Reply to Jan Cavan Boulas about WordPress Microsub feed reader

Replied to a tweet by Jan Cavan BoulasJan Cavan Boulas (Twitter)
Jan, as I had mentioned to you earlier this year at WordCamp Orange County, the work on the IndieWeb concept of Microsub with respect to feed readers is continuing apace. In the last few months Aaron Parecki has opened up beta versions of his Aperture microsub server as well as limited access to his Monocle reader interface in addition to the existing Indigenous and Together reader interfaces.

My friend Jack Jamieson is in the midst of building a WordPress-specific Microsub server implementation which he’s indicated still needs more work, but which he’s self-dogfooding on his own website as a feed reader currently.

If it’s of interest, you or your colleagues at Automattic might want to take a look at it in terms of potentially adding a related Microsub reader interface as the other half of his Microsub server. Given your prior work on the beautiful WordPress.com feed reader, this may be relatively easy work which you could very quickly leverage to provide the WordPress ecosystem with an incredibly powerful feed reader interface through which users can interact directly with other sites using the W3C’s Micropub and Webmention specifications for which there are already pre-existing plugins within the repository.[1][2]

For some reference I’ll include some helpful links below which might help you and others get a jump start if you wish:

While I understand most of the high level moving pieces, some of the technical specifics are beyond my coding abilities. Should you need help or assistance in cobbling together the front end, I’m positive that Jack, Aaron Parecki, David Shanske, and others in the IndieWeb chat (perhaps the #Dev or #WordPress channels–there are also bridges for using IRC, Slack, or Matrix if you prefer them) would be more than happy to lend a hand to get another implementation of a Microsub reader interface off the ground. I suspect your experience and design background could also help to shape the Microsub spec as well as potentially add things to it which others haven’t yet considered from a usability perspective.

In the erstwhile, I hope all is well with you. Warmest regards!

Reply to Release Version 2.0 of Micropub plugin · Issue #150 · snarfed/wordpress-micropub

Replied to Release Version 2.0 of Micropub plugin · Issue #150 · snarfed/wordpress-micropub (GitHub)
Version 2.0 is merely the name I'm using for all the changes thus far. Since I have decided I'm not going to pursue any further enhancements before releasing a new version, using this issue to track anything left to do before releasing this version as stable.
Micropub errors for OYS 8-25-18 (using master branch from 2018-08-24 ef76125)

[25-Aug-2018 18:42:04 UTC] Micropub Error: 403 forbidden - Unauthorized
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:04 UTC] REST request: /micropub/1.0/endpoint: {"type":["h-entry"],"properties":{"published":["2018-08-24T17:44:13-07:00"],"syndication":["https:\/\/www.swarmapp.com\/user\/11479\/checkin\/5b80a65de0c0c9002c0c8589"],"content":["Being lazy for dinner tonight."],"photo":["https:\/\/igx.4sqi.net\/img\/general\/original\/11479_Z5VSLqOla8M3LhlRo_7QKUXeiGvaufQM1NTUYg32Dp0.jpg"],"checkin":[{"type":["h-card"],"properties":{"name":["Gerrish Grill"],"url":["https:\/\/foursquare.com\/v\/5b66159f2db4a9002ce66d2b"],"latitude":[34.1745],"longitude":[-118.09457],"locality":["Pasadena"],"region":["CA"],"country-name":["United States"],"postal-code":["91107"]},"value":"https:\/\/foursquare.com\/v\/5b66159f2db4a9002ce66d2b"}],"location":[{"type":["h-adr"],"properties":{"latitude":[34.1745],"longitude":[-118.09457],"locality":["Pasadena"],"region":["CA"],"country-name":["United States"],"postal-code":["91107"]}}]}}(Header Absent)
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:04 UTC] REST result: /micropub/1.0/endpoint: {"error":"forbidden","error_description":"Unauthorized"}(403) - null(User ID: 0)
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:04 UTC] PHP Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /htdocs/wp-includes/rest-api/class-wp-rest-server.php on line 1259
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:08 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:08 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:08 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:09 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs//wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:12 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:12 UTC] PHP Notice: Array to string conversion in /htdocs/wp-includes/formatting.php on line 1045
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:14 UTC] http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=json&extratags=1&addressdetails=1&lat=45.53548&lon=-122.621244&zoom=18&accept-language=en-US
[25-Aug-2018 18:42:15 UTC] http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/reverse?format=json&extratags=1&addressdetails=1&lat=45.53548&lon=-122.621244&zoom=18&accept-language=en-US

