Has anyone ever considered building an email extension of the Webmention specification?

By that I mean, a sender attempts to send a mention and if there is no endpoint or the send fails, then as a back up, the sender parses the receiving site’s page for an h-card and if an email address exists, sends an email notification there instead?

Might be helpful for those who don’t yet have Webmention set up, but could act as a backup. Then when they have things working later, they could force manual mentions to recollect them? Also useful for those who’d like notifications, but don’t want to build infrastructure or who might not want to show comments on their site either.

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?

Read iCal, RSS and CSV feeds (blog.trakt.tv)
A cool way to extend Trakt.tv’s calendar and user data is through iCal, RSS, and CSV feeds. Trakt VIP members get access to a bunch of feeds throughout the site. Read on for what’s available and for cool things you use the feeds for.
I’m sort of tempted to pay for a membership, but it doesn’t seem like they provide permalinks for watches or ratings, though there are links for comments. Not sure I’d get those, so in the end it becomes another silo, albeit one with more social related data than IMDb or others seem to provide, though not contextual data.
Liked a tweet by ReadwiseReadwise (Twitter)
Read How to do PESOS from Pocket to Micropub by Jan-Lukas ElseJan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
After thinking about it, I finally figured out how to PESOS from Pocket to my own site using IFTTT. The first step was to retrieve an IndieAuth access token using the tool Gimme a token. Then I created a IFTTT applet with the a new favorite item on Pocket as the trigger and a Webhook to execute. I f...
Following in Charlotte’s footsteps?
My newest IndieWeb desire: The ability to watch and simultaneously screencapture, gif-ify, and otherwise live note a movie with commentary and quotes on my website (roughly in real time without distracting from it too much) the way Bix has done with The Desk Set on Twitter. I’d love to do it as a running collection perhaps. Maybe not too dis-similarly to the way that ThreadReader app presents it.

Do any television sets do automated screencaptures or gifs yet? And can anyone post from a television set to their website? Where is the micropub client for that? I want to see movie reviews like this. Film Threat perhaps?

Marty’s app Kapowski is maybe a start for this? I used to have a DVD tool on my computer that would do screencaptures relatively easy, but who has those anymore? Anyone else have ideas?

Screencapture of Tracy and Hepburn in the movie The Desk Set.

I’ve noticed that Bloomberg Businessweek’s Jealousy List for 2020 has quirky little animated drolleries racing around on it as you scroll up and down the page.

This makes me wonder what web designers and developers would put on their own personal jealousy lists for 2020. What types of features and functionality have you seen this year that you’d love to have on your own website or in your own projects?

Replied to a tweet by Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass)Allie Nimmons (your friendly neighborhood pain in the ass) (Twitter)
This was an inspiring question to me, so I thought I’d spitball a few ideas for doing this in an IndieWeb way. Personal events like this are an excellent use case with respect to personal websites!

I had thought of doing some of this ages ago to own this sort of great nostalgic data on my own website. Sadly I couldn’t get it up due to other work commitments. I now really wish I had.

At the moment, the only direct wedding-related page on the IndieWeb wiki is a snarky definition for engagement. When I’m done, I’ll create a stub for wedding with the following brainstorm.

Of course if you’re looking for general inspiration, the prior artwork of Pinterest, various registries, and other wedding sites will naturally be useful. But I think there are a number of IndieWeb building blocks that can be leveraged to accomplish a lot of what these sites do.

I think if I were doing it today, I’d meld some of the work from bookmarks and photos to create a Pinterest-esqe post type (probably by extending the Post Kinds Plugin, maybe with a custom wedding type with a custom display).

There is lots of prior art on the registries front on the wiki under wish or wish lists. To goose things a bit, I’d definitely add referral links from places like Amazon.com, etc. and use the money either to make a donation to a charity in honor of the event or to defray honeymoon costs. If you want to encourage direct donations or funding mechanisms, there’s also some interesting prior art at the payment wiki page.

