Read Downing My Public Domain Stance with a Swig of Castor Oil (CogDogBlog)
Beyond movies and perhaps MAD magazine references I have no direct experience with being forced castor oil as a cold remedy. But there is an old advertisement in an image that is in the public doma…
This also reminds me a bit of the small print in newspaper circulars for stores like Macy’s announcing huge 40% off sales where they indicate that the original list prices of the items is not an indication that they ever sold for that price. Which means their advertisements are really just stating the starting price and make it seem like there’s a big discount applied.

By analogy, I have to wonder if the listings on Almay actually result in any significant sales? I suspect that the uploader probably spent more time handling upload, curation, and management than they’d likely ever earn back unless they were doing it at scale? 

Perhaps it may be worth it for a professional photographer to supplement their income, or it may affect someone with hundreds of thousands of photos, but I’d have to agree with Alan’s take that I’d rather have the credit and the kind emails too.

Crediting your own website when syndicating to Mastodon with WordPress plugins

I’ve been tinkering around with methods to automatically syndicate (POSSE) content from my personal website to Mastodon. I’ve been working at making a custom plugin which is far from finished. But a test post I made the other day, caught a few people’s attention[1][2]

I was trying to syndicate from my website so that the post on Mastodon would credit my website for the post and link back to my homepage as the application that made the post. You’ll notice at the bottom of the post there’s the post date and a globe icon, which indicates the post is public, followed by my website name ‘BoffoSocko.com’ and details about replies, reposts, and favorites.

screen capture of a Mastodon post which gives credit to Boffosocko.com at the bottom of the post.

I assuredly won’t release a public plugin for WordPress that does this. But since some have asked how I did it, I thought I’d share some of the internals of a few WordPress plugins that one can quickly modify to achieve the same thing.

That I can currently see, there are three plugins in the repository that will allow one to syndicate content to a variety of Mastodon instances. They are Mastodon Autopost, Mastodon Auto Share, and Share on Mastodon. The first two are closely related and essentially replicate the same codebase.

Similar to using Twitter’s API to crosspost, Mastodon is looking for two bits of information when an application is registered: a client name and a website URL. 

Mastodon Autopost and Mastodon Auto Share, both have a file called client.php which define these two variables. 

public function register_app($redirect_uri) {
  $response = $this->_post('/api/v1/apps', array(
    'client_name' => 'Mastodon Share for WordPress',
    'redirect_uris' => $redirect_uri,
    'scopes' => 'write:statuses write:media read:accounts',
    'website' => $this->instance_url
  ));

You can edit this file with a text editor to change the 'client_name' from 'Mastodon Share for WordPress' to 'Anything You Want'. If you’re in a joking mood, maybe change it to 'Twitter'?

To change the URL so that the link on the client_name directs to your website, you’ll want to change the line 'website' => $this->instance_url.

In particular change $this->instance_url to 'https://example.com' where example.com would be your website. I’ll note that $this->instance_url on this line in the original plugin is a bug. If left alone, it points the URL to your home Mastodon instance instead of to the more logical https://wordpress.org/plugins/autopost-to-mastodon/ where the plugin lives. 

If you prefer using Jan Boddez‘ excellent plugin, you’ll want to do something similar, except in that case you’ll want to change a file named class-options-handler.php in the includes folder.

Here you’ll want something like:

'client_name'   => __( 'Example.com' ),

But note that Boddez doesn’t have a similar bug, so the website line

'website' => home_url(),

is already correctly defined so that your website will automatically be linked without any changes to it.

If you’re already using one of these plugins and manually modify them, note that you’ll probably need to re-authorize the plugin so that the changes propagate.

Browser Bookmarklets for Giving Credit

I’ve been thinking more lately about giving credit on my own website, particularly in cases where the context of things I’m reading has some additional context based on where I originally saw them. I’d also like to give people I follow credit as the source by which my own content is aggregated.

Earlier today I tinkered around with some ideas relating to the old Curator’s Code which I revisit from time to time. I outlined some details, data fields, UI, and some pseudo-code to actually build it into a WordPress plugin. Then I thought I ought to check the repository where I discovered that someone had previously made one. Unfortunately it was withdrawn from the repository. I suspect its that they didn’t want to continue to support it moving into the Gutenberg era. (It still works with the classic editor.)