Replied to a tweet by Kevin Marks (Twitter)
Then a few years earlier, Weimar era cinema also includes Der Golem (1915), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and later with influences from Louise Brooks lensed through the influential La Invencion De Morel (1940) by Adolfo Caesares.

One of the additional early contemporaneous cultural influences to these that I can think of is the 1917 version of Cleopatra.

Film poster for Der Golem (1915)
Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917)
Film poster from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Film poster for Die Buchse der Pandora (1929) starring Louise Brooks

La Invencion de Morel by Adolfo Caesares

👓 The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist | The Atlantic

Replied to The Lazy Trope of the Unethical Female Journalist (The Atlantic)
With Camille Preaker, Zoe Barnes, and Rory Gilmore, Hollywood’s depictions of women reporters have never been further from reality.

👓 Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 | John A. Stewart

Replied to Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 by John StewartJohn Stewart (John Stewart)
This is the first post in a three part series on using Google Sheets as the database for a blogging CMS. In this post, I’ll explain the motivations for building the system. In the second post, I’ll walk you through the Google Sheet itself and the Google scripts (their version of js) that drive it. In the third post, I’ll share the website that displays the blog, and the code behind it. My guess is that interest in the three pieces will vary for different audiences, so I wanted to encapsulate the descriptions.
I generally like where John is taking this idea and the fact that he’s actively experimenting and documenting what he’s coming up with as potential solutions. While I do like some of the low-tech angle that he’s taking, I’m not sure, based on what he’s written, how some of it will come out within the broader spectrum of DoOO or IndieWeb-related technologies.

For example:

  • How easy/hard will it be for students to own/export their data after the class?
  • How might they interact if they’re already within the DoOO cohort or already self-hosting  their own space?
  • What are the implications for students of maintaining multiple spaces with a variety of technologies and therefor overhead?
  • I’ve never had a lot of luck with Disqus, which I find to be heavy and often has problems with auto-marking all of my content as spam. I’ve definitely found it to be an issue with using for POSSE workflows. Worse, with the introduction of specifications like Webmention to the DoOO space, students could be writing their responses to classmates and teachers on their own sites and thereby owning all of that content too, but with Disqus, this just isn’t possible.

I’ll reserve judgement for once I’ve seen some of the code and further ideas in parts II and III as I suspect he’s likely taken some of these issues into account.

We’ve played with this concept of front-end blogging for a while now. Alan Levine has built an open sourced tool called TRU Writer that even provides this type of front end interface on a WordPress site.  

I’m curious if John, Alan Levine, or others have yet come across the concept of Micropub? It generalizes the idea of a posting client and interface so that it could work with almost any CMS-related back end. I could see people building custom micropub clients for the education space, or even using some of the pre-existing ones like Quill, InkStone, or Micropublish.net. Many of them also use JSON or form encoded data that they could also be using with platforms like the one John describes here. The other nice part about them is that they’re flexible and relatively open in more ways than one, so they don’t necessarily need to be rebuilt from scratch for each new CMS out there.

Damn straight DiSo is back.

Replied to a tweet by Chris MessinaChris Messina (Twitter)
Sounds like @steveivy is in:

Damn straight DiSo is back.

I suspect we could get @kevinmarks to be the tour manager:

#DiSo #DiSo10thReunion #DiSoReunionTour2018 #IsRingoAvailableToo?#CanIBeARoadie?

