Standard Plugins
- EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading
- Pushover Notifications(Link)or the forked alternative Pushbullet Notifications(Link) for WordPress – This plugin sends notifications of site events to my phone. The Pushover version is actively maintained and allows for extensions.
Simple Local Avatars(Link) – Overrides the default of using the Gravatar service for profile pictures to storing them locally. However, this plugin hasn’t been updated in years. May look for a new one.- Avatar Privacy (Link) – Adds local avatars and custom default avatars, caches items from gravatar, adds opt out of avatars, etc. Should be a part of WordPress Core.
The SEO Framework (Link) – Sometimes, I think about getting rid of all SEO plugins. I’m not really obsessed with this. This does add non-Indieweb markup for some sites that require it. It isn’t worth it for me to manually add this right now.Last time I commented that I thought about getting rid of all SEO plugins. So I did.- Antispam Bee(Link) – As an alternative to third-party solution Akismet, this plugin does a similar job without a third-party service.
- Hum(Link) – This is a simple URL shortener. So for each post, there is an equivalent URL address at di5.us. This allows me to give out easier to enter links to longer post titles.
- JSON Feed(Link) – Adds a JSON Feed to a WordPress site. This is an alternative to RSS as a feed. I’ve used it to feed my content to Micro.blog more effectively, as the specification was co-created by Manton Reece, who is the creator of that service.
The plugin could stand some enhancement. I now am a contributor. - Series(Link) – Creates a simple taxonomy called ‘Series’. I added this to my site to allow creating series of articles. There are other plugins for this, but this one is extremely simple.
WP Photo Sphere(Link) – For the rare occasions that I post 360 degree images. Rare as in I’ve only posted one.Hasn’t been updated in a year and was throwing errors.- Dimage 360 (Link) – My current solution for displaying 360 degree images.
Social Network Auto Poster(Link) – I keep wanting to get rid of this thing. But I haven’t spent the time to replace it. Thinking of doing that soon.- Simple Location(Link) – You can call this an Indieweb plugin, but it isn’t specifically an Indieweb technology(although it does use Microformats markup). It adds location and weather awareness to a post. So, you can click to add your location and the current weather conditions at that location to a post.
- Home Assistant for WordPress(Link) – I use Home Assistant for my Home Automation integration. Since it has an API, I wrote this simple plugin. A year after I wrote this, I have not added the ability to display information from any sensor and to update a sensor on the Home Assistant side from WordPress as planned. I use it right now as an enhancement to Simple Location. Instead of getting my location from the browser, it gets it from my Home Assistant installation, which tracks my presence.
- WP Term Images(Link) – Allows you to set an image for any category, term, or tag. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but even though there are a few improvements I’d make, it does the job. My theme displays these images on archive pages, as well as in the RSS feed. I may consider running a fork of it so I don’t have to add this in all my themes.
The Indieweb Stuff
- WordPress Webmention(Link) – Adds webmention support for WordPress. This allows communications between sites.
- Semantic Linkbacks(Link) – Adds richer content to WordPress comments received by Webmention. For example, interprets them as reply, repost, like, favorite, mention, etc. This allows different displays and actions to be done with them.
- IndieAuth (Link) – Creates an IndieAuth endpoint on your site so you can log into other services with your website credentials.
- Micropub (Link) – Adds the ability to post to your site using Micropub. Uses the IndieAuth plugin for login.
- Post Kinds (Link) – A replacement for the WordPress Post Formats which uses Indieweb post types. It allows you to respond to content on other sites, generates previews of those sites for context, allows you to post activity type posts(like watching, listening, reading, etc).
- Syndication Links(Link) – Another project, which adds fields to a post for the corresponding versions on other networks. It also adds links to same to the post. It also adds a UI for posting to other sites, with support for the Bridgy service built in.
- Indieweb Plugin(Link) – The Indieweb plugin is not only a plugin installer, but it contains tools for adding rel-me links(urls to your presence on other sites) based on your profile, declaring the default author for your site, and adding a simple h-card widget to show off a primary author.
- MF2 Feed (Link) – Accepting that it is hard to get a theme that supports Microformats 2 markup, as there are only a few, this tries to add a side file to your site with the data available. I use this as a way of testing it for those who may have no other easy way to be Indieweb capable.
