Year: 2014

Map
RSVPed Attending Homebrew Website Club 11-20
I am planning on attending my first meeting of the Homebrew Website Club this week. This is a meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, designing their own website, in the same structure as the Homebrew Computer Club meeting, and is attended by the same group that does IndieWebCamp, which I am involved in.

Attending this event: yes

The Problem With and the Future Of Mentions

My involvement with the Indiewebcamp movement continues, and I want to encourage what is possible.

One of the building blocks of Indiewebcamp is the webmention.

Webmention is considered an update to pingback. Pingback was proposed in 2002 as an automated version of the Trackback concept that added link verification. The basic principle of  a Pingback is Person A posts something. Person B posts something that links to Person A’s post, which sends a pingback. Person A confirms by visiting Person B’s site to check the link exists. The pingback specification uses the XML-RPC framework as a method of transport.

Akismet, a hosted anti-spam service, has taken the measure of blocking all of them by default, because they’ve become such an avenue for spammers. We certainly think Trackback support should be discontinued, and Pingback likely behind it. It isn’t just that they’ve become an avenue for spammers…but they add no value.

Webmention is similar to the pingback specification in use, but it is carried over plain HTTP as opposed to XMLRPC. This means it is easier to implement, and a simple HTML form can send webmentions.

Most pingbacks and tracks contain title of the post that sent the trackback and ellipsed […] … […] summary text, which is of little use. No improvement of presentation is likely to go forward without addressing the underlying protocol.

The proof of concept of this is the WordPress webmention plugin, which adds support for webmentions, and its companion plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, which takes the output of any sort of linkback and turns it into human readable text, along with a profile picture. It allows for a much nicer presentation.

The way Semantic Linkbacks does human readable text is that it parses the site that has sent the mention. It counts on the site being microformats 2 complaint, although it will try to fall back on the original microformats standard and other information if needed.

I’ve thus filed a feature request with the people at WordPress, the start of my attempt to make WordPress more friendly. It is specifically for Microformats 2 support in WordPress, which would allow better parsing of WordPress sites.

With this, more sites will display markup that will allow sites receiving mentions from them to better present those mentions. Part of the reason mentions are mostly garbage is we have made them that way with neglect.

I’d like to not only see Webmentions baked into more sites, but improved presentation tools and discussion around them, and then…the Spam problem will be one worth solving. There are efforts underway to address this.

 

Listened to The Many and The Few from youtube.com
The Many and the Few was written by Woody Guthrie, who wrote many Chanukah themed songs during his time in New York City. This version was performed by Lorin Sklamberg and Susan McKeown. While the original Guthrie recording is an upbeat tempo, the two musicians have given the song a much different tone.

Eight candles we’ll burn and a Ninth one too
Every New Year that comes and goes

Chanukah concludes tonight.

Replied to RIP Joseph Sargent, Director of the Greatest Jewish Action Movie (Tablet)
I’ve always been a fan of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. It inspired me to read the book…not so good. With a script written by the great Peter Stone, an ensemble cast that included Walter Matthau, Robert Shaw, Doris Roberts, Hector Elizondo, Jerry Stiller and Martin Balsam, this movie is truly a classic…unlike the remake.

The author of this piece suggests it is the greatest Jewish action movie of all time, and I’m not quite sure about that. But it has some great lines.

Indieweb 2014 End of Year Summary

I found out about Indiewebcamp in March of 2014, so I have not yet been involved with it for a complete calendar year. But, I’ve decided, with the end of 2014 approaching, to take stock on how I’m doing, and can reassess next year.

As part of this evaluation, I am using the Indiemark system, a set of metrics for measuring the indieweb-ness of a site, and a step-by-step approach to incrementally adopting indieweb features.

Identity

Level 2

I own my own domain, and I post h-card contact info and an icon on`my page.

I have given much thought to people-focused communications, which falls under this category. Need to develop this more.

 Authentication

Level 1

I have set up Indieauth, which allows me to authenticate to sites using my domain name. But this exposed a bug in one of the libraries indieauth runs on, which has gone up the chain for repair. There is currently no level 2, but a level 2 may include two factor authentication, which I am trialing as a security measure…

Posts

Level 3

My Post Kinds/Taxonomy plugin supports different kinds of content. And while I support the following types, I am actually planning to limit myself due overlap.

  • note
  • article – longer form content
  • reply
  • like or favorite, depending on your preference – I have the hardest time with deciding
  • photo – post where the primary content is an image
  • repost – this is a complete reposting of the original, haven’t really done those
  • rsvp – only used once. I really need to go more places.

Syndication

Level 2

I syndicate(POSSE) my posts to applicable silos(Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus). I am not currently linking back to the originals, as I previously did, unless relevant, as I haven’t gotten my syndication working the way I’d like.

 

Posting UI

Level 3

It’s hard to say where I am with this. I have a UI for posting, the WordPress interface, one I created for adding context information for replies, but I’m still not happy with the UI for syndication.

I’d like to work on a simpler UI for the future. The WordPress one is very useful, but has a lot of ‘stuff’ to finish a post. Great for an article, not so great for a note.

Navigation

Level 4

I have previous/next navigation, time based archives, and tag based archive pages, so I’ve covered this category as of now.

Search

Level 4

My site is searchable using the built-in WordPress search functions.

Aggregation

Level 4/5.

Thanks to the work of Matthias Pfefferle, I receive webmentions and show comments and mentions from other people on my site. That achieves the notes for Level 5.

However, I’ve spent a lot of time on reply-contexts, which I am manually entering. My project continues with plans to pull in more of this information automatically, which is more of a Level 4 goal.

Web Actions

Level 3, but not Level 2.

I had hard-coded actions and web actions on my site. They were removed for now, as they didn’t work the way I wanted. They will likely be back.

I do provide syndication links on posts of all other places the post can be found.

Security

Level 5/6

I serve the site now exclusively over https, and redirect anyone requesting a plain unencrypted site. The site supports SPDY for increasing speed over an SSL site.

The site has an A rating with Qualysis SSL Labs. It uses an SHA-2 certificate and supports Mozilla’s Intermediate Compatability Cipher List. This makes it fairly up to date in this category, but I am holding out for the A+.

 Miscellany

This site is also now delivered over IPV6 as well as IPV4.

The site runs on Nginx, and uses a caching system I wrote.

Conclusion

One of the most interesting things about getting involved in this group has been building things. I have always loved making things, and have never been good at it. I still think I am a reasonably good idea person, but a horrible programmer.

I still have 4 days in 2014, if I want to build something else.