For Homebrew Website Club Wednesday, even though I didn’t make it to an in-person meetup I did manage to make some reasonable visible progress on my website.
I hacked together some tweaks to add the following:
Improved support in my theme for time related microformats including dt-published and dt-updated
Because I post so frequently, I added a visible timestamp next to the date so it’s easier to follow my timeline of posts.
I removed the data for my location, weather, and syndication links from the_body of my posts and appended it to my post meta data. This should prevent it from showing up in Webmentions to others’ websites or in syndicated copies, but still be available to parsers to attach that data to my posts in readers and other services.
I modified my CSS so that the text in the Simple Location and Syndication Links plugins matches that of the rest in its section.
I added a cute little bullhorn icon in front of my Syndication Links so that it has some parallelism with the rest of the meta data on my site.
I’d always liked the idea of adding in related posts data on my site, but didn’t like how it had worked in the past. Things were even worse with replying to other people’s posts as my markup (and far too many others I’ve seen in the WordPress world) was hacky and caused the related posts data to show up in their Webmentions sent to other sites. I looked through some of Jetpack’s documentation and figured out how to remove their Related Posts functionality from the_body, where it defaults, and append it instead to the post meta section of my posts. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much closer to how I’d like it. Best of all, that data shouldn’t show up in my replies to other sites now either! I had disabled the functionality ages ago because it made me feel like a rude-IndieWebber.
With IndieWebCamp Online 2020 coming up this weekend, I hope to fix a few outstanding issues and roll these changes up into my open sourced IndieWeb Twenty Fifteen WordPress theme as my hackday project. If you’re using it on your own site, do let me know. Not that I can promise to fix it if it’s broken in places, but I’d at least like to know how it’s working out for you or where it could be improved.
Things left over to fix:
Simple Location data still needs some CSS help to display the way I want it to.
I need to target the Simple Location icon so I can have its color match that of the other icons.
Because so many of my posts don’t have titles, I’ll need to tweak something there so that the Jetpack related posts will pick up better meta data as a pseudo-title instead of displaying the relatively context-less commentary that appears in the_body.
It may take a day or two for the related posts to populate properly, but I should make sure that it’s putting out relevant/interesting results.
Is it worth adding a default featured photo for the related posts that don’t have one? Could I pull one from other meta fields for some classes of posts?
Micropub version 2.1.0 for WordPress was released. It contains no exciting new features as Micropub is fairly stable. Micropub now checks WordPress capabilities more effectively. It will now throw an error if the user tries to edit a post authored by another user if they do not have that permission,...
This should be a simple request. You’ve got all the parts right there.
I use the widget for this plug-in as a major feature of my weblog. I’ve got 16 years of content and it really helps my readers to find not only the stuff I’ve written recently but all the other things I’ve published on any particular day.
I have one small request. Would there be a way to include a screen in the Dashboard that would allow someone to put in a date or a date range and return all the weblog entries for the dates entered?
My reason for asking this is that I’ve still got a few holes in my weblog– days for which I have written very little, and I’m going through a project of trying to fill in the holes. I want to publish stuff on the days where I haven’t got much. This report would really help me plan future publishing dates.
Op Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon en LinkedIn is het vrij normaal om andere gebruikers te vermelden door hun accountnaam in je update te noemen. Groot gemaakt door Twitter is de @-mention nu een bekend fenomeen op het web. De netwerken zijn zo slim om deze gebruiker een notificatie te sturen...
The Indieweb plugin was updated with an icon refresh. This used some of the same code updated in Syndication Links earlier this week. It also added a Mastodon field to the user profile and added a way of displaying that as a Mastodon icon in the profile links on the page.
Rounds all numbers to a maximum of two decimal points, as I introduced a bug in the last version that would fail to fill in numbers in the post editor due form validation requirements.
Extracts additional location information from Compass…mostly the information I store when I’m on a plane, to generate a better description of the location. It also passes this info to WordPress more effectively so it could do more in future.
I also introduced a new location provider. If set, if you enter a 3 letter airport code in the location name box, it will replace it with the location and name of that airport, as well as the weather. In future, I may add a similar reverse address lookup for people.
Misc bug fixes
Syndication Links
Some bug fixes introduced in 4.2.0
Due to the request to allow syndication provider checkboxes to be checked by default, I introduced two new filters: syndication_link_checked and syndication_link_disabled. The first parameter of each is a boolean that if true, will set either checked or disabled on that Syndication Provider. The second and third parameter is the uid of the provider and the post_id of the post.
Hooray!
34.1777684-118.1019145
After a bit of tweaking, the update to Micropub plugin v2.0.11 seems to have gone well. I’m now also getting updates from OwnYourSwarm again–it had stopped working sometime on 12/11. Need to figure out why Quill isn’t finding my syndication endpoints while OwnYourSwarm does.
In addition to some other useful upgrades and bug fixes, the big new feature this release adds is excellent syndication support for Micro.blog.
While many people use RSS feeds, JSONfeed, or other plugin methods for syndicating their WordPress website’s content to Micro.blog, this plugin now provides for a per-post decision about exactly what content to send to Micro.blog. It also naturally provides a syndication link from your site back to the Micro.blog post. To my knowledge no other method provides this syndication link functionality.
As I suspect many may already be aware, if your site supports Webmention (typically done with the Webmention and Semantic-linkbacks plugins), then Micro.blog will notify your site with replies and comments to your post as they appear on Micro.blog. This provides one the ability to do two-way communication between the two platforms.
Set up and configuration for Micro.Blog syndication
If you don’t already have it, install the plugin and activate it, otherwise update it within your site’s administrative interface.