- Refback (Link) – I quickly created this a few months ago. It is very basic. A refback is when you take referrers to your website(URLs sent when someone visits your site from another site), and process them as responses to your site.
A Few Choices
- The theme I use is a custom one I built, but the most popular theme for Indieweb sites is Sempress(Link). I am currently using a fork of the WordPress Twenty-Sixteen theme(link) called IW26 that I modified for Microformats and support of the plugins I use. I have an alternative theme, a fork on the popular Independent Publisher theme called Indieweb Publisher(link). I’m thinking of switching themes occasionally to mix things up.
Bridgy
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. I deprecated the Bridgy plugin and moved a new version of the functionality into Syndication Links. I am now using it.
Bridgy is a service that you can link your accounts on places like Twitter, Github and Facebook(deprecated due API changes) 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.
Read How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition by David Shanske (david.shanske.com)
I ought to write up a version of what I’m using that does something like this. It’s always nice to see an extensive colophon like this for people’s websites.
Syndicated copies to:
Also on:
Bookmark: How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition – David Shanske
Thank you for this David. I always wondered how you did the series of posts. Am going to have a look at that.
Great overview of useful plugins for a typical Indieweb WordPress Website. Wish I’d have seen this months ago. How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition by David Shanske David Shanske
This is an update to my 2018 article on how I set up my WordPress site.
Standard Plugins EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading Pushover Notifications(Link)or the forked alternative Pushbullet Notifications(Link) for WordPress – This plugin sends n…
Great overview of useful plugins for a typical Indieweb WordPress Website. Wish I’d have seen this months ago. How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition by David Shanske David Shanske
This is an update to my 2018 article on how I set up my WordPress site.
Standard Plugins EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading Pushover Notifications(Link)or the forked alternative Pushbullet Notifications(Link) for WordPress – This plugin sends n…
Following David Shanske’s example I’ve documented how my WordPress is set up in a page in my site’s Kbase, the ‘wiki’ section.
In 2018 and 2019, I wrote an article on how I set up my WordPress site. It included some summaries of the Indieweb plugins for WordPress I use, and what they do.
Recently, I came across Geoff Graham’s response on CSS Tricks commenting on another post by Miriam Suzanne on implementing Indieweb technology. I asked to speak to Geoff, who I did not previously know, and did so this past Friday.
Earlier that week, someone I had helped configure their WordPress site at a Homebrew Website Club meeting had decided things were a bit too complicated for them. Whenever that happens, I feel like it is a good time to ask…how can we make this better?
I had some suspicions that Geoff might be confused about a few things, and it would give me a chance to not only explain, but use that to plan how to prevent same in future. This article is also an outgrowth of that.
The CSS Tricks post was in response to Miriam Suzanne…who is using a static site, not WordPress. I’m going to focus purely on WordPress.
The IndieWeb plugin you can get for WordPress was originally conceived as sort of a JetPack for WordPress, but because each piece of the Indieweb infrastructure is independent, it does most of this by being a plugin installer/recommender. And it clearly can do better at explaining its recommendations.
The plugin by itself handles establishing your identity as the IndieWeb sees it. It offers an h-card template and widget. H-Card is the markup for marking up information about a person or place. So, this is an element many people opt to put on their site anyway.
Alternatively, it offers rel-me linking. Rel me is just a way to tell visitors that a link to another site is a link to another version of me. But, a bunch of links to other profiles is also a common website design measure. Your Twitter URL would be marked up with rel=me, establishing your website and your twitter profile are both the same person. To prove that, your Twitter bio should also point back to your site, otherwise anyone could impersonate you. That’s again, about proving your identity against something verifiable.
Other than a few other behaviors, such as telling the code whether this is a single author or multi-author site, to address differing behaviors, the plugin is as simple as possible, but is a good gateway to more.
If you want to continue to build your identity, it suggests IndieAuth. IndieAuth is a protocol. There’s some confusion about this idea, because indieauth.com is a hosted instance of that protocol that uses rel-me links. but WordPress users don’t need any of that. The WordPress implementation is an entire self-hosted implementation built into your site.
So, what is IndieAuth? IndieAuth is a protocol, based on top of OAuth2. If you haven’t heard of OAuth2, it is what those, Login with Google or Login with Facebook buttons are based on. IndieAuth allows you to log into any site with your URL as your identifier. If you use the WordPress version, you put your URL into an application that supports IndieAuth, and it will redirect to your WordPress instance to authenticate by logging into that, then redirect back to the application. So, for WordPress users, it is really Login with your WordPress site.
