UX | Chris Aldrich

👓 Sunday, December 16, 2018 | Scripting News

Read Scripting News: Sunday, December 16, 2018 by Dave Winer (Scripting News)

Feeling courageous? Click the [repost] symbol next to this post. #

I like that Dave is continuing to experiment with allowing others to use Twitter to interact with his blog. Reminds me of some of my experiments almost two years ago.

Improving user experience with links, notifications, and Webmentions

Back in December, I was thinking about html links and the functionality of sending notifications using webmentions. Within the IndieWeb, this is known as mentioning or potentially person-tagging someone (inline). By adding a link to a person’s website onto any mentions of their name in my posts, my website will automatically send them a notification that they were mentioned. They can then determine what they want to do or not do with that information.

While I want people that I mention in some of my posts to be aware that they’ve been mentioned by me, I don’t necessarily need to add to the visual cruft and clutter of the pages by intentionally calling out that link with the traditional color change and underline that <a> links in HTML often have. After all, I’m linking to them to send a notification to them, not necessarily to highlight them to everyone else. In some sense, I’m doing this because I’ve never quite liked that Twitter uses @names highlighted within posts. All the additional cruft in Twitter like the “@” and “#” prefixes, while adding useful functionality, have always dramatically decreased the readability and enjoyment of their interface for me. So why not just get rid of them?! I’m glad to have this power and ability to do so on my own website and hope others appreciate it.

In the past I’ve tried “blind notifying” (or bcc’ing via Webmention) people by adding invisible or hidden links in the page, but this has been confusing to some. This is why one of the general principles of the IndieWeb is to

Use & publish visible data for humans first, machines second.

Thus, I’ve added a tiny bit of CSS to those notification links so that they appear just like the rest of the text on the site. The notifications via Webmention will still work, and those who are mentioned will be able to see their names appear within the post.

For those interested, I’ve left in some hover UI so if you hover your mouse over these “hidden” links, they will still indicate there’s a link there and it will work as expected.

As an example of the functionality here within this particular post, I’ve hidden the link on the words “mentioning” and “person-tagging” in the first paragraph. Loqi, the IndieWeb chat bot, should pick up the mention of those wiki pages via WebSub and syndicate my post into the IndieWeb meta chat room, and those interested in the ideas can still hover over the word and click on it for more details. In practice, I’ll typically be doing this for less relevant links as well as for tagging other people solely to send them notifications.

I’m curious if there are any edge cases or ideas I’m missing in this sort of user interface? Sadly it won’t work in most feed readers, but perhaps there’s a standardizable way of indicating this? If you have ideas about improved presentation for this sort of functionality, I’d be thrilled to hear them in the comments below.

Twitter:

👓 Blocking Domains in webmention.io | Aaron Parecki

Read Blocking Domains in webmention.io by

Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

For the past week or so, I've been getting a series of Pingbacks from a spam blog that reposts a blog post a couple times a day as a new post each time. It's up to about 220 copies of the post, each one having sent me a Pingback, and each one showing up in my reader as a notification, which also cau...

Reply to Aaron Davis about links

Replied to a post by

Aaron Davis (Read Write Respond)

I think it is one of those topics with a lot of conjecture John. Apologies if there are too many links. ❧

Don’t apologize for links. It’s the web and links are important. In fact I might think that you could have a few additional links here! I would have seen it anyway, but I was a tad sad not to have seen a link to that massive pullquote/photo you made at the top of the post which would have sent me a webmention to boot. (Of course WordPress doesn’t make it easy on this front either, so your best bet would have been an invisible <link> hidden in the text maybe?)

I’ve been in the habit of person-tagging people in posts to actively send them webmentions, but I also have worried about the extra “visual clutter” and cognitive load of the traditional presentation of links as mentioned by John. (If he wasn’t distracted by the visual underlines indicating links, he might have been as happy?) As a result, I’m now considering adding some CSS to my site so that some of these webmention links simply look like regular text. This way the notifications will be triggered, but without adding the seeming “cruft” visually or cognitively. Win-win? Thanks for the inspiration!