Now that the IndieWeb has some very solid support for events and RSVPs, I might even try doing an online wedding invitation and collecting RSVPs. I’ve recently seen Jacky Alcine’s website leveraging CommentPara.de to connect to Quill for comments/replies, and it would be cool to get Quill to also add RSVP functionality to allow those without their own websites to RSVP using the non-anonymous functionality in CommentPara.de. I suspect that since many people have trouble getting RSVP functionality into their sites, that Aaron Parecki might be Tom Sawyered into providing that functionality as a quick and easy win for the broader community. (I’m not immediately aware of any other Micropub tools that do RSVPs though I may be wrong.) Of course potentially expanding it with meal options would be a lovely bonus so people can choose meat/vegetarian/other options. I’ll also mention that gRegor Morill has been tinkering with RSVPs using Webmention on Twitter. As a minimal fallback, you can also allow people to respond directly in the built-in commenting system in WordPress, but if you’re going to do it…)

The biggest piece that would be fun to figure out would be to see how to get things set up to receive social media related wedding photos of the pre-, during, and post-event stuff back to my website from friends and family. Using Brid.gy with Twitter to pull back photos that tag your twitter user name is fairly straightforward, but I’m not sure that services like Flickr or Instagram may work as easily. This may require some thought and programming, but being able to backfeed social photos to your site or even providing friends and family a serviceable photo upload functionality to your site so you can document and keep photos from the event in real-time would be a cool win and could likely be a great feature for any event-related website to have built in or widgetized. It’s usually weeks or months for paid wedding photos to show up and it’s generally a big hassle finding all the online social photos, much less keeping copies of them, so having this could be both fun and useful, particularly for looking back on the event years later. 

Naturally, being a WordPress person, I’m sure there may be some interesting prior art in the plugin repository, but I think it would be far cooler to IndieWebify this sort of data and functionality for the broader world.

Depending on the wedding date, this general topic (even for other non-wedding related events) would be an awesome one to look at and explore during an upcoming IndieWebCamp. Perhaps someone is up for it at San Francisco this weekend? (I suspect they’ll have some good live-streaming options for those who aren’t local.)

Given her weddings/events background and web-based work, perhaps Liz Coopersmith (t) might be someone interesting to collaborate with on something like this? 

Similarly, I recall a great presentation by Brianna Privett at WordCamp US 2017 called The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse. She may have some useful tidbits and advice in there as well.

Featured photo: Wedding cake. flickr photo by THEMACGIRL* shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

Read curator's ǝpoɔ by Maria Popova (curatorscode.org (via web.archive.org))

Attributing your source of discovery should never obscure attributing the creator or originator of the content. For instance, if you repost a compelling poster you found on your favorite design blog, first credit the person who designed the poster, and then attribute discovery to the design blog that brought it to your attention.

USE THE UNICODES–OR DON’T

We’ve proposed two unicode characters for attributing. They’re clean and short, and they help spread the message of The Curator’s Code itself, but they are not the only way to attribute. You can always use words like “via,” or simply hyperlink to your source — the link is the important part.

ᔥ VS. ↬

Part of what The Curator’s Code aspires to do is evolve our thinking about the levels of attribution. “Via” ᔥ tends to denote a direct repost — something you found elsewhere and shared with your audience with little modification or elaboration. “HT” ↬ tends to stand for indirect discovery — something for which you got the idea at your source, but modified or elaborated on significantly when sharing with your audience.

I like the general idea of this website, and if nothing else the definitions. I’ve always wanted a plugin or functionality on my website for doing this more quickly. Sadly the Curator’s Code site is dead and with it the bookmarklet.

and of course, I’ll give this the obligatory:
[ IndieWeb chat]

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 14 A loose collective of developers and techno-utopians

Episode 14: A loose collective of developers and techno-utopians

Running time: 1h 19m 57s | Download (37.5MB) | Subscribe by RSS | Huffduff

Summary: Our first episode since January. David Shanske and Chris Aldrich get caught up on some recent IndieWebCamps, an article about IndieWeb in The New Yorker, changes within WordPress, and upcoming events.

