Week: 17

Map

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.

Episode 3: Syndication


This podcast is partly being used to develop Indieweb podcasting tools for WordPress. As a result, it will get better each time I post. At the time of this post, there was no direct download option being generated, so if there is one here now, I’ve upgraded. Also, duration is missing. But unlike previous episodes, the system will now autogenerate the enclosure for RSS feeds, so you can subscribe. 

The current podcast feed on this site can be found in a variety of ways.

Co-Host: Chris Aldrich of Boffosocko.com

Show Notes

Facebook has announced ending publishing by API…and David is thinking about what it means for the community and his current project.

History:

ThinkUP from Anil Dash and Gina Trapani ultimately died trying to fight the API wars with various social silos. They spent all their time trying to keep up with no guarantee that the silos would cooperate. All their engineering resources were spent trying to keep up instead of innovating on a stable platform.

Related IndieWeb wiki pages

WordPress Plugins:

Deprecating and Replacing Bridgy Publish for WordPress

I’ve decided to take a different direction for the Bridgy plugin for WordPress. I’ve never quite been able to explain to people it doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a user interface for the Bridgy service. I’ve decided that the best thing to do is to is to change the approach radically.

Bridgy is a service that integrates with various sites…Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Github, and sends back comments, likes, etc to the original copies of the same posts on your site. There are a few similar services I’ve integrated with. It also has a feature called Publish where it allows you to syndicate your posts to those services.

This is something of an arms race, as APIs change all the time. Sometimes, there is no official established API. Ryan Barrett, the creator of Bridgy, announced in a blog post this week that due to Facebook API changes scheduled to take effect on August 1st, the Publish features of Bridgy for Facebook would be discontinued at the same time.

I’m writing this partly to lay out my plan in my mind as I’m working on writing this now. I’ve gone through a few different versions of this idea before settling on this.

The Bridgy plugin consists of two parts: The first part is a UI that is added to the post editor that consists of a series of checkboxes, and the corresponding code that triggers the same action from a post made over Micropub. The second part was added last summer, and is basically a registration page for registering for Bridgy.

I’ve opened an issue for discussion on whether I should move the second part into the main Indieweb plugin. Newcomers to the Indieweb could install the plugin, register for Bridgy inside it, and instantly start getting backfeed from other sites.

That brings us to the first part. The checkboxes. They will need to be rewritten, if I want them to continue, for the new post editor, Gutenberg, at some point. But, I don’t just want to syndicate via Bridgy. I want to syndicate to anywhere I can or choose to integrate in, both using the WordPress post editor and Micropub.

So, I’ve decided to integrate the top level of this, the logic that gets a request for syndication from the post editor or Micropub, inside Syndication Links.

Syndication Links displays icons which link to syndicated copies of posts. You’ll see them on this post. I keep adding in integrations to other plugins as people ask. I have Mastodon Auto Post, Keyring Social Importer, Medium, Social Network Auto Poster, and a few more. And I’ll likely continue to look at plugins that syndicate to other sites, figure out where they store their data, and display it as part of this plugin.

But now, this second part will expand the plugin into this territory of being a middleman for actually syndicating content. This is similar to what I did in Simple Location, where I have a series of providers for weather, location, maps, etc. and anyone could write a plugin(though only I have so far) that adds another provider.

To start, the first provider I’ll be including will be a rewritten version of Bridgy Publish, as well as my plan to add Indienews, as both are triggered by sending a webmention to a site.

At the point that I finish the alternative with feature parity to the existing code, I will discontinue development on the separate Bridgy plugin. It will mean one less plugin to maintain. Anyone who does not want to use the new features in Syndication Links…they will be off by default to start with.

It also means that, if I wanted to, I could add native publishing support for services in future. While there are certainly no end of Twitter/Facebook/etc plugins for WordPress, none of them quite understand syndicating a favorite to Twitter doesn’t mean a new tweet, it means something else. I can continue to write integrations for other plugins, or add new providers myself.

Not saying I’m going to do that. I’m only committing to what I’ve said above.

Finally, to all of you who liked the Bridgy Publish plugin…I’m curious to hear your comments on this. Bear in mind, I built the Bridgy Publish plugin to use it, and I still never migrated myself over to it. I would like to finally leave what I am using, and this would mean I could change providers without changing interfaces if I ever add something in future.

