Indieweb Publisher WordPress Theme Now Available to Try

Over the last months, one of the regular problems mentioned with the Indieweb on WordPress is the lack of compatible themes. Most themes do not properly mark up their content in microformats, or support some of the customizations that would integrate with Indieweb plugins.

I had already been working on my fork of the WordPress stock Twenty-Sixteen theme, called IW26. In my changing of the theme, I tried to limit being opinionated to the markup and plugin integration and leave the design to be mostly unchanged. On the backend, update the theme with any improvements to WordPress core and backdate any improvements made to _s, the starter theme that many WordPress themes are based on.

Independent Publisher is a popular theme that began adding microformats and Indieweb support. I had contributed to the theme. But development seems to be over and I haven’t gotten a response from the developer.

So, after much consideration, I decided to fork the theme. The Indieweb version, called Indieweb Publisher, strips out many of the specialty features the original theme had.  It is still an evolving work, but it is good enough for daily use.

What was removed:

  • Excerpt Options – Switched to only the decision as to whether to have an excerpt on front/archive pages. The type of excerpt to generate seems to me to be strictly plugin territory.
  • Multi-Author Mode – This was replaced with the Indieweb plugin’s setting for whether a site is a single or multi-author site.
  • Social icons menu – Again, seems like plugin territory to me.
  • Custom header used as a logo

What was added

  • Basic support for the Syndication Links, Simple Location, and Post Kinds plugins.
  • Option to show time on posts, not just date
  • Option to hide category display.
  • Custom logo feature to replace adaptive use of custom header
  • Genericons Neue replaced Genericons font set
  • Privacy Policy link if enabled in WordPress
  • Archive title and description functions and filters replaced custom coded functions
  • H-Card template page that can be used as front page
  • Set rel-feed if front page is not feed.
  • Footer widget
  • Switch to SASS for CSS generation
  • Replaced custom navigation with navigation from core implemented in WordPress 4.1
  • Started removing styling on microformats classes

Still being worked on is importing the Independent Publisher 2 layout that appears on WordPress.com and letting this be an alternate layout option, as well as taking full advantage of SASS file generation to remove duplication. I actually like the look of IP2 as well.

So, give it a try, give feedback and suggestions, and I’ll continue to iterate on both themes. You can download it from Github in a zip file and upload it to your site.

Someday, it may be worthy of an upload to the wordpress.org repo

How I Set up my WordPress Indieweb Website – 2019 Edition

This is an update to my 2018 article on how I set up my WordPress site.

Standard Plugins

  1. EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading
  2. Pushover Notifications(Link)or the forked alternative Pushbullet Notifications(Link) for WordPress – This plugin sends notifications of site events to my phone. The Pushover version is actively maintained and allows for extensions.
  3. Simple Local Avatars(Link) – Overrides the default of using the Gravatar service for profile pictures to storing them locally. However, this plugin hasn’t been updated in years. May look for a new one.
  4. Avatar Privacy (Link) – Adds local avatars and custom default avatars, caches items from gravatar, adds opt out of avatars, etc. Should be a part of WordPress Core.
  5. The SEO Framework (Link) – Sometimes, I think about getting rid of all SEO plugins. I’m not really obsessed with this. This does add non-Indieweb markup for some sites that require it. It isn’t worth it for me to manually add this right now.  Last time I commented that I thought about getting rid of all SEO plugins. So I did.
  6. Antispam Bee(Link) – As an alternative to third-party solution Akismet, this plugin does a similar job without a third-party service.
  7. Hum(Link) – This is a simple URL shortener. So for each post, there is an equivalent URL address at di5.us. This allows me to give out easier to enter links to longer post titles.
  8. JSON Feed(Link) – Adds a JSON Feed to a WordPress site. This is an alternative to RSS as a feed. I’ve used it to feed my content to Micro.blog more effectively, as the specification was co-created by Manton Reece, who is the creator of that service. The plugin could stand some enhancement. I now am a contributor.
  9. Series(Link) – Creates a simple taxonomy called ‘Series’. I added this to my site to allow creating series of articles. There are other plugins for this, but this one is extremely simple.
  10. WP Photo Sphere(Link) – For the rare occasions that I post 360 degree images. Rare as in I’ve only posted one. Hasn’t been updated in a year and was throwing errors.
  11. Dimage 360 (Link) – My current solution for displaying 360 degree images.
  12. Social Network Auto Poster(Link) – I keep wanting to get rid of this thing. But I haven’t spent the time to replace it. Thinking of doing that soon.
  13. Simple Location(Link) – You can call this an Indieweb plugin, but it isn’t specifically an Indieweb technology(although it does use Microformats markup). It adds location and weather awareness to a post. So, you can click to add your location and the current weather conditions at that location to a post.
  14. Home Assistant for WordPress(Link) – I use Home Assistant for my Home Automation integration. Since it has an API, I wrote this simple plugin. A year after I wrote this, I have not added the ability to display information from any sensor and to update a sensor on the Home Assistant side from WordPress as planned. I use it right now as an enhancement to Simple Location. Instead of getting my location from the browser, it gets it from my Home Assistant installation, which tracks my presence.
  15. WP Term Images(Link) – Allows you to set an image for any category, term, or tag. It hasn’t been updated in a while, but even though there are a few improvements I’d make, it does the job. My theme displays these images on archive pages, as well as in the RSS feed.  I may consider running a fork of it so I don’t have to add this in all my themes.

