Packing for the Indieweb Summit

Rosemary Orchard challenged me to talk about what tools I use. To start, I decided to go over some of the things I’m bringing to the Indieweb Summit this weekend.

  • Computer
    • Dell Inspiron 7370 – This is a 13.3″ laptop running Linux  which I bought open-box. As I spent more time away from home, I needed something that wouldn’t slow down under load.
    • Eleduino 13.3 Inch 2K HDMI Portable Gaming Monitor – There are a variety of these available on Amazon and other sites. I use this as a second monitor for trips.
    • Kabcon Quality Tablet Stand – This is a bit more stable then the tiny stand that came with the gaming monitor. It is designed to hold larger tablets.
    • Nexstand Laptop Stand – This brings the laptop high enough to handle a keyboard.
    • Royal Kludge RK61 Wired/Wireless Keyboard – This will be this keyboard’s first trip. It is a new mechanical keyboard, even smaller than the previous one I carried, that doubles as a bluetooth keyboard.
  • Travel Gear
  • Camera Equipment
    • Acer 4K Holo 360 Camera – Also the first trip for this item. I saw it on extreme discount and ordered it. It is a small Android LTE capable device that doubles as a 360 camera. I keep wanting to do more with 360.
    • Smatree Q3 Telescoping Selfie Stick with Tripod Stand – I use this to hold the 360 degree camera. At the last IWC Austin and last years IWS Summit I used it to hold a webcam for remotely streaming one of the rooms. Will use this to experiment with the 360 camera.
Released Post Kind 3.3.0. This has a lot of major changes under the hood. A completely new load system for dependencies and a lot of parsing improvements from the Parse This library. On the user facing side, Post Kinds takes over generating RSS and Atom feeds to remove empty title properties, adds Aaron Parecki’s Media Fragment script, adds remote as an RSVP property, and a bunch of other little fixes.

The biggest change is the continuation of moving media related metadata into the attachment itself in the media library, rather than storing it in the post. When you edit the response properties, they will go directly into the attachment data.

In a future version, I hope to continue with that to add better displaying of photos. Right now, the title of the photo is not showing, only, because it is using the built in gallery to generate the photos, the caption, which maps to the summary property. I will release a future version that shows the title if the caption is not set, as well as some other related fixes.

There is always more to do. Being as this was a major change, I wanted to let it sit for a little while before I released another version.

Simple Location 3.8.1 released. Fixes two bugs and automatically adds location name to attachments if they have location data in the photo itself. Also takes the timestamp in the photo, recalculates timezone based on the location data, and stores a timestamp.
Released an update to the JSONFeed plugin for WordPress. It addressed several open issues, noted compatibility with the latest version of WordPress, and adds comment feeds for parity with the defaults.

IndieAuth for WordPress Question

Thinking about the necessity of maintaining IndieAuth code in the Micropub plugin and now the Yarns Microsub plugin for WordPress.

I wanted to put out to any WordPress user for some input. The IndieAuth plugin creates an IndieAuth endpoint inside your WordPress installation. This means that you login to your site and that login generates a token to give Micropub, Microsub, or other clients in order to let them have access to your site.

Alternatively, if you don’t install it, the IndieAuth code inside the other plugins will connect to an external IndieAuth endpoint, defaultly indieauth.com. Indieauth.com, for example, delegates your login to a third-party site(Github, for examplle) on which you have an account that you link to from your website. So all you need is to add a link marked up properly to your site for that.

So, the question is, why would people want an external login to a built-in login? Since it uses the WordPress login system to get your credentials, you could install any number of login enhancements for WordPress that would work seamlessly to accomplish the same goal if you want to log in using a third-party site, for example.

It is definitely more secure for you to use authorization under your own control than delegating it to another site. To try and make my life easier, I would like to make Micropub and Microsub dependent on having the IndieAuth plugin installed.

The only use case presented for allowing an external site was…what if I want to sign into Site A with the credentials of Site B? That would be web sign in. There is functionality for that built into the IndieAuth plugin, but it probably deserves to be its own plugin so you can install it or not as the case may be.

Web sign in presents you with a URL and then, when you ask to log in, searches that URL for an IndieAuth authorization endpoint. If none is available, it would fail back on another technique, such as relmeauth…looking for alternative login providers.

Hoping for some comments on why people might want to maintain the external option.

Simple Location 3.7.0 Released

Simple Location Version 3.7.0 was released. This version fixes an issue where Micropub post locations were not showing because they were defaulting to private.

Going forward, Micropub posts with a location property will be set to public by default unless the client sends information indicating otherwise.

To support fixing the ones set incorrectly, there is now a bulk action to set multiple posts to private or public.

For Micropub posts without a location property, there is now a setting to add one from the backend geolocation provider. This will obviously not work with the web browser based provider, only the ones that work in the background. There are currently 2 bundled in.

  • Set Location from Author Profile – This will always pull the location set in the user’s metadata. You can read about how to set this here. Thereotically, any external provider that supports HTTP requests could use this
  • Compass – Aaron Parecki’s location storage system. I selfhost my own copy.

In a future update, will be looking to set Compass API lookup per user so each user could have a separate feed for location.