Recorded: May 19, 2019

Shownotes

6 camps later…
Austin
Online
New Haven
Berlin
Düsseldorf
Utrecht

National Duckpin Bowling Congress
Duck Tours
Streaming rigs for remote participation at IndieWeb Camps
Ad hoc sessions (🎧 00:11:28)

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? (The New Yorker) by Cal Newport (🎧 00:13:50)

Swarm Account deletions and posting limits
New Checkin icon within the Post Kinds Plugin: example https://david.shanske.com/kind/checkin/
Weather now has microformats mark up in WordPress
Fatwigoo problems with icons
IndieWeb Bingo

Webmention Project

Project of updating Matthias Pfefferle‘s Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins (🎧 00:26:10)

Readers & Yarns

Readers & Yarns update (🎧 00:40:50)
X-Ray
Indigenous Replacement: Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App

Post Kinds Plugin

Post Kinds and new exclude functionality (🎧 00:48:15)

  • widgets
  • titleless posts
  • On this day

David’s list of 24 IndieWebCamps he’s attended
Looking back at past IndieWebCamp sessions and wiki pages for interesting ideas and new itches
Date and time stamps on webmentions
Call for tickets in WordPress
Subscribing to h-cards with WebSub
Is Mastodon IndieWeb?
Fixing IndieAuth
Improving scoping, particularly for multi-user sites

Coming up within the community

IndieWeb Book Club

IndieWeb Book Club is coming up featuring Mike Monteiro’s book Ruined by Design(🎧 01:13:04)

IndieWeb Summit 2019

9th annual IndieWeb Summit (Portland) is coming up in June. RSVP now.

Questions?

Feel free to send us your questions or topic suggestions for upcoming episodes. (Use the comments below or your own site using Webmention). 
Perhaps a future episode on Micro.blog?

Replied to a tweet by Marc DrummondMarc Drummond (Twitter)
I notice you’re a Drupalista. Would it help to know that Kristof De Jaeger has already done a huge amount of the work for you? See: https://www.drupal.org/project/indieweb

And Dries has been writing a lot about it over the past year as well.

Building toward an independent web isn’t something one does overnight anyway. Small incremental steps will eventually win the day. I like the way that Brent Simmons describes what he’s working on and why. Perhaps that could be a useful model in addition to the related idea of itches?

If it helps you might take your passions for “diversity, inclusion, equity & justice” and inject them into the space? I would always welcome help in those areas for the broader community.

A Sketch for an IndieWeb Bullet Journal

Over the past several weeks I’ve been thinking more and more about productivity solutions, bullet journals, and to do lists. This morning I serendipitously came back across a reply Paul Jacobson made about lab books on a post relating to bullet journals and thought I’d sketch out a few ideas.

I like the lab book metaphor! That’s probably why a notebook-note analogy appeals to me for my productivity tools. Paul Jacobson on A vague Notion of a more productive system.

I’m honestly a bit surprised that no one has created a bullet journal plugin for WordPress yet. Or maybe someone comes up with a bullet journal stand alone product a bit like Autommatic’s Simple Note? Last week after a talk I attended, someone came up to me who had self-published 400+ copies of a custom made bullet journal that they wanted to sell/market. I’ve also been looking at some bullet journal apps, but my very first thoughts were “Who owns this data? What will they do with it? What happens if the company goes out of business? Is there a useful data export functionality?” For one of the ones I looked at my immediate impression was “This is a really painful and unintuitive UI.”

Naturally my next thought was “how would the IndieWeb build such a thing?”

Perhaps there’s a lot of code to write, though I can imagine that simply creating Archive views of pre-existing data may be a good first start. In fact some good archive views would be particularly helpful if one is using a plugin like David Shanske’s Post Kinds which dramatically extends the idea behind Post Formats. This would make tracking things like eating, drinking, reading, etc. a lot easier to present visually as well as to track/journal. One could easily extend the functionality of Post Kinds to create “to do” items and then have archive views that could be sorted by date, date due, tags/categories for easier daily use. Since it’s all web-based, it’s backed up and available almost everywhere including desktop and mobile.