A reply to David Shanske regarding implementation of the DiSo Project

Replied to a post by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)

People continued working on it. Everything you need using W3C standards like Webmention, Microformats2…give it a try? https://IndieWeb.org/WordPress/Plugins
I suspect that @chrismessina could do it quickly, but for those who’d like to leave Twitter for with similar functionality (but greater flexibility and independence), I recorded a 2 hour video for an #IndieWeb set up/walk through with some high level discussion a few months back. If you can do the 5 minute install, hopefully most of the rest is downhill with some basic plugin installation and minor configuration. The end of the walk through includes a live demonstration of a conversation between a WordPress site on one domain and a WithKnown site running on another domain.

tl;dr for the video:

Additional pieces are discussed on my IndieWeb Research Page (focusing mostly on WordPress), in addition to IWC getting started on WordPress wiki page. If you need help, hop into the IndieWeb WordPress chat.

For those watching this carefully, you’ll notice that I’ve replied to David Shanske’s post on his website using my own website and sent him a webmention which will allow him to display my reply (if he chooses). I’ve also automatically syndicated my response to the copy of his reply on Twitter which includes others who are following the conversation there. Both he and I have full copies of the conversation on our own site and originated our responses from our own websites. If you like, retweet, or comment on the copy of this post on Twitter, through the magic of Brid.gy and the Webmention spec, it will come back to the comment section on my original post (after moderation).

Hooray for web standards! And hooray for everyone in the IndieWeb who are helping to make this type of social interaction easier and simpler with every passing day.

Reply to Kartik Singhal about Webmention

Replied to a tweet by Kartik SinghalKartik Singhal (Twitter)
Let me know if you need help finding resources. I see you have a Hugo site and I’m pretty sure someone has set it up for Webmention use before. https://indieweb.org/Hugo

Reply to Matt McManus on Lost Infrastructure

Replied to a tweet by Matt McManusMatt McManus (Twitter)
Some have framed it as just that! Here’s a handy chart:

A chart of the internet’s lost infrastructure. See the original at the IndieWeb wiki.

Reply to Stephen Downes on microsub readers

Replied to a post by Stephen DownesStephen Downes (downes.ca)
Building an IndieWeb Reader by Aaron Parecki
There's a lot to like in this description (I haven't tried out the actual product) of a reader that in many ways resembles what I'm trying to do with gRSShopper. This is a hard project: "there are a whole bunch of different parts to building a reader, many of which have no overlap in skillset: managing the subscription list, polling and fetching feeds, parsing feeds, data storage, rendering posts in a UI, providing inline action buttons to be able to reply and favorite posts, etc." There are some nice bits, especially the interoperability with Twitter and Github.
Also on Twitter
A WordPress plugin to help facilitate setting up these types of feed readers using Microsub was released yesterday: https://wordpress.org/plugins/aperture/

It’s obviously much more powerful if you’ve got Webmention and Micropub functionality set up too.

Reply to Robin DeRosa et al on archiving and self-hosting in DoOO

Replied to a tweet by Robin DeRosaRobin DeRosa (Twitter)
I had read Dave Winer’s post† and shortly thereafter Mike Caulfield’s response, which was similar to some of my own reaction (particularly the analogy to nature and proliferation of copies via means of DNA, etc.)

I’ve recently outlined how ideas like a Domain of One’s Own and IndieWeb philosophies could be used to allow researchers and academics to practice academic samizdat on the open web to own and maintain their own open academic research and writing. A part of this process is the need to have useful and worthwhile back up and archiving ability as one thing we have come to know in the history of the web is that link rot is not our friend.

