Tag: Micropub

👓 My Feedly wishlist | Paul Jacobson

Replied to My Feedly wishlist by Paul Jacobson (Paul Jacobson)
Richard MacManus wrote about the state of feed readers as he saw it in his AltPlatform.org post titled “The state of feed readers”. He mentioned a couple things in his Feedly wishlist that prompted me to think more about what I’d like to see added to Feedly.

Feedly and custom sharing

Apparently there were a bunch of us thinking and writing about feed readers and the open web a year ago last June. Several week’s prior to Richard’s article, I’d written a piece for Richard’s now defunct AltPlatform entitled Feed reader revolution (now archived on my site), which laid out some pieces similar to Paul’s take here, though it tied in some more of what was then the state of the art in IndieWeb tech.

Around that time I began tinkering with other feed readers including Inoreader, which I’ve been using for it’s ability to auto-update my RSS feeds using OPML subscriptions from the OPML files I maintain on my own website. Currently I’m more interested in what the Microsub specification is starting to surface in the feed reader space.

I’m not sure if he’s played around with it since, but, like Paul, I was using some of the Press This bookmarklet functionality in conjunction with David Shanske’s Post Kinds plugin for WordPress to make posting snippets of things to my website easier.

Feedly has a Pro (aka paid) functionality to allow one to share content using custom URLs.

Screenshot of the custom share functionality set up from within Feedly.com.

While one can use the Share to WordPress URL functionality, I’d recommend the Custom Sharing feature.  Using the Post Kinds plugin, one can use the following example URL to quickly share things from their Feedly account to their personal website:

https://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kindurl=URL&kind=bookmark

One should change the URL to reflect their own site, and one can also change the word “bookmark” to the appropriate desired kind including “like”, “favorite”, “read”, or any of the others they may have enabled within the Post Kinds plugin.

I personally don’t use this method as it only allows one custom sharing URL (and thus allows only one post kind), and instead (again) prefer Inoreader which allows one to configure custom sharing similarly to Feedly, but doesn’t limit the number of kinds and the feature is available in their free tier as well.

In addition to some of what I’ve written about the Post Kinds plugin before, I’ve also detailed how to dovetail it with sharing from my Android phone quickly in the past.

Highlights and Annotations

Also like Paul, I was greatly interested in quickly creating highlights and annotations on web content and posting them to my own website. Here I’m using a modified version of the Post Kinds plugin to accomplish this having created highlight posts and annotation posts for my site. Next I’m utilizing the ability to prepend http://via.hypothes.is to URLs on my mobile phone to call up the ability to use my Hypothesis account to easily and quickly create highlights and annotations. I then use some details from the outline linked below to capture that data via RSS using IFTTT.com.

Naturally, the process could be streamlined a lot from a UI perspective, but I think it provides some fairly nice results without a huge amount of work.

An Outline for Using Hypothesis for Owning your Annotations and Highlights

I will mention that I’ve seen bugs in trying to annotate easily on Chrome’s mobile application, but haven’t had any issues in using Firefox’s mobile browser.

Reply to Jan Cavan Boulas about WordPress Microsub feed reader

Replied to a tweet by Jan Cavan BoulasJan Cavan Boulas (Twitter)
Jan, as I had mentioned to you earlier this year at WordCamp Orange County, the work on the IndieWeb concept of Microsub with respect to feed readers is continuing apace. In the last few months Aaron Parecki has opened up beta versions of his Aperture microsub server as well as limited access to his Monocle reader interface in addition to the existing Indigenous and Together reader interfaces.

My friend Jack Jamieson is in the midst of building a WordPress-specific Microsub server implementation which he’s indicated still needs more work, but which he’s self-dogfooding on his own website as a feed reader currently.

If it’s of interest, you or your colleagues at Automattic might want to take a look at it in terms of potentially adding a related Microsub reader interface as the other half of his Microsub server. Given your prior work on the beautiful WordPress.com feed reader, this may be relatively easy work which you could very quickly leverage to provide the WordPress ecosystem with an incredibly powerful feed reader interface through which users can interact directly with other sites using the W3C’s Micropub and Webmention specifications for which there are already pre-existing plugins within the repository.[1][2]

For some reference I’ll include some helpful links below which might help you and others get a jump start if you wish:

While I understand most of the high level moving pieces, some of the technical specifics are beyond my coding abilities. Should you need help or assistance in cobbling together the front end, I’m positive that Jack, Aaron Parecki, David Shanske, and others in the IndieWeb chat (perhaps the #Dev or #WordPress channels–there are also bridges for using IRC, Slack, or Matrix if you prefer them) would be more than happy to lend a hand to get another implementation of a Microsub reader interface off the ground. I suspect your experience and design background could also help to shape the Microsub spec as well as potentially add things to it which others haven’t yet considered from a usability perspective.

