How to automatically publish content from a static site on Twitter, using Eleventy and Netlify's lambda functions.
A nice little article with some excellent code examples for those who want to follow along.
Tag: POSSE
🎧 This Week in Google 481 Stoned on Cheese | TWIG.tv
Foldable Phone, Online Civility
- The Samsung Developers Conference Keynote features a foldable phone, SmartThings IoT, and Bixby innovations.
- Android will support foldable phones.
- Google employees stage a walkout over sexual harassment
- Tim Berners-Lee's Contract for the Web
- How to encourage civility online
- YouTube Content ID
- Facebook and "White Genocide"
- Young people are deleting Facebook in droves
- Facebook's holiday pop-up store
- Everybody gets free Amazon shipping
- Amazon's new HQ2(s)
- 8 new Chromebook features
- Google Home Hub teams up with Sephora
- Ajit Pai's FCC is hopping mad about robocalls
Picks of the Week
- Jeff's Number: Black Friday home tech deals
- Stacey's Thing: Extinct cables, Alexa Christmas Lights
Leo Laporte doesn’t talk about it directly within an IndieWeb specific framework, but he’s got an interesting discussion about YouTube Content ID that touches on the ideas of Journalism and IndieWeb and particularly as they relate to video, streaming video, and YouTube Live.
While most people are forced to rely on Google as their silo of choice for video and specifically live streaming video, he points out a painful single point of failure in their system with regard to copyright rules and Google’s automatic filters that could get a user/content creator permanently banned. Worse, as Leo indicates, this ban could also extend to related Google accounts (YouTube, Gmail, etc.) One is thus open to potential chilling effects of intimidation, censorship, and deplatforming.
Leo discusses the fact that he’s not as beholden to YouTube because he streams and hosts all of his content on his own website and only utilizes silos like YouTube as ancillary distribution. In IndieWeb parlance what he does is known as POSSE or Post to your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and this prevents his journalism, commentary, and even his business from being ravaged by the whims of corporate entities whose rules he can’t control directly.
The discussion starts at 1:05:11 into the episode and goes for about 10 minutes for those who are interested in this particular sub-topic.
This idea also impinges on Cal Newport’s recent article Is YouTube Fundamental or Trivial? which I read the other day.
👓 Meeting subscribers where they’re at | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Yesterday I upgraded my laptop to OSX Mojave. Among the improvements: a desktop version of the iOS news app, which is slick. I checked into it a few times yesterday, and I expect I will again today. Under the hood, it's a highly-curated feed reader. There's a proprietary API, but a lot of content is...
👓 Syndication Links 4.0.0 Released | David Shanske
David Shanske (David Shanske)Today, from my hotel room in Berlin, Germany, where I am preparing to attend Indiewebcamp Berlin, my first European Indiewebcamp, I released Syndication Links 4.0.0. The major version number change is because in this version, Syndication Links takes on a new role. As promised previously, I’ve buil...
Yet another update from the unstoppable David Shanske! I can’t wait to try this out.
👓 Distributor publicly released with Gutenberg support and Enterprise service offering | 10up
Jake Goldman (10up)We are proud to announce that Distributor has exited beta and is now openly available. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across your websites—whether in a single multisite network or across the web with the REST API. With Distributor, content creators can "push" or "pull" content [...]
Some thoughts on silos, divisions, and bridges
Cruce Saunders (Twitter)Instead of 'eliminating' divisions, or 'blowing up' silos....let's use metaphors about bridging, connecting, unifying, transcending, collaborating across borders.... connecting all of the groups within an organization in a coherent way so that they all work seemlessly together.
— Cruce Saunders (@mrcruce) July 31, 2018
The #IndieWeb community has been working on this for a while. There’s even a service called Brid.gy to help enact it. At the same time, as Ben Werdmüller indicates, we need to be careful not to put too much reliance on silos’ APIs which can, and obviously will, be pulled out from underneath us at any moment.
As any kindergartner can tell you, “It’s difficult to play ball when the local bully owns the ball and wants to make up their own rules or leave in a huff.”
One of the things I love about IndieWeb is that we’re all trying to create a way for balls to be roughly standardized and mass manufactured so that everyone can play regardless of what the bully wants to do or what equipment people bring to the game.1
And as Nikhil Sonnad has reminded us very recently, we also need more than just connections, we need actual caring and thinking human interaction.2
References
1.
Aldrich C. Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet. A List Apart. https://alistapart.com/article/webmentions-enabling-better-communication-on-the-internet. Published July 19, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.
2.
Sonnad N. Everything bad about Facebook is bad for the same reason. Quartz. https://qz.com/1342757/everything-bad-about-facebook-is-bad-for-the-same-reason/. Published July 30, 2018. Accessed July 31, 2018.
Stepping back from POSSE | Ben Werdmüller
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Just a quick note: ostensibly to fight algorithmic propaganda, Facebook is shutting off API access to publish to profiles tomorrow. I expect other platforms to follow. That's completely their right. The indieweb has this intrinsic idea of Publishing on your Own Site, Syndicating Elsewhere: automatic...