A Micropub client is a great example of something you can use IndieAuth to log into. The Micropub plugin adds a Micropub server, or endpoint to your WordPress site. This allows you to use any Micropub client to post to your site. That gives you an infinite number of publishing apps, if, for example, you aren’t thrilled with the built-in WordPress editors.
The Webmentions plugin for WordPress handles the receiving and sending of webmentions. Like the IndieAuth plugin, people often think it requires webmention.io, which is a hosted webmention provider. The WordPress version is entirely self-contained.
Back when it was built, the plugin handled only the business of receiving and sending webmentions, not handling display to any degree. Semantic Linkbacks, a separate plugin handled that for not only webmentions, but the older pingback and trackback protocols.
For the duration of the pandemic, the primary developer and I have been working on a complete reimplementation of the Semantic Linkbacks display code inside the webmentions plugin, and hope to have that done soon, which will eliminate the split(although deprecate support for enhancing pingbacks which wasn’t really happening anyway).
Semantic Linkbacks takes a webmention, which is a notification that another site has linked to something on your site, fetches the other site, and tries to render a display of the information. How that is done can vary from just a profile photo(if it can find one), to interpreting it as a full comment.
It does this using Microformats…a way of marking up HTML to allow elements to be identified. It is one of several ways of doing this, but is a very simple and readable one, which is why it is popular in the IndieWeb community.
Being as many themes are not properly marked up, we did try creating a plugin to do this with WordPress hooks and filters…the Microformats plugin…but its ability to do so is limited. Which is why you are likely better off with a properly marked up theme.
Since many people are not inclined, or not comfortable modifying a theme, the new version of Webmentions will include several different alternative ways to try to find an image or summary to display…from OpenGraph(which Facebook and Twitter use to display URLs provided to it) to detecting the WordPress REST API version of a page and using that to get the author name and profile image. None of them will provided as much context as Microformats, but the experience will still be something worth installing.
The other plugins provide other useful functionality for a site interested in taking the place of your participation in social media silos.
A popular goal of members of the IndieWeb community is to syndicate their content to those sites and pull back the interactions to their own websites. However, most people do not want to write integration to the APIs for these sites.
A community member offers Brid.gy as a service for feeding back interactions to syndicated posts from various other sites, by implementing their APIs, and then sending webmentions to your site when someone comments on the syndicated version of your post. The same could be done by implementing the API directly.
Syndication Links helps with syndication by offering a marked up display of links to the syndicated copies of posts. These look similar to the ‘Share with Twitter/Facebook’ buttons many sites have, except they link you directly to the syndicated copy of the post on those sites, instead of implementing tracking or other code in your site.
Brid.gy also offers a service to publish to sites it supports, and Syndication Links optionally leverages a way of triggering that capability, as well as allowing Micropub to trigger it. It supports several other services as well, and may be expanded to more in the future. But if you don’t want this feature, it is actually disabled by default.
Simple Location is one of my geekier projects. It obsessively adds location context to posts on your site. So, add a location to a post, show a map…the weather, etc at that location. It also adds archives and other data. If you are trying to reproduce the experience of Swarm, or other check-in type functionality on your site…add maps to photo posts, etc, that’s what it is for.
But if that isn’t what you want, it’s fine not to install that piece. Because not everyone’s needs are the same.
If you don’t want to learn how to markup individual types of posts(as opposed to your theme) with Microformats, the Post Kinds plugins tries to add the ability to post a reply, like, check-in, etc from your site. It is integrated with the Classic WordPress editor, however, so some may opt out of it.
The IndieWeb implementation on WordPress is a serious of building blocks that you can or cannot choose to use, which is what makes it wonderful, but sometimes confusing. WordPress has a philosophy of decisions, not options. But the IndieWeb is all about options…about building the features that are right for you.
As WordPress users within the IndieWeb community, we can always do a better job of explaining what these things are for, and are happy to do so. We have a live chat, weekly events, and are generally happy to help. But the IndieWeb is not a monolith…we’re a community of people with a common philosophy of using our own websites rather than someone else’s. That means different things to different people.
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