More Webmention plugin testing

I got an email from Matthias Pfefferle about my question with the WordPress Webmention plugin, and that I could not see comments from others on my posts. Matthias suggested I modify the Semantic Linkbacks plugin to enable display of all comments. I am trying to see if I can get this text to appear in the comments on another post by linking to another post. Update: it worked!

My IndieWeb areas of interest

I am planning to attend the next Homebrew Website Club meeting in Portland, and have been thinking about IndieWeb areas in which I have an interest. Here are some topics I would be interested in discussing this week…

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…

First steps with Cordova – Talk To Me

I am learning the Apache Cordova toolset for developing apps using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I’m using the following books to help me get started:

I’ve been playing around, and decided to use the MIT AppInventor tutorials as my first projects. With that, here is my first app (TalkToMe). The user enters a text string, clicks a button and Android’s text-to-speech capabilities to speak the text.

Screenshot_TalkToMe

 

You can download the app from my web site, and the source code is at Github – enjoy!

 

My notes from the Homebrew Website Meeting – PDX

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!