👓 NextScripts API for Facebook Configuration | NextScripts
Setup/Installation: Facebook - Social Networks AutoPoster (NextScripts API) NextScripts API for Facebook Configuration NextScripts API for Facebook could be used instead of official native Facebook API. NextScripts API for Facebook could post: 1. Facebook Profile. 2. Facebook Pages (all kinds). 3. P...
👓 Alternative Facebook API Library | NextScripts
NextScripts Autoposting API for Facebook allows you to share your texts, images and links to Facebook Profiles, Pages and Groups. New API library from NextScripts can automatically share texts, images and links to Facebook.
👓 What happened with Facebook | NextScripts
Facebook made changes to it’s API access policy on May 1st, 2018. As the result we introduced our own Premium API for Facebook. We feel that we need to explain how exactly those changes affected SNAP. Since the beginning Facebook native API was unrestricted. Anyone w...
Updating my POSSE setup from my personal website to Twitter.
Threaded conversations between WordPress and Twitter
I’ve written about threading comments from one WordPress website to another before. I’ve long suspected this type of thing could be done with Twitter, but never really bothered with it or necessarily needed to do it, though I’ve often seen cases where others might have wanted to do this.
For a post today, I wrote on my own site and syndicated it to Twitter and got a reply back via webmention through Brid.gy. This process happens for me almost every day, and this all by itself feels magical. The real magic however, and I don’t think I’ve done this before or seen it done, was that I replied to the backfed comment on my site inline and manually syndicated to Twitter using a permalink of the form http://www.example.com/standard-permalink-structure/?replytocom=57527#respond, where 57527 is the particular comment ID for my inline comment. (This comment ID can typically be found by hovering over the “Reply” or “Comment” button on one’s WordPress website in most browsers.)
When a reply to my second syndicated Twitter post came in, Brid.gy properly sent it as a comment to my comment AND nested it properly!
I’ve now got a nested copy of the conversation on my site that is identical to the one on Twitter.
I suspect that by carefully choosing the URL structure you syndicate to Twitter, you’ll allow yourself more control over how backfed comments from Brid.gy nest (or don’t) in your response section on your site.
Perhaps even more powerfully, non-WordPress-based websites could also use these permalinks structures for composing their replies to WordPress sites to have their replies nest properly too. I think I’ve seen Aaron Parecki do this in the wild.
Since the WordPress Webmention plugin now includes functionality for sending webmentions directly from the comments section, I’ll have to double check that the microformats on my comments are properly marked up to see if I can start leveraging Brid.gy publish functionality to send threaded replies to Twitter automatically. Or perhaps work on something that will allow automatic replies via Twitter API. Hmmm…
Despite the fact that this could all be a bit more automated, the fact that one can easily do threaded replies between WordPress and Twitter makes me quite happy.
Thread onward!
For more on my IndieWeb explorations with Twitter, see my IndieWeb Research page.
Reply to Dan Cohen tweet
Dan Cohen (Twitter)Has anyone set up WordPress so that “standard” post types continue to show up on your blog, but “status” (or “aside”) post types feed into social media platforms such as Twitter or https://t.co/kisv1mbGgT?
— Dan Cohen (@dancohen) June 6, 2018
Dan, There are a lot of moving pieces in your question and a variety of ways to implement them depending on your needs and particular website set up. Fortunately there are lots of educators playing around in these spaces already who are experimenting with various means and methods as well as some of their short and long term implications.
I suspect some of the most interesting parts may be more closed off to you (or possibly more difficult) because in your particular case it looks like you’re being hosted on WordPress.com rather than self-hosting your own site directly. For the richest experience you’d ideally like to be able to install some of the IndieWeb for WordPress plugins like Webmentions, Semantic Linkbacks, Post Kinds, and potentially others. This can be done on WordPress.com, but typically involves a higher level of paid account for the most flexibility.
For crossposting your content to micro.blog, that portion is fairly simple as you can decide on any variety of post formats (standard, aside, status, images, etc.), post kinds, categories, or even tags and translate those pieces into RSS feeds your WordPress installation is already creating (most often just by adding /feed/ to the end of common URLs for these items). Then you can plug those particular feeds into your micro.blog account and you’re good to go for feeding content out easily without any additional work. Personally I’m using the Post Kinds plugin to create a finer-grained set of content so that I can better pick and choose what gets syndicated out to other sites.
From within micro.blog, on your accounts tab you can enter any number of incoming feeds to your account. Here’s a list of some of the feeds (from two of my websites one using WordPress and the other using Known) that are going to my account there:
As a small example, if you were using the status post format on your site, you should be able to add https://dancohen.org/type/status/feed/ to your feed list on micro.blog and then only those status updates would feed across to the micro.blog community.
