The Definitive Location
PESOS – Post Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site
POSSE – Post on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
This is an update to my 2014 article on how I set up my WordPress site. It was requested I update it.
Bridgy is not a WordPress plugin, or something you need to install(although you can host it yourself). Bridgy now has a WordPress plugin(link) which acts as a UI for registering and posting to Bridgy. Oddly enough, I wrote the plugin, but don’t actively use it. I need to fix my handling of syndication.
Bridgy is a service that you can link your accounts on places like Twitter, Github and Facebook to, and it will pull in comments, likes, etc from those sites and send them to your site to be integrated. This requires the Webmention and Semantic Linkback plugins to understand what is being sent.
I enjoy developing this site as a learning tool. I hadn’t done much WordPress development before this and it is very useful to know.
For anyone who comes here considering trying my setup, I’m always available to help. For those who are trying my plugins…they are still being refined, but feedback and contributions(of code) are appreciated.
This site is under development, so it does change regularly. I will often summarize some of the changes with a post, but sometimes not.
I’ve decided to take a different direction for the Bridgy plugin for WordPress. I’ve never quite been able to explain to people it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a user interface for the Bridgy service. I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to is to change the approach radically.
Bridgy is a service that integrates with various sites…Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Github, and sends back comments, likes, etc to the original copies of the same posts on your site. There are a few similar services I’ve integrated with. It also has a feature called Publish where it allows you to syndicate your posts to those services.
This is something of an arms race, as APIs change all the time. Sometimes, there is no official established API. Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy, announced in a blog post this week that due to Facebook API changes scheduled to take effect on August 1st, the Publish features of Bridgy for Facebook would be discontinued at the same time.
I’m writing this partly to lay out my plan in my mind as I’m working on writing this now. I’ve gone through a few different versions of this idea before settling on this.
The Bridgy plugin consists of two parts: The first part is a UI that is added to the post editor that consists of a series of checkboxes, and the corresponding code that triggers the same action from a post made over Micropub. The second part was added last summer, and is basically a registration page for registering for Bridgy.
I’ve opened an issue for discussion on whether I should move the second part into the main Indieweb plugin. Newcomers to the Indieweb could install the plugin, register for Bridgy inside it, and instantly start getting backfeed from other sites.
That brings us to the first part. The checkboxes. They will need to be rewritten, if I want them to continue, for the new post editor, Gutenberg, at some point. But, I don’t just want to syndicate via Bridgy. I want to syndicate to anywhere I can or choose to integrate in, both using the WordPress post editor and Micropub.
So, I’ve decided to integrate the top level of this, the logic that gets a request for syndication from the post editor or Micropub, inside Syndication Links.
Syndication Links displays icons which link to syndicated copies of posts. You’ll see them on this post. I keep adding in integrations to other plugins as people ask. I have Mastodon Auto Post, Keyring Social Importer, Medium, Social Network Auto Poster, and a few more. And I’ll likely continue to look at plugins that syndicate to other sites, figure out where they store their data, and display it as part of this plugin.
But now, this second part will expand the plugin into this territory of being a middleman for actually syndicating content. This is similar to what I did in Simple Location, where I have a series of providers for weather, location, maps, etc. and anyone could write a plugin(though only I have so far) that adds another provider.
To start, the first provider I’ll be including will be a rewritten version of Bridgy Publish, as well as my plan to add Indienews, as both are triggered by sending a webmention to a site.
At the point that I finish the alternative with feature parity to the existing code, I will discontinue development on the separate Bridgy plugin. It will mean one less plugin to maintain. Anyone who does not want to use the new features in Syndication Links…they will be off by default to start with.
It also means that, if I wanted to, I could add native publishing support for services in future. While there are certainly no end of Twitter/Facebook/etc plugins for WordPress, none of them quite understand syndicating a favorite to Twitter doesn’t mean a new tweet, it means something else. I can continue to write integrations for other plugins, or add new providers myself.
Not saying I’m going to do that. I’m only committing to what I’ve said above.
Finally, to all of you who liked the Bridgy Publish plugin…I’m curious to hear your comments on this. Bear in mind, I built the Bridgy Publish plugin to use it, and I still never migrated myself over to it. I would like to finally leave what I am using, and this would mean I could change providers without changing interfaces if I ever add something in future.
The current podcast feed on this site can be found in a variety of ways.
Co-Host: Chris Aldrich of Boffosocko.com
Show Notes
Facebook has announced ending publishing by API…and David is thinking about what it means for the community and his current project.
History:
ThinkUP from Anil Dash and Gina Trapani ultimately died trying to fight the API wars with various social silos. They spent all their time trying to keep up with no guarantee that the silos would cooperate. All their engineering resources were spent trying to keep up instead of innovating on a stable platform.
Related IndieWeb wiki pages
WordPress Plugins:
The eighth annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
Originally intended to showcase a privacy-centred implementation of emerging social web technologies – with the aim to present a solution not initially motivated by legal requirements, but as an example of privacy-aware interaction design – my “social backfeed” design process unveiled intricate challenges for Indieweb sites, both for privacy in general and legal compliance in […]
You use the WordPress suite of plugins. And being as I’m as regular contributor, there are a few ideas I’ve floating that I think are a good start, and invite you to contribute more.
This doesn’t solve all of the problems necessarily, but I think these ideas are a good faith effort in that direction.
I don’t live in the EU, and I know that the European view on privacy is very different than the American one. Anything I say below is my opinion.
