Tag: PESOS

Quickly making watch posts on my website

I was reading about how Cathie LeBlanc sometimes felt overwhelmed about logging the movies she’d recently seen:

I have to be better about posting my movie “reviews” more quickly. I get overwhelmed thinking that I need to write something about the movie when really the whole point of me doing these reviews is just to record what movies I’ve seen. So this month, I’m writing very little about each of these viewings.

I always had this problem too and finding quick and easy ways of posting them before I forgot became part of the solution. I’m not sure I’ve fully documented what I’ve been doing, but it’s slowly changed over time, so I thought I’d take a moment to write down some of the faster methods I use or have used.

One can always use the WordPress mobile posting app, bookmarklets in conjunction with Post Kinds, or even posting via email, but it usually takes a few minutes and can distract from conversations and family/friends when they’re around. Generally I’m looking to immediately capture the title of the film/tv show, the date/time stamp, and maybe the location. Later on, when I’ve got a few extra minutes, I’ll come back and optionally add details/context like poster art, cast, crew, etc. and a mini review with a rating. The method you use will depend on what kind of display you want and how much detail you’d like. At the end of the day, do what works best for you.

Checkin Method

I’m a relatively avid user of the Swarm app (fka Foursquare), so I’ll often take a photo of the movie poster, ticket, theater/other while I’m at the theater and then quickly checkin on my phone. Swarm typically has some interface to indicate which movie I’m seeing when I check into movie theaters. Otherwise it’s pretty easy to manually type things in while I’m waiting for the show to start. Once the movie is over I can discretely can go back to the checkin and add a few quick comments and a rating without disturbing the rest of the party, otherwise I’ll revisit it later.

To get this all on my website I’ve set up the Micropub plugin and configured OwnYourSwarm (for public/private posting–you choose), and the service takes care of posting all the data for me as a checkin so that I don’t forget. In the end it’s usually less than 10 seconds, and I’ve got the data I need as it happens.

Traditional PESOS watch method using IFTTT

This alternate PESOS method can be done using popular services like IMDb.com or Letterboxd.com and relies on using RSS feeds from them to pipe content to my site using IFTTT.com. (Other silo services may be able to do this as well.) Most often I send the URLs of movies/tv shows of what I watch from IMDb to my Reading.am account which has an RSS feed to trigger IFTTT.com that, in turn, creates a draft post on my website. (If only IMDB.com had a usable RSS feed, I could skip the Reading.am account. Typically I’ll search for the movie on IMDb, share that from my browser to may email client and email it to a custom Reading.am email address that autoposts it to my Reading.am account.) Later I can peek in on it, add a mini-review and rating if I like, and publish publicly or not. Letterboxd can be used similarly, but it has the added benefit of having a rating system built in so it can send that data as well.

Hopefully they’ll resolve with a logged in account, so here are the two IFTTT.com recipes I’m using as reference:

(If you can’t access the recipes to recreate your own, let me know, and I’ll manually delineate all the relevant settings.)

Both methods will work without it, but I’m also using the Post Kinds plugin to create explicit watch posts which have a nice contextual presentation which I kind of like. It also has the ability to parse URLs to create the context quickly, so if you put in an IMDb or Letterboxd URL, it will fetch artwork, cast, description, etc. automatically and there’s no need to cut/paste.

Examples

To get some idea, here are some interesting examples of these methods.

If others have better/faster methods, I’d love to hear them or see them documented. Perhaps one day someone (or maybe even IMDb or Letterboxd) will build a custom Micropub client specifically for watch posts (something akin to Teacup for food/drink or Indiebookclub for reading) that will automatically poll the data related to a film/television title and post it to one’s site?

No webmentions to original URLs that include emojis

Filed an Issue snarfed/bridgy (GitHub)
Bridgy pulls comments and likes from social networks back to your web site. You can also use it to publish your posts to those networks.

I’ve found a few instances in which Brid.gy will apparently fail to send a webmention (and/or fail to find a target) when the original URL contains an emoji(s). I’d suspect it’s a quirky encoding issue of some sort. I’m sure I’ve seen this issue before on Instagram where it’s probably more likely as the result of emojis in Instagram “titles” when using PESOS methods.

