I made it to the Portland Homebrew Website meeting in Portland yesterday evening. This was my first time to attend, and I enjoyed the discussions. I said that I was approaching things from the user point of view, that I have just started adding IndieWeb features to my WordPress website, and that I felt I could add value by writing up my experiences and creating screencasts. The video link between Portland and San Francisco was nice to have, but the sound part wasn’t too good. Overall, everyone was very welcoming. Thanks to Mozilla for hosting!

One topic I asked about was the POSSE concept, and how that contrasts with people’s use of IRC. My observation was that some people do not post often on their site, but spend a lot of time talking with people on IRC. I thought that Aaron Parecki’s explanation of IRC as “quick communication” was good.

I have only been working on IndieWeb stuff for a few weeks, so some things (like IRC and Twitter) are still a little new to me. I’ll keep working on it, though!

This is a test of the Webmention plugin for WordPress. Here is a link to another post.

I have created a short screencast below to show how to install and test the Webmention plugin for WordPress, feedback is welcome!

 

 

I am testing webmentions on my site, I am linking back to another post.

Thanks to Kartik Prahbu on the IndieWebCamp IRC channel for posting a webmention to one of my posts, I was able to see the comment in my moderation panel!

I did have a question about my testing, and I am adding this information to hopefully get some help from others.

Looking at my curl response, I wonder why it would have a 404 Not Found message even though I was able to see the webmention comment. Here is a screenshot:

 

Any comments?

Matt is working on testing webmentions, let’s see if this makes it back!

 

IndieAuth is an alternative authentication system to OpenID. It allows you to use your own website as a login mechanism. My first step in using IndieAuth was to be able to log into the IndieWebCamp website. I checked the HTML for my Bio widget, and saw that my links to Twitter, Github and LinkedIn had the proper rel=me links per this IndieWebCamp page . I was then able to create my user page.

I then followed the instructions at https://indieauth.com/#documentation to allow users to sign into my website. To set this up, I added a Text widget with the following text:

After moving the widget to just below my Bio widget, it looks like this:

I then tested this with my domain (http://andysylvester.com). I saw that I was able to authenticate with one of my social network identities, but then I was directed to some other page that did not mean much to me:

I then clicked on the link within the page, but it took me to the IANA main site – ugh.

Finally, I installed the IndieAuth WordPress plugin and repeated the above steps from my form, and saw the same results. However, I saw a difference in my WordPress login page after activating the plugin:

 

I entered my domain and was able to authenticate, but then got a message that I did not have an account associated with that website. I will have to look more into this topic.

 

When I installed the FavePersonal theme for my weblog, it included the Social plugin for WordPress. I did some experiments with the Twitter broadcast mode, making posts using the Status tab in the editor.

 

I entered text and a URL at the end, but my weblog did not display the link as active:

 

The link did appear active in Twitter, though:

 

Next, I entered text and a link again, and this one did display the link on the weblog:

 

I think that the problem was that there was a colon before the link in the first example, I will have to perform some more tests for that problem.

I also decided to change the template for the tweet. Here is how the initial default setting appears in the Social settings page:

 

The format is:

{title}: {content} {url}

This resulted in this tweet:

I decided to remove the URL field so that it now looks like:

{title}: {content}

This resulted in this tweet:

I started adding more than 140 characters to see if the Social plugin would shorten the URL at the end of the post, but it did not perform any shortening. If I want to shorten URLs in a post, it looks like I will need to find a URL shortener plugin or use a service like Bitly.

Overall, the Social plugin meets my needs (I don’t have a Facebook account, so I don’t know how well that part works). I will probably try other plugins like Jetpack to see how they work.

 

I started my weblog a few years ago, and have done some writing here and for publication. However, I have let things slide, and have not been active in quite a while. In the past few months, I have become interested in the IndieWeb concept of publishing your content once and syndicating elsewhere (POSSE). I am also interested in doing some mobile development and finally have some time to explore both of these areas. With this being the first part of the year, I thought I would put my stake in the ground as to what my weblog focus will be:

Out of the Box – These types of posts will be to capture the first experience of using a tool, app, or technique. My hope is to capture the good, the bad, and the ugly, and provide feedback on the bad and ugly parts.

Narrate Your Work – Following Dave Winer’s post, I am going to work to document my steps as I try out new tools and apps.

I am also going to take heart in Matt Mullenweg’s post for the New Year where he talks about the intrinsic value of blogging, and write this weblog for myself and one other person (I will have to figure our who that person is!). Now, let’s get started!

I am starting to add some IndieWeb features to my WordPress website. To start, I used the hCard creator page to create hCard markup, then added it to my About page with the Text tab selected in the editor – easy!

Now to figure out my next step…