Reply to “To PESOS or to POSSE?” by Dries Buytaert

Replied to To PESOS or to POSSE? by Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert (dri.es)
Comparing two different approaches that help you take control back over your own data on the web. [...] The goal of this analysis was to understand the pros and cons of how I can own my own content on https://dri.es. While PESOS would be much easier to implement, I decided to go with POSSE. My next step is to figure out my "POSSE plan"; how to quickly and easily share status updates on my Drupal site, how to syndicate them to 3rd party services, how to re-organize my mailing list and my RSS feed, and more. If you have any experience with implementing POSSE, feel free to share your takeaways in the comments.
What a fantastic breakdown of the concepts of POSSE vs. PESOS, though to be sure there are also additional variations for syndicating, cross-posting, or moving content around to reach various audiences.

One thing that I think you’ve only briefly touched upon is the ability to also have likes, replies/comments, etc. also come back to your site as native content via webmentions. I’ve been able to get rid of five apps and their incessant notifications and trim it all back to just using my own site to handle everything instead. Using something I choose to use instead of something I’m forced to, while also owning my data, is really very liberating.

Like you, I too have always wanted to own my own content on the web, and there are some easier and some harder methods. Not being as strong a developer as many, I’ve taken a more hybrid approach to things which is still evolving. To some extent I began at the easy end with some PESOS based workflows and relying on simple tools like IFTTT.com to at least begin owning all my content. For many content management systems, this is nearly dead easy, and could even be done with something as simple and flexible as Tumblr without much, if any, coding experience.

Over time, as I’ve been able, I’ve  moved to a more direct POSSE method as either I or, more often, others have managed to master making the simple posting interfaces easier and easier. I think in the end, POSSE is the strongest of the methods, so that has always been my ultimate goal.

From a Drupal-centric approach, you might be able to gain an interesting perspective on the multitude of ways POSSE/PESOS can be done by looking at the various ways that are available in WordPress ecosystem. It’s probably easy to discern that some are far easier than others based on one’s facility with coding. In general, I’ve noticed that the more freedom and flexibility a particular method or plugin has, the longer it takes to code and/or configure. The less flexibility a plugin offers, the easier. (So one could compare something like SNAP at the more comprehensive/difficult end to something simpler like JetPack for POSSE.) The difficulty is in the administrative tax of keeping up with the panoply of social media platform APIs to keep things working smoothly over time, particularly when you want your posts to be able to leverage the broad arrays of posting options and display outputs platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer. The other difficult questions can sometimes be: am I just replacing one or two social platforms, or am I trying to replace 20? and am I doing them with one plugin or with 20? and finally, how DRY is that process? Sometimes manually cutting and pasting is just as good.

As you do, I write first and foremost for myself and then a distant second for reaction and conversation with others. Thus I think of my personal site as just that: personal. To some extent it’s a modern day version of a commonplace book where I collect a variety of thoughts in a variety of means, while still trying somewhat to keep it in an outer facing form to look what people might expect a site to look like. This means that I have a good number more than the traditional types of posts most social media sites have. I try to own all my own bookmarks and even post what I’m reading both online and in physical form. I keep highlights and annotations of things I find interesting. I naturally keep longer posts, status updates, and photos like many. I even log scrobbles of music and podcasts I listen to as well as film and television I watch. Interestingly there’s a tremendous amount I only publish privately to myself or a small circle of others that’s hidden on my site’s back end. Depending on how far and deep you want your experience to go you might want to consider how all these will look or be represented on your site. To  a great extent, I think that WordPress’s attempt to copy Tumblr (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video) with their Post Formats was interesting, it just didn’t go far enough. Naturally, this may take a different form for you depending on whether you’re building just for yourself or if you’re planning something more modular for the larger Drupal community to leverage.

Screencapture of my homepage with a list of the various post types my site supports including: articles, notes, bookmarks, jams, checkins, watches, RSVPs, etc.
A few of the post types my website supports.

The best part of all this is that I’ve not done any of it alone. While I try to maintain a list of some of my experiments to help others (you’ll probably appreciate the ones on mobile posting and RSS based on your outline), there’s also a wealth of other examples on the IndieWeb wiki and a terrifically stellar group of people around almost 24-7 in the IndieWeb chat to help spur me along. I’ll echo Tantek’s welcome to what I think is a more thoughtful and vibrant open web.

I hope others also find these resources so they’re not fumbling around in the dark as I was for so long. Since you’re obviously building in Drupal, I can recommend you take a look at some of the examples provided by the WordPress and the Known communities which Ben referenced. Since they’re all .php based and open-source, you may get further faster in addition to being able to iterate upon and improve their work. Many of the developers are frequently in the IndieWeb chat and I’m sure would be happy to help with ideas and pitfalls they came across along the way.

Like others, I’m posting my reply first on my own website, and manually cross-posting it to yours (manually until you support Webmention–perhaps via the Vinculum plugin?) as well as automatically to Twitter and others.

