Having a conversation

If I want to have a conversation with someone, how should I go about doing that? If I read a post by someone and want to respond, should I try writing my own comment and linking to their site to see if they have webmention support? Should I try to comment directly on their site? What about contacting them on IRC? What if they aren’t on IRC right then?How do I decide how the person wants to be contacted? (look at their h-card info?) It is a bit confusing to me.

Following other sites

Another area of interest is how to follow what other people are posting. Do IndieWeb sites have feeds, and how do I find them? I looked at my own site, and realized to my horror that there was nothing there indicating my feeds! I hurriedly looked through my WordPress widgets, found the one with the RSS feeds, and added that to my home page. I am also interested in seeing if my theme supports other types of feeds based on posts. Since there is a status post, I wonder if the theme creates a feed with just status posts, or if the theme supports feeds for categories. Jeena from Sweden writes about the “indie feed reader” problem. I installed Tiny Tiny RSS, then started adding some IndieWeb sites, and saw that Aaron Parecki, Amber Case, and Tantek Celik do not appear to produce feeds from their sites. I looked around on the IndieWebCamp site, and saw pages on feeds, feed readers, and using microformat parsers to read/follow websites that use microformat markup. Whew! It looks like there are lots of options, but nothing that is very user-friendly. Maybe that means there is an opportunity here…

Curating the web

Finally I am interested in tools to help me curate the web. I currently follow Dave Winer’s River of News web site, where he publishes “rivers” of RSS content on various topics. When I look at these rivers on my Samsung Galaxy S3 using Google Chrome, I scan through the list of news items, and create a new tab for items I want to read. If I want to keep a record of an article or post, I share the URL to Todo.txt, then edit my todo.txt file and copy those links to another text file that I have on my PC. If I am reading articles on my PC and find something that I want to record, I copy the link to my text file, and usually try to copy the title of the article or write a comment below the link to describe what it is. If I want to find something, I do a search of the text file with whatever terms I can remember. I don’t do any tagging or any other categorization, so this is primarily a link dump. I would like to do more in this area. I would also like to be able to publish rivers on my site. I know about Planet and Sam Ruby’s Venus. I am using Venus to power a river of news for one of my websites, but again it was not as user-friendly as I would like, and had problems in displaying embedded videos. Again, maybe there is an opportunity here…