👓 WordPress Development Workflow 2018 | Alex Vasquez

Read My WordPress Development Workflow 2018 by Alex VasquezAlex Vasquez (Digisavvy: A Digital Marketing & WordPress Agency)
Development & business workflows are deeply personal opinions we all have when it comes to creating with WordPress. Over the years I’ve become more and more opinionated as I continue creating sites for clients. I’d like to share my current setup in the hopes that...
In the vein of Now Pages or What I Use pages, it would be interesting to see more people maintain these type of Development Workflow pages.

Alex has some great stuff here, though I wish there were even more links!

Reply to iamjeffperry tweet about community infrastructure

Replied to a Twitter thread by Jeff PerryJeff Perry (Twitter)
Perhaps in the vein of what you might be looking for, I’ve got a multi-user site built on WithKnown. It functions much like a stand-alone-Facebook-like service where users have their own accounts and can interact with each other on the service. It also has an OAuth server which allows users to use their own websites to log in and be able to post or syndicate content from their own websites into it, that way they have a choice of owning all of the content they post to it or not.

Note: this particular test site is meant more for folks to do quick test drives of the Known platform rather than serving as a platform in the way you’re describing. As an example of what you may be looking for though, here’s an original post on my own website (note the “also on” link at the bottom) and here’s the copy that was syndicated into the separate “community service” on an entirely different domain.

I suspect you could use other sites/services like WordPress to do something like this as well.

Alternately, you could have folks post on their own site and aggregate things in a “planet-like” fashion via RSS (by keyword perhaps) or other means on a central hub as suggested by Aaron Parecki.

Master View template

Filed an Issue IndieWeb Post Kinds (GitHub)
Adds support for responding to and interacting with other sites using the standards developed by the Indieweb Community
For ease-of-use as well as to help designers, theme builders, and maybe even Gen2 it might be useful to have a “master template” for views which includes all of the output of the data fields within Post Kinds in a single view.

If done in a relatively modular fashion with good commenting, perhaps even Gen2 folks could more easily delete or move pieces within such a master template to mash up various pieces to get what they’d like to display. Including alternate versions for displaying things could be useful as well (eg: raw display of things like start time and end time as well as a separate calculated duration time based on these two.)

👓 The Missing Building Blocks of the Web | Anil Dash – Medium

Read The Missing Building Blocks of the Web by Anil Dash (Medium)
At a time when millions are losing trust in the the web’s biggest sites, it’s worth revisiting the idea that the web was supposed to be made out of countless little sites. Here’s a look at the neglected technologies that were supposed to make it possible.

Though the world wide web has been around for more than a quarter century, people have been theorizing about hypertext and linked documents and a global network of apps for at least 75 years, and perhaps longer. And while some of those ideas are now obsolete, or were hopelessly academic as concepts, or seem incredibly obvious in a world where we’re all on the web every day, the time is perfect to revisit a few of the overlooked gems from past eras. Perhaps modern versions of these concepts could be what helps us rebuild the web into something that has the potential, excitement, and openness that got so many of us excited about it in the first place.
Anil is great at describing a fundamental problem on the web here. I feel a bit like he’s written a variation of this article a few times now.1–3

I wish that when he pivoted from ThinkUp he’d moved towards building an open platform for helping to fix the problem. He’s the sort of thinker and creator we could use working directly on this problem.

I do think he’d have a bit more gravitas if he were writing this on his own website though instead of on Medium.

References

1.
Dash A. The lost infrastructure of social media. Medium. https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3. Published August 10, 2016. Accessed March 23, 2018.
2.
Dash A. Rebuilding the Web We Lost. Anil Dash. http://anildash.com/2012/12/rebuilding-the-web-we-lost.html. Published December 18, 2012. Accessed March 23, 2018.
3.
Dash A. The Web We Lost. Anil Dash. http://anildash.com/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html. Published December 13, 2012. Accessed March 23, 2018.

🔖 Bringing interactive examples to MDN | Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

Bookmarked Bringing interactive examples to MDN by Will Bamberg (Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog)
Over the last year and a bit, the MDN Web Docs team has been designing, building, and implementing interactive examples for our reference pages. The motivation for this was the idea that MDN should do more to help “action-oriented” users: people who like to learn by seeing and playing around with example code, rather than by reading about it.

We’ve just finished adding interactive examples for the JavaScript and CSS reference pages. This post looks back at the project to see how we got here and what we learned on the way.
h/t to @rachelandrew

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 0 “Considering the User”

An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 0 "Considering the User"
This is a test or alpha episode of An Indieweb Podcast (working title).

In it, David Shanske and and I talk about a variety of Indieweb topics, with the theme of “Considering the User”, inspired by an article we were reading this week. Other topics include: home automation, generations, itches, Webmention, and some examples of the Post Kinds Plugin in practice (exercise, issues, chickens).

In the future we hope to have additional broad ranging conversations and perhaps interviews with others about various IndieWeb related topics.

Part of this is also an opportunity to improve audio post presentations on our websites over time. While David posted the “original” of this post on his site, I had to debate whether or not I would technically repost it or make an original of my own. Ultimately I opted for the latter.

David, by far the more veteran podcaster, deserves the lion’s share of the credit for his audio set up and recording facilities.

You can subscribe to future episodes here: http://boffosocko.com/tag/an-indieweb-podcast/feed/

If you need more IndieWeb content, guidance, or even help, an embarrassment of riches can be found on the wiki, including the following resources:

Fragmentions for Better Highlighting and Direct References on the Web

Fragmentions

Ages ago I added support on my website for fragmentions.

Wait… What is that?

Fragmention is a portmanteau word made up of fragment and mention (or even Webmention), but in more technical terms, it’s a simple way of creating a URL that not only targets a particular page on the internet, but allows you to target a specific sub-section of that page whether it’s a photo, paragraph, a few words, or even specific HTML elements like <div> or <span> on such a page. In short, it’s like a permalink to content within a web page instead of just the page itself.

A Fragmention Example

Picture of a hipster-esque looking Lego toy superimposed with the words: I'm not looking for a "hipster-web", but a new and demonstrably better web.
29/1.2014 – Larry the Barista by julochka is licensed under CC BY-NC
Feature image for the post “Co-claiming and Gathering Together – Developing Read Write Collect” by Aaron Davis. Photo also available on Flickr.

Back in December Aaron Davis had made a quote card for one of his posts that included a quote from one of my posts. While I don’t think he pinged (or webmentioned) it within his own post, I ran across it in his Twitter feed and he cross-posted it to his Flickr account where he credited where the underlying photo and quote came from along with their relevant URLs.

Fragmentions could have not only let him link to the source page of the quote, it would have let him directly target the section or the paragraph where the quote originated or–even more directly–the actual line of the quote.

Here’s the fragmention URL that would have allowed him to do that: http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/27/reply-to-laying-the-standards-for-a-blogging-renaissance-by-aaron-davis/#I%E2%80%99m%20not%20looking

Go ahead and click on it (or the photo) to see the fragmention in action.

What’s happening?

Let’s compare the two URLs:
1. http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/27/reply-to-laying-the-standards-for-a-blogging-renaissance-by-aaron-davis/
2. http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/27/reply-to-laying-the-standards-for-a-blogging-renaissance-by-aaron-davis/#I%E2%80%99m%20not%20looking

They both obviously point to the same specific page, and their beginnings are identical. The second one has a # followed by the words “I’m not looking” with some code for blank spaces and an apostrophe. Clicking on the fragmention URL will take you to the root page which then triggers a snippet of JavaScript on my site that causes the closest container with the text following the hash to be highlighted in a bright yellow color. The browser also automatically scrolls down to the location of the highlight.

Note: rather than the numbers and percent symbols, one could also frequently use the “+” to stand in for white spaces like so: http://boffosocko.com/2017/10/27/reply-to-laying-the-standards-for-a-blogging-renaissance-by-aaron-davis/#not+looking+for+just This makes the URL a bit more human readable. You’ll also notice I took out the code for the apostrophe by omitting the word “I’m” and adding another word or two, but I still get the same highlight result.

This can be a very useful thing, particularly on pages with huge amounts of text. I use it quite often in my own posts to direct people to particular sub-parts of my website to better highlight the pieces I think they’ll find useful.

It can be even more useful for academics and researchers who want to highlight or even bookmark specific passages of text online. Those with experience on the Medium.com platform will also notice how useful highlighting can be, but having a specific permalink structure for it goes a step further.

I will note however, that it’s been rare, if ever, that anyone besides myself has used this functionality on my site. Why? We’ll look at that in just a moment.

Extending fragmentions for easier usability.

Recently as a result of multiple conversations with Aaron Davis (on and between our websites via webmention with syndication to Twitter), I’ve been thinking more about notes, highlights, and annotations on the web. He wrote a post which discusses “Page Bookmarks” which are an interesting way of manually adding anchors on web pages to allow for targeting specific portions of web pages. This can make it easy for the user to click on links on a page to let them scroll up and down specific pages.  Sadly, these are very painful to create and use both for a site owner and even more so for the outside public which has absolutely no control over them whatsoever.

His post reminded me immediately of fragmentions. It also reminded me that there was a second bit of user interface related to fragmentions that I’d always meant to also add to my site, but somehow never got around to connecting: a “fragmentioner” to make it more obvious that you could use fragmentions on my site.

In short, how could a user know that my website even supports fragmentions? How could I make it easier for them to create a fragmention from my site to share out with others? Fortunately for me, our IndieWeb friend Kartik Prabhu had already wired up the details for his own personal website and released the code and some pointers for others who were interested in setting it up themselves. It’s freely available on Github and includes some reasonable details for installation.

So with a small bit of tweaking and one or two refinements, I got the code up and running and voilà! I now have a natural UI for highlighting things.

How?