In your case here, you’ve kindly added enough context about what to expect about the included links that the reader can decide for themselves while still making your point. You should sleep easily on this point and continue linking to your heart’s content.

In some sense, I think that the more links the better. I suspect the broader thesis of Cesar Hidalgo’s book Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies would give you some theoretical back up for the idea.

👓 Twitter is relaunching the reverse-chronological feed as an option for all users starting today | The Verge

Read Twitter is relaunching the reverse-chronological feed as an option for all users starting today by Casey Newton (The Verge)

Just hit that sparkle, fam

Apparently so many people are using shortcuts like “filter:follows -filter:replies” from a few months back that they’ve decided to fix their UI.

Of course the article indicates that it seems to be higher engagement (aka clicks for advertising) as the motivator rather than simply making a stronger and more usable product:

Keith Coleman, vice president of product at Twitter, told The Verge that in tests, users who had access to the easy toggle participated in more conversations than average.

👓 Gutenberg FAQ | Matt Mullenweg

Read WordPress 5.0: A Gutenberg FAQ by Matt Mullenweg (Matt Mullenweg)

We are nearing the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg, one of the most important and exciting projects I’ve worked on in my 15 years with this community. I knew we would be taking a big leap. But it’s a leap we need to take, and I think the end result is going to open up many new oppo...

👓 The Problem With Feedback | The Atlantic

Read The Problem With Feedback (The Atlantic)

Companies and apps constantly ask for ratings, but all that data may just be noise in the system.

A great framing of a lot of crazy digital exhaust that online services and apps are collecting that don’t do much. I’ve also thought for a while about the idea of signal to noise ratio of these types of data as well as their quantization levels which often don’t make much sense to me. I don’t think that there are any IndieWeb realizations of these sorts of (mostly business) systems in the wild yet, but this is an important area to begin to consider when they do.

👓 Micro.blog + Mastodon | Manton Reece

Read Micro.blog + Mastodon by

Manton Reece (manton.org)

For some time, we have been considering how we could open up compatibility between Micro.blog and Mastodon. Any feature that could be disruptive needs to be approached carefully. In this post I want to talk about how Micro.blog supports Mastodon, why I think it’s useful, and anticipate some questi...

There’s some awesome new functionality in micro.blog now. It looks like it’s still got some work to come, but, ideally, this is how most websites will work in the near future.

👓 Thinking through the IWC Berlin displaying responses session | Eddie Hinkle

Read Thinking through the IWC Berlin displaying responses session by

Eddie Hinkle (eddiehinkle.com)

I remotely attended the Displaying Responses session of IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018. It was very interesting and they made some good progress thinking though how to deal with how and when to display responses received to posts on your website. They came to the conclusion that there are four groups of people that you want to treat their responses differently: Accepted / Immediate Connections 2nd level connections Everyone Mute or Blocked Accepted / Immediate Connections These are essentially your friends on Facebook or your follow list on Twitter. These are people that you have chosen to connect with in some way and this logical conclusions can be drawn around the level of interactions you're willing to have. My plan is to display these responses completely (name, photo and content of response). This list will be generated for me by adding anyone I follow, as well as anyone I have sent a reply to. This will NOT add people to whom I have liked, emoji reacted, quoted, or bookmarked. Those are lower level responses that do not indicate a deeper level of a desire to connect with that person. 2nd Level Connections These are "friends of friends". You can assume they won't do anything TOO bad, but you might not want them posting all over your site. There is a deeper level of trust here because of mutual connection but still some care should be taken. This can be determined through different ways. One way that has been brainstormed in the IndieWeb is Vouch. I don't currently track 2nd level connections but I liked how Tantek thought this through, so my plan is for replies to display their photo and name as "other people that have responded to this post", but not display the content of their reply. I also think if they send a like, emoji reaction or quote, I'll display it just like I would an Immediate Connection. Everyone This is the World Wide Web, and anyone could send anything to my website via webmention. So this is a category you likely want to moderate. My initial thought is I will accept likes, quotes and emoji reactions from them but I won't list attribution of who did it while moderated, just the reaction itself. For replies I am considering potentially listing the url of the author of the post under "other people who have replied" but no name, photo or content while moderated. Mute or Blocked These are people who you do not trust for whatever reasons have happened for you. You don't want to associate with them in any way. Responses are not displayed from these people and they are not listed in the moderation queue. Some thoughts on moderation This means I'll need a moderation queue. Anything from a 2nd level connection or from the Everyone group will enter the moderation queue. Responses from 2nd level connections should appear higher in the queue than responses from the Everyone group. From there I can choose to: approve a response (display it like an immediate connection) approve response and accept author (makes this author an immediate connection so they aren't moderated anymore) ignore response (this leaves the response as is, it leaves the queue but doesn't display additional details) remove response (this removes the response from my storage) remove response and block author (this both removes the response from my storage and makes sure I don't receive responses from them in the future) All in all, it was a great session that I really enjoyed and I'm looking forward to actually working on implementing some of these features into my site.

