IndieWeb News | Chris Aldrich

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I have just installed the IndieNews plugin but … I don’t understand how to use it.

Syndicating Your Posts

The IndieNews plugin allows you to automatically syndicate your posts to the IndieNews and IndieWeb.xyz sites using webmention. You’ll notice on your posts that in your tags, in addition to the indieweb tag you’ve added, the plugin has automatically added additional tags which include #indienews and /en/indieweb which–instead of being wrapped with links to those tags on your website–are wrapped with links pointing to those websites along with the appropriate syndication markup. As a result, when you publish your posts and send webmentions, both of those services are posting to those services on your behalf.

I’d recommend care in syndicating to them using this plugin as this morning it might appear to some that you’re spamming those channels. I tag lots of things on my site as “IndieWeb” mostly for my own use, so I specifically don’t use the plugin for concern of overwhelming those other sites. Instead I typically cross-post to both services manually using their respective instructions: IndieWeb News and IndieWeb.xyz.

IndieNews Dashboard Widget

The other feature that the plugin does is add a small widget to your main /wp-admin/ dashboard page that also displays a feed of what appears on the IndieNews website for your convenience.

Example of what IndieNews widget looks like in your WordPress dashboard.

I’ll admit that the GitHub repo for the plugin doesn’t do as good a job of describing how to use it as it might. Perhaps we ought to file an issue to improve that?

I’ve come across many journals (and particularly many talking about Altmetrics^1,2) that are supporting the old refback infrastructure and wonder why they haven’t upgraded to implement the more feature rich webmention specification?

I’ve been thinking more lately about how to create a full stack IndieWeb infrastructure to replace the major portions of the academic journal ecosystem which would allow researchers to own their academic papers but still handle some of the discovery piece. Yesterday’s release of indieweb.xyz, which supports categories, reminds me that I’d had an idea a while back that something like IndieNews’ structure could be modified to create a syndication point that could act as an online journal/pre-print server infrastructure for discovery purposes.

A little birdie has told me that there’s about to be a refback renaissance to match the one currently happening with webrings.

References

Akers KG. Introducing altmetrics to the Journal of the Medical Library Association. Journal of the Medical Library Association. http://jmla.mlanet.org/ojs/jmla/article/view/250/403. Published July 3, 2017. Accessed July 2, 2018.

Roemer RC, Borchardt R. Chapter 2. Major Altmetrics Tools. ALA Tech Source. https://journals.ala.org/index.php/ltr/article/view/5746/7187. Published July 1, 2015. Accessed July 2, 2018.