Preparing to board Cathay Pacific flight 845 to Hong Kong. I am not yet confirmed for my connecting flight. Sadly, no internet on board.
Tomorrow I am going to be once again spending time in Manila. It has been on my mind lately, as it is a long journey and a hard trip. But, I intend to make the best of it and be as productive as possible.
I’m going away for a month, and called Chris Aldrich to talk about things I’m interested in, and what I might work on for the next few weeks as I’m in a hotel room.
Your Endpoint Did Not Return a Location Header
There have been some issues with Quill and other services advising that the WordPress Micropub endpoint did not return a Location header. There seems to be some confusion about this, which is partly because the message is a bit technical. One individual thought that this was related to Simple Location.
This indicates an error on the part of the Micropub plugin. Regrettably, in addition to not displaying the error response prominently, the Micropub specification dictates that the error response returns one of 4 error codes, and may return a human readable error description to assist the client developer in understanding the error, but is not meant to be shown to the end user.
This does not account for errors on the endpoint side that may need to be debugged. Currently, the WordPress plugin that creates the endpoint does not surface error messages on its side either to allow you to figure this out.
Better error messaging to the end-user on one side or the other seems to be a common issue amongst Indieweb tools to help them figure out the issue.
The most common issue that explains the failure is an inability to associate the URL with the user account. There are two versions of the software that does this.
- In the IndieAuth plugin, to ensure accuracy, the plugin passes the WordPress user ID in the return to ensure that it can find it.
- If you don’t have the IndieAuth plugin installed, the Micropub plugin uses an external IndieAuth endpoint instead of a built-in one, and the following techniques to find the WordPress user from your URL
- If you have the Indieweb plugin installed, it looks in its settings for the default author on a single author site.
- If you are using the URL of your author post archive, usually /author/username it will try to use that to get your username and therefore your user ID
- If you have set a website URL in your profile, it will try to use that. Please make sure your website URL uses https if your website does, as this has caused some issues in matching.
In both plugins, we continue to improve the functionality in this case and I often port ideas that improved functionality in one version into the other, as they are both authorize Micropub using IndieAuth, but in the case of the Indieauth plugin, it also implements the IndieAuth functionality.
Right now, I’m working on improvements to the Micropub plugin to improve the error handling, among other things, and hopefully this will help.
Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)I’m also going to make a strong argument in the open source Known community that syndication should be limited to webhooks going forward. In other words, third parties will be able to create microservices with a standard API, which your Known or other indieweb-compatible site will be able to connect to. You could click a button to notify those services (or have your site do it automatically). But any kind of API maintenance would be taken out of the core code or official plugins. Not only is life too short, but it’s long past time to stop building code on top of centralized silos of content.
I have to agree with Ben. The Micropub plugin for WordPress triggers a WordPress hook based on syndication targets and I’m working on a compatible system for the Post Editor, so that the UI doesn’t need to know how the item is POSSEd.
This is because I also don’t want to deal with silo interfaces most of the time.
Nothing like a Catskills show.
A excitement packed Saturday night.
In this episode, Chris and I recap our takeaways and stories from the Indieweb Summit 2018 last month in Portland, Oregon, discuss Microsub, Vouch, and other ideas.