I am also an archivist and librarian by education, if not by profession. We learn about the past by reading the materials of the day. The fact that email is so easy to keep and delete makes things difficult for us to archive for the future. Does the right to privacy mean we lose the ability to look back, because we don’t want to remember?
Historical concerns aside, let’s think about today. In the majority of states in the US, only one party partipating in a phone call is required to record a conversation and even post it. Privacy is very lopsided. There is no such thing as absolute privacy.
For me, keeping a copy of communications I was a party to is perfectly acceptable. My website is where I keep my copy. It is not covered by privacy regulations. I have no business agenda there. I will not sell your data or use it for anything else but archiving that conversation.
The thorny issue is whether or not I have the right to display that information publicly. This is because I am, in some cases, copying that data from another service. For example, Twitter or Facebook. Those services got permission to store that information and you have the right to manage it. But you may not know that I have copied it to ask me to remove the public display of your image.
But how is that different than someone creating a screenshot of the post? Which was public information at the time?
As a private individual, I think it is mandatory that I post a policy about what I do. And that I will hide or remove information on request. As a developer of Indieweb tools, I think I should give people the option to not store information if they so choose.
So, I am going to build the tools for people to not collect data. I am going to stop what I am working on and do some of this right now. But I still will. I am going to try to better secure that data. I am going to be clearer about it. That is the lesson I can take away from this and should. That we need to think about privacy impact.
I hope those who are more concerned about this tell me through my site they don’t want me to share our public conversations that they were happy to put in a public forum. I will then restrict them to my eyes only.
In Indieweb terms, I support webmention deletion. If the original source changes and you send a webmention, my site should remove or update my copy.
Disclosure: Your responses to this may be captured for archival purposes. Please advise me if there is an issue.
With the GDPR regulations coming into effect in Europe May 25th, privacy seems to be on everyone’s mind. This week, we tackle what webmentions are, using them for backfeed, and the privacy implications.
Related IndieWeb wiki pages
Hi there, can you tell me please if Webmention collects any personal data on my blog? Maybe you heard of the GDPR in Europe, we have to declare if someone collects personal data… Thanks for your help!
Disclaimer: Some of this is my interpretation and opinion. Anything technical is a fact as I understand it.
A webmention consists of two properties. A source URL and a target URL. So, when I link to a page on another site, a webmention is sent to that page if it supports it, telling it that I linked to it. The webmention plugin on the target side then generates and displays a link showing that site name(which it extracts from the title of the page) linked to that posts. Even under GDPR, linking to another site is not a personal data violation. Therefore, that is fine.
Now, there is a debate as to whether storing the IP address of the webmention is storing data. Webmention doesn’t actually need to do it…but WordPress does it for new comments by default. WordPress itself is looking into anonymizing that data to avoid the issue, and even though I myself don’t agree with that interpretation of the GDPR for personal use, as it doesn’t add anything to the presentation, I was going to, when the new functions are added, ensure they are applied to webmentions, which is a type of comment.
If you are concerned about data collection, the second plugin, Semantic Linkbacks, which is separate, is not required. But, I think the experience of Semantic Linkbacks is worth installing. Semantic Linkbacks reads the URL of the page that sends you the webmention for more information.
So that means it goes and looks at your page for your site name and author name, and instead of the generic page title, it tries to format your webmention as a better comment. It finds the name of the author of the page, the site name, title, etc.
But, webmentions require affirmative action. You have to link to me. Someone has to send one. If you didn’t want that outcome, why install the plugin that has this feature? So, if you have a privacy policy, you probably should outline that you receive webmentions and what you do with them…namely, display them.
So, the data that Semantic Linkbacks extracts does include information if your site is marked up to support it. So, if your author image is marked up as such, it will note this so it can display it. The image on your site is one you yourself chose to represent you. Same with the other information. It is basically trying to represent the link you made to the site accurately.
Any site that receives webmentions should respect any request to remove their display or purge the information. But webmention itself allows for this. If you send another webmention, it will update. So, if you take down the page, send another webmention and it will purge the comment. There’s even a form built into the Webmention plugin for that.
Under GDPR t0 my understanding, you have a right to see what data a site has on you and get a copy of it…we have that covered because the data is a copy of the page you yourself created. You have the right to correct incorrect data…there’s the update webmention functionality.
And if we didn’t, WordPress is building in tools for data export, deletion, and anomymization…regrettably though, they use email address as a way to extract comment and user data…something the plugin doesn’t collect.
I won’t speak for Matthias Pfefferle, who authored the plugin and has been kind enough to put up with my submissions to it, but he’s given me the impression that he takes this very seriously. And even though I don’t agree with the way people seem to be applying GDPR concerns to this, I respect their concerns enough to try to address them through plugin enhancements that will allow better controls over this.
As another side note, the WordPress Core team, who is scrambling to add GDPR tools to WordPress itself, didn’t consider Pingbacks and Trackbacks, built into WordPress, to be something to address as a GDPR concern to my knowledge. Webmention functions the same way as those two in terms of what it does, although it is a newer specification.
Links
While this is very WordPress centric, there are a lot of discussions here relevant to a broader Indieweb audience about adding new types of posts to your site, trying to design things flexibly(although a developer’s guide is probably needed), etc.
Ryan Barrett, the man behind Bridgy and someone I probably pester entirely too often, announced on Thursday that he was shuttering Bridgy for Facebook entirely, as recent Facebook API changes had made it impossible for the service to work.
So now, if I want to post to Facebook, I would have to do so myself. I’m not sure I always want to do that, so you might see even less of me there. Sometimes, I likely will. And I won’t be able to save the interactions unless I manually save them.
Oh, well. Guess there is always Twitter.