When I subsequently remove the emoji from the permalink, and reprocess Bridgy then has no problem finding the URL and sending the webmention. So at least there’s a “fix” on the user’s side for those experiencing this issue, but only if they’re aware it exists and have the means of executing it.

Example of failed webmention:

(I’ll note that it’s also got a fragment # in the URL, but don’t think this is a part of the issue)

Original: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/29/%F0%9F%93%85-virtual-homebrew-website-club-meetup-on-may-15-2019/?replytocom=262215#respond

Syndicated copy that was liked: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1129124049068498944#favorited-by-14591484

Bridgy Log: https://brid.gy/log?start_time=1558056830&key=aglzfmJyaWQtZ3lyTAsSCFJlc3BvbnNlIj50YWc6dHdpdHRlci5jb20sMjAxMzoxMTI5MTI0MDQ5MDY4NDk4OTQ0X2Zhdm9yaXRlZF9ieV8xNDU5MTQ4NAw

Example of previously failed webmention that ultimately went through following emoji removal:

Original: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/29/%F0%9F%93%85-virtual-homebrew-website-club-meetup-on-may-15-2019/?replytocom=262215#respond

Syndicated copy: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1129124049068498944#favorited-by-19844672

Bridgy Log: https://brid.gy/log?start_time=1558714459&key=aglzfmJyaWQtZ3lyTAsSCFJlc3BvbnNlIj50YWc6dHdpdHRlci5jb20sMjAxMzoxMTI5MTI0MDQ5MDY4NDk4OTQ0X2Zhdm9yaXRlZF9ieV8xOTg0NDY3Mgw

Another potential example from Instagram

Done via PESOS from Instagram which I’m sure missed webmentions (though too far back to find the specific logs):

Docteur Jerry et Mister Love ❤️⚗️👓🎬

👓 Some OwnYourSwarm Updates | Aaron Parecki

Read Some OwnYourSwarm Updates by Aaron PareckiAaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

Today I launched some updates to OwnYourSwarm, the service that sends your Swarm checkins to your own website. It does this by watching your Swarm account and sending checkins to your site via Micropub.

 

Private Posts
I made two changes to how OwnYourSwarm can handle private posts. Private posts ar...

 

This is awesome Aaron! Thanks for continuing to push the boundaries.

Replied to a post by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION)
For today’s you need to highlight some cool tools. Give us 3-5 apps or websites we should try in class.

Some of my favorite and often used edtech tools:

Hypothesis – a service that allows me to quickly highlight and annotate content on almost any web page or .pdf file

IFTTT.com – a service which I use in combination with other services, most often to get data from those sites back to my own. For example:

Huffduffer.com – a service I with audio related content I find online. I use its bookmarklet to save audio from web pages. Huffduffer then creates a custom RSS feed that I can subscribe to in any podcatcher for catching up on podcasts while I’m on the go.

Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress – since many in the class are also using it, I’ll mention that I love using its bookmarklet functionality to quickly bookmark, favorite, or reply to other posts on the web.

URL Forwarder – This is an Android-based app that I’ve configured to dovetail with the Post Kinds Plugin and my website for posting to my site more quickly via mobile.

Jon Udell’s media clipper – I use this audio/video tool for finding and tagging the start and stop points of media so that I can highlight specific portions for others

Looks like I’ve finally got IndieAuth and my headers working with OwnYourSwarm properly and have checkin data being PESOSed from Swarm/FourSquare to my website now. Hooray!

I still have a few minor tweaks to get things working properly with Post Kinds to display everything correctly, but I feel like I’m almost there. Next we’ll have to delve back to May sometime when my system between IndieAuth and OwnYourCheckin fell apart.

