A beautiful, lightweight and customisable cross platform app built for Micro.blog
I’m really loving some of the subtle changes that Inoreader has been making to how they display titleless feeds. The presentation of my micro.blog feed is really spectacular and almost as good as reading on micro.blog itself.
My IndieWeb setup is continuing to evolve. I just added support for syndication (this post should appear on IndieNews) and JSON-posting to my Hugo backend and theme.
Congratulations! I’m sure you’ve found lots of documentation, but keep in mind that micro.blog is built on Hugo. If it helps I noticed that Steve Layton wrote a piece the other day about adding Webmention to micro.blog/Hugo with lots of code and details. It looks like you may have some of that already, but seeing the previously worn paths and knowing where to turn can help a lot!
A feed of all the people I'm following on micro.blog.
Taking a crack at following my micro.blog feed within a feed reader rather than natively on the web or in the app. An interesting experience that helps put more emphasis on the longer form material rather than the here-and-now.
Are there other ways to follow micro.blog feeds outside of the traditional outlets?
As part of getting back into using micro.blog I’ve been working to customize my hosted site. One of the things I wanted to do was add webmentions rather then comments like Disqus.
In addition to some other useful upgrades and bug fixes, the big new feature this release adds is excellent syndication support for Micro.blog.
While many people use RSS feeds, JSONfeed, or other plugin methods for syndicating their WordPress website’s content to Micro.blog, this plugin now provides for a per-post decision about exactly what content to send to Micro.blog. It also naturally provides a syndication link from your site back to the Micro.blog post. To my knowledge no other method provides this syndication link functionality.
As I suspect many may already be aware, if your site supports Webmention (typically done with the Webmention and Semantic-linkbacks plugins), then Micro.blog will notify your site with replies and comments to your post as they appear on Micro.blog. This provides one the ability to do two-way communication between the two platforms.
Set up and configuration for Micro.Blog syndication
If you don’t already have it, install the plugin and activate it, otherwise update it within your site’s administrative interface.
Add your Micro.blog account username to your user profile on your WordPress site. This is typically found at /wp-admin/profile.php. In my case I simply added c to the field labeled Micro.blog username.
Enter your Micro.blog username (not the full URL) in the appropriate field and save your profile.
Adjust your WordPress Syndication Links settings page (typically found at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links) to include Micro.blog by using the appropriate checkbox. Be sure to save the setting.
I obviously have a lot of syndication targets. Micro.blog is always one of them. If you’re also using Micropub clients like Quill that support the feature, you can choose Micro.blog as a syndication target in those interfaces.
Remove, if necessary, any of the RSS, JSON, or other syndication feeds from your Micro.blog account so you’re not accidentally duplicating the syndication.
Add the JSONfeed URL from the bottom of the Syndication Links plugin settings page into your list of feeds at https://micro.blog/account/feeds.
Create a post, select Micro.blog as an endpoint in the relevant meta-box, and publish your post.
Once published, your post will ping Micro.blog’s server to indicate the new content which will then be displayed in your timeline. The Syndication Links plugin will then find the permalink URL of your post on Micro.blog and display it on your post (as per your settings) along with any other syndicated copies. This notification process is roughly real time, but may take a minute or two for your post to display and the syndication link to appear on your site based on the processing times on the relevant servers.
Here’s an example of what Syndication Links looks like on a post recently syndicated to Micro.blog. This example was syndicated to both Micro.blog and Twitter.
As an added bonus, Syndication Links plugin will also find the syndication links from Micro.blog in your current feed and add those to your original posts.
If you have any questions, need clarifications, or find bugs with regard to your set up, you can file issues for the plugin on GitHub.
Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks
Jemima Kiss interviews Kevin about Open Social at FOWA. Thu 9 Oct 2008 15.50 EDT
Kevin Marks, Google's developer advocate for Open Social, talked today about the unpredictable, organic growth of social networks. Even the biggest networks have seen their audience bases grow exponentially in unexpected communities; this is partly because of the dynamics of relationships between people, who mostly want to connect - or feel most comfortable connecting to people like themselves.
Despite some derogatory write-ups of Google's Orkut social network in the US press - "it's not a proper social network and is full of Brazilian prostitutes" - it's a perfect example of a social networking site with a strong community in one language. A community tends to mould the site to its own culture, which makes it less appealing for other languages and cultures. Clearly those with a strong English-language audience have a big advantage, despite the cultural differences of the Anglo-speaking world.
