David ShanskeOverall, there’s been a lot of progress, and it is much simpler to set up an IndieWeb site in WordPress now than it was 1-2 years ago. Moreover, thanks largely to dshankse’s efforts, things are much more full-featured.
My main WordPress work over the past year has been Yarns Microsub Server. It’s currently in Beta and, though it has a few kinks to work out, is working well for me.
My foremost WordPress goal for this year is to add some polish to Yarns for a full release. This has three main goals:
- Improve parsing, since there are some sites that Yarns/Parse-This have difficulty with
- Improve admin screen. Right now, the admin UI is functional, but ugly and not very intuitive. I don’t want to invest a ton of time into design, but I think I can clean it up a bit so it’s easier to understand. The best experience would be for everything to be possible through a Microsub client, so ideally people won’t be using Yarns’ UI at all. Nonetheless, I can do better and a better interface would certainly make things easier for newcomers to Microsub.
- Documentation. I’ve been thinking through the best way to explain Yarns. For someone who is new to IndieWeb and particularly to Microsub, it’s a bit confusing. I think the best option would be a three tiers of documentation to catch every type of user.
- Instructions in text/screenshots, probably just as a blog post;
- Video instructions – a brief demo of me adding a channel, adding a feed, and then replying to a post;
- Interactive demo – Add tooltips etc. to guide people through the initial setup.
Other than that, my goals for WordPress are to improve my website as my main identity online through some visual customization and better organization, and to use Microsub and Micropub to start posting more replies and simple interactions to my site, particularly on mobile.
