Syndication is Hard

Recently, in a conversation, it was asked how the syndication in my WordPress plugin, Syndication Links works. The syndication principle used here is POSSE…Post On your Site, Syndicate Elsewhere…so your site does all the heavy lifting.

Syndication Links is more of a framework for syndication, as opposed to actually doing all the work. It is expandable via plugin or extension, or additional providers being added.

There is a lot more I’d like to do with it, but providers keep making it harder to interface with their services. But…that isn’t the problem that prompted me to write this.

I’ve integrated support for using Bridgy. In the past, I used Bridgy’s Webmention publishing support. This would trigger Bridgy to read the web page and interpret the Microformats in the page and publish to the various sites it supports. Then, Bridgy added support for Micropub…allowing the sending of microformats properties directly…which meant regardless of the WordPress theme, the results could be consistent.

The problem is, Bridgy has some very developed opinions about how to publish that Syndication Links doesn’t yet..although they are under development.

Right now, if the content is longer than a certain length(dictated by the maximum length of the provider), the code will replace it with link + title, but can be overridden by a setting, which would send the entire content to Bridgy…who might truncate it inconsistently.

There is also an option for using the manual excerpt option in WordPress, if set…but not an auto-generated excerpt.

But, looking to improve this…like figuring out how to take advantage of additional properties supported by Bridgy and to custom-render a better submission int he first place. But…first, have to figure out how.

Opted for this post rather than a GitHub issue because I thought it might get some feedback and traction.