I asked Marks to explain a bit more about trends in social networking and how Open Social is trying to both facilitate growth, and respond to change. Open Social doesn't have a three-year road map, but is constantly adjusting its templates around the mapping of social information.
Some interesting philosophy of social networks from 2008 that’s still broadly applicable today. This sort of design thinking is something that IndieWeb as a service platforms like Micro.blog, WithKnown, WordPress, and others will want to keep in mind as they build.
People tend to be members of more than one network for a reason.
Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 09:00PM
Are we continuting with various tools and sharing them on this site?
Should we focus more on building out our own domains and share that process?
Both? Other?
Where shall we go?
Todd, I’ve randomly come across this post today and thought I’d toss out some additional ideas to consider if you haven’t already made up your minds.
If you’re thinking about doing something like WithKnown (aka Known, the CMS your post is on), and interested in the WordPress portion, you might consider doing a full/partial Domain of One’s Own program through Reclaim Hosting or even rolling your own. Even if you go small with just a few classes, you might consider adapting the Homebrew Website Club model at your site where you invite students to tinker around, help each other out, and then show off or demonstrate their work. The related IndieWeb wiki and online chat are free to join and can provide a wealth of information and help for students (and educators!) working at owning their own domains.
Incidentally, if you’re unaware, WordPress now has a suite of plugins that will allow it to have a lot of the site-to-site communication capabilities that Known does. I’ve not done it before, but I’m fairly certain you could run it on a multiuser installation of WordPress much the same way you’re using http://janevangalen.com/cms/.
Another interesting option would be to have students try out accounts on micro.blog which are relatively inexpensive, though I suspect if you touched base with Manton Reece and explained what you were doing, he might offer free or significantly reduced hosting for a reasonable period of time. I know he’s given away a year of free hosting to attendees of IndieWebCamps who are starting out with their own domains. If he did then you might be able to use some institutional funds to purchase domains for students to get them started.
I’m happy to spitball ideas in these areas if you’re interested. I’m glad to see others experimenting around with the ideas around DoOO and IndieWeb for Education!
By the way, good on you for opening up your planning process for teaching and learning on the open web. It certainly sets a useful example for others who are exploring and following in your footsteps.
After launching support for Mastodon on Micro.blog, I blogged about how Micro.blog is evolving to support 3 types of usernames: normal Micro.blog users, Mastodon users, and IndieWeb-friendly domain names. This last type of username is where I think we can bring more social network-like interactions ...
@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.
Working on the book. When it goes live on the web, it will be published as a Micro.blog-hosted site with a little JavaScript for auth. The new Lanyon theme’s sidebar works great for the table of contents. The draft is 50 short (micro!) chapters in 6 parts. pic.twitter.com/OWlKGeeh4a
IndieWebCamp Austin will be February 22-23, 2020. Register now for just $10 for the weekend:
IndieWebCamp Austin 2020 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their ...
I’m struggling with micro.blog. I have tried it since it was stsrted after the Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately it’s not possible to get in contact with people or to reach any audience. I thnk the conceptual problem of micro.blog is, that I can’t search for interesting people and posts. Maybe it’s time to say good bye to micro.blog. My hope was to have an alternative to Twitter, without censorship and manipulation.
@jwurzer I recall that @macgenie had a good piece called Where Discover Doesn’t Help that may also be useful to you. I had responded to it with some related ideas around Micro Monday. Another good place to find people is to visit the micro.blog profile pages of people you do find interesting and then click through the “Following XYZ users you aren’t following” to see people who may be similar.
To some extent, just like you did with Twitter and all your other social networks, you’ll likely have to (re-)”build” and “discover” your audience and people you want to interact with. The nice part about it is that it’s built on open protocols, so as more and more sites and services support them, you’ll be able to interact from one place instead of the typical 4 or more.
Personally, while I highly leverage m.b. and its many discovery aspects, I do it with my own feed reader where I pick and choose who I follow (whether they’re on Twitter, Instagram, micro.blog, or their own site) and then read them all there. Then I’m using my own website to collect, write, respond, and interact. It’s taken me a while to reframe how I use the social layers of the internet, but ultimately I find it much more healthy and rewarding.
Jan-Lukas Else (jlelse.blog)
Steve Layton (shindakun.dev)
Jemima Kiss from the Guardian
Todd Conaway (Teaching and Learning on the Open Web)
willtmonroe (micro.blog)
Jörg Wurzer (jwurzer.micro.blog)