I know a few people like Jonathan LaCour and Eddie Hinkle have been tinkering around with monthly, weekly, or annual recaps on their websites (see also: https://indieweb.org/monthly_recap). Isn’t this what a lot of bullet journals are doing, but in reverse order? You put in data quickly so you can have an overview to better plan and live in the future? If you’re already using Micropub tools like teacup (for food/drink), OwnYourSwarm (for location), or a variety of others for bookmarking things (which could be added to one’s to-do list), then creating a handful of bullet journal-type views on that data should be fairly easy. I also remember that Beau Lebens had his Keyring project for WordPress that was pulling in a lot of data from various places that could be leveraged in much the same way.

In some sense I’m already using my own WP-based website as a commonplace book (or as Jamie Todd Rubin mentions on Paul’s post a (lab) notebook), so how much nicer/easier would it be if I could (privately) track to do lists as well?

Of course the hard part now is building it all…

Additional notes and ideas

I started thinking about some of this ages ago when I prototyped making “itches” for my own website. And isn’t this just a public-facing to-do list? I don’t immediately see a to-do list entry on the IndieWeb wiki though I know that people have talked about it in the past. There’s also definitely no bullet journal or productivity entries, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t build them.

There are a lot of preexisting silos on the web that do to-do lists or which have productivity related personal data (Google notes, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc.), so there are definitely many UI examples of good and bad display. For distributed group task management I could easily see things being marked done or undone and webmentions handling notifications for these. I suspect for this to take off on a wide, distributed scale for company-wide project management however, more work would need to exist on the ideas of audience and private or semi-private posts. The smaller personal side is certainly much more easily handled.

As another useful sub-case for study, I’ll note that several within the IndieWeb are able to post issues on their own websites, syndicate to GitHub’s issue queue, and get replies back, and isn’t this just a simple example workflow of a to-do list as well?

Greg McVerry has also mentioned he’s tinkered around in this area before primarily using pre-existing functionality in WithKnown. In his case, he’s been utilizing the related idea of the Pomodoro Technique which is widely known in productivity circles.

I’d be thrilled to hear ideas, thoughts, additional brainstorming, or even prior art examples of this sort of stuff. Feel free to add your thoughts below.

Featured photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

👓 Chris Aldrich’s Year In Pocket

Read My Year in Pocket (Pocket App)
See how much I read in Pocket this year!
According to Pocket’s account I read 766,000 words or the equivalent of about 10 books. My most saved topics were current events, science, technology, health, and education.

The most popular things I apparently saved this year:

I’ll have to work at getting better to create my own end-of-year statistics since my own website has a better accounting of what I’ve actually read (it isn’t all public) and bookmarked. I do like that their service does some aggregate comparison of my data versus all the other user data (anonymized from my perspective).

Pocket also does a relatively good job of doing discovery of good things to read based on aggregate user data in terms of categories like “Best of” and “Popular”. They also give me weekly email updates of things I’ve bookmarked there as reminders to go back and read them, which I find a useful functionality which they haven’t over-gamified. Presently my own closest functionality to this is to be subscribed to the RSS feed of my own public bookmarks in a feed reader (which I find generally useful) as well as regularly checking on my private bookmarks on my websites’s back end (something as easy as clicking on a browser bookmark) and even looking at my “on this day” functionality to review over things from years past.

I’ll note that I currently rely more on Nuzzle for real-time discovery  on a daily basis however.

Greg McVerry might appreciate that they’re gamifying reading by presenting me with a badge.

As an aside while I’m thinking of it, it might be a cool thing if the IndieWeb wiki received webmentions, so that self-documentation I do on my own website automatically appeared on the appropriate linked pages either in a webmention section or perhaps the “See Also” section. If wikis did this generally, it would be a cool means of potentially building communities and fuelling discovery on the broader web. Imagine if adding to a wiki via Webmention were as easy as syndicating content to a site like IndieNews or IndieWeb.XYZ? It could also function as a useful method of archiving web content from original pages to places like the Internet Archive in a simple way, much like how I currently auto-archive my individual pages automatically on the day they’re published.