The Indieweb Stuff

  • WordPress Webmention(Link) – Adds webmention support for WordPress. This allows communications between sites.
  • Semantic Linkbacks(Link) – Adds richer content to WordPress comments received by Webmention. For example, interprets them as reply, repost, like, favorite, mention, etc. This allows different displays and actions to be done with them.
  • IndieAuth (Link) – Creates an IndieAuth endpoint on your site so you can log into other services with your website credentials.
  • Micropub (Link) – Adds the ability to post to your site using Micropub. Uses the IndieAuth plugin for login.
  • Post Kinds (Link) – A replacement for the WordPress Post Formats which uses Indieweb post types. It allows you to respond to content on other sites, generates previews of those sites for context, allows you to post activity type posts(like watching, listening, reading, etc).
  • Syndication Links(Link) – Another project, which adds fields to a post for the corresponding versions on other networks. It also adds links to same to the post. It also adds a UI for posting to other sites, with support for the Bridgy service built in.
  • Indieweb Plugin(Link) – The Indieweb plugin is not only a plugin installer, but it contains tools for adding rel-me links(urls to your presence on other sites) based on your profile, declaring the default author for your site, and adding a simple h-card widget to show off a primary author.
  • MF2 Feed (Link) – Accepting that it is hard to get a theme that supports Microformats 2 markup, as there are only a few, this tries to add a side file to your site with the data available. I use this as a way of testing it for those who may have no other easy way to be Indieweb capable.
  • Refback (Link) – I quickly created this a few months ago. It is very basic. A refback is when you take referrers to your website(URLs sent when someone visits your site from another site), and process them as responses to your site.

A Few Choices

  • The theme I use is a custom one I built, but the most popular theme for Indieweb sites is Sempress(Link). I am currently using a fork of the WordPress Twenty-Sixteen theme(link) called IW26 that I modified for Microformats and support of the plugins I use. I have an alternative theme, a fork on the popular Independent Publisher theme called Indieweb Publisher(link). I’m thinking of switching themes occasionally to mix things up.

Bridgy

Bridgy now has a WordPress plugin(link) which acts as a UI for registering and posting to Bridgy. Oddly enough, I wrote the plugin, but don’t actively use it. I need to fix my handling of syndication. I deprecated the Bridgy plugin and moved a new version of the functionality into Syndication Links. I am now using it.

Bridgy is a service that you can link your accounts on places like Twitter, Github and Facebook(deprecated due API changes) to, and it will pull in comments, likes, etc from those sites and send them to your site to be integrated. This requires the Webmention and Semantic Linkback plugins to understand what is being sent.

Replied to Carlo Costanzo on Twitter (Twitter)

“@dshanske – What does this intriguing plug-in do???
Now that I’ve converted to WordPress…

https://t.co/YJIL5FAbkp”

Not very much yet. The code to extract the data is there, and I wanted to add the ability to display it. I do use it to extract my location for my site already. Why, have any ideas for when I get back to it?

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and the Catskills

I spent some time in the last few days watching the second season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’ve always enjoyed period pieces, especially 20th century ones. This is set in 1959.

I can’t pretend I was a Jew in New York in the 1950s…my parents were though, although certainly not the economic level of the characters in the show. There are things I question. I’m sure I’m not the only member of an ethnicity who thinks that they did not quite get my culture right.

In the second season, the title character and her family go to Steiner’s Mountain Resort in the Catskills. The actual scene was filmed at Scott’s Oquaga Lake House in Deposit, NY. I’ve been through Deposit, although not familiar with this place.

Summers like the one pictured on the show were common, as the city was hot, air conditioning wasn’t really a thing, and flying was a much more costly affair than it is today. There were hundreds of Jewish resorts in Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster Counties.