When a user naturally selects a portion of my page with their mouse–the way they might if they were going to cut and paste the text, a simple interface pops up with instructions to click it for a link. Kartik’s JavaScript automatically converts the highlight into the proper format and changes the page’s URL to include the appropriate fragmention URL for that snippet of the page. A cut and paste allows the reader to put that highlighted piece’s URL anywhere she likes.

text highlighted in a browser with a small chain icon and text which says "Click for link to text"
Highlighting text pulls up some simple user interface for creating a fragmention to the highlighted text.

The future

What else would be nice?

I can’t help but think that it would be fantastic if the WordPress Fragmention plugin added the UI piece for highlight and sharing text via an automatically generated link.

Perhaps in the future one could allow a highlight and click interaction not only get the link, but to get a copy of both the highlighted text and the link to the URL. I’ve seen this behavior on some very socially savvy news websites. This would certainly make a common practice of cutting and pasting content much easier to do while also cleverly including a reference link.

The tough part of this functionality is that it’s only available on websites that specifically enable it. While not too difficult, it would be far nicer to have native browser support for both fragmention creation and use.  This would mean that I don’t need to include the JavaScript on my website to do the scrolling or highlighting and I wouldn’t need any JavaScript on my site to enable the highlighting to provide the specific code for the custom URL. How nice would it be if this were an open web standard and supported by major browsers without the need for work at the website level?

Medium-like highlighting and comments suddenly become a little easier for websites to support. With some additional code, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump to dovetail this fragmention functionality with the W3C Webmentions spec to allow inline marginalia on posts. One can create a fragmention targeting text on a website and write a reply to it. With some UI built out,  by sending a webmention to the site, it could pick up the comment and display it as a marginal note at that particular spot instead of as a traditional comment below the post where it might otherwise loose the context of being associated at the related point in the main text. In fact our friend Kartik Prabhu has done just this on his website. Here’s an example of it in his post announcing the feature.

Example of inline marginalia on Kartik Prabhu’s website “Parallel Transport”.

You’ll notice that small quotation bubbles appear at various points in the text indicating marginalia. By clicking on them, the bubble turns green and the page expands to show the comment at that location. One could easily imagine CSS that allows the marginalia to actually display in the margin of the page for wider screens.

How could you imagine using fragmentions? What would you do with them? Feel free to add your thoughts below or own your site and send me a webmention.​​​​​​​​

👓 Learn Archives – Pods Framework | Pods.io

Read Learn Archives - Pods Framework (pods.io)
WordPress Content Types and Fields WordPress is all about creating content. It comes bundled with Posts and Pages, which you can organise using the Categories and Tags taxonomies. It’s also got post meta fields which you can use to append data to your content – author, date, and custom fields, for example.

🔖 Pods Framework

Bookmarked Pods Framework (Pods Framework)
The Pods Framework is an open-source, GPLv2+ licensed PHP project released on October 8th, 2008. The goal was to create an interface and PHP codebase to easily create, extend, and manage content types within WordPress. While the normal WordPress content architecture is limited to the built-in tables, a primary feature of Pods allows you to base content types off of their own custom tables designed around each content types’ needs. The Pods Framework allows an ordinary user or developer to easily create and extend custom post types, content types, taxonomies, users, media, or comments — helping you keep your content organized and speed up the development of your project. Pods starts as a blank slate, as most frameworks do. The control is put into the hands of the developer to mould it into what is needed, without the fluff. Much of Pods’ functionality is coupled with a UI for easy administration, however, there are large portions of the codebase that can be optionally used for advanced implementations or specific project needs. You control everything while Pods Framework does the behind-the-scenes heavy lifting.

👓 Petition to Re-License React has been Escalated to Facebook’s Engineering Directors | WP Tavern

Read Petition to Re-License React has been Escalated to Facebook’s Engineering Directors by Sarah Gooding (WP Tavern)
React users are petitioning Facebook to re-license React.js after the Apache Software Foundation announced its decision to ban Apache PMC members from using any technology licensed with Facebook’s BSD+Patents License. So far the GitHub issue has received 627 “thumbs up” emoji and 66 comments from concerned React users who are hoping for a change in licensing. Many respondents on the thread said that ASF’s decision affects their organizations’ ability to continue using React in projects. “Apache CouchDB and others will switch away from React if we have to,” CouchDB committer Robert Newson said. “We’d rather not, it’s a lot of work for no real gain, but we don’t have a choice. Changing license can be simple (RocksDB completed that change in a day).”

👓 Introducing Mavo: Create web apps entirely by writing HTML! | Lea Verou

Read Introducing Mavo: Create web apps entirely by writing HTML! by Lea Verou (lea.verou.me)
Today I finally released the project I’ve been working on for the last two years at MIT CSAIL: An HTML-based language for creating (many kinds of) web applications without programming or a server backend. It’s named Mavo after my late mother (Maria Verou), and is Open Source of course (yes, getting paid to work on open source is exactly as fun as it sounds).