microformats

Liked a post by

David Shanske (david.shanske.com)

Micropub 2.2.3 for WordPress has been released. It fixes a variety of warning notices. Published, updated, name, and summary properties are no longer stored in post meta. When queried, they will be pulled from the equivalent WordPress properties. Content should be as well, however as content in th...

Hooray!

Bookmarked WordPress Theme Components (WP Theme Components)

Theme components are bite sized code snippets that can be reused across multiple themes, but are either too small or don’t make sense to be released as a plugin. Stop cluttering up your functions.php file and start using theme components! Who are theme components for? Th...

This looks interesting and useful. Perhaps a potential solution for adding small tidbits of microformats mark up to one’s theme at a more granular level than the mf2 plugin? I can see use cases for other snippets too like accepting Webmentions automatically, etc.

Making IndieWeb Friendly WordPress Themes: An IndieWebCamp Popup Session

The IndieWeb WordPress community could use some more theme options.

Let’s get together as a community and host a theme raising (a play on the idea of the old barn raising). We can all work/hack together to make some of the popular WordPress themes more IndieWeb friendly. We’ll discuss methods for adding the necessary Microformats and best ways to indieweb-ify a WordPress theme.

Either bring your own favorite theme or work from one on a list.

All levels are welcome!

Beginners and those without coding experience are welcome/encouraged to attend. We’ll try to help newcomers learn to begin tinkering with some WordPress theme code. If you don’t have a GitHub account yet, you might create one beforehand and we’ll show you how to use it for development, but even without it you can still do a lot with just a text editor.

Details

When: 2020-09-26 9:30 – 11:30 AM (Pacific) / 12:30 – 2:30 PM (Eastern)
Event page: https://events.indieweb.org/2020/09/making-indieweb-friendly-wordpress-themes-8fs9gAVX3OkV
hashtag: for social media and used to create an Etherpad for the session: #WPandMicroformats
Etherpad: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/WPandMicroformats for note taking during the session
Streaming video/audio platform: Zoom (link to come)
Demos: Yes – when we’re done, show off how well your new hacked theme works on your site.

RSVP

Newcomers can post a comment on this post below or reply yes via Twitter to https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1300562134699393024. Or you can feel free to just show up on the morning of the event.

If you feel able, RSVP at Meetable or post an indie RSVP on your own website.

Prerequisites

Bring your own theme or a theme you’d like to make more IndieWeb friendly by adding Microformats v2 support. Ideas for possible themes can be found at https://indieweb.org/WordPress/Development#Themes

(Optional) Create a GitHub account which you can use/learn during the process. Those who don’t want a GitHub account can simply use their text editor of choice to modify the relevant theme files.

Volunteers

We’re always happy to have additional help! If you’d like to volunteer or help organize and run the session, please touch base with Chris Aldrich or David Shanske in the IndieWeb Meta chat room.

I look forward to seeing everyone there!

Replied to u-read-of/read-status proposed draft · Issue #10 · microformats/h-entry (GitHub)

https://indieweb.org/read Indiebookclub.biz is a micropub client that publishes this.
The Post Kinds plugin displays the posts created by it and allows the creation of posts with the read-of proper...

I seem to recall @gRegorLove having some reservations about having implemented the read-status indicators. Since there are proposals for watch-of and listen-of and potentially other similar future verbs which may have a variety of “tenses” or a sense of progress across time, I wonder if it may be more advisable to have a completely separate progress/tense related microformat? This would provide the broader benefit of allowing it to be reused in those other cases rather than being specific to the read case only.

Perhaps a grow-able spectrum of statuses like: p-want-to, p-currently, and p-finished? (These are placeholder suggestions as we may do better with some thought on naming). These could be used in combination with the other proposed read, watch, and listen related microformats (or other potential future classes of verbs). The “want” status is reasonably well attested for activities like want to read, want to watch, want to listen, want to buy (or acquire), etc. Most of these are often finished in relatively short (or very long) time frames such that on-going statuses like watching, listening, or owning may not be posted frequently the way that an ongoing “reading” progress-like status might be used over the days, weeks, months that books are being read. I could see myself using ongoing statuses like these being used with to-do list items or project management related functionality as well. Longer term checkins at on-going events (conferences, festivals, vacations, etc.) might benefit from these statuses as well.

