Yarns Beta release

Slowly but surely I’ve been chipping away at Yarns Microsub Server, and it seems to working quite well these days. Therefore, I’ve posted a beta release, which you can download right now.

About Yarns

Yarns is a Microsub Server plugin for WordPress. This means you can use it to follow blogs and other sites across the web, then view feeds of your subscriptions in a Microsub Client. Then, as long as you’ve set up your website correctly, you can reply to items in your feeds and your responses will be posted to your personal website.

Instructions

For installation instructions, check out the Readme on Yarns’ github repo.

For more info, see an overview of Microsub on IndieWeb.org.

Notes

The biggest challenge of this project has been parsing. Yarns can aggregate posts from websites that are marked up with microformats 2. This is a little like subscribing to an RSS feed, but allows for a more complex variety of post types including likes, replies, events, notes, articles. Initially, I was writing the parsing functions myself, but was delighted when David Shanske offered to build a library using some parsing functions he had already written for another plugin. Now, Yