micro.blog | Chris Aldrich

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@daveymoloney I like what you've done with your WP site using the Autonomie theme to implement IndieWeb principles. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions for you that I couldn't quite figure out. First, how are you able to selectively post from WP to Micro.blog? I know that Micro.blog allows a user to publish feeds from other sources. But you mentioned that you "some of what you post on your Microblog Statuses timeline" is also posted on Micro.blog. I'd love to know how you do that! As you know, Bridgy allows you to choose which posts to syndicate to sites like Twitter. But I've seen no way to accomplish the same thing with Micro.blog yet. Second, how did you create the Microblog Statuses timeline using Autonomie? I know that Autonomie, Indepdendent Publisher and other Indieweb-friendly themes allow for "post kinds" show up on separate pages. But you seem to be combining several "kinds" on the Microblog Statuses page. I'd love to know how you did this. My overall goal is to combine my "stream" page with my main website. But until now, I haven't seen a good way to accomplish the kind of control over my short-form posts that you have. Thanks for such a great example!

@willtmonroe You may have discovered this already, but since it went unanswered, you’ll likely find more help in the IndieWeb WordPress chat, but quickly there are some plugins for WordPress listed at https://indieweb.org/Micro.blog.

@daveymoloney’s microblog status page is most likely done by his having a page and menu link that displays the WordPress Post Format type “status” posts. (Incidentally you already have that page on your site, you just need to put it in a menu somewhere: http://willtmonroe.com/type/status/) I’d suspect that he took the RSS feed from that page and piped it into Micro.blog as well. Since you’re using Post Kinds plugin, you can do something similar using a URL format like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/ or for porting to micro.blog using a similar feed URL like https://boffosocko.com/kind/note,photo,like,listen/feed/. You’d just need to put the names of the types you want to use/have in the list separated with commas.

Let me know if you need more help!

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👓 The evolution of linkblogging | Manton Reece

Read The evolution of linkblogging by Manton Reece (manton.org)

In my posts about defining what makes a microblog post and guidelines for RSS, I talked a little about links but didn’t explore linkblogging. While many blog authors post primarily long essays, shorter link blogs are a common approach for bloggers who want to post new content several times a day. ...

Some subtle, but valuable disntinctions here. When is a bookmark not a bookmark.

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Replied to a tweet by

Chris Messina (Twitter)

Given all the dogged work that the #IndieWeb community has done to advance the cause, it's gratifying to see them get some "ink" in the @NewYorker, but I'm left feeling like I'm reading about an idiosyncratic classic car show, rather than discovering something new and wonderful. https://t.co/yYlNSZ1ZNq
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) May 20, 2019

I agree with Chris’ summation and wish there would have been some more positive “gee wiz” in the piece.

The likely missed subtext here though is that the author is a computer science professor so avowedly anti-social media that he doesn’t have accounts of his own, and he has actually written a book about digital minimalism. From this perspective, this generally positive review of the IndieWeb in The New Yorker reads as positively scintillating!

It also bears pointing out that Cal Newport, the author of the piece, has both his own domain name and his own website which he uses as his primary identity on the web. He also uses it as the cornerstone of all of his web communication, so he’s as solidly in the IndieWeb camp as one could want from the perspective of the most simplistic definition.

I would love to see a journalist (rather than an essayist) who follows social and Internet culture more closely and intelligently (Taylor Lorenz for example?) who wanted to cover something more positive within the interwebz than the scandal-of-the-day at Instagram, Facebook, add silo-of-your-choice-here to direct a more balanced eye on the topic of how the IndieWeb community is looking to reshape the web. I suppose the benefit and the curse of a decentralized, non-corporate web movement is that it’s got to be heavily reliant on slow, steady growth with only the best of earned media. In some sense it’s nice being the under-the-radar internet version of Coachella circa ’99-’06 rather than the 2019 Coachella where everyone only cares about Beyoncé.

We’re obviously on the right track. Thankfully companies like Micro.blog have got a good start on mainstreaming some of our ideas in an ethical way. Keep up the good fight gang!

I’m still waiting for the thousands of app developers who were burned by Twitter to discover the ideas of Micropub or Microsub and rebuild those clients with it. Or the hundreds of second tier social apps (great unitaskers like SoundCloud as an example) that either just aren’t getting as much traction with Facebook, et al. or are worried about being put out of business by them that could be more IndieWeb friendly and benefit greatly from it.

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