In the erstwhile, I hope all is well with you. Warmest regards!

👓 Indiepaper, an open alternative to Instapaper and Pocket | Cult of Mac

Read Indiepaper, an open alternative to Instapaper and Pocket (Cult of Mac)
Indiepaper is a read-later service built for the open web. Save your articles, and never again get locked out by a proprietary service like Instapaper.

👓 Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 | John A. Stewart

Replied to Google Sheets Blogging CMS, part 1 by John StewartJohn Stewart (John Stewart)
This is the first post in a three part series on using Google Sheets as the database for a blogging CMS. In this post, I’ll explain the motivations for building the system. In the second post, I’ll walk you through the Google Sheet itself and the Google scripts (their version of js) that drive it. In the third post, I’ll share the website that displays the blog, and the code behind it. My guess is that interest in the three pieces will vary for different audiences, so I wanted to encapsulate the descriptions.
I generally like where John is taking this idea and the fact that he’s actively experimenting and documenting what he’s coming up with as potential solutions. While I do like some of the low-tech angle that he’s taking, I’m not sure, based on what he’s written, how some of it will come out within the broader spectrum of DoOO or IndieWeb-related technologies.

For example:

  • How easy/hard will it be for students to own/export their data after the class?
  • How might they interact if they’re already within the DoOO cohort or already self-hosting  their own space?
  • What are the implications for students of maintaining multiple spaces with a variety of technologies and therefor overhead?
  • I’ve never had a lot of luck with Disqus, which I find to be heavy and often has problems with auto-marking all of my content as spam. I’ve definitely found it to be an issue with using for POSSE workflows. Worse, with the introduction of specifications like Webmention to the DoOO space, students could be writing their responses to classmates and teachers on their own sites and thereby owning all of that content too, but with Disqus, this just isn’t possible.

I’ll reserve judgement for once I’ve seen some of the code and further ideas in parts II and III as I suspect he’s likely taken some of these issues into account.

We’ve played with this concept of front-end blogging for a while now. Alan Levine has built an open sourced tool called TRU Writer that even provides this type of front end interface on a WordPress site.  ❧

I’m curious if John, Alan Levine, or others have yet come across the concept of Micropub? It generalizes the idea of a posting client and interface so that it could work with almost any CMS-related back end. I could see people building custom micropub clients for the education space, or even using some of the pre-existing ones like Quill, InkStone, or Micropublish.net. Many of them also use JSON or form encoded data that they could also be using with platforms like the one John describes here. The other nice part about them is that they’re flexible and relatively open in more ways than one, so they don’t necessarily need to be rebuilt from scratch for each new CMS out there.

Doing a round of tests on the new Micropub plugin for WordPress.
* OwnYourSwarm – I can log in and see my data, but posts don’t show up on my site.
* Teacup seems to work, though not as well as I would expect with Post Kinds Plugin (https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/19/55725248/)
* micropublish.net throws some errors where it previously used to work
* IndieBookClub.biz allows me to log in and post, but the post doesn’t show up on my site
* Omnibear doesn’t work (never has, and I’m aware of some recent troubleshooting to get it working)
* InkStone doesn’t seem to work (I don’t think I’d ever used it before either, so I’m not sure it would have worked with the previous plugin version without testing).

A reply to David Shanske regarding implementation of the DiSo Project

Replied to a post by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
People continued working on it. Everything you need using W3C standards like Webmention, Microformats2…give it a try? https://IndieWeb.org/WordPress/Plugins
I suspect that @chrismessina could do it quickly, but for those who’d like to leave Twitter for with similar functionality (but greater flexibility and independence), I recorded a 2 hour video for an #IndieWeb set up/walk through with some high level discussion a few months back. If you can do the 5 minute install, hopefully most of the rest is downhill with some basic plugin installation and minor configuration. The end of the walk through includes a live demonstration of a conversation between a WordPress site on one domain and a WithKnown site running on another domain.

tl;dr for the video:

Additional pieces are discussed on my IndieWeb Research Page (focusing mostly on WordPress), in addition to IWC getting started on WordPress wiki page. If you need help, hop into the IndieWeb WordPress chat.