A well laid out synopsis of how this could be done well. Filing for future templating.

👓 Three things about Readers during IndieWebCamp Nürnberg | Seblog

Read Three things about Readers during IndieWebCamp Nürnberg by

Sebastiaan Andeweg (seblog.nl)

This year is marked as the ‘Year of the Reader’, and indeed, there was a lot of Reader talk last weekend. I really like the progress we are making with Microsub and apps like Indigenous, but I also noticed we’re not there yet for me. But that’s not a discouragement, quite the opposite!

This blogpost has three parts: first I describe the painpoints I feel at the moment, then I describe what I have been hacking on yesterday, and in the last part I share some other ideas we talked about over dinner in Nürnberg, that where not recorded in any form other than short notes on some phones.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

this is another single point of Aaron in our stack. ❧

As opposed to another single point of Ryan….
November 08, 2018 at 08:59AM

I have discovered new interesting posts by looking at the likes my friends post. ❧

November 08, 2018 at 09:07AM

More ways to combat feed overwhelm
Before IndieWebCamp, we had a discussion about Readers in a traditional Nürnberger restaurant. Here also, people came up with some ideas to deal with accruing unread-counts.
One idea came from how Aperture deletes posts after 7 days. This actually prevents the overload. It would be nice if you can tell your reader that, for example your Twitter feed, is ephemeral and that the posts can be discarded if you did not read them in time.
One other idea that came up was to keep track of the average time between posts of a certain feed. This way a Reader could boost posts when they are from a feed that is not regularly updated. These kind of posts are usually lost in piles of more posts from more frequently updates feeds.
Yet a last idea was to tell your reader to leave out posts with certain words for a small period of time. This can come in handy when you haven’t watched the newest episode of Game of Thrones yet, but want to stay connected to your feeds without spoilers. ❧

Some good ideas here to deal with feeds.
November 08, 2018 at 09:10AM

Spent a few minutes late this afternoon to update the CSS on my website to hide the automatic titles given to annotation and highlight posts. Also modified these slightly to give the highlighted/quoted portion of other sites a highlighter-yellow color.

An example of the yellow highlight color of highlighted/annotated posts on my website. Previously the quoted portions had been a muted grey like other posts.

Reply to Ben Werdmuller on social media resharing

Replied to a tweet by

Ben Werdmuller (Twitter)

“The single change social networks could make that would have the most positive impact is to remove all kinds of resharing. Force people to speak in their own voices or not at all. Using other peoples' language to express yourself forces you to evaluate the world on their terms.”

I’ve been awaiting the percolation of your prior thoughts. For additional reference Manton Reece may have some thoughts as this lack of repost functionality is relatively central to how micro.blog works.