Still have my fingers half-crossed that I don’t botch anything up…

An Indieweb Podcast: Episode 3 “Syndication”

Episode 3: Syndication


Running time: 52m 56s | Download (24.9 MB) | Subscribe by RSS

Summary: Facebook has recently announced it will be shutting off its API access on August 1st for automating posts into its ecosystem. For a large number of users this means it will be much more difficult to crosspost or syndicate their content into the platform. As a result, this week David Shanske and I discuss the good and the bad of this move as well as some general thoughts around the ideas of syndicating content from one site to another.

David also discusses plans he’s got for changes to both the Bridgy Publish Plugin and the Syndication Links Plugin.

 
Huffduff this Episode

Show Notes

Related Articles and Posts

Resources and mentions within the episode

# Indicates a direct link to the appropriate part of the audio within the episode for the mentioned portion.

IndieWeb Journalism in the Wild

Some tidbits I really appreciate about John Naughton's website

I noticed a few days ago that professor and writer John Naughton not only has his own website but that he’s posting both his own content to it as well as (excerpted) content he’s writing for other journalistic outlets, lately in his case for The Guardian. This is awesome for so many reasons. The primary reason is that I can follow him via his own site and get not only his personally posted content, which informs his longer pieces, but I don’t need to follow him in multiple locations to get the “firehose” of everything he’s writing and thinking about. While The Guardian and The Observer are great, perhaps I don’t want to filter through multiple hundreds of articles to find his particular content or potentially risk missing it?  What if he was writing for 5 or more other outlets? Then I’d need to delve in deeper still and carry a multitude of subscriptions and their attendant notifications to get something that should rightly emanate from one location–him! While he may not be posting his status updates or Tweets to his own website first–as I do–I’m at least able to get the best and richest of his content in one place. Additionally, the way he’s got things set up, The Guardian and others are still getting the clicks (for advertising sake) while I still get the simple notifications I’d like to have so I’m not missing what he writes.

His site certainly provides an interesting example of either POSSE or PESOS in the wild, particularly from an IndieWeb for Journalism or even an IndieWeb for Education perspective. I suspect his article posts occur on the particular outlet first and he’s excerpting them with a link to that “original”. (Example: A post on his site with a link to a copy on The Guardian.) I’m not sure whether he’s (ideally) physically archiving the full post there on his site (and hiding it privately as both a personal and professional portfolio of sorts) or if they’re all there on the respective pages, but just hidden behind the “read more” button he’s providing. I will note that his WordPress install is giving a rel=”canonical“ link to itself rather than the version at The Guardian, which also has a rel=”canonical” link on it. I’m curious to take a look at how Google indexes and ranks the two pages as a result.

In any case, this is a generally brilliant set up for any researcher, professor, journalist, or other stripe of writer for providing online content, particularly when they may be writing for a multitude of outlets.

I’ll also note that I appreciate the ways in which it seems he’s using his website almost as a commonplace book. This provides further depth into his ideas and thoughts to see what sources are informing and underlying his other writing.

Alas, if only the rest of the world used the web this way…

👓 Export your Facebook posts to WordPress | Chris Finke

Read Export your Facebook posts to WordPress by Christopher Finke (chrisfinke.com)
I’m a big proponent of owning the data that you create. I use WordPress (of course) wherever I blog, and I use the Keyring Social Importers plugin to make backup copies of my Twitter updates and Foursquare checkins. And as of today, I am also syncing my Facebook updates back to a private WordPress blog using Keyring Social Importers. Not familiar with Keyring Social Importers? That’s too bad, it’s amazing. Install it, and within minutes, you can be importing data from any one of a dozen sites to your blog. Remember all of that data you put into Myspace/Jaiku/Bebo/Pownce and how it disappeared when the site shut down? Wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to save a copy of all of that? That’s what Keyring Social Importers makes possible.

I was kind of hoping for something slightly different when I searched for something and found this, but it is interesting for those who don’t know about Keyring Social Importers and it had an interesting comments section.

I was looking for something in the range of a bulk Facebook Importer to exit Facebook altogether whereas this solution keeps you addicted to it. I would classify it more of a PESOS solution than a POSSE solution.

