Building on the momentum from this weekend’s IndieWeb Camp, I’m staying on in Amsterdam for View Source 2019 to hear the all the latest best practices in building for the web.
Category: Web/Internet
Photo Gallery as Post
I take a lot of photos, certainly with the smartphone I always have in my pocket but also often with an actual camera (my well-traveled Sony a6000). Casual shots often end up being shared in isolation via SMS, Slack or social media, while special events or travels generally end up with an album of selected photos on Flickr. As part of exploring a more IndieWeb way of sharing what I’m up to via my own personal site, I began to wonder how to integrate into that my established photo workflows.
That turned into a lively discussion at this week’s IndieWeb Camp Amsterdam, with some great suggestions from folks already bringing their photos into their posting stream. IndieWeb post types include ‘photo’ which is perfect for casual photos taken along the way, but I didn’t want a collection of twenty of thirty pictures from an organized album to turn into a long string of individual photo posts. And there is no ‘photo gallery’, which could either directly represent an album of my photos on Flickr, or gather a set of ‘photo’ posts as a single, aggregate one. A simple compromise we reached during the IndieWeb Camp discussion is to create a general ‘note’ post that links to the Flickr album.
One happy by product of this conversation was hearing that many people like using Flickr for their personal photo collections, and that Flickr has an excellent API for scripted access. That offers possibilities for future more automated or micropub integration, but I’ll begin now with the manual way and see what I learn as I go. Stay tuned for my first test of that…
IndieWeb Summit 2019 – Hack Day Recap
Today is day two of IndieWeb Summit 2019, emphasizing hands-on experimentation to learn more about the IndieWeb, improve your web site, and/or help other folks with their own projects. My goal for the day was to resolve a number of the issues I was having getting core IndieWeb functionality working with my WordPress based blog. Thanks to some great help from David Shanske and Jack Jamieson (plus the power of hands-on tinkering), here’s what I accomplished:
- Adopted a WordPress theme that’s both fully compatible with IndieWeb protocols and microformats and visually appealing to me. Specifically I installed and switched to IW26 — David Shanske’s fork of the WordPress 2016 standard theme.
- Enabled support for IndieAuth, WebMention and MicroPublish endpoints by adding the right <link> elements to my home page. As part of that learned how to use the Microformats parser on microformats.io to examine and debug my own settings.
- Set up an .htaccess file in my site’s home directory with rules to properly handle redirection to https: and to dereference the www. prefix to site URLs. Made the appropriate matching adjustments in WordPress and my Dreamhost admin panel.
- Developed a better understanding of WordPress Post Kinds (after all, David wrote the plugin), customized the set to fit what I’m likely to use when I post, and tested a few.
- Added rel-me connections to my blog for Flickr and Instagram using the WordPress widget.
- Tested use of Quill as a micropublishing client. Successfully posted a note to my blog from Quill in Firefox on an Android phone.
- Tested WebMention support thanks to Jack, resulting in a series of comments on our respective sites (and also highlighting a formatting bug he was able to fix on his custom WordPress theme with some help from David).
- Added Syndication Link support and tested it by posting a review to TripAdvisor.com and a companion note on my blog reference that review.
This got me over the WordPress vs. IndieWeb theme problem I’d been struggling with and hoped to resolve today, and a lot more overall IndieWeb functionality as a bonus. Thanks to David & Jack’s help I’m comfortable asserting that you can satisfyingly bring IndieWeb to a WordPress site, though more compatible themes and onboarding resources would both be big wins.
The ninth annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, graphic artists, designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, create and improve their personal websites, and build upon each others creations.
IndieWeb Summit 2019 is happening the weekend of June 29-30 in Portland Oregon and I’m planning on being there. I’m not exactly ready, though, as I still haven’t figured out how to properly converge my exceptionally sporadic social posting habits and my WordPress-based (and decidedly old school) web site, but then that seems like a particularly good reason for attending IndieWeb Summit in the first place. Wish me luck…
(This is an example, and my test case, for implementing IndieWeb RSVP support on my blog so I can sign up to attend an event through the event web page itself, all powered by the magic of the IndieWeb. Go look at that event page and you’ll see my RSVP, complete with my picture!)
I’m spending the day today at IndieWebCamp SF Decentralized Web Hackers Day hosted in Mozilla’s San Francisco office as a lead-up to this week’s Distributed Web Summit. My personal adventure today is getting up to speed on IndieWeb basics and enabling as many of them here on orangemoose.com as time (and trial & error) allows.
Decentralization is one of the core aspects of the IndieWeb, which aims at enabling a people-focused alternative to today’s very (if not alarmingly) centralized “corporate web”, but doing so by applying familiar, existing technologies in careful ways that keep the user in control of their data including identity, posts, code, created content, location, and more.
Happily today’s Hackers Day is set up to encourage hands-on experimentation and adoption, and the room is full of wonderfully knowledgeable people eager to help. Look for another post after the day is done, and we’ll see how well I do.