👓 whitehouse.gov Redesign | inkdroid

Read whitehouse.gov Redesign (inkdroid.org)
TLDR; By “redesign” I actually mean clusterfuck. As of last Thursday 47% of the 315 whitehouse.gov URLs I’ve collected during 2017 are now 404 Not Found
Dollars to donuts this goes down to switching CMSes from Drupal to WordPress–probably because the tech team doesn’t know Drupal, but also doesn’t know how to remap the URLs or to port over any of the data. I’ll bet it’s down more to incompetence than it is being evil, though being evil may be part of it too.

Alpha Release of Linkback Module for Drupal 8 with Webmention Support [8.x-1.0-alpha1]

Bookmarked Alpha Release of Linkback Module for Drupal 8 with Webmention Support [8.x-1.0-alpha1] by Dan FeidtDan Feidt (Drupal.org)
We are proud to bring you the first alpha release of Linkback, an interesting suite of modules which can help integrate your website with the wider internet. Linkback provides the backend functionality to save both outgoing and incoming pings and webmentions involving remote sites.
Drupal 8, now (along with platforms like WithKnown, Perch, WordPress, Craft, Kirby, ProcessWire, Elgg, and Django) has Webmention support. Congratulations to Dan Feidt (aka HongPong) and everyone involved!

This means that more websites can communicate directly with each other on the open and decentralized web. (Wouldn’t you like to “@mention” someone from your own website to theirs?) It’s a rapidly growing reality on the internet.​​​​​

Homebrew Website Club — Los Angeles

In an effort to provide easier commuting access for a broader cross-section of Homebrew members we met last night at Yahoo’s Yahoo’s primary offices at 11995 W. Bluff Creek Drive, Playa Vista, CA 90094. We hope to alternate meetings of the Homebrew Website Club between the East and West sides of Los Angeles as we go forward. If anyone has additional potential meeting locations, we’re always open to suggestions as well as assistance.

We had our largest RSVP list to date, though some had last minute issues pop up and one sadly had trouble finding the location (likely due to a Google map glitch).

Angelo and Chris met before the quiet writing hour to discuss some general planning for future meetings as well as the upcoming IndieWebCamp in LA in November. Details and help for arrangements for out of town attendees should be posted shortly.

Notes from the “broadcast” portion of the meetup

Chris Aldrich (co-organizer)

Angelo Gladding (co-organizer)

  • Work is proceeding nicely on the overall build of Canopy
  • Discussed an issue with expanding data for social network in relation to events and potentially expanding contacts based on event attendees

Srikanth Bangalore (our host at Yahoo!)

  • Discussed some of his background in coding and work with Drupal and WordPress.
  • His personal site is https://srib.us/

Notes from the “working” portion of the meetup

We sketched out a way to help Srikanth IndieWeb-ify not only his own site, but to potentially help do so for Katie Couric’s Yahoo! based news site along with the pros/cons of workflows for journalists in general. We also considered some potential pathways for potentially bolting on webmentions for websites (like Tumblr/WordPress) which utilize Disqus for their commenting system. We worked through the details of webmentions and a bit of micropub for his benefit.

Srikanth discussed some of the history and philosophy behind why Tumblr didn’t have a more “traditional” native commenting system. The point was generally to socially discourage negativity, spamming, and abuse by forcing people to post their comments front and center on their own site (and not just in the “comments” of the receiving site) thereby making the negativity be front and center and redound to their own reputation rather than just the receiving page of the target. Most social media related sites hide (or make hard to search/find) the abusive nature of most users, while allowing them to appear better/nicer on their easier-to-find public facing persona.

Before closing out the meeting officially, we stopped by the front lobby where two wonderful and personable security guards (one a budding photographer) not only helped us with a group photo, but managed to help us escape the parking lot!

I think it’s agreed we all had a great time and look forward to more progress on projects, more good discussion, and more interested folks at the next meeting. Srikanth was so amazed at some of the concepts, it’s possible that all of Yahoo! may be IndieWeb-ified by the end of the week. 🙂

We hope you’ll join us next month on 10/05! (Details forthcoming…)

Live Tweets Archive


Ever with grand aspirations to do as good a job as the illustrious Kevin Marks, we tried some livetweeting with Noterlive. Alas the discussion quickly became so consuming that the effort was abandoned in lieu of both passion and fun. Hopefully some of the salient points were captured above in better form anyway.

Srikanth Bangalore:

I only use @drupal when I want to make money. (Replying to why his personal site was on @wordpress.) #

(This CMS comment may have been the biggest laugh of the night, though the tone captured here (and the lack of context), doesn’t do the comment any justice at all.)

Angelo Gladding:

I’m a hobby-ist programmer, but I also write code to make money. #

I’m into python which is my language of choice. #

Chris Aldrich:

Thanks again @themarketeng for hosting Homebrew Website Club at Yahoo tonight! We really appreciate the hospitality. #

📅 DrupalCampLA | September 13-14, 2008

RSVPed Attending BarCamp / DrupalCampLA
Dates: September 13-14, 2008; 10am - 6pm, both days Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 South Figueroa Street Los Angeles, California 90015 Still FREE Registration is Open until September 10th, 2008. Please visit our official site for more details and to sign up!
@drupalcampla
#drupalcampla

PESOS post from Lanyrd prior to its shutdown.