I also bookmarked a useful meta-post a few weeks back that has a nice section on using micro.blog with WordPress. And there are also many nice resources on the IndieWeb wiki for micro.blog and how people are integrating it into their workflows.
For crossposting to Twitter there are a multitude of options depending on your need as well as your expertise and patience to set things up and the control you’d like to have over how your Tweets display.
Since micro.blog supports the Webmention protocol, if your site also has Webmentions set up, you can get responses to your crossposts to micro.blog to show up back on your site as native (moderate-able) comments. You can do much the same thing with Twitter and use your website as a Twitter “client” to post to Twitter as well as have the replies and responses from Twitter come back to your posts using webmention in conjunction with the brid.gy website.
I’ve been playing around in these areas for quite a while and am happy to help point you to particular resources depending on your level of ability/need. If you (or anyone else in the thread as well) would like, we can also arrange a conference call/Google hangout (I’m based in Los Angeles) and walk through the steps one at a time to get you set up if you like (gratis, naturally). Besides, it’s probably the least I could do to pay you back for a small fraction of your work on things like PressForward, Zotero, and DPLA that I’ve gotten so much value out of.
Because of the power of these methods and their applicability to education, there are an ever-growing number of us working on the issue/question of scaling this up to spread across larger classrooms and even institutions. I’m sure you saw Greg McVerry’s reply about some upcoming potential events (as well as how he’s receiving comments back from Twitter via webmention, if you scroll down that page). I hope you might join us all. The next big event is the IndieWeb Summit in Portland at the end of June. If you’re not able to make it in person, there should be some useful ways to attend big portions remotely via video as well as live chat, which is actually active 24/7/365.
As is sometimes said: I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter. At least I wasn’t hampered by Twitter’s character constraints by posting it on my own site first.
📺 re:publica 2018 – Jim Groom: Domain of One’s Own: Reclaim Your Data | YouTube
Jim Groom from YouTubeA Domain of One's Own is an international initiative in higher education to give students and faculty more control over their personal data. The movement started at the University of Mary Washington in 2012, and has since grown to tens of thousands of faculty and students across hundreds of universities. The first part of this presentation (5-10 minutes) will provide a brief overview of how these Domains projects enable not only data portability for coursework, but also a reflective sense of what a digital identity might mean in terms of privacy and data ownership.
The second part of this presentation will explore how Domain of One's Own could provides a powerful example in how higher education could harness application programming interfaces (APIs) to build a more user-empowered data ecosystem at universities. The initial imaginings of this work has already begun at Brigham Young University in collaboration with Reclaim Hosting, and we will share a blueprint of what a vision of the Personal API could mean for a human-centric data future in the realm of education and beyond.
A short talk at the re:publica conference in Germany which touches on the intersection of the Domain of One’s Own which is very similar to the broader IndieWeb movement. POSSE makes a brief appearance at the end of the presentation, although just on a slide with an implicit definition rather than a more full-fledged discussion.
Toward the end, Groom makes mention of MyData, a Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing, which I’d not previously heard of but which has some interesting resources which look like they might dovetail into some of what those in the IndieWeb are looking at. I’m curious if any of the folks in the EU like Sebastian Greger have come across them, and what their thoughts are on the idea/model they’ve proposed? It looks like they’ve got an interesting looking conference coming up at the end of August in Helsinki. There seems to be a white paper outlining a piece of their philosophy, which I’ll link to below:
MyData: A Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing by Antti Poikola (t), Kai Kuikkaniemi (t), Harri Honko (t)
This white paper presents a framework, principles, and a model for a human-centric approach to the managing and processing of personal information. The approach – defined as MyData – is based on the right of individuals to access the data collected about them. The core idea is that individuals should be in control of their own data. The MyData approach aims at strengthening digital human rights while opening new opportunities for businesses to develop innovative personal data based services built on mutual trust.
Based on a quick overview, this is somewhat similar to a model I’ve considered and is reminiscent to some ideas I’ve been harboring about applications of this type of data to the journalism sphere as well.
An Indieweb Podcast: 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 EpisodeShow Notes
Related Articles and Posts
- New Facebook Platform Product Changes and Policy Updates
- Bridgy Publish for Facebook shuts down in August by Ryan Barrett (#)
- Buffer responds to syndication question, but then checks itself (#)
- I’m done with Syndication. Let’s help people be themselves on the web. by Ben Werdmuller (#)
- Deprecating and Replacing Bridgy Publish for WordPress by David Shanske (#)
Resources and mentions within the episode
- ThinkUp (#) — (my instance is still up,though no longer working!)
- BBC Audio Archive (#)
- IndieNews a community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb (#)
- WordPress Indienews a plugin to automatically send mentions to IndieNews (#)
- Convoy a syndication tool for WithKnown (#)
- Faux-casts (#)
- Related IndieWeb wiki pages
- Related WordPress Plugins
# Indicates a direct link to the appropriate part of the audio within the episode for the mentioned portion.