reply | Chris Aldrich

Replied to a tweet by

If you have a blog, how do you track reply posts on other blogs? Do you use refback, linkback, trackback, or webmention? Do you get enough reply posts to make the setup worthwhile?
— Lucas Gonze (@lucas_gonze) March 5, 2020

Refbacks were almost all noise and very little signal for me. Pingbacks/Trackback look dreadful and aren’t well supported anymore, so I don’t receive many. Webmentions have been AWESOME and just required two simple plugins for WordPress. My very small personal site has gotten over 6,000 reactions/replies in the past year (with the help of backfeed, particularly from Brid.gy.)

The real win is that I can use my own website to converse with others and don’t need the big social silos the way I did several years ago.

Replied to Proposing a Microformats2 Markup for Licensing Information by

Jamie Tanna (Jamie Tanna)

Some recommendations for how to mark up licensing information with Microformats, for making license information machine-discoverable and machine-readable.

Great write up Jamie. Some interesting things to think about and lots of useful examples.

I suspect that for most personal websites the idea of fair use will give people enough protection for reply contexts. Of course it will depend on their jurisdiction as fair use can vary by country or potentially even within countries in terms of how it is applied.

I would almost have to think that barring particular legislation and precedent that people/companies who are explicitly providing Open Graph Protocol or similar meta data on their websites are explicitly granting a license to use that content as the only use for that data on most systems is to provide it for creating contexts on services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Facebook likely created OGP as a proprietary format to give itself broad legal protection for just such use cases, though I suspect they parse pages and take titles or other snippets when OGP doesn’t exist. Naturally some large systems like WordPress may push OGP into code without the site’s owners being aware of what they’re potentially giving away, so the area is really murky at best. It would be beneficial to consult an attorney to see what their best advice might be or if there are precedents with respect to these areas.

For future reference, here is the relevant section for Fair Use from Title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States:

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use⁴⁰

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Replied to a post by

Brett Kosinski (The “B” Ark)

Taking back control of my content, I’m pulling my (modest) book reviews from Goodreads back to my blog. An underrated favourite of mine is Last Chance to See by the astounding Douglas Adams. #indieweb #books #ownyourdata

Congrats! I love the increasing number of people I’ve seen even in the last few days working on this! Are you using IndieBookClub.biz to post to your website?

I’m waiting for people to start documenting examples of owning their knitting on their websites and syndicating to/from Ravelry. #IndieWebKnittingChallenge

Replied to a tweet by

Carolina Gilabert (Twitter)

Open question to you, twitter friends:

What's your favourite #IndieWeb enabled site?

At the last #HomebrewWebsiteClub I worked on enabling webmentions on my site. It's my first indie web feature, and I'm already looking for what's next

RTs for reach appreciated pic.twitter.com/33vJdStx5O
— Carol (@CarolSaysThings) February 25, 2020

I’m enamored of Aaron Parecki‘s Monocle reader. I can subscribe to almost anything I want, read it without interfering algorithms, and reply to posts directly in the reader, which uses Micropub to post those directly on my site, which has Webmentions to send notifications to those sites in turn.

I’m similarly in love with an app version called Indigenous for Android.

But really, who can have just one favorite?!? I also love:

They’ve not only got interesting sites, but they’re always doing cool things that are worth following.

And if you want some other interesting ones to take a peek at, I have longer list (with RSS/OPML) at https://boffosocko.com/about/following/

Replied to a tweet by Jack Turban MD (Twitter)

PSA: You can get a C in organic chemistry and still be a doctor.
— Jack Turban MD (@jack_turban) February 25, 2020

and if you’re *really* careful, you can get a D in Chemistry and win the Nobel Prize!

“Chemistry was my worst subject in high school! I imagined my chemistry teacher aspirating his cornflakes when he found out his worst student had won the Nobel Prize!”

Peter Agre was awarded the 2003 Chemistry Prize. pic.twitter.com/h2AaNmR945

— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) August 4, 2019

Replied to fixing reposts by

Malcolm Blaney (mblaney.xyz)

I received some feedback during the week that creating a full content re-post wasn't ok. I accept that this is a pretty common view, probably the view of the majority of people. But what to do if you like the idea of full content re-posts? I am more than happy for people to share my writing, but I ...

I totally get where both sides are coming from. It’s definitely a presentation problem.

I’ve even had incoming emails in the past like this. Once a site owner actually asked me to add a rel=”canonical” tag to point back to their site, which I was quite impressed with. Ultimately I just fixed my display and provided only an excerpt. My intention was only to ever provide the reposted site the ultimate credit.

These days I don’t do too much reposting at all, and if I do, I’ll highlight a snippet and then ping the Internet Archive to save a copy on my behalf so that it’s still there in the future if I want to refer back to an original.

