Testing out the Narwahl microblog plugin for posing quick notes to my website. Seems relatively slick, though the interface also includes the ability to post a title and it seems to throw a php error. I do wish the text box was a bit smaller along with a few other simple UI tweaks. Otherwise pretty ...
testing out a reply.
Hopefully this fixes it a bit?
Third time’s the charm? Sempress (includes reply context, but without proper markup)
How about with IW Publisher child? – has too big an h-card
And now with IW Publisher? – also too big an h-card for some reason
With Independent publisher? – did as well as mine; proper h-card; included reply context
With IW16? How will it look? – does perfectly for replies and doesn’t include context, but don’t like the way it appears on my own site.
Finally circling back to my slightly modified 2016 child.
Let’s also not forget to see how replies look from a relatively standard TwentyFifteen site, which is a good simple look for a personal site.
The question now is will having added h-entry to 2015 bork replies to others?–let’s see if the second time is the charm?–third time is the charm with h-entry in seemingly the correct place now.
Those all failed, but if we wrap the_content with e-content, maybe?
Making sure I haven’t broken anything yet. Circling back again to see if the h-card is working properly again.
Why is it every time I ask a question at the Post Office, the woman at the counter literally screams that I want a supervisor? No wonder they feel they need a glass partition between us.
And why scream?
Hopefully this also works as a reply for your required test. 🙂
Flow is the writer's problem for blogging. I have been working on this since I started in 1994. I solved the problem for myself in 1997, and ever since I've been working on solving it for everyone else.
Dave has some solid points about the UI and process of writing here. Speed is key! WordPress is pretty deplorable in this way. Some of the more advanced user may simply write the word “new” in their browser and tab down once to the correct URL to begin creating. Others may have some browser bookmarklets set up to jump right to creation. Still, for the unwashed masses–and I include myself in this, things should be far easier and more direct. I’ve recently been experimenting with the Narwhal plugin that puts a writing interface right up top on my website (and only appears when I’m logged in) and provides a pretty solid experience the way Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites do.
I have played around with many of Dave’s tools over the years and appreciated his UI and particularly some of his outliner tools. Given that he’s built and tested some very strong tools and interfaces, I’d be really curious to see him implement a Micropub client back end on some of them so that they not only allow one to post to his sites, but so that one could use them to create, edit, and publish to almost any website out there. Some of his tools are already set up to post content to Twitter, why not set them up to post to WordPress and many others too?
Given that CMSs and static site services like WordPress, Drupal, Craft, WithKnown, Jekyll, Kirby, Hugo, and Blot all support Micropub either natively or with simple plugins, Dave could easily take his various publishing interfaces and make them broadly available to almost any website on the planet. How many times have I desperately wished I could use Radio3, Little Outliner, Little Card Editor, pngWriter and others to be able to post to other websites instead of just Twitter?!
He might even implement them as Micropub clients just so that he could use his own interfaces to publish directly to his WordPress sites instead of worrying about their interface. I suspect that in day or two’s worth of work he could not only have half a dozen or more micropub clients, but he might also figure out how to dovetail them all together to make something more interesting and useful than Gutenberg, which has taken hundreds of developers and a magnitude larger amount of time to create.
Perhaps some additional competition against Gutenberg would help speed WordPress (and everyone else for that matter) toward making a simpler and more direct publishing interface? Micropub seems like a designer’s dream for making better posting interfaces, especially since it’s got such broad endpoint support.
Shout out to @getbluelab which replaced my malfunctioning #pH#sensor quickly and with minimal fuss. No “your concern is so important to us we make you wrangle for hours with some minimum wage guy who never used the product” nonsense. Just got it done. #recommended
An excellent question. I happen to plan to write a post about that before too long :-) The core challenge is aggregation ... no point having isolated reviews. We need an aggregate, across multiple rating dimensions.
My friends, and former employers, at the Government Digital Service have written a spectacularly good blog post "Making GOV.UK more than a website".
In it, they describe how adding Schema.org markup to their website has allowed search engines to extract semantic content and display it to a user. For...
I like the idea of experimenting into some of these new areas, but I’m worried about who owns some of these gateways and how they treat the data–both from the perspective of the site owners as well as from the users who are encouraged to access data through them. How do our power structures change based these new modalities? Is it responsible?
I’ve had Webmentions enabled on this site for some time now. Sending a Webmention is pretty straightforward thanks to plugins like Webmention for WordPress and Semantic-Linkbacks. The question is how to send Webmentions in comments when someone replies to one of my posts?
Okay, this gives a lot more context!
It looks like you’re 90% of the way there. I suspect the last piece you’re missing are the proper microformats either in your theme or in the_body of your specific reply. I suspect you know what microformats are Paul, but for context and the benefit of others reading, they’re bits of metadata added into HTML as classes that provide computers additional information about what is in your post and what each part represents.
For implementing Webmention with WordPress, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin has a built in parser that looks at the microformats of the incoming webmentions and uses that data to decide what to display in your comments section. The first part it looks for is an h-card which is a microformats version of a business card that generally includes the post author’s name, photo/avatar, and URL. This is how the system determines the avatar and name to use.
The second part it’s looking for in the received webmention is an h-entry (or hentry in the older microformats v1 specification). This defines the broader body of the comment that it will display. And the last big part that the parser is looking for is what kind of response was sent. Was it a simple reply, like, a bookmark, a read, a listen, etc.? If it can’t figure out what the specific reply may have been it defaults to a simple “mention” which is the response that you’re seeing in your example Paul.
The positive part of this system is that WordPress already has some reasonable support for microformats v1 built into core and many themes even extend on it relatively well. Sadly, WordPress doesn’t support microformats v2, which would make it a far better IndieWeb friendly platform. Fortunately most themes have h-card or hcard along with the related microformats that go on the names, URLs, and avatars. Unfortunately they don’t have the microformats that indicate the response types.
To fix this many people IndieWeb-ifying a site use a theme with strong Microformats v2 mark up like SemPress (or one of its children) and they’re doing it in combination with the Post Kinds plugin which adds the microformats to the response to indicate the proper type. Post Kinds, a dramatic expansion of the idea of Post Formats by the way, also has a built in parser which kindly provides a reply context for your posts as well.
A screenshot of a reply context (highlighted in yellow) which indicates the post is about a favorite of Huffduffer which includes a blockquote from the Huffduffer site to show what the site is about. My commentary about the favorite appears beneath the reply context.
If you’re not using (or don’t want to use) Post Kinds you can manually add the required mark up in your posts to indicate the type. Most of these are documented on the IndieWeb wiki, here’s an example for a typical “reply“:
<div class="h-entry">
<a href="http://example.com/note123" class="u-in-reply-to">Some note with a point</a>
<div class="p-name p-content">Good point! Now what is the next thing we should do?</div>
</div>
In this example the important microformats are the u-in-reply-to and the p-namep-content. Generally most WordPress themes will add either h-entry (or hentry) in the theme, so you just need the u-in-reply-to piece.
Again, most people get around the need to add these microformats by using Post Kinds plugin while others use a version of the old core Press This bookmark functionality that was adopted for use as IndieWeb Press This. IndieWeb Press this bookmarklet will take a page you want to reply to, like, or bookmark, then create a post with the requisite microformats, and finally allow you to write your reply and publish pretty quickly.
Yet another method to get around some of the required microformats is to publish using a Micropub client in combination with the WordPress Micropub plugin.
The upshot is that once you’ve arranged the basic pieces, your publishing process proceeds apace as before.
And of course, to be even more upfront, I’ll mention that some of the replies I’ve sent to Paul in the past (and you can see this in the example screenshot he includes) mistakenly include my reply context to his post in them. This is a result of my having overwritten some theme changes in my site that once upgraded my lowly mf1 hentry to the better mf2 h-entry. As a result the parser inside the Semantic Linkbacks plugin falls back to parsing as microformats version 1 and includes the context instead of stripping it out and just sending only the piece that is the intended reply. The reply that should have shown up on Paul’s post was the portion he outlined in red. I’ll try to fix this again shortly.
For those looking to help spread the ideas and functionality of the IndieWeb within WordPress, we’d all love help to:
Improve WordPress’ core support for Microformats version 2
Better support for Microformats v2 in more Themes
I and others have documented some other subtleties and resources for microformats with respect to WordPresss and themes on the IndieWeb wiki which should be of help for those of a variety of development levels. Obviously we still have a way to go towards making all this more intuitive, obvious, and user friendly, but we’re getting there day by day. Any extra help and feedback is always helpful.
If you’ve got questions, need help, or have suggestions, feel free to hop into the IndieWeb WordPress chat and we can try to get you up to speed.
So, I spend a long time trying to set up PESOS for individual silos on IFTTT, specifically Facebook and Instagram, because they are terrible. I’ve got it currently set up to publish my initial post, but no back feed support yet. Also, this is going to wordpress, but it shouldn’t matter (in theor...
This is some brilliant work. Thanks for puzzling it all out.
I do have a few questions/clarifications though so as not to be confused since there are a few pieces you’ve left out.
For the IndieAuth token, which is created at /wp-admin/users.php?page=indieauth_user_token one only needs to give it a title and the “create” scope?
For the “then” portion that uses IFTTT.com’s Webhooks service are the following correct?
The URL is (when used with WordPress) of the form: https://example.com/wp-json/micropub/1.0/endpoint
The Method is: POST
The Content Type I’m guessing based on the Body field you’ve included is: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
For your Pocket example, it looks like you’re using the Post Kinds Plugin, so I’m guessing that you could have gotten away without the {{Excerpt}} and {{Title}} portions and just have sent the URL which Post Kinds picks up and parses to give you your context portion with a title and an excerpt anyway?
It looks like part of the trouble of this PESOS set up is that you’re too reliant in the long run of relying on Pocket (or other services) being around in the long term. If Pocket disappears, then really, so does most of your bookmark, which ideally should point to the canonical URL of the content you’re bookmarking. Of course perhaps IFTTT may not give you that URL in many cases. It looks to me like the URL you’re bookmarking would make a more appropriate syndication link URL.
For most of my bookmarks, likes, reads, etc. I use a plugin that scrapes my post and saves a copy of the contents of all the URLs on my page to the Internet Archive so that even in the event of a site death, a copy of the content is saved for me for a later date.
In any case, I do like this method if one can get it working. For some PESOS sources, I’ve used IFTTT before, though typically with RSS feeds if the silo provides them. Even then I’m often saving them directly to WordPress as drafts for later modification if the data that IFTTT is providing is less than ideal. Sometimes worse, using RSS doesn’t allow one to use Post Kinds URL field and parsing functionality the way your webhook method does.
I’ve tinkered a bit with CROWDLAAERS, but it’s always seemed to me geared toward a very niche audience including teachers potentially using it for grading? Perhaps I’m missing some more of its flexibility? Remi Kalir might be able to help elucidate it or indicate if he’s noticed anyone using it for off-label usage.
I might see it being more useful if one could analyze site-wide annotations on a domain with a wild-card search of this sort: https://tomcritchlow.com/*.
I have to imagine that it would be cool to see all the annotations and conversations across something like the New York Times with a data visualization tool like this.
Jon Udell and gang are aware of Webmention, but haven’t pulled the trigger (yet) on making the decision to build them in. I’ve outlined some methods for making their platform a bit more IndieWeb friendly by adding markup and some additional HTML to allow people to force the system to be able to send webmentions. I do frequently use Jon’s facet tool to check highlighting and annotation activity on my website.
I have found Crowdlaaers useful several times in that I’m aware that some pages are annotated, but they’re either not public or are part of other groups for which I’m not a member. An example of this is this page on my website which has one annotation which I can’t see, but by using Crowdlaaers, I can. Another example is viewing annotations on sites that have subsequently blocked Hypothes.is like this example. Of course, sometimes you’ll do this and find odd bugs floating around in the system.
If you’re using the Webmention plugin, it will happen automatically on publish. (If you’re also using it to receive, then I highly recommend using Semantic Linkbacks as well.)
For quick “manual” webmentions you can use Aaron Parecki’s Telegraph or Kevin Marks’ Mention Tech. Just input your source URL that has a link to a target URL and the services will send the Webmention on your behalf.
Some sites that receive them will have boxes you can put your URL response in them and click a send button. (See mine below.)
My IndieWeb setup is continuing to evolve. I just added support for syndication (this post should appear on IndieNews) and JSON-posting to my Hugo backend and theme.
Congratulations! I’m sure you’ve found lots of documentation, but keep in mind that micro.blog is built on Hugo. If it helps I noticed that Steve Layton wrote a piece the other day about adding Webmention to micro.blog/Hugo with lots of code and details. It looks like you may have some of that already, but seeing the previously worn paths and knowing where to turn can help a lot!
I love the idea of wikis. My problem is I have no idea what I would use a wiki for.
Try it for bookmarking things. Keep a daily journal. Document discovery tools.
You use your website every day for something. Try doing that with a wiki. Eventually your creative juices will begin flowing. Eventually you’ll come up with some creative ideas…
Starting things is fun. Narrating things as you go is… funner.
Just about a month ago I joined the IndieWeb chat via Slack, which is connected to IRC and a web chat as well. I haven’t actually participated, but I’ve been getting the feel of conversations and checking out a bunch of the materia...
Congrats this is awesome!
Even doing the cutting/pasting from the wiki page to set up an event can sometimes be harrowing, so kudos for sticking with that part.
The part I got hung up on the most here was actually adding my name in the RSVP. The code seemed to suggest that adding would work, but it kept showing me “Template:Jeremyfelt.com” instead. I then poked around and saw that others had redirects setup, so I created a page titled “jeremyfelt” and added a wiki redirect to my user page and changed the code to , but it then said “Template:jeremyfelt” and I knew I was going nowhere. Finally, I updated it with standard URL syntax: [[jeremyfelt|Jeremy Felt]] and my name appeared as expected. No cool picture next to it or anything, but I’ll figure that at some point. This is all wiki stuff I probably used to know but have completely forgotten. ❧
Feel free to hop into the helpful chat and most are ready and happy to try to help you out when you get stuck or provide pointers.
— Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:31PM
Thought I would join in the year end fun with Tannis, Martin, Tony and others and put together a year end review kinda blog post. Funny. I’ve been blogging about edtech since 2007, and I don&…
Most of the convo, if any, seems to happen on the socials vs comments left on the blog these days. ❧
The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM
I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM
I still find blogging one of the most professionally satisfying things I do. It is a powerful thing to feel like you have a voice. ❧
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
2020 will also bring a more concerted effort on my part to both amplify the women in my network who blog, and both comment and refer back to their blogs. To use what they write as a starting off point for my own posts more. ❧
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
And I am planning on cutting back on my personal use of social media (easier said than done) and want to try to return to using my blog more than Twitter for sharing. ❧
More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/
Kudos as well to making the jump here:
Taking a bit of a Twitter break. I’m going to try to stay off until the new year, but likely lack the willpower to stay off for more than a few hours. Wish me luck!
….but silently. Not via reply to to this tweet. Cause that’ll just suck me back into the vortext.
— Clint Lalonde (he/him) (@edtechfactotum) December 19, 2019
In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
10 days ago I was sitting in a room in Los Angeles with 12 other folks listening to Marie Selvanadin, Sundi Richard, and Adam Croom talk about work they’re doing with Domains, and it was good! That session was followed by Peter Sentz providing insight on how BYU Domains provides and supports top-level domains and hosting for over 10,000 users on their campus. And first thing that Friday morning Lauren and I kicked the day off by highlighting Tim Clarke’s awesome work with the Berg Builds community directory as well as Coventry Domains‘s full-blown frame for a curriculum around Domains with Coventry Learn. In fact, the first 3 hours of Day 2 were a powerful reminder of just how much amazing work is happening at the various schools that are providing the good old world wide web as platform to their academic communities.
https://roadshow.reclaimhosting.com/LA/
I’m still bummed I couldn’t make it to this event…
One of the questions that came up during the SPLOT workshop is if there’s a SPLOT for podcasting, which reminded me of this post Adam Croom wrote a while back about his podcasting workflow: “My Podcasting Workflow with Amazon S3.” . We’re always on the look-out for new SPLOTs to bring to the Reclaim masses, and it would be cool to have an example that moves beyond WordPress just to make the point a SPLOT is not limited to WordPress (as much as we love it) —so maybe Adam and I can get the band back together.❧
I wonder if this could be used to create a SPLOT that isn’t WordPress based potentially using APIs from the Internet Archive and Huffduffer? WordPress-based infrastructure could be used to create it certainly and aggregation could be done around tags. It looks like the Huffduffer username SPLOT is available.
–annotated December 17, 2019 at 10:46AM
I am hoping to have a simple (to use) podcast where I can record pieces of lessons that are problematic and potentially have student guests for Q/A. Is there a domain app/plugin that is simple to use? What are you using?
In addition to all the other great recommendations, and in part to expose the idea, if you want to go really low tech, there are a variety of phone apps that will record audio in .mp3 format. If you give it a flexible enough license, you can upload/host your audio with notes and other meta data for free on Archive.org. (OER podcasting anyone?)
Then to quickly generate a subscribe-able podcast feed, create a free Huffduffer.com account (using the class name perhaps?) and use Huffduffer’s browser bookmarklet to save your Archive.org posts to your account. Huffduffer can provide podcast feeds out of individual user accounts, collectives, and even by tags, so you’ve got a lot of flexibility in how you and students can subscribe to content there. As an example you can subscribe to a “community podcast” for the tag A Domain of One’s Own.
If you create a custom/unique tag for the class, students can record and tag their own content to create an audio conversation back and forth if desired.
Chris Aldrich (chrisaldrich.net)
David Shanske
Dave Winer
Johannes Ernst
Paul Jacobson
Charlotte Allen
Hungry Bread Elevator
Paul Jacobson
Jan-Lukas Else
Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom
Kim Carter