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. It’s @dConstruct season again and I’m looking for accommodation in Brighton in early September again. Ideally a couch to sleep on for a few days — anyone have one/can recommend one?

  3. 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.

  4. 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 :)

  5. After RSVPing the local meetup tonight, I get an email with shared signup details for wp10.wordpress.net so I can post my photos from the party to their site.

    This is another, rather bizarre example of WordPress promoting monoculture. Even funnier is this misguided quote from the email:

    If you don't already have the WordPress mobile app for your smartphone, you'll want to download it so that you can upload pictures and post to the site right from the party. It would be a good idea to add the site to your mobile app before your party so you don't have to worry about it later.

    Paraphrased: “So that you can participate TO THE MAX, post to our hosted silo and download yet another app that you’ll delete straight away”.

    Nevertheless, I plan to download the app and try it out as I’ve never used it before and WordPress UX tends to be pretty good. Perhaps then discuss the whole thing in on freenode to brainstorm a better way of doing this topic-based aggregation.

  6. Aral Balkan: So http : // twitter . com / @aral (sans spaces, of course) is a valid URL. If clients used it as a mention we’d have fully-qualified names.

    Aral Balkan current rough consensus is to use URLs as nouns, pingback (or webmention) as notification infrastructure.

    Personally I am doing some rather more complex stuff where I author notes using @-names, which get parsed by @cassisjs into .h-x-username twitter.com-linked anchors, then I transform those into .h-card’s with data either from my contacts DB (at the mo mirrored from my personal CardDAV share) or from the identengine.com API for people I don’t know. Then all the links in a note get sent pingbacks.

    Fat chance of twitter implementing that though ;)