Tag: administrative note

Courtesy of the fantastic web magic of Ryan Barrett‘s Brid.gy and the hard work of Jamie Tanna to create the integration, I can now post my RSVPs for Meetup.com events directly on my WordPress website and syndicate (POSSE) my response to Meetup!

Hooray for open web standards and the IndieWeb! 🎉

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Today I accidentally realized that both the WordPress Micropub server and the Post Kinds plugin support read-status values of “to-read”, “reading”, and “finished”. I’ve managed to tweak my PESOS work flow with Goodreads.com to also include these experimental pieces using the following additional snippets of code appended to the “Body” fields I’ve described before:

&read-status=to-read
&read-status=reading
&read-status=finished

I’ve added one of the three snippets to the appropriate IFTTT.com recipes for  Goodreads feeds to create the appropriate output. Here’s the first post I’ve made using the new recipe for bookmarking a book I’d like to read: https://boffosocko.com/2020/02/15/meditations-marcus-aurelius/.

Previously I’ve been using simple notes to create read posts for books and just adding a “read” category to give me more control over the data in the posts. (I only used read posts previously for online articles.) Now that I’ve got the ability to provide some better differentiation for my progress, I think I’ll switch to using read posts for all my reading (books and articles).

Incidentally following IndieBookClub.biz and Indigenous for Android which added support for these earlier today, my method may be the third to use these microformats in the wild. Thanks to gRegor Morrill, Kristof De Jaeger, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, and Charlotte Allen for their prior work, experimentation, code, and examples for allowing me to get this working on my website. 

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

Extra Feeds Plugin for WordPress

David Shanske has built a simple new IndieWeb friendly plugin for WordPress.

For individual posts, the Extra Feeds plugin will add code into the <header> of one’s page to provide feed readers that have built-in discovery mechanisms the ability to find the additional feeds provided by WordPress for all the tags, categories, and other custom taxonomies that appear on any given page. 

Without the plugin, WordPress core will generally only provide the main feed for your site and that of your comments feed. This is fine for sites that only post a few times a day or even per week. If you’re owning more of the content you post online on your own website as part of the IndieWeb or Domain of One’s Own movements, you’ll likely want more control for the benefit of your readers.

In reality WordPress provides feeds for every tag, category, or custom taxonomy that appears on your site, it just doesn’t advertise them to feed readers or other machines unless you add them manually or via custom code or a plugin. Having this as an option can be helpful when you’re publishing dozens of posts a day and your potential readers may only want a subsection of your posting output.

In my case I have a handful of taxonomies that post hundreds to thousands of items per year, so it’s more likely someone may want a subsection of my content rather than my firehose. In fact, I just ran across a statistician yesterday who was following just my math and information theory/biology related posts. With over 7,000 individual taxonomy entries on my site you’ve got a lot of choice, so happy hunting and reading!

This plugin also includes feeds for Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have that plugin installed), and the author feed for sites with one or more different authors.

This is useful in that now while you’re on any particular page and want to subscribe to something on that specific page, it will be much easier to find those feeds, which have always been there, but are just not easily uncovered by many feed reader work flows because they weren’t explicitly declared.

Some examples from a recent listen post on my site now let you more easily find and subscribe to:

  • my faux-cast:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich &raquo; listen Kind Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/rss/" />
  • the feed of items tagged with Econ Extra Credit, which I’m using to track my progress in Marketplace’s virtual book club:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich &raquo; Econ Extra Credit Tag Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/tag/econ-extra-credit/feed/rss/" />
  • the feed for all posts by an author:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Chris Aldrich &raquo; Posts by Chris Aldrich Feed" href="https://boffosocko.com/author/chrisaldrich/feed/rss/" />

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich

For Homebrew Website Club Wednesday, even though I didn’t make it to an in-person meetup I did manage to make some reasonable visible progress on my website.

I hacked together some tweaks to add the following:

  • Improved support in my theme for time related microformats including dt-published and dt-updated
  • Because I post so frequently, I added a visible timestamp next to the date so it’s easier to follow my timeline of posts.
  • I removed the data for my location, weather, and syndication links from the_body of my posts and appended it to my post meta data. This should prevent it from showing up in Webmentions to others’ websites or in syndicated copies, but still be available to parsers to attach that data to my posts in readers and other services.
  • I modified my CSS so that the text in the Simple Location and Syndication Links plugins matches that of the rest in its section.
  • I added a cute little bullhorn icon in front of my Syndication Links so that it has some parallelism with the rest of the meta data on my site.
  • I’d always liked the idea of adding in related posts data on my site, but didn’t like how it had worked in the past. Things were even worse with replying to other people’s posts as my markup (and far too many others I’ve seen in the WordPress world) was hacky and caused the related posts data to show up in their Webmentions sent to other sites. I looked through some of Jetpack’s documentation and figured out how to remove their Related Posts functionality from the_body, where it defaults, and append it instead to the post meta section of my posts. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s much closer to how I’d like it. Best of all, that data shouldn’t show up in my replies to other sites now either! I had disabled the functionality ages ago because it made me feel like a rude-IndieWebber.

With IndieWebCamp Online 2020 coming up this weekend, I hope to fix a few outstanding issues and roll these changes up into my open sourced IndieWeb Twenty Fifteen WordPress theme as my hackday project. If you’re using it on your own site, do let me know. Not that I can promise to fix it if it’s broken in places, but I’d at least like to know how it’s working out for you or where it could be improved.

Things left over to fix:

  • Simple Location data still needs some CSS help to display the way I want it to.
  • I need to target the Simple Location icon so I can have its color match that of the other icons.
  • Because so many of my posts don’t have titles, I’ll need to tweak something there so that the Jetpack related posts will pick up better meta data as a pseudo-title instead of displaying the relatively context-less commentary that appears in the_body. 
  • It may take a day or two for the related posts to populate properly, but I should make sure that it’s putting out relevant/interesting results.
  • Is it worth adding a default featured photo for the related posts that don’t have one? Could I pull one from other meta fields for some classes of posts?

This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich