Episode 14 – Once a Quarter()


Summary: Our first episode since January. David Shanske and Chris Aldrich get caught up on some recent IndieWebCamps, an article about IndieWeb in The New Yorker, changes within WordPress, and upcoming events.

Recorded: May 19, 2019

Shownotes

6 camps later…
Austin
Online
New Haven
Berlin
Düsseldorf
Utrecht

National Duckpin Bowling Congress
Duck Tours
Streaming rigs for remote participation at IndieWeb Camps
Ad hoc sessions (? 00:11:28)

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? (The New Yorker) by Cal Newport (? 00:13:50)

Swarm Account deletions and posting limits
New Checkin icon within the Post Kinds Plugin: example https://david.shanske.com/kind/checkin/
Weather now has microformats mark up in WordPress
Fatwigoo problems with icons
IndieWeb Bingo

Webmention Project

Project of updating Matthias Pfefferle‘s Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks plugins (? 00:26:10)

Readers & Yarns

Readers & Yarns update (? 00:40:50)
X-Ray
Indigenous Replacement: Final Indigenous Log: The Future of the App

Post Kinds Plugin

Post Kinds and new exclude functionality (? 00:48:15)

  • widgets
  • titleless posts
  • On this day

David’s list of 24 IndieWebCamps he’s attended
Looking back at past IndieWebCamp sessions and wiki pages for interesting ideas and new itches
Date and time stamps on webmentions
Call for tickets in WordPress
Subscribing to h-cards with WebSub
Is Mastodon IndieWeb?
Fixing IndieAuth
Improving scoping, particularly for multi-user sites

Coming up within the community

IndieWeb Book Club

IndieWeb Book Club is coming up featuring Mike Monteiro’s book Ruined by Design(? 01:13:04)

IndieWeb Summit 2019

9th annual IndieWeb Summit (Portland) is coming up in June. RSVP now.

Questions?

Feel free to send us your questions or topic suggestions for upcoming episodes. (Use the comments below or your own site using Webmention).
Perhaps a future episode on Micro.blog?

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.

RSVPed Attending IndieWeb Summit

The ninth annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, graphic artists, designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, create and improve their personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

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.

Simple Location 3.6.3 Released

Version 3.6.3 of Simple Location has been released. This adds Aaron Parecki’s Compass server as a location provider.

Location providers in Simple Location look up the current location of the user.  As I write this, I realize that I set it up to globally look up the location, and I could make it, since Compass has users, allow for a different lookup per user.  Future feature, I suppose, along with looking up historic location.

Since I hate to do just one thing, I added in a new weather provider that had been on my list, APIXU.

The goal I have in adding as additional providers that perform the same function…map, weather, location, reverse geocoding, elevation is that I do not want to be beholden to one company. If my access shuts down, I can switch to another one. Someday, I may implement automatic fallover.