Toward that end, for those in the space I’ll point out some useful resources including the IndieWeb wiki pages for archival copies. Please contribute to it if you can. Another brilliant resource is the annual Dodging the Memory Hole conference which is run by the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

While Dodging the Memory Hole is geared toward saving online news in particular, many of the conversations are nearly identical to those in the broader archival space and also involve larger institutional resources and constituencies like the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and university libraries as well. The conference is typically in the fall of each year and is usually announced in August/September sometime, so keep an eye out for its announcement. In the erstwhile, they’ve recorded past sessions and have archive copies of much of their prior work in addition to creating a network of academics, technologists, and journalists around these ideas and related work. I’ve got a Twitter list of prior DtMH participants and stake-holders for those interested.

I’ll also note briefly, that as I self-publish on my own self-hosted domain, I use a simple plugin so that both my content and the content to which I link are being sent to the Internet Archive to create copies there. In addition to semi-regular back ups I make locally, this hopefully helps to mitigate potential future loss and link rot.

As a side note, major bonus points to Robin DeRosa (@actualham) for the use of the IndieWeb hashtag in her post!!

Reply to Mariko Kosaka on RSS, blogging, and linkbacks

Replied to a tweet by Mariko KosakaMariko Kosaka (Twitter)
Webmention is the more modern specification now as some have mentioned. I wrote a piece on it in @alistapart recently which includes some background, UI examples, and links to more technical resources:
https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet

It is a small part of an suite of open protocols including Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub for allowing site to site communication and interaction which goes to the broader scope of your question about RSS feeds and blogs. See also: Lost Infrastructure

I keep meaning to provide a better overview of it all, but this recent pencast overview captures a chunk of it. Aaron Parecki’s article Building an IndieWeb Reader captures some of the rest of the microsub/reader portion.

 

Reply to Curtis McHale and David Wolfpaw on rel-alternate

Replied to a tweet by DΛVID V3.0.6DΛVID V3.0.6 (Twitter)
The conversation started in the IndieWeb Chat last week with:
15:27 aaronpk: “my post permalinks now have a rel=alternate link to an mf2 and jf2 JSON version of the post”

And continued over the next several hours and days primarily with participation of aaronpk, GWG, and pfefferle among a few others.

David Shanske (GWG) and I discussed an overview of it in the most recent episode of An IndieWeb Podcast. The conversation about rel=”alternate” begins at the 11:00 minute mark.

Somewhere there’s a note that GWG has already built a big chunk of code into the Webmention/Semantic Linkbacks plugin that implements a large chunk of the work already. There’s also some work done in https://github.com/indieweb/wordpress-mf2-feed as well.

Reply to Kat about daily ponderance

Replied to Daily Ponderance: July 30, 2018 by Kat DiClementeKat DiClemente (kasem-beg.com)
Images then & now, that represents how I feel about this class…
I like the ideas of some of these images. Even more interesting to me than the ponderance itself is that Kat has gotten the start of an h-card up on her website! I can see her name and photo now! She’s got a bit more human understandable identity.

This also means that when we use Post Kinds to reply to her, the built-in parser will find her name and photo automatically.

I do notice that it’s missing picking up her website URL properly. I suspect it’s because she left her user profile’s Website field (located at http://kasem-beg.com/wp-admin/profile.php#url) empty.

Sketches of my Home and About page designs

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)

For today’s #dailyponderance I want you to put the computer away, grab some paper and pencil and map out what you think your homepage and about me page should contain.

You don’t need to be an artist, boxes and stuick figures will do.

You don’t have to be writer. Copy can come later. Think layout.

If you already have an about me and a home page sketch it out for others to see what your “prototype” looks like.

I’ve actually been doing some small revamping of both my Home and my About pages on the site recently, so this is actually a nice little exercise that’s reminding me about some of the small changes I’d like to effect. It also reminds me of some of the changes I want to make with regard to some of my menu structures too.

Lately I’ve added a bunch of different ways to slice and dice the content on my site so that readers can hopefully more easily find or discover the content they may be most interested in reading.  I’ve also been trying to pare down on the amount of information and detail which I present.

So without additional ado, here they are:

Home and About Page layouts