Read Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds by Dan Q (danq.me)
I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of things I’ve found online, sometimes with commentary), checkins (mostly chronicling my geocaching/geohashing), and others: I’ve extended Post Kinds to facilitate comics and reviews, for example.
I’m sort of hoping that feed readers will improve with respect to titleless posts and make hacks like this one unnecessary. Though it could be an interesting tidbit until then.
Read A fresh look for your Microblogs, Twitter and Facebook Feeds by Inoreader (Inoreader blog)
If you’ve browsed your Twitter or Facebook page feeds in the last week, you have probably noticed that we changed the presentation of the posts, so they are more coherent with how a microblog post should look like. Initially, Inoreader started as a pure RSS reader and titles are an essential part ...
titleless posts!

Narwhal Microblog Plugin for WordPress: Quickly Posting Notes to your IndieWeb Site

This morning, after reading a brief, but interesting snippet in the IndieWeb WordPress chat from last night, David Shanske made me think about an old itch I had to have a quicker and more stripped down posting interface for notes on my website. I immediately thought of WordPress’s P2 and 02 themes/products which had a built-in simple posting interface reminiscent of Twitter’s UI. 

Screencapture of Twitter's simple posting interface

Not wanting to wait to see what David might come up with before the next couple of IndieWebCamps, I thought I’d at least do some research to see what was hiding in the good old WordPress repository. I found a few old plugins that were roughly the sort of idea I was looking for, but they were last maintained about 8-10 years ago. 

Then I came across the Narwhal Microblogging plugin from Billy Wilcosky, which is being actively developed/maintained and has almost exactly what I’m looking for!

Screencapture of the Narwhal microblogging plugin user interface

Apparently the plugin itself had an early simple start before the developer came across Jon Smajda’s plugin Posthaste which was apparently repurposed for the Prologue/P2 code that WordPress used for that product/theme. He’s since rewritten a large chunk of it based on Posthaste’s original code and added in some basic formatting options and the ability to add media, so one can post a quick note along with a photo.

Settings for the plugin are hiding in Settings << Writing admin interface (or at the path /wp-admin/options-writing.php on your website) which includes the ability to choose which pages to display the “widget” and allowing one to hide the title, tags, categories, draft seclector, one’s Gravatar, and the Greeting and Links. I’d personally pare my version down to just provide tags, categories, and the draft options to keep the interface as clean as possible.

Screencapture of the settings for the Narwhal plugin

Finally the developer notes that within the user interface “if you leave the ‘Category:’ box at its default setting it posts to your default category. However… If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles into the ‘asides’ category even if you do not explicitly specify the ‘asides’ category in the dropdown. You can then style them as asides.”

This is the view of the posting interface on my site after paring it down to my personal bare minimum.

Benefits

I’ve already discussed some of the immediate benefits for easily and quickly posting directly from my own website. Just below I’ll add a few others.

Most importantly for me at the moment, the plugin works with the Classic Editor in WordPress. The interface also only shows up when one is logged into their website, so visitors won’t ever see it.

Titleless posts

The plugin automatically takes the first 40 characters of your note and posts that into the title field, so you don’t have to bother with it. Sadly, this means that feed readers and other services will take your status updates and give them a title. (Though in the wild, most feed readers do something like this anyway. I am hearing strong rumors that Inoreader is about to have better support for social media-like posts soon.) For those using the plugin for IndieWeb use and prefer to keep their notes/asides/status updates titleless, you can spelunk into the code pretty easily and make a quick change which the developer kindly documents in his support page:

But, if you want to modify the title character limit it is easy to do.

  1. Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
  2. In this file you will see a line for this max character limit and you will see the number 40. You could just increase it to something like 100, 3500, or 999999. Depending on how long you are willing to let your titles get.

In my case, I think I’ll just decrease the character limit to 0 and then rely on the Post Kinds plugin to add it’s customary pseudo-title to the admin interface on my back end so that I can distinguish my posts in the posts pages.

UI suggestions

The category chooser could be a little cleaner and provide a dropdown of all my pre-existing categories with the ability to select multiple ones. I suspect that somewhere in the WordPress universe there’s a way to do this even if it means swiping a snippet of code from core’s editor.

The basic text box for entering text could be a bit smaller on the page to accept 2-4 lines of text since it’s meant for short posts. As it stands now, it defaults to 10, but it also smartly already has a slider that appears when you type more than the available number of lines and it also has a handle in the corner to allow you to increase the boxes size.

I’ve mentioned doing natively titleless notes above, but to make things a bit more user friendly, it would be nice to have the ability in the settings page to enter a number for the text excerpt, so that users could configure it without needing code. I suspect that most in the IndieWeb space would set the title excerpt to zero so as to not have titles on their notes.

It will take me some time to dig into it, but it would be nice if the developer had some notes about the CSS classes used in the plugin so that one might more easily style the display of the output on one’s website. Fortunately the defaults to match one’s current theme seem relatively solid.

At present, there isn’t any UI for including syndication targets to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. It would be nice if there was some tie into syndication services or functionality like that provided with Syndication Links plugin and brid.gy publish or brid.gy fed if those pieces are present.

The last dovetail that would be nice to have, particularly within an IndieWeb framing, would be to have better direct integration of this plugin with the Post Kinds plugin. This could extend to auto-setting the post kind to “note”, which should in turn allow the automatic setting of Post Formats to either “status” or “aside”.

Summary

In sum, this plugin is really fantastic for allowing a simple and lightweight means of posting quick status updates or notes to one’s WordPress website! It’s the next best thing to using any of the variety of Micropub clients, particularly when you already happen to be at your own site.

I suspect this plugin is the sort of thing that many within the IndieWeb and WordPress communities will love using–and at least one person in the chat has already said they think it’s a great find. There are currently less than 10 active installations of the plugin, but I think it deserves a magnitude or more. Let’s see what we can do about that!

Have you tried it? What do you think of the idea?

👓 I’ve now removed the titles in the RSS feed from posts in the micro category using the_title_rss | John Johnston

Read a post by john john (John's World Wide Wall Display)
I’ve now removed the titles in the RSS feed from posts in the micro category using the_title_rss. So I’ve reenabled adding of titles through wp_insert_post_data. If this works this post will have a title in my dashboard, but all get through to micro.blog
This seems like a cool potential way of doing all sorts of things in the IndieWeb space for WordPress. I’m curious what it looks like from other perspectives. I’ll have to think this through a bit…

In the end though, it still feels too much like individuals trying to solve problems that should be better handled by feed readers and the platforms.

Read Titles or Not by John JohnstonJohn Johnston (johnjohnston.info)
Since joining micro.blog I’ve been messing around with my blog and its RSS on and off. I had settled on removing the titles for status post RSS feed. This means short status posts (<280 characters) were passed over to micro.blog and displayed the whole content there. Longer posts are truncated and linked. Unfortunately this meant that microblog looks quite ugly sometimes, especially when it posts a truncated indieWeb reaction that includes a quote. So I’ve changed how it works a little to only remove titles from the RSS id there are <280 characters. This is a status post, so hopefully it will show up on Micro.Blog as a linked title. Details in this gist: functions that have do with micro.blog and microblogging that live in my child theme’s functions.php Before and after display of a post in micro.blog   Like this:Like Loading...