Reply to “To PESOS or to POSSE?” by Dries Buytaert

Replied to To PESOS or to POSSE? by Dries BuytaertDries Buytaert (dri.es)
Comparing two different approaches that help you take control back over your own data on the web. [...] The goal of this analysis was to understand the pros and cons of how I can own my own content on https://dri.es. While PESOS would be much easier to implement, I decided to go with POSSE. My next step is to figure out my "POSSE plan"; how to quickly and easily share status updates on my Drupal site, how to syndicate them to 3rd party services, how to re-organize my mailing list and my RSS feed, and more. If you have any experience with implementing POSSE, feel free to share your takeaways in the comments.

What a fantastic breakdown of the concepts of POSSE vs. PESOS, though to be sure there are also additional variations for syndicating, cross-posting, or moving content around to reach various audiences.

One thing that I think you’ve only briefly touched upon is the ability to also have likes, replies/comments, etc. also come back to your site as native content via webmentions. I’ve been able to get rid of five apps and their incessant notifications and trim it all back to just using my own site to handle everything instead. Using something I choose to use instead of something I’m forced to, while also owning my data, is really very liberating.

Like you, I too have always wanted to own my own content on the web, and there are some easier and some harder methods. Not being as strong a developer as many, I’ve taken a more hybrid approach to things which is still evolving. To some extent I began at the easy end with some PESOS based workflows and relying on simple tools like IFTTT.com to at least begin owning all my content. For many content management systems, this is nearly dead easy, and could even be done with something as simple and flexible as Tumblr without much, if any, coding experience.

Over time, as I’ve been able, I’ve  moved to a more direct POSSE method as either I or, more often, others have managed to master making the simple posting interfaces easier and easier. I think in the end, POSSE is the strongest of the methods, so that has always been my ultimate goal.

From a Drupal-centric approach, you might be able to gain an interesting perspective on the multitude of ways POSSE/PESOS can be done by looking at the various ways that are available in WordPress ecosystem. It’s probably easy to discern that some are far easier than others based on one’s facility with coding. In general, I’ve noticed that the more freedom and flexibility a particular method or plugin has, the longer it takes to code and/or configure. The less flexibility a plugin offers, the easier. (So one could compare something like SNAP at the more comprehensive/difficult end to something simpler like JetPack for POSSE.) The difficulty is in the administrative tax of keeping up with the panoply of social media platform APIs to keep things working smoothly over time, particularly when you want your posts to be able to leverage the broad arrays of posting options and display outputs platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer. The other difficult questions can sometimes be: am I just replacing one or two social platforms, or am I trying to replace 20? and am I doing them with one plugin or with 20? and finally, how DRY is that process? Sometimes manually cutting and pasting is just as good.

As you do, I write first and foremost for myself and then a distant second for reaction and conversation with others. Thus I think of my personal site as just that: personal. To some extent it’s a modern day version of a commonplace book where I collect a variety of thoughts in a variety of means, while still trying somewhat to keep it in an outer facing form to look what people might expect a site to look like. This means that I have a good number more than the traditional types of posts most social media sites have. I try to own all my own bookmarks and even post what I’m reading both online and in physical form. I keep highlights and annotations of things I find interesting. I naturally keep longer posts, status updates, and photos like many. I even log scrobbles of music and podcasts I listen to as well as film and television I watch. Interestingly there’s a tremendous amount I only publish privately to myself or a small circle of others that’s hidden on my site’s back end. Depending on how far and deep you want your experience to go you might want to consider how all these will look or be represented on your site. To  a great extent, I think that WordPress’s attempt to copy Tumblr (text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, video) with their Post Formats was interesting, it just didn’t go far enough. Naturally, this may take a different form for you depending on whether you’re building just for yourself or if you’re planning something more modular for the larger Drupal community to leverage.

Screencapture of my homepage with a list of the various post types my site supports including: articles, notes, bookmarks, jams, checkins, watches, RSVPs, etc.
A few of the post types my website supports.