How I Set Up My Indieweb WordPress Site – 2018 Edition

This is an update to my 2014 article on how I set up my WordPress site. It was requested I update it.

Standard Plugins

  1. Character Count for Post Content and Excerpt(Link) – Because I need to be aware of the 140 character limit of Twitter, one of the services I send my content to, I need to know the character count of what I’m typing. This adds that to my editing screen. No longer using this plugin and could not find a replacement.
  2. EWWW Image Optimizer(Link) – It reduces file sizes for images to ensure faster loading
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. WordPress SEO by Yoast(Link) – While I’m not obsessive about Search Engine Optimization, I find this plugin assists in my writing by reminding me about the importance of certain elements. While this is still a popular plugin and good for many people, it’s become a bit too aggressive for me.
  6. 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.
  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.
  9. Series(Link) – Creates a simple taxonomy called ‘Series’. I added this to my site to allow creating series of articles.
  10. WP Photo Sphere(Link) – For the rare occasions that I post 360 degree images. Rare as in I’ve only posted one.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Home Assistant for WordPress(Link) – I use Home Assistant for my Home Automation integration. Since it has an API, I wrote this simple plugin. While at the moment, I hope to add the ability to display information from any sensor and to update a sensor on the Home Assistant side from WordPress, 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.

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.
  • Semantic Comments(Link) – One of my own plugins. It changes the display of WordPress comments based on the information from Semantic Linkbacks. It presents the profile pictures in a Facepile for the various types of mentions with the comments separately below. This functionality has now been rolled into Semantic Linkbacks and is even better than it was.
  • Indieweb Taxonomy(Link) – Semantic Linkbacks is all about receiving webmentions for the various semantic types. But this plugin, another one of mine(although I credit several with contributions), adds new terms to WordPress posts for responding to content on another site. So, a post on this site can be a reply to another site, a like, etc. It will automatically send a webmention to the other site, if that site supports it, of course. Replaced by Post Kinds
  • Post Kinds (Link) – This replaced Indieweb Taxonomy. It is 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.
  • H-Card Tools – Still under development and not yet available for download, this is just the profile widget marked up appropriately, in the sidebar of the site. Some of this was rolled into the Indieweb plugin
  • Indieweb Plugin(Link) – The Indieweb plugin is not only a plugin installer, but it contains tools for adding rel-me links based on your profile, declaring the default author for your site, and adding a simple h-card widget to show off a primary author.

A Few Choices

  • There is an alternative to my Syndication Links plugin…a plugin called WordPress Syndication (Link).  It automatically adds the links to the post, and extracts the data from a variety of sources that post to other sites. This includes NextScripts Social Network Auto-Poster(Link) or Mailchimp’s Social plugin(Link), and even Bridgy(we’ll get back to Bridgy in a moment).
  • The theme I use is a custom one I built, but the most popular theme for Indieweb sites is Sempress(Link). My theme isn’t quite refined, but if you want it, a copy can be downloaded here. The version in use on my site is just a colored version of the minimal style the theme offers. I am currently using a fork of the WordPress Twenty-Sixteen theme(link) I modified for Microformats and support of the plugins I use.

Bridgy

Bridgy is not a WordPress plugin, or something you need to install(although you can host it yourself). 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.

Bridgy is a service that you can link your accounts on places like Twitter, Github and Facebook 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.

To the Future

I enjoy developing this site as a learning tool. I hadn’t done much WordPress development before this and it is very useful to know.

For anyone who comes here considering trying my setup, I’m always available to help. For those who are trying my plugins…they are still being refined, but feedback and contributions(of code) are appreciated.

This site is under development, so it does change regularly. I will often summarize some of the changes with a post, but sometimes not.

Bookmarked 15 People Hospitalized After Carbon Monoxide Scare Following Passover Seder (newyork.cbslocal.com)

A Westchester County family had gathered for a traditional Passover meal, but carbon monoxide was an uninvited guest and 15 people ended up in the hospital.

A miracle no one was hurt. But a good reminder for you to check your carbon monoxide detectors and smoke detectors.