The Definitive Location
Greg McVerry (quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com)You begin with the wrong question. Don’t write because you want “others to care” write about what you care about and if you push content those who have similar interest will find you.
David Shanske is an encyclopedia of cool stuff! Get it out there. Set a challenge to write a 150 words a day for th…
Tantek Çelik (tantek.com)I’ve posted a lot less, recently, and this past year.
As I’ve used social media less, many motivations for posting faded, replaced with questioning motivations for posting and interacting with posts publicly.
From a broader #indieweb community, technology, and social perspective, I think we must…
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
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.
Work on your #newwwyear Resolution to have a better website for 2018
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.“
I’ve been watching reruns of Quincy M.E. on local TV and tuned in to an episode from 1982 called Stolen Tears, where Martin Balsam plays a Holocaust survivor fighting a Holocaust denier, played by Norman Lloyd. Somewhat ironically, Norman Lloyd(born Norman Perlmutter) is also Jewish. I was a fan of his work on St. Elsewhere.
It put me in mind of the 1991 TV movie, Never Forget, starring the late Leonard Nimoy as Mel Mermelstein, and directed by the late Joseph Sargent. Sargent, also director of the original Taking of Pelham One Two Three(which starred Martin Balsam), died a year ago tomorrow. So I bought a copy of the movie on Amazon’s video streaming service, which I haven’t seen since the 90s, and watched it.
In the movie, based on the actual story, Mel Mermelstein is a Holocaust survivor who has a small exhibit at his place of business, and goes to schools and other groups to talk about his experiences. He attracts attention from a Holocaust denying organization and feels the need to challenge them, despite the fact that most Jewish organizations tell him to simply ignore it and not give the hate group any further ammunition. There are people who consider Nimoy’s portrayal of Mermelstein to be one of, if not his best dramatic performances.
As part of this evaluation, I am using the Indiemark system, a set of metrics for measuring the indieweb-ness of a site, and a step-by-step approach to incrementally adopting indieweb features.
Level 2
I own my own domain, and I post h-card contact info and an icon on`my page.
I have given much thought to people-focused communications, which falls under this category. Need to develop this more.
Level 1
I have set up Indieauth, which allows me to authenticate to sites using my domain name. But this exposed a bug in one of the libraries indieauth runs on, which has gone up the chain for repair. There is currently no level 2, but a level 2 may include two factor authentication, which I am trialing as a security measure…
Level 3
My Post Kinds/Taxonomy plugin supports different kinds of content. And while I support the following types, I am actually planning to limit myself due overlap.
Level 2
I syndicate(POSSE) my posts to applicable silos(Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus). I am not currently linking back to the originals, as I previously did, unless relevant, as I haven’t gotten my syndication working the way I’d like.
Level 3
It’s hard to say where I am with this. I have a UI for posting, the WordPress interface, one I created for adding context information for replies, but I’m still not happy with the UI for syndication.
I’d like to work on a simpler UI for the future. The WordPress one is very useful, but has a lot of ‘stuff’ to finish a post. Great for an article, not so great for a note.
Level 4
I have previous/next navigation, time based archives, and tag based archive pages, so I’ve covered this category as of now.
Level 4
My site is searchable using the built-in WordPress search functions.
Level 4/5.
Thanks to the work of Matthias Pfefferle, I receive webmentions and show comments and mentions from other people on my site. That achieves the notes for Level 5.
However, I’ve spent a lot of time on reply-contexts, which I am manually entering. My project continues with plans to pull in more of this information automatically, which is more of a Level 4 goal.
Level 3, but not Level 2.
I had hard-coded actions and web actions on my site. They were removed for now, as they didn’t work the way I wanted. They will likely be back.
I do provide syndication links on posts of all other places the post can be found.
Level 5/6
I serve the site now exclusively over https, and redirect anyone requesting a plain unencrypted site. The site supports SPDY for increasing speed over an SSL site.
The site has an A rating with Qualysis SSL Labs. It uses an SHA-2 certificate and supports Mozilla’s Intermediate Compatability Cipher List. This makes it fairly up to date in this category, but I am holding out for the A+.
This site is also now delivered over IPV6 as well as IPV4.
The site runs on Nginx, and uses a caching system I wrote.
One of the most interesting things about getting involved in this group has been building things. I have always loved making things, and have never been good at it. I still think I am a reasonably good idea person, but a horrible programmer.
I still have 4 days in 2014, if I want to build something else.
The author of this piece suggests it is the greatest Jewish action movie of all time, and I’m not quite sure about that. But it has some great lines.
Eight candles we’ll burn and a Ninth one too
Every New Year that comes and goes
Chanukah concludes tonight.