The best part of all this is that I’ve not done any of it alone. While I try to maintain a list of some of my experiments to help others (you’ll probably appreciate the ones on mobile posting and RSS based on your outline), there’s also a wealth of other examples on the IndieWeb wiki and a terrifically stellar group of people around almost 24-7 in the IndieWeb chat to help spur me along. I’ll echo Tantek’s welcome to what I think is a more thoughtful and vibrant open web.

I hope others also find these resources so they’re not fumbling around in the dark as I was for so long. Since you’re obviously building in Drupal, I can recommend you take a look at some of the examples provided by the WordPress and the Known communities which Ben referenced. Since they’re all .php based and open-source, you may get further faster in addition to being able to iterate upon and improve their work. Many of the developers are frequently in the IndieWeb chat and I’m sure would be happy to help with ideas and pitfalls they came across along the way.

Like others, I’m posting my reply first on my own website, and manually cross-posting it to yours (manually until you support Webmention–perhaps via the Vinculum plugin?) as well as automatically to Twitter and others.

​​​

Reply to Aaron Davis’ Reply to IndieWeb Press This bookmarklets for WordPress

Replied to Reply to IndieWeb Press This bookmarklets for WordPress by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
I have been using Dave Winer’s Radio3 platform/bookmarklet, but would rather a process which would allow me to store bookmarks on my blog and POSSE them. I was therefore wondering about creating a similar bookmarklet that generates ‘Bookmark’ post-kinds, as well as the possibility of posting from mobile? Am I going down the wrong path, especially as WordPress tinkers with ‘Press This’?

Aaron, the IndieWeb PressThis version bookmarklets are certainly a laudable solution for bookmarking things (even as WordPress moves the functionality of the original out of core), but I suspect you may find a more robust solution given some of your current set up.

Post Kinds Bookmarklets

A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.

A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.

Since you have the Post Kinds plugin set up, you might consider using that for a lot of the distance it can give you instead. I’ve written up some basic usage instructions for the plugin along with screenshots, but you’ll probably be most interested in the section on Bookmarklet Configuration. I’ve created a dozen or so browser bookmarklets, with handy visual emoji, for creating specific bookmark types for my site.

As for mobile posting, I’ll mention that I’ve heard “rumors” that David Shanske has a strong itch for improving the use of Post Kinds with a better mobile flow, so I would expect it to improve in the coming months. Until that time however, you can find some great tips on the wiki page for mobile posting. I recommend reading the entire page (including the section on Known which includes tools like URL Forwarder for Android that will also work with WordPress in conjunction with Post Kinds and the URL scheme described in the Bookmarklet Configuration section noted above.)

Using these details you should be able to make bookmarklets for your desktop browser and an Android phone in under an hour. If for some reason the documentation at these locations isn’t clear enough for you to puzzle out, let me know and I can do a more complete write up with screenshots and full code. (It’s still a piece of the book I need to expand out, or I’d include it here.)

Email

WordPress has the option of setting up an email address by which to post to your site. You can configure this pretty quickly, especially for mobile use to send URLs to your website that way. I typically use this method for quickly bookmarking things to my site for private use at a later date.

PESOS Options

There are also services that do bookmarking and include RSS feeds to your content which you could also potentially use to trigger IFTTT.com actions to post to your website. I have something similar to this set up for Reading.am which I’ve described in the past. You could certainly use this in combination with Diigo, which I see you use. Again, here more often than not I use these methods when I post things to my site as drafts or private posts.

cc: Indieweb Press This Bookmarklets for WordPress

Reply to Wat is POSSE en PESOS op het IndieWeb? by Frank Meeuwsen

Replied to Wat is POSSE en PESOS op het IndieWeb? by Frank Meeuwsen (Digging the digital)
Nieuwe termen, nieuwe wijn? Of is het meer van wat we al kenden?

