1. shawfactor: Thoughts on extending webmentions

    Great work getting webmention set up and your content marked up with microformats!

    At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website.

    The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.

    But if that is all there is to webmentions it is just a nicer implementation of Pingback.

    Pingback succeeded because it was simple. Webmention is even simpler, for good reason.

    However the current workflow is awkward and i doubt it will catch on with the general public. Sophisticated Indieweb users can and will read an article on an external site and then return to their own to post a comment, but that king of behaviour is not intuitive.

    I absolutely agree! I’m trying various different approaches to making this easier (and making web content more actionable in general), currently I’m using web action toolbelt to really quickly reply to content on other sites. There’s been a lot of discussion about this, and it’s something which everyone can work on as more people start implementing indieweb comments.

    I make the comment on the external site and as part of making the comment I add my author url, that being the url of my own site. The external site then sends a webmention of the comment to my site. My own site could then scrapes my comment and saves a copy in my CMS. Otionall  I could republish the comment in my blog or activity feed at my discretion. Thus fully implementing PESOS.

    We actually discussed this exact flow at IWCUK 2012, but no-one ever implemented it because, with browser extensions, there’s no need to log in to other people’s sites (complex to implement) and have those sites post to each other (security hole).

    Thanks for bringing these issues up, it’s great to have new people join the discussion! I’ll start documenting your points on the Indiewebcamp wiki — it’s there and on the IRC room where most discussion takes place.

  2. So I got in-stream reply contexts showing — perhaps summaries of comments next? I like Facebook’s approach of showing the last 4, a total count and a “show me more” button, which could be implemented simply as a link to the note page initially.

    Reply context stream example: http://waterpigs.co.uk/notes?tagged=reply

    Still TODO: make the ↪ a link to the in-replied-to page, add the datetime to the title for that link, remove the in-reply-to info from the bottom of in-stream notes as it’s noise now

  3. There is value to seemingly insignificant atoms of personal content (e.g. the stereotypical what I’m eating/doing/feeling right now) — providing context for more significant pieces of content; self reflection and the creation of new content molecules

  4. Aitor García Rey: I should write something about the unintended small interactions emerging in digital platforms eg. star a tweet to acknowledge wo. comment.

    @_aitor looking forward to reading it, I’m working on a comparison of the tangible outcomes of micro-interactions (like, favourite) across various different silos. Lots of work being done on likes.

  5. 2013 in numbers:

    • 2 days, 4 rooms
    • 43 Creators, 3 Apprentices participating in-person
    • > 13 people participating remotely, including 5 by video
    • 16 brainstorming sessions
    • 11 selfdogfooding demos
    • 11 hack demos
    • 38 active IRC participants (people who actually said stuff)
    • ≈60 people in IRC at any given time
    • 2718 total IRC messages
    • 176 wiki edits
    • 35090 net wiki insertions (new chars)

    Most counts either manually from the wiki or scraped from the IRC logs, which are surprisingly nicely marked up.

    I received over 20 mentions via both pingback and webmention — I’d love to hear how many others received. Likewise, if anyone has personal stats like LOC or commit counts, please leave them in the comments!

    Does anyone who was there IRL have any other stats e.g. amount of food/drink consumed? Total bandwidth/electricity usage would also be awesome to know.

  6. Zachary Kain ☯: @BarnabyWalters Ah, thanks. I'm not really server-language savvy, so I'm thinking of using RSS + IFTTT for the grunt work

    @zakkain good plan! So are you setting up posting with POSSE on your domain? Also check out the work bret.io is doing getting indieweb comments working using no server side code, and hop on on freenode if you need any help, there’s always some friendly person there :)

  7. In reply to a post on twitter.com

    @zakkain at the moment everything I post is a note or an article, both of which get POSSEd to twitter automatically by my server and then to Facebook manually if I want. Delegating to an external service, even if it’s one I manage, is probably a good long term solution, but I always want to get the syndicated URL back on my site which complicates things a little more.

    I know others are having success using IFTTT for POSSE.

  8. I’m beginning to think that I want to store two broad categories of content on my site, content which is defined by the time it occurred/is published and content which is primarily defined by some other attribute.

    Examples of content defined by time, which at the moment I’m using notes for:

    • short, tweet-like notes
    • (often) ideas
    • checkins
    • bits of personal data like , , sleep or other quantified self-type things
    • replies
    • photos
    • some longer written pieces
    • assorted other location data e.g. journeys, runs, walks

    Examples of content primarily defined by things other than time:

    • essay-like articles
    • experiments and tools
    • venues
    • profile data
    • contacts/people — although this is a tricky one which requires further experimentation
  9. Sandeep Shetty: # Liking Mutable Things On most silos where people can't edit stuff they've posted, you're liking immutable things. On the #indieweb, however, where content owners have complete control over __their__ content, you're liking things that are potentially mutable. One way to mitigate the problems of liking mutable things (like I do with #converspace) might be to quote the thing you liked along with your like post. #converspace #rssb #thinkingoutloud

    @sandeepshetty that’s the reason for reply contexts — dealing with content which changes or goes away. If you store the reply/like context then your copy of the data is always the most valuable, most complete. Otherwise it’s the copy shown on the remote site.