I am looking for reviewers to review PRs for me for the WordPress plugins in the Indieweb organization. I feel like any work I do that is part of the github.com/indieweb should have a second opinion at least. If anyone is interested, please tell me. Right now, we only have one regular reviewer other than me and I feel like we should spread it a bit. Qualifications are ability to read and discuss code critically.
Replied to Webmentions work log 20200113 by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)

Why not, right?
I shipped a great bug yesterday. A big thanks to Chris Aldrich for catching that and sending me a DM today to let me know.
With all my cleverness around separating comment types for display below posts, I forgot to check for cases where there was some kind of Webmention, but no regul…

The approve and whitelist functionality in webmentions broke. It does need to be renamed, but the issue at the moment has to be traced through execution of both plugins to figure out why it is causing issues. Since some functionality is being moved from one plugin to the other, it is waiting on that. If you update a webmention it does work, but it isn’t triggering on initial creation.

I am eager to see custom comment types and statuses…I’ve been following those tickets since the beginning

Happy Anniversary Webmention Specification

When I joined the Indieweb community in 2014, the first work I did was thinking about how to improve displaying webmentions. The specification was being developed and there were a lot of ideas floating around.

The specification for Webmentions became a W3C recommendation three years ago, on January 12, 2017. The whole idea of a webmention, like its predecessors, is it is a way for one site to notify another that it is linking to it.

The receiving site gets to decide what to do with the notification…display it, store it, use it for stats…etc.

Now, in recent times, with additional Indieweb protocols being developed, webmentions are not getting the attention they once did in discussions. That is the sign of maturity.  But there are still areas to explore.

On the development front, I have been slowly submitting improvements to  the webmention plugin in WordPress. The webmention functionality in WordPress is bifurcated into two plugins, Semantic Linkbacks and Webmentions. They are being merged, piece by piece, each piece being improved and redesigned as it is merged.

The webmentions plugin now has the MF2 Parser, which it hasn’t since its early days. In future iterations, it will be hooked up and start parsing microformats, gradually moving this away from Semantic Linkbacks.

Last night, I upgraded my weather setup here at home. Outside, I have an Acurite 5 in 1 sensor, which measures rain, temperature, humidity, and wind. There is a newer version that adds UV. light intensity, and optionally lightning. One of the things missing is a barometer. So, I acquired a BME280, which is a temperature, humidity, and pressure sensor.  I don’t do much Python, but it was the library I could find, so I hooked it into a Pi I already had running sensor collection, hacked together a script with the Adafruit library for the sensor to collect the data and publish it to an MQTT broker, then imported it into Weewx, where my data from the other sensor is stored. Fun. Trying to figure out what’s next. I don’t think I can do an outdoor sensor as easily.

Syndication Links 4.2.1 and Simple Location 4.0.2 Released

Released some minor bugfix editions today.

Simple Location

    • Rounds all numbers to a maximum of two decimal points, as I introduced a bug in the last version that would fail to fill in numbers in the post editor due form validation requirements.
    • Extracts additional location information from Compass…mostly the information I store when I’m on a plane, to generate a better description of the location. It also passes this info to WordPress more effectively so it could do more in future.
    • I also introduced a new location provider. If set, if you enter a 3 letter airport code in the location name box, it will replace it with the location and name of that airport, as well as the weather. In future, I may add a similar reverse address lookup for people.
    • Misc bug fixes

Syndication Links

    • Some bug fixes introduced in 4.2.0
    • Due to the request to allow syndication provider checkboxes to be checked by default, I introduced two new filters: syndication_link_checked and syndication_link_disabled. The first parameter of each is a boolean that if true, will set either checked or disabled on that Syndication Provider. The second and third parameter is the uid of the provider and the post_id of the post.

I have been very reluctant to add an auto-post feature that just syndicated everything. I wanted some more granularity around this feature. But I’m not ready to implement it at this time. So, as a compromise, I’ve added a filter if someone does not want to wait for me.

Chanukah is upon us next week, and I’ve added to my Youtube Chanukah playlist, which complements my digital music collection of Chanukah songs. It includes some fun ones from Acapella groups that do an annual Chanukah song. I have over 150 tracks otherwise…and may pick up more ideas… Sirius XM’s Radio Hanukkah launches December 20th to 31st on Channel 788. Chanukah is an 8 night holiday, gets 11 days of music. Christmas gets 11 Sirius channels that begin November 1st…Clearly we need more Chanukah songs…they are running out.