For those watching this carefully, you’ll notice that I’ve replied to David Shanske’s post on his website using my own website and sent him a webmention which will allow him to display my reply (if he chooses). I’ve also automatically syndicated my response to the copy of his reply on Twitter which includes others who are following the conversation there. Both he and I have full copies of the conversation on our own site and originated our responses from our own websites. If you like, retweet, or comment on the copy of this post on Twitter, through the magic of Brid.gy and the Webmention spec, it will come back to the comment section on my original post (after moderation).

Hooray for web standards! And hooray for everyone in the IndieWeb who are helping to make this type of social interaction easier and simpler with every passing day.

Reply to Mariko Kosaka on RSS, blogging, and linkbacks

Replied to a tweet by Mariko KosakaMariko Kosaka (Twitter)
Webmention is the more modern specification now as some have mentioned. I wrote a piece on it in @alistapart recently which includes some background, UI examples, and links to more technical resources:
https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet

It is a small part of an suite of open protocols including Micropub, WebSub, and Microsub for allowing site to site communication and interaction which goes to the broader scope of your question about RSS feeds and blogs. See also: Lost Infrastructure

I keep meaning to provide a better overview of it all, but this recent pencast overview captures a chunk of it. Aaron Parecki’s article Building an IndieWeb Reader captures some of the rest of the microsub/reader portion.

 

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 9 30 Days of IndieWeb

Episode 9: 30 Days of Indieweb

Running time: 0h 58m 33s | Download (18.9MB) | Subscribe by RSS | Huffduff

Summary: David is about to head off abroad for a month. We talk about what’s been happening recently and his plans for his upcoming sojourn.

Recorded: August 5, 2018

Shownotes

IndieWeb Camp NYC–September 28-29, 2018–RSVPs are open now

Micropub Plugin work for WordPress
It will include a Media endpoint
Code for integration with the WordPress REST API

rel=”alternate”
This sketch solution may be an end-around the issue of getting WordPress (or potentially other CMSes) Themes to be microformats 2 compatible, and allow a larger range of inter-compatibility for websites and communication.

Facebook API changes cause breakage of Brid.gy
Ditchbook, a micropub-based tool for exporting data from Facebook and importing into other services

Greg McVerry’s EDU522 course Digital Teaching and Learning Too (🎧 00:47:57)

Reply to Becky Hansmeyer about A Micro.blog App Idea

Replied to A Micro.blog App Idea by Becky HansmeyerBecky Hansmeyer (Becky Hansmeyer)
Yesterday I realized that I would really love a standalone app for publishing to Micro.blog that was focused on WordPress. The app itself would be structured very simply: it would open to a list of…
This sounds like something I think a lot of people would want. I know I do. It’d be particularly great if one could also simultaneously update/edit micro.blog posts as well, particularly when one is syndicating them to micro.blog via a feed. (Or does micro.blog accept fat pings to update the content? and maybe add some UI to indicate it was edited at a later date to prevent people from doing a bait and switch post?)

The closest thing I can think of currently for this is Aaron Parecki’s open sourced Quill app which works via micropub (to both WordPress and/or micro.blog hosted, or to WordPress and then syndicated via feed to micro.blog). I suspect that, depending on how one authenticates, Quill could (?) be aware of syndicated copies to micro.blog and be able to edit the posts on both platforms after-the-fact. Since Quill is a (progressive?) web app, it could be used as a mobile app on both iOS and Android.

As an aside, I notice your WordPress blog shows a generic: “This Article was mentioned on micro.blog.” line in many of your comments. Are you doing this by design, or are you unaware of the Symantic Linkbacks plugin which will help to take webmentions to your site and help turn them into more friendly looking replies within your comments section?

👓 Your Endpoint Did Not Return a Location Header | David Shanske

Read Your Endpoint Did Not Return a Location Header by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske)
There have been some issues with Quill and other services advising that the WordPress Micropub endpoint did not return a Location header. There seems to be some confusion about this, which is partly because the message is a bit technical. One individual thought that this was related to Simple Locati...