I don’t give credit on my site often enough in large part because it isn’t an easier thing to do when quickly posting some of the smaller bits of content. They say “manual until it hurts“, and doing this has just hurt too much for too long. Toward that end I thought I’d make a couple of quick bookmarklets for cutting and pasting text into my site. It’s not as good as a better custom UI, but it’ll work and could potentially work well for others.

These bookmarklets aren’t any great shakes and perhaps (hopefully?) someone with more JavaScript chops than I have can greatly improve upon them to add or modify some of the bits and automate things a bit better. In particular, I’m sure there’s a way to find the original publication date on a page and pull that data out, but currently I could only figure out how to find the last modified date using document.lastModified because I couldn’t find the other. I’d also prefer to have a way to automatically find the author(s) as well, but JS isn’t my best friend.

Instructions for use

Create two bookmarks in your browser’s bookmark bar. Give them convenient names like “via” and “hat tip” and add the snippets of code respectively into the URL fields. On a site you want to give credit to, highlight the name of the author of the post and click the bookmarklet. You’ll see a pop up for some text which you can then cut and paste into your post to give the credit. You can obviously edit the text if necessary.

If your site supports sending Webmention notifications, then when the post is published, the cited page will get a notification of your post.

Bookmarklet code

Below are snippets of code that the bookmarklets are running (for transparency’s sake).

javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","<p><small><cite class="h-cite via"><abbr title="via">ᔥ</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">"+text+"</span> in <a class="u-url p-name" href=""+location.href+"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" >"+document.title+"</a> (<time class="dt-published">"+document.lastModified+"</time>)</cite></small></p>");})()
javascript:(function(){let text=""; if(window.getSelection()!=''){text=window.getSelection().toString()+"\n";}prompt("Press Ctrl+C, Escape","<p><small><cite class="h-cite ht"><abbr title="hat tip">↬</abbr> <span class="p-author h-card">"+text+"</span> in <a class="u-url p-name" href=""+location.href+"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" >"+document.title+"</a> (<time class="dt-published">"+document.lastModified+"</time>)</cite></small></p>");})()

Example

Here’s an example of what it looks like on my site:

 Maria Popova with input from Tina Roth Eisenberg in curator’s ǝpoɔ ()

Who will you credit?

Read The Original Renegade (nytimes.com)
14-year-old Jalaiah Harmon created one of the biggest dances on the internet. But nobody really knows that.

I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web.

Tantek Çelik at OSBridge2011

Good morning web builders and designers! How can we make this a reality within more platforms to help creators like Jalaiah Harmon? 

Why should programmers on platforms like GitHub have all the fun and leave out dancers on Dubsmash, Funimate, ‎Likee, Triller, and TikTok?

Replied to Idea: a script to find Flickr photos being used online by Matt Maldre (Matt Maldre)
Flickr is a great place to find photos to use. Many photographers assign their photos with a Creative Commons license, so any can use the … Idea: a script to find Flickr photos being used online... Read More »

Clicking through to the photo, there is no mention of this image appearing on this important announcement. Perhaps the author privately contact the photographer about using his image. Since Ken Doctor is so incredible with his media experience (i’m being serious), I’m fairly certain someone from his team would have contacted the photographer to give him a heads up.

I’m sure I’ve said it before, but I maintain that if the source of the article and the target both supported the Webmention spec, then when a piece used an image (or really any other type of media, including text) with a link, then the original source (any website, or Flickr in this case) would get a notification and could show—if they chose—the use of that media so that others in the future could see how popular (or not) these types of media are.

Has anyone in the IndieWeb community got examples of this type of attribution showing on media on their own websites? Perhaps Jeremy Keith or Kevin Marks who are photographers and long time Flickr users?

Incidentally I’ve also mentioned using this notification method in the past as a means of decentralizing the journal publishing industry as part of a peer-review, citation, and preprint server set up. It also could be used as part of a citation workflow in the sense of Maria Popova and Tina Roth Eisenberg‘s Curator’s Code[1]set up, which could also benefit greatly now with Webmention support.
Annotated on March 09, 2020 at 12:18PM

For IndieWebCamp 2020 Online, I’m working at improving my WordPress IndieWeb Twenty Fifteen Theme so that it has some additonal microformats support as well as support for other common IndieWeb plugins like Syndication Links and Simple Location.

I’m also alternating that work with continuing brainstorming and hacking at options for giving-credit/citations.