1. New in this version of :

    • Improved styling (still WIP, as always)
    • stream on homepage, currently just notes but will add other things too
    • content creation/editing UIs publicly viewable (take a peek!)
    • profile photo as the icon
    • complete code restructure, now using silex for HTTP routing
    • removed tonnes of nonsense framework code, replaced with small number of ≈200 line functional libraries. Clearer, easier to navigate and much more fun to work with
    • no more SQL databases — content is indexed using a custom built 209 LOC CSV index which is surprisingly speedy, and suits my needs perfectly
    • no more support for rendering content in many forms using content negotiation (HTML, JSON, ATOM etc.) — now only HTML+microformats2 representations of content are given
    • ATOM feed shimmed with microformats2 to ATOM converter
    • Pingbacks no longer natively accepted (though they are sent), using webmention.io to shim them into webmentions for easier handling

    The local maximum has been overcome, for now. There is still much to do.

  2. Indiereader

    goal: by 2014-01-01, no longer be using twitter.com to read+reply to my friends’ content.

    It’s already possible to use web action toolbelt to add indieweb reply/bookmark buttons to twitter.com and weave to expand POSSEd copies into full posts, but I think that’s as far as the “progressively enhance the twitter UI for indieweb support” train goes. Remaining pain points:

    • Ads and other UI noise
    • Lack of good search
    • Lack of control over timeline — lists, following and blocking are the only ways to control what you see
    • Very weird in-timeline threaded conversation view

    Pieces in place allowing a seamless transition from using twitter.com:

    • A whole bunch of indiewebcampers publishing their notes+articles on their own sites using microformats2
    • An open source microformats2 parser
    • App.net mark up notes with microformats2 h-entry and h-card
    • h-card and xfn for follow lists, e.g. my contact list
    • Shim to parse twitter.com into microformats2 data
    • twitter-activitystreams to consume personal twitter feed as microformats2

    Pain points still to be resolved:

    • How to fall back to subscribing to someone’s twitter feed if they don’t publish their notes on their own site?
    • Whether or not to support ATOM+RSS — sure there’s a lot of it around, but it’s a nightmare, and I don’t want to encourage publishing invisible DRY-violating data. Perhaps superfeedr’s normalisation will be of use
    • What to do about all the wordpress blogs around with half-baked microformats support — auto-detect and use their ATOM feed? Try to find a related twitter account?
  3. A bottom-up, building blocks approach to interoperability makes the barrier to entry small and the value large, as opposed to a monolithic all-or-nothing protocol approach, which demands compliance due to its implementation’s incapability of gracefully handling partial support.

    Building blocks give creators freedom to implement what’s important to them in the order it makes most sense, getting positive feedback from low hanging fruit and making complex tasks managable.

    Stop designing protocols. Create building blocks.

  4. v0.2.0 update to php-mf2 (BREAKING CHANGES) contains lots of goodness, including

    • support for the new, safe, consistent e-* property parsing rules
    • improved API, parsing mf2 from HTML now only requires one function call
    • PSR-0 namespace update (mf2Mf2)
    • improvements to the way classic microformats are supported
    • vastly improved documentation

    Go get it now from Packagist, or try it out at pin13.net/mf2

  5. “…disruptive technologies don’t start out better than established technologies, as would seem intuitive, they start out worse. But for all their faults in comparison with entrenched, established competitors, there’s something radically different that opens whole new opportunities, and makes them disruptive.”

    — para-meta-quoted from Not Real Programming

    I’m aware the d-word is taboo, but I can’t help but think this perfectly describes and , as well as the reactions many people have to them.

  6. Marcus Povey: Thoughts: Simple distributed friend/follow/subscribe scheme

    @mapkyca nice brainstorming, loving the idea of key discovery for private content! (I publish a link to my PGP key on my homepage, if you want to test it out :)

    Have you had a look at PuSH v0.4? It’s way simpler than old PuSH and is no longer strongly tied to RSS/ATOM content.

    Note also that the “argh my little site got popular and is dying” thing can be solved even with your simpler system, by making the endpoint an external service. Woo hypermedia discovery over well-known URLs!

  7. myOpenID.com is dead. OpenID is dead. Long live Web Sign-In.

    I got an email saying the service will end on 2014-02-01, but the site appears to be down already. janrain.com, the company who apparently ran myOpenID, is also down, so I can’t find a “goodbye” post. Here’s the notification email:

    I wanted to reach out personally to let you know that we have made the decision to end of life the myOpenID service. myOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014.

    In 2006 Janrain created myOpenID to fulfill our vision to make registration and login easier on the web for people. Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards. And now, billions of people who have created accounts with these services can use their identities to easily register and login to sites across the web in the way myOpenID was intended.

    By 2009 it had become obvious that the vast majority of consumers would prefer to utilize an existing identity from a recognized provider rather than create their own myOpenID account. As a result, our business focus changed to address this desire, and we introduced social login technology. While the technology is slightly different from where we were in 2006, I’m confident that we are still delivering on our initial promise – that people should take control of their online identity and are empowered to carry those identities with them as they navigate the web.

    For those of you who still actively use myOpenID, I can understand your disappointment to hear this news and apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. To reduce this inconvenience, we are delaying the end of life of the service until February 1, 2014 to give you time to begin using other identities on those sites where you use myOpenID today.

    Speaking on behalf of Janrain, I truly appreciate your past support of myOpenID.