The Concord Hotel, a setting on the show, and apparently close to where Steiner’s is supposed to be, is a place that I am familiar with, having been a guest there as a kid. I remember spending time at the Stevensville Hotel, and when it closed, the Brown’s Hotel, and only recall one time at the Concord. I also spent time at Kutscher’s.

The show tries to recapture the idea of it. By the 80s and 90s when I experienced these hotels, it was a very different time, but the things featured on the show brought back some memories. By today, that part of history is all gone. I still go up to Sullivan County, and I’ve driven or walked past the remnants of old Catskills resorts.

I would have liked to experience it in its heyday.

State of the Indieweb in WordPress

Every year, at the Indieweb Summit, we have the State of the Indieweb(it’s the year of the Reader, by the way). The head of the WordPress project gives his State of the Word. I even watched the Governor of my State give his State of the state.

As I go through my 2018 Year in Review, I wanted to cover the State of WordPress as it relates to the Indieweb, cover where we are and were I hope we are going.

While the Block Based Editor, aka Gutenberg, had no direct effect on WordPress and its Indieweb usage, it has had a serious effect on developing for WordPress and will continue to do so in the future.

We’ve had several community members who have opted to move off of WordPress. But we continue to, because of the market presence of the product, attract new people. So, concerns aside about the future of the WordPress project, it makes sense for the community to continue to evolve.

  •  IndieAuth Endpoint for WordPress
  • Micropub Endpoint Rewritten to use WordPress REST API
  • Weather for Simple Location
  • New Weather, Location, and Map Providers for Simple Location
  • Refbacks
  • Parse This, a post-processing and parsing library for WordPress split out and updated, now set to be used in a Microsub server
  • Yarns Microsub in beta
  • Support for syndication built into Syndication Links
  • Redesign of the UIs for Simple Location and Post Kinds
  • New code to allow the registration of custom post kinds
  • Attempt to store microformats in mf2 json and convert to jf2
  • New Widgets
  • Basic support for receiving Vouches added to Webmentions…though disabled by default
  • Template improvements to Semantic Linkbacks to improve the settings page and new property support
  • Additional Microformats 2/Indieweb Plugin friendly themes.

This is only a short list of things that came to mind when I read through the various changelogs.

All of these items reflect the coming together and polishing of a complete Indieweb experience. As we move into the end of the first month of 2019, here is what I personally am hoping to see.

  • The release of Yarns Microsub
  • At least one of the two theme conversions I worked on being released in the WordPress Theme Directory, giving us another option for individuals who better integration
  • Redesign, improvement, and enhancement of the Facepiles in Semantic Linkbacks.
  • Look at the future of Webmention and Semantic Linkbacks. Every year, there is talk of why they aren’t merged. This is partly to do with the storage design. It may be time to standardize the storage.
  • Improve MF2 Feed to generate a compliant feed for times when the theme cannot be modified to encourage more interaction
  • Improve documentation

While I’m not hoping for it, in the longterm, whether or not we should pivot to accept a block editor world for the Indieweb plugins is a matter for debate.

The alternative is to leave the block editor for article posting and add a UI into Post Kinds to allow for simple note and like posting in the admin. Or use Micropub exclusively.

But, we will all continue to plug along. What are you looking to get out of having a WordPress site and adopting the principles of the Indieweb community this year?

 

 

RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp Austin

IndieWebCamp Austin 2019 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.

This time Austin…could you skip the snow?

2018 Year in Review: Travel

Continuing the year in review update, I traveled 50,483 miles according to Google. Someday, I hope to store more of this data locally.

I visited Germany for the first time and took a second month-long sojourn in the Phillipines. I’m not counting the layover in Hong Kong as I didn’t leave the airport.

In the U.S., visited Seattle for the first time, as well as my third trip to the Indieweb Summit in Portland.

I did a quick trip to Orlando for the Parkeology Challenge, as well as spending some time with my family in South Florida.

I’m curious what 2019 will bring.

 

2018 Year in Review: Driving

Doing a series of Year in Review posts…in this first post, I am going over my Driving Year in Review. This is courtesy of Automatic. Automatic makes a device that hooks into your car’s diagnostic port. I have the Classic version, which pairs with your phone over bluetooth. I’m not sure how long they’ll continue to support it as they discontinued my device some years ago.

According to their stats, in 2018…

  • 15.4 Days behind the wheel
  • 9254 Miles Driven
  • Longest trip was 127 miles
  • Average 1.4 hours per weekday
  • Average fuel economy 27.6 mpg

I spent the month of August out of the country, so I only used the car 11 months of the year.