issue | Chris Aldrich

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.

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”.
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.