Separating the progress (tense) from the verb/action may also make it easier to create collections of posts around the related content. (An example may be the collection of all the posts about a particular book: the want post, the progress posts, notes, annotations, etc.)

On a separate note, I’ll mention that @swentel’s Indigenous for Android has added publishing support for both p-read-of and p-read-status (as well as all the proposed values) in the past few months.

Read Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia by

Cory Doctorow (well.com)

Metadata is "data about data" -- information like keywords, page-length, title, word-count, abstract, location, SKU, ISBN, and so on. Explicit, human-generated metadata has enjoyed recent trendiness, especially in the world of XML. A typical scenario goes like this: a number of suppliers get together and agree on a metadata standard -- a Document Type Definition or scheme -- for a given subject area, say washing machines. They agree to a common vocabulary for describing washing machines: size, capacity, energy consumption, water consumption, price. They create machine-readable databases of their inventory, which are available in whole or part to search agents and other databases, so that a consumer can enter the parameters of the washing machine he's seeking and query multiple sites simultaneously for an exhaustive list of the available washing machines that meet his criteria.

Doctorow apparently drew out the roadmap for Twitter, democracy, and the future of society in 2001.

If everyone would subscribe to such a system and create good metadata for the purposes of describing their goods, services and information, it would be a trivial matter to search the Internet for highly qualified, context-sensitive results: a fan could find all the downloadable music in a given genre, a manufacturer could efficiently discover suppliers, travelers could easily choose a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be a utopia. It’s also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. ❧

Apparently this also now applies to politics and democracy too.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:12AM

When poisoning the well confers benefits to the poisoners, the meta-waters get awfully toxic in short order. ❧

If we look at Twitter as a worldwide annotation tool which is generating metadata on a much tinier subset of primary documents (some of which are not truthful themselves), this seems to bear out in that setting as well.

ref: Kalir & Garcia in Annotation
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:17AM

Schemas aren’t neutral ❧

This section highlights why relying on algorithmic feeds in social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can be toxic. Your feed is full of what they think you’ll like and click on instead of giving you the choice.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:23AM

It’s wishful thinking to believe that a group of people competing to advance their agendas will be universally pleased with any hierarchy of knowledge. The best that we can hope for is a detente in which everyone is equally miserable. ❧

The fate of true democracies.
Annotated on August 06, 2020 at 09:33AM

↬ Jeremy Keith Replying to a tweet from @hdv (2020-08-06)

Outline for Webmentions in Conjunction with Academic Citations

Replied to a tweet by

Terence Eden (Twitter)

What's the semantic way to say in HTML "this work was cited in that academic paper"?

I know how I cite something in SchemaOrg (see screenshot) - but I want to do the reverse. Like a pingback or webmention.

Is this possible / sensible / useful? pic.twitter.com/MBmdRd970Q
— Terence Eden (@edent) June 28, 2020

I’ve noted before how Altmetric does what some would call backfeed, though I’m not sure what or how their mechanism works other than some heavy search and extreme processing from social media platforms.

Pingbacks are essentially dead and in personal experience some of the few sites that still support them are in academia, but they’re relatively rare and have horrible UI in the best of times. Webmention is a much better evolutionary extension of the pingback idea and have been rapidly growing since before the spec was standardized by the W3C.

I’ve sketched out how individual academics could use their own websites and publish pre-prints and syndicate them to pre-print servers and even to their final publications while still leveraging Webmentions to allow their journal articles, books, other works, to accept and receive webmentions from other web publications as well as social media platforms that reference them.

I think the Microformats process is probably the best standardized way of doing this with classes and basic HTML and there is a robust offering of parsers that work in a variety of programming languages to help get this going. To my mind the pre-existing h-cite is probably the best route to use along with the well-distributed and oft-used <cite> tag with authorship details easily fitting into the h-card structure.

As an example, if Zeynep were to cite Tessie, then she could write up her citation in basic HTML with a few microformats and include a link to the original paper (with a rel=”canonical” or copies on pre-print servers or other journal repositories with a rel=”alternate” markup). On publishing a standard Webmention would be sent and verified and Tessie could have the option of displaying the citation on her website in something like a “Citation” section. The Post Type Discovery algorithm is reasonably sophisticated enough that I think a “citation” like this could be included in the parsing so as to help automate the way that these are found and displayed while still providing some flexibility to both ends of the transaction.

Ideally all participants would also support sending salmentions so that the online version of the “officially” published paper, say in Nature, that receives citations would forward any mentions back to the canonical version or the pre-print versions.

Since most of the basic citation data is semantic enough in mark up the receiver with parsing should be able to designate any of the thousands of journal citation formats that they like to display any particular flavor on the receiving website, which may be it’s own interesting sub-problem.

Of course those wishing to use schema.org or JSON-LD could include additional markup for those as well as parsing if they liked.

Perhaps I ought to write a longer journal article with a full outline and diagrams to formalize it and catch some of the potential edge cases.

Displaying Webmentions on TiddlyWiki

I’ve previously written about setting up receiving Webmention for TiddlyWiki by logging into webmention.io and creating an account to delegate the receipt of the notifications.

Naturally, these notifications can be more fun for cross-site conversations if one has the ability to display the webmentions on the posts to which they relate. There are probably a number of ways of doing this, but following the TiddlyWiki advice of keeping Tiddlers as small as possible, it seemed like creating a tiddler for the response and then transcluding or embedding it into the original would be the best course of action.

At the recent Gardens and Streams: Wikis, Blogs, and UI—a pop up IndieWebCamp session there was some discussion on internal bi-directional linking in wikis, but I thought it would also be fun to show off bi-directional linking between my wiki and other websites. To do that will require displaying at least some Webmentions.
My wiki currently doesn’t have very many webmentions or incoming links, but after writing about a Bookmarklet for pasting content into TiddlyWiki, I got an email from Anne-Laure Le Cunff that she’d used some of the code to write a bookmarklet for Roam Research. Since her article didn’t send a webmention, I used Telegraph to manually force her article to send my wiki a Webmention so my account would have a record of it for the future for potential exporting or other use.
Now I’d like to display this webmention on that tiddler. Doing it automatically would be great, but I thought, since I don’t expect to receive many on my wiki that I ought to try out a manual set up to see how things might work and how I might display them if they were automated.
Since I had created that bookmarklet, I used it to copy and paste the text from Anne-Laure Le Cunff‘s website into a new tiddler. I then massaged it a bit to format it to look like a response and I’ve transcluded it into the original post under a heading of Responses.
The side benefit of doing this is that the stand alone tiddler that has the link and the context from her post also sits in my wiki as a bookmark of her post as well. As a result, I get a two-for-one deal: I get the bookmark of her post with some context I’m interested in, but my original post can now also display it as a response! Now I can also use that bookmark in other places in my website as well. If only one could do this so easily in other CMSes?!
I’ve yet to hear of another example of this in the wild, so unless I’m missing something, this may be the first displayed Webmention on a TiddlyWiki in the wild.

Next steps

Data formats

TiddlyWiki has lots of ways to display data in Tiddlers, so perhaps one might use various fields in a bookmark tiddler to create the necessary comment display. This could give a more standardized method of displaying them as well. It could be particularly useful if someone was using a microformats parser to import the data of such mentions. If this were the case, then the tiddler that is being commented on could do a filter/search for all tiddlers in the wiki that mention it and transclude the appropriate pieces in a list format with the appropriate mark up as well as links back to the individual tiddlers and/or the links to the sending site.
I’m curious if others have ideas about how to best/easiest implement the display portion of webmentions on a public TiddlyWiki? Since I’m also hosting my entire TiddlyWiki on GitHub pages, there might be other potential considerations if I were to be hosting it statically instead. This may require some experimentation.
I’ve got a few mental models about how one might implement showing Webmentions in TiddlyWiki, but it may take some more thinking to figure out which way may be the best or most efficient.

Automation

I don’t anticipate a lot of incoming webmentions to my wiki at present, but if they become more prevalent, I’ll want to automate the display of these notifications somehow. This will take some thought and coding as well as more knowledge of the internals of TiddlyWiki than I’ve currently got. If someone with the coding chops is interested, I could probably brainstorm a set up fairly quickly.

It would also be nice to be able to have full microformats support in TiddlyWiki so that the stand alone “bookmark” mention works properly, but also so that the transcluded version might have the correct mark up. This may rely on the two things to be properly nested to make them work in both contexts.

An h-card for my TiddlyWiki

I’m still spending lots of time trying to figure out how TiddlyWiki works, so some of this may seem hack-y, but it seems to get the job done. I’d love it if others who are using their TiddlyWikis as their primary website (and who have more experience than I) weighed in with their expertise or experience.

One of the core IndieWeb building blocks is having an h-card on your website to establish one’s identity, either for others to read or for computers and parsers to know who you are.

A valiant first attempt

To start out, I created an About Tiddler with the appropriate h-card and other microformats mark up and then put it into a tab in my right sidebar to make it easy to find.

Naturally, I ran into a problem when trying to throw this into indiewebify.me. Since TiddlyWiki websites are generated primarily by JavaScript and thus suffer from the js;dr problem, figuring out where to put and display an h-card was going to be an issue. I even tried throwing it into the Site Title in the control panel and hoped for the best, but in the end, the site title is really the shadow Tiddler $:/SiteTitle and like all the rest of the page is generated by JavaScript.

I muddled around a bit and even tried to add an h-card using a <link> in the <head>, but nothing seemed to work.

A hackable solution?

Ultimately, in frustration, I simply threw a simple h-card into the <head> just to see what would happen. It wasn’t terrible—the parser found it and displayed it as a success. Unfortunately I discovered that TiddlyWiki displayed my photo and name at the bottom of my page in the browser. I didn’t expect this, but at least it was a start.

Since this method seemed to work, I thought I’d continue the cheat and just throw in some in-line CSS so that the muddled h-card wouldn’t actually show on my page. I’d use this coded h-card in my <head> for computers and keep the somewhat more elaborate one for people in my about page.

What I did

So, for those who’d like the entirety of the solution, here’s what I did:

I created a plugin tiddler entitled $:/plugins/indieweb/core/rawMarkup and gave it the tag $:/tags/RawMarkup
I added the following lines of code to it and saved the Tiddler
1. <a style="display:none" class="h-card u-url" href="http://tw.boffosocko.com/"> <img src="https://www.boffosocko.com/logo.jpg" alt="" style="display:none" />Chris Aldrich</a>
Profit!

Again, this works, but seems very hack-y to me. If you’ve managed to get a h-card into your TiddlyWiki in a different or more elegant way, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thoughts on delegated h-cards

Given the difficulty and trouble of all this, I’m sort of left wondering why–particularly since I’m using this site as a secondary one to my primary site–I couldn’t just throw in a link to the h-card for my primary site and call it a day? Unless I’m missing something, for some reason the way that representative h-cards are defined, they expect the h-card to point to the site they’re actually on.

Why couldn’t/shouldn’t I delegate my h-card on subdomains or other personal sites to point to the representative h-card on my primary site? What if parsers could follow other rel=”me” links on my site to find/intuit a representative h-card from one of those? While I could have lots of domains to better differentiate my online identity, why couldn’t I do that, but still have the same primary identity?

Annotated edit (indieweb.org)

An edit (AKA diff, change) is a special type of reply that indicates a set of suggested changes to the post it is replying to. A collection of (presumably related) suggested edits in open source is often called a patch or pull request.

In part out of laziness and lack of an easy way to implement a workflow and mark up, I will post content (bookmarks or notes) to my website and (pseudo-)syndicate all or portions of it to the IndieWeb wiki as either edits or as links to See Also sections of pages. “Pseudo” because the content isn’t always a 1 to 1 match.

To document the change, I’ll include a syndication link on my website to the permalink for the edit on the wiki. Having subscribed to feeds of wiki changes/edits before the user interfaces are far less than useful/ideal, so having a better contextual bookmark on my website makes more sense for readers while somewhat reformatting things for the readers of the wiki (a related but somewhat different context) works better for that, but still provides bi-directional links and references.

Perhaps I’ll create an edit post kind in the future? For the moment I’ll just post some (like this one) as an annotation? Small steps…

Example bookmark of a commonplace book: https://boffosocko.com/2020/03/14/neils-noodlemaps/
with a syndication link to the diff of the addition to the example on the IndieWeb wiki: https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=commonplace_book&oldid=69042