Add your Micro.blog account username to your user profile on your WordPress site. This is typically found at /wp-admin/profile.php. In my case I simply added c to the field labeled Micro.blog username.
Enter your Micro.blog username (not the full URL) in the appropriate field and save your profile.
Adjust your WordPress Syndication Links settings page (typically found at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=syndication_links) to include Micro.blog by using the appropriate checkbox. Be sure to save the setting.
I obviously have a lot of syndication targets. Micro.blog is always one of them. If you’re also using Micropub clients like Quill that support the feature, you can choose Micro.blog as a syndication target in those interfaces.
Remove, if necessary, any of the RSS, JSON, or other syndication feeds from your Micro.blog account so you’re not accidentally duplicating the syndication.
Add the JSONfeed URL from the bottom of the Syndication Links plugin settings page into your list of feeds at https://micro.blog/account/feeds.
Create a post, select Micro.blog as an endpoint in the relevant meta-box, and publish your post.
Once published, your post will ping Micro.blog’s server to indicate the new content which will then be displayed in your timeline. The Syndication Links plugin will then find the permalink URL of your post on Micro.blog and display it on your post (as per your settings) along with any other syndicated copies. This notification process is roughly real time, but may take a minute or two for your post to display and the syndication link to appear on your site based on the processing times on the relevant servers.
Here’s an example of what Syndication Links looks like on a post recently syndicated to Micro.blog. This example was syndicated to both Micro.blog and Twitter.
As an added bonus, Syndication Links plugin will also find the syndication links from Micro.blog in your current feed and add those to your original posts.
If you have any questions, need clarifications, or find bugs with regard to your set up, you can file issues for the plugin on GitHub.
For IndieWebCamp Berlin 2 2019, I built this proof of concept feature in the WordPress Admin. It does actually work, but the functionality that enables the posting needs a lot more backend work before it will work properly.
Problem is that the WordPress post endpoint does not allow you to set a t...
I can’t wait to see this in action!
I’ve been going through a number of broken links on my website and slowly, but surely, bringing many of them back to life. Thanks Broken Link Checker! Apparently there were 429 broken links, but I’m able to quickly fix many of them because as I made my posts, I backed up the original links automatically using Post Archival in the Internet Archive. (Somehow this plugin has violated one of WordPress’ guidelines and can’t be downloaded, though I haven’t seen any details about why or been notified about it.)
I’ve only come across one or two which archive.org didn’t crawl or didn’t have. Many of the broken links I’m able to link directly to archive copies on the same day I made them and my archive snapshots were the only ones ever made.
This is an information and discussion page for the WordPress plugin, Automatic Featured Image Posts. Feel free to leave comments or suggestions about the plugin below or download Automatic Featured Image Posts through the WordPress repository. You can also fork and/or contribute to Automatic Feature...
Cool idea here for those who want to own and display all of their photos.
I slept my way through most of IndieWebCamp Berlin2 this weekend (mostly due to the time zone differential), but in the spirit of the event, I did want to work on a few small hack projects.
I started some research and work into creating a plugin to effectuate making “vias” and “hat-tips” easier to create on my site since I often use them to credit some of my sources. I was a bit surprised not to see any prior art in the WordPress repository. Sadly, there’s nothing concrete to show off just yet. I think I’ve got a clear concept of how I want it to look and what will go into the first simple iteration. It will be my first “real” WordPress plugin, so there’s some interesting learning curve along the way.
On a more concrete front, I made a handful of CSS tweaks and fixes to the site, and particularly to some of my annotation/highlighting related posts, that I’ve been meaning to take care of for a while. Now on read posts where I’ve aggregated some annotations/highlights, the highlighted portions should appear in yellow to better differentiate them in portions of text and represent them as highlights. This prevents me from creating a read post for the content and one or dozens of related, but completely separate, follow-up annotation posts. Now they’re combined, and I think they provide a bit more contextualization for the original, but still include the timestamps for the annotations. I’m sure there’s some more I can do to tweak these, but I like the result a bit better than before. Today’s post about a research paper I read on food is a good example of to highlight (pun intended) some of the changes. Ideas for further improvements are most welcome.
I also slightly tweaked and then further experimented with some of the CSS for my reply contexts. I’ve been considering reformatting them a tad to try to highlight the fact that the content within them is context for my responses. In some sense I’m looking at making the context look more card-like or perhaps oEmbed-esque. I still haven’t gotten it the way I’d ultimately like it, but perhaps one day soon? I played around with changing the size of the context with respect to my content as well as adding some outlines and shadows to make the context look more like cards, but I haven’t gotten things just right. Perhaps some more research looking at others’ sites will help? Which sites do you think do reply contexts incredibly well?
I’m glad there’s a holiday coming up so I can spend a bit of time catching up on some of the sessionsand notes and hopefully see some of the demos from the camp.
Using v2.1 of Narwhal Microblog on WordPress 5.2.4 and PHP v7.2 I get the following error:
Warning: Use of undefined constant posthasteForm - assumed 'posthasteForm' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /home/public_html/wp-content/plugins/narwhal-microblog/narwhal-microblog.php on line 265
Knowing that Posthaste was the underlying code, I suspect it’s an issue with php and the version in use. Apparently we’ve gotten to the version where posthasteForm is throwing the expected errors. 🙂
I’m not seeing any specific funcionality issues with the plugin, but it is throwing this error on the pages where Narwhal appears.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Go to this plugin’s folder and open the narwhal-microblog.php file.
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!
David Shanske
dorfdimpaler
David Shanske
