Week 46, 2022

Map
I’m back from my vacation, where I spent a lot of time field-testing my venue code. As far as I can tell, it is working perfectly, but field-testing is what allows me to figure out the tweaks I need to make the experience better, so there will be some point releases over the coming weeks as I make the experience better. Here is an example of one of my venues…I tried to use some code to import old checkins at venues and create new local venues replacing ones I’d linked to remotely. However, it did create some duplication, so I will need to spend some time cleaning it up. Also, if I want to classify my venues and provide descriptions, I’ll need to add those.

Rel-Me Profile Link Verification on WordPress for Mastodon and Other Services

With the recent interest in Mastodon, there have been a lot of people using WordPress interested in taking advantage of their rel-me link verification feature.

Rel=”me” is a property you can add to links to say that the link represents the same person/entity as the page being linked from. Bi-directional rel-me link verfication means page A and page B both link to each other with rel-me…so you can prove both are under the control of the same person.

On Mastodon, doing this gives you a verified indication in your profile. But, the Indieweb community has already been using this for years for the same purpose.

There are a lot of WordPress plugins for Indieweb Building blocks. But for identity, this is built into the Indieweb plugin itself. In addition to suggesting other plugins to add more Indieweb stuff, it offers the identity features using rel-me.

On the Options page in Admin for the plugin, there is an option to set whether or not the site represents a single person/entity, and to set who the default author is. If you don’t set it, it will put the rel-me links on your author archive(usually /author/username). Otherwise, it will put them on the homepage.

It adds standard profile fields under your URL and uses them to generate rel-me links. By default, these links are hidden links, not visible, so they should just work.

However, if you want them visible, there are 2 options

  • One of two widgets. One for an entire profile with the rel-me links displayed as icons, the other for just the links displayed as icons
  • Manually adding them to your theme.

I know we should have a block, but I confess to never having written one. One of these days I’ll have to bite the bullet and do so.