In rare cases for things that I find highly important, I’ll also repost, but keep it as a private post on my site that only I can see as an archived copy. Other times I’ll post and also add a rel-canonical back to the original site. I’m certainly never reposting as a means of creating traffic for my own site.

It’s interesting to me how frequently these same sorts of behaviors on personal websites will freak people out when they’re daily occurrences within the social sphere where they may not have better presentation. I had an online magazine send me a take down request a few weeks back for using a photo version of one of their generic mastheads in a spot that was obviously a reply context (and incidentally met all the requirements of fair use). Sometimes you can’t win despite your best intentions–just keep trying and we’ll get there.

Replied to Feature request: reading progress · Issue #14 · gRegorLove/indiebookclub by

gRegorLove (GitHub)

Similar to Goodreads, allow entering a percentage or page number to track your progress.

I need to think about this some more, but I suspect IBC would generate text like "Progress: 25%" and include it in the e-content of the Micropub request.

Perhaps this example could be a useful model: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/13/55767168/

The progress portion is coded roughly in HTML with a label as follows:

<ul>
    <li class="bookprogress"><progress value="177" max="465">38%</progress> <label for="">38.0% done; loc 4290-4847 of 12932</label></li>
</ul>

You could always use <p> or <span> instead of ul/li tags (with some app specific classes to allow the receiving site to create its own custom CSS for display. Otherwise browsers should be able to display a reasonable visual default.

I’d recommend support for pages, percentages finished, and potentially even Amazon’s default location numbers, with the ability to translate back and forth potentially when given at least two of the parameters as a minimum which should allow the calculation of the others. I find in practice that it’s generally pretty rare to have both page numbers and location numbers, but it could happen.

I’ve also got an extended version available at https://boffosocko.com/2012/06/17/big-history/#READING%20PROGRESS

Replied to Introducing Indigenous for Android by

swentel (realize.be)

You can now download the app from Google Play. If you want to install it manually, you can also go over to the release section on GitHub. Use GitHub to post issues, ideas, documentation, nicer icons, design mockups ... everyone can help out!

Congratulations on the fantastic updates on Indigenous! The recent changes are making me wonder how I’ve lived all this time without it.

My first use of the read post functionality was a tad confusing because I wasn’t aware that either the WordPress Micropub client or Post Kinds supported the read-status set up that IndieBookClub.biz had pioneered.

The vast majority of my read posts are for online articles which are relatively short in nature and so don’t use the read-status features and are simply marked up with read-of. When I originally suggested that Indigenous support read posts, I only expected the read-of support and didn’t imagine the additional read-status support for “to-read”, “reading”, or “finished” to be included. These are highly experimental and have thus far only been supported by IndieBookClub which focuses on much longer book-length content that can take better advantage of the ideas of the idea of a bookmark to read, ongoing reading, and finished reading markers. Even with this support gRegor still thinks that it may be better to use the addition of p-category or u-category microformats instead of the read-status tags. The WordPress Micropub server is the only other software that supports these additional read-statuses besides gRegor’s own website.

Given that:

an exceedingly small number of sites have support for read-status;
the read-of microformat has somewhat better support (though it is still an experimental microformat itself);
the majority of posts that Indigenous users are likely to use for creating read posts will be articles (as opposed to either smaller posts like notes, likes, favorites, checkins, RSVPs, etc. or book length material),

I would recommend that you have a default setting in Indigenous for just read-of without a specific read-status (the UI could either indicate “none” or “read” without a read-status value). However for the occasional longer form usages leaving the other options in would be useful. I can easily imagine myself using the option for “to-read” over the simpler bookmark functionality now that it exists!

Thanks again for all your work!

Replied to Feed WordPress 101: Feeding The Machine by

Alan Levine (CogDogBlog)

If you are just syndicating a few feeds into your own site, or maybe for a single class of students, it’s not much work to manually add the feeds. Collecting them can be as simple as asking students to email you the address for their blog, or collecting them via something like a Google Form. Many of us dream of a single one button solution, but my experience in creating at least half a dozen of these sites are is… feeds can be messy.

Alan, this series is great. Coincidentally I came across it courtesy of Greg McVerry (#) after having spent some time over the past few days discussing feed discovery with David Shanske who recently wrote a small WordPress plugin for helping to uncover RSS feeds for tags and categories. Today he wrote some broader thoughts about feed discovery you may appreciate.

In addition to all of this, since you’re a coder, you might also appreciate some of the more advanced feed discovery code David has written into the Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (code on Github). You may be able to build some of the discovery bits into some of your syndication hubs/planets in the future.

Of course, like FeedWordPress and the relatively similar PressForward plugin, you might also be able to bend Yarns into an aggregator in similar ways.

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use40

107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use⁴⁰