I like to think of the IndieWeb as delivering on the original promise of the original decentralized internet. It’s nice that billions of people can now more easily communicate with so-called “free” services like Twitter, Facebook, et al., but it’s at a much larger expense of giving away all of their data, control, and often their privacy and even identities. Social media sites all have their own standards, functionalities, and even quirks, none of which is controllable by individuals, so if you use them, you are forced to use them on their terms instead of your own. The dumpster fire that Twitter has become as a “community” is a prime example. I also think it’s a terrible drawback that if you have a Facebook account and want to communicate with someone on Twitter, you need a Twitter account to do so. Here’s an example of what happens with this type of service-proliferation. Who wants to have to manage all of this, much less remember which service you were having which conversation on?

As you say, much of the data one posts may have little value and feel ephemeral, but certainly not all of it, and certainly not in aggregate. At least the individual should get to decide and have agency over the decision. As it stands, I can delete individual posts from Facebook, but I have no guarantee that the data is physically removed from their servers and still available for either their internal use or for possible future governmental use.

Another way to frame it all is to think of your web presence as a commonplace book.

If you recall the early days of social media, you may appreciate this alternate viewpoint of social media that I wrote about a few months ago: http://boffosocko.com/2017/04/11/a-new-way-to-know-and-master-your-social-media-flow/

Interestingly, I came across your post almost immediately after fleshing out some detail on the wikipage for cross-posting which may be a worthwhile overview from the perspective of a traditional social media user. To help conglomerate all of the various pieces for you and others in the future, I’ve created a category page under the heading “syndication” with links to all of the various pieces which may together make a more coherent whole.

As for your question (excuse my rough translation):

Then I think again, if I put my tweets first on my own site, what about the possible conversations that result from it? If someone answers and I reply again, do I do that on my own site? The IndieWeb wiki is not very clear here…

There isn’t a direct answer within some of the pages you mention, but ideally, yes, all of the conversation takes place in a back and forth manner on your own website (as well as that of those with whom you’re communicating). Sadly, not all of the moving pieces have been solved completely with respect to user interface which could be done in multiple ways. One standard in particular that isn’t supported by many is that of salmention. Until then, some of us are managing to do this manually to maintain the threaded comments so that the entire context of a conversation is still available on our own sites. Even without it, some semblance of threading is possible by providing permalink URLs for all the parts of the conversations on individual pages until such time as it’s more feasible. If you care to experiment, try commenting on this on my site and see what happens.

Incidentally, especially if you haven’t come across it yet, I hope that as you continue to explore and write that you’ll syndicate your content to https://news.indieweb.org/nl for the benefit of others.

Today I was reminded while thinking about Disqus that I had an Intense Debate account from April 23, 2009. Apparently it’s still functioning all these years later–possibly as a result of their purchase by Automattic in 2008. Not that there was much there, but I took a few minutes and exported out all my data and now own it here on my site.

One of the interesting parts was that it featured a comment about Twitter pulling the rug out from underneath developers–an event that foreshadowed even more of the same in the coming years as well as a conversation about the gamification of follower accounts, something which has gotten us into a sad state of affairs today nearly a decade later. Apparently while they tried to cap follower accounts, their early efforts just didn’t go far enough to help the civility of the platform.

📺 Using IFTTT for WordPress Social Media Automation | Advanced WordPress Meetup, San Diego, CA (YouTube)

Watched Using IFTTT for WordPress Social Media Automation from Advanced WordPress Meetup, San Diego, California
This presentation was given by Jim Walker, The Hack Repair Guy, on "Using IFTTT for WordPress Social Media Automation", at the Advanced WordPress Meetup, San Diego, California, July 2017.

This is a short video about using IFTTT.com to do a PESOS type of workflow for WordPress. While interesting, it reminds me of Louis Gray’s old diagram and my response which puts one’s own website at the center and uses POSSE. In short, there’s now a far better way of doing this type of thing with WordPress.

Below are the slides from the presentation, which includes this gruesome looking diagram:

Who wants to implement this type of convoluted workflow?

👓 The duality of microblogging | Colin Walker

Read The Duality of Microblogging by Colin Walker (colinwalker.blog)
Further to the points I made in "Self-hosted microblogging - where does it fit?" I've been having more thoughts on how best to use Micro.blog and fit it into my own online ecosystem.