setting to discard self-refbacks

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

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

UI suggestion: Admin drop down filter for refbacks

Filed an Issue Refbacks for WordPress (GitHub)
Contribute to dshanske/wordpress-refback development by creating an account on GitHub.
Similar to the design set up for other comment types, it would be nice to have a filter for refbacks in the dropdown menu at /wp-admin/edit-comments.php. With the Webmentions plugin enabled, one is presented with the options to filter for “All Comment Types”, “Comments”, “Pings”, and “Webmentions”. Adding a filter for “Refbacks” would be incredibly helpful as well.

Simple Location’s Last Seen widget is revealing private locations

Filed an Issue Simple Location Plugin for WordPress (GitHub)
Adds Basic Location Support to Wordpress. Contribute to dshanske/simple-location development by creating an account on GitHub.
Using the version 3.5.2 of Simple Location, I’m most recently checked into a location that is marked as private, but the location widget indicates “Private” followed by the exact street address to the private location to which I’m checked in. Previously the widget showed the most recent public location, but now it’s explicitly uncovering private locations.

Perhaps it’s related to the recent fix that was causing private posts to be marked public?

Simple Location’s “Last Seen” widget is revealing private locations.

Space separated tags not appropriate for WordPress multi-word tags

Filed an Issue Omnibear (GitHub)
A Micropub browser extension. Contribute to keithjgrant/omnibear development by creating an account on GitHub.
WordPress installs will frequently use multi-word tags/categories, thus there is no way to send those tags when Omnibear defaults to space separated tags. Comma, semi-colon, or other separators may be better in these situations.

Bug: My Profile link in footer directs to incorrect URL

Filed an Issue gRegorLove/indiebookclub (GitHub)
indiebookclub is a simple app for tracking books you are reading https://indiebookclub.biz
When logged in the “My Profile” button in the footer of my page directs to https://indiebookclub.biz/users/www.boffosocko.com which gives a “Page not found notice”.

If I go to https://indiebookclub.biz/users/boffosocko.com instead, then the page resolves and shows the profile page I would expect.