Week: 09

Map
Replied to Identifying Post Kinds in WordPress RSS Feeds (danq.me)

I use the Post Kinds plugin to streamline the management of the different types of posts I make on my blog, based on the IndieWeb post types list: articles, like this one, are “conventional” blog posts, but I also publish notes (which are analogous to “tweets”), reposts (“shares” of thin…

I like the idea of adding the kind of post to the RSS feed to identify it, although not everyone will. I’ve opened an issue to remind myself to explore a version of it in future. Working on a major change to the plugin now.

Planning out the Next Generation of Post Kinds

I’ve been working on the Post Kinds plugin for several years now. It allows the enhancement of WordPress posts into the Indieweb types of posts.

But in the current environment, the question I keep getting asked is: When will it support Gutenberg, the WordPress block editor?

This is something of a problem for me as I do not know how this would work. I really need to talk it out with someone more embedded in the Gutenberg world and see what ideas come.

So, to prepare for that, I need to make a major shift in the way I have Post Kinds set up to disconnect further what happens on the frontend to what happens on the backend. And since Gutenberg uses the REST API to get data, I need to add an endpoint to work with this.

So, there are a few experiments in this regard I am working on. In a previous version of Post Kinds, I switched from storing metadata about a photo in the photo post to storing it in the attachment. WordPress uses a custom post type for attachments to store information about video, audio, images, etc.

This means you can edit the attachment, and separately attach it to the post. So, one of the first things I want to do is enhance that, and add the ‘citation’ post type I’ve been contemplating.

Loosely inspired by the old WordPress links manager, this would store the metadata for individual URLs. It would be necessary as I want to be able to turn my website into a Pinboard-esque bookmark archive. Not every bookmark is to be shared in my feed, or even public.

So, ones that are shared would be attached to a post, similar to the way attachments are. But otherwise could be addressed as simply bookmarks.

Over the last week, I experimented heavily with a simple fields API to generate the forms fields by configuring an array. The idea here is to define the fields I need for any given post kind, and therefore generate them automatically, rather thanm writing templates.

So, both of these ideas are elements of what I want to build. The challenge is the UI to bring these pieces together. It is going to require some trial and error on my part to get it right.

Right now, after having merged in the Fields file, which I will eventually hook up to the form interfaces, I will be finishing the Citation Edit UI, and then seeing how I can link that to posts, taking the attachment model.

Then working on how to properly save and edit the combined post.

Thoughts?

RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp Online

IndieWebCamp Online 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.

RSVPed Attending IndieWebCamp New Haven

IndieWebCamp New Haven 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.

Thinking about Bridging

I am writing this post on my phone, which is a challenge in itself.

But at Indiewebcamp Austin this past weekend, I was trying to explain the realization that I had back at the Summit in June.

Bridgy, the prime example of that, was launched in Indieweb form in December 2013. It creates a bridge between Indieweb protocols and proprietary APIs. So you can post on your site, post the same on another site like Twitter(or ask Bridgy to do it for you). And any responses are sent back using Indieweb protocols.

This philosophy encourages inclusivity. It connects those trying to adopt Indieweb principles to those who don’t know what that is seamlessly.

Building these connections between the Indieweb and other systems means you don’t have to give up those systems to join the Indieweb.

Other similar initiatives cannot say that they place such a priority on this. It is a better way to build. It has brought people to the community in my opinion.

The Indieweb principles of modularity suggests you build your platform on pieces that can be swapped out. This was referring to devices, storage methods, etc.

Several large companies are collaborating on the Data Transfer Project, to allow you to move your data from one platform to another with one click.. but they aren’t necessarily thinking about syncing to keep usable backups in multiple places.

But between it and plurality, which suggests we encourage a variety of approaches and implementations, we didn’t as a community explain our principles of connecting things even if they don’t follow these principles. We have just done it.

I have come across this in trying to help implement a Microsub endpoint, which turns any input into the same format, so you can read it in a client that doesn’t have to know about the original format.

Trying to turn RSS, Jsonfeed, Microformats, etc into a single type of output is a challenge I am still working on. But I could go farther with that.

If you make everything interoperate, you don’t have to cut yourself off from one group, one data source, etc. You can bring everything together and the part of it that is yours is still under your control.

Indigenous for Android now supports a feature that was added in the version of Simple Location I just released. As part of the recent private geofencing feature I released, it now sends when the location is not to be disclosed to Indigenous, who sets it the interface appropriately(though it can still be overridden). Also released a few minor bugfixes.
Replied to https://micro.blog/the/2470134 by the the (micro.blog)

@dshanske Hmmm, Siri says my elevation is “about 42m.” Does that vary during the day with the tide? Does it vary over the lunar month? (Enquiring minds and all that.)

The altitude reading on phones is not necessarily the most precise and can vary. It is GPS based, with some calculations done. I compared it to the altitude showing on the in-flight map and it isn’t that close. When there is no altitude data, my website actually uses an elevation API to provide an estimated altitude. For example, it is estimating my house is 29 meters above sea level, but I don’t display altitude unless it is significant.
Replied to https://micro.blog/nitinkhanna/2469677 by nitinkhannanitinkhanna (micro.blog)

@dshanske I was just pulling your leg! Whenever I think about interesting features on blogs, these two names come up, and now yours. How does private geofencing work?

Well, geofencing is the idea of triggering an event when something enters, leaves, or is inside an area. The biggest issue I had with adding my location to posts was that sometimes, I didn’t want to be specific as to where I was. Now, if you are inside one of these zones, it will hide the actual location automatically and replace it with a text description, such as ‘Home’, or ‘Work’. (Like this post on my website).