Replied to https://choycedesign.com/2018/01/07/coaching/ (Mel Choyce)

At the urging of some colleagues, I’ve started working with a professional coach to help me work through some obstacles I encountered in this last year as a WordPress focus lead. I’m fortunate in that Automattic will pay for me to receive ten coaching sessions per year.

(Since I’m also taking a…

I envy that. Sometimes I feel I could use some professional and personal development, but the closest I get is buying myself books on the subject.
RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp Baltimore – Jan 20-21, 2018 – Baltimore, Maryland

IndieWebCamp Baltimore 2018 is a gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

Launching of Weather

With this post, I am launching weather for my website. So, why and what is weather? This is inspired by recent weather events.

In addition to the ability to show a location, I’m also now showing the weather conditions at that location at the time the post was made. So, as this post was made, it was 43 degrees with showers(indicated by the icon).

I may tweak the presentation in future. The new additions to my location plugin include not only displaying the weather on a post, but a sitewide weather display as well as a new option to show the last location reported on a post…Will be testing that and the weather in the coming days as I take a trip.

I have an idea in future to grab this information from my phone, which has a GPS chip, but am not there yet.

Thinking of Homepage Mentions

Going to get a bit technical. This is your only warning.

One of the challenges I have been looking at has actually come because of others. Now, if you’ve been looking at my website, you might notice that, thanks to the efforts of myself, Matthias Pfefferle, and Ryan Barrett that there have been major improvements to the presentation of different types of responses on my site. I have a screenshot of the replies on a recent post.

Facepiles, the row of faces representing people who ‘liked’ or what have you, was actually the first project I tackled when I joined the Indieweb community back in 2014. I’ve learned a lot since then.

Either way, the current work not only builds on what I’ve learned, but the contributions by Ryan, who really wanted this feature available, really jumpstarted things. Now, all of these people below don’t know they commented on my site…as they commented elsewhere and I pulled it back to my site via webmention.

So, it brings me to a new problem I want to solve. Homepage mentions. What is that? So, in June, we implemented the ability to direct webmentions(which I’ve talked about before) that reference your homepage as opposed to a specific article to a designated page.

WordPress doesn’t allow the attachment of responses directly to the homepage, and david.shanske.com represents me, having a direct relationship to me on Twitter, Facebook, etc. So, any mention of my website or my username on one of those sites generates a mention that is sent to my site.

This is a problem in display. In recent weeks, I’ve had the following scenarios my website doesn’t yet deal with in a satisfactory way

  • Someone referencing my website as me, effectively tagging me in their post as having been somewhere. Example: With David(david.shanske.com)
  • Someone referencing my website as me in mentioning something I did. Example: David(david.shanske.com) kindly helped me.

Neither of this usages by others are displayed properly website, which is why they are not showing at all. I’m not sure how or where to display them.

Should someone mentioning me in this manner give me the option of generating a post, ala Facebook’s service of letting others post on your timeline, even if I moderate it somehow?

At the least, it should generate a message appropriate to the situation. And if it does, where should it go? Should I display recent mentions on the sidebar of my homepage? On a dedicated page?

The Indieweb declares a person tag as a tag on a post that refers to a specific person by URL and is done as a explicit action. Many of these mentions are explicit, but some are less so.

My goal is by mid January to figure out how I’m going to display these, one way or another, and write some code to do this. Perhaps as my project for Indiewebcamp Baltimore, coming up in late January.

 

I haven’t logged into Twitter in months, though I syndicate content there from my website.  Someone mentioned me, which got pulled back to my site. Turned out to be confusion with my cousin. But, I decided to clean up my Twitter account. I removed a bunch of inactive accounts accounts I didn’t think I needed. I considered starting from 0, but I’m not sure. I have a lot of social media accounts I send stuff to, but I’m never really on any of those services. So, I mostly respond to responses, with some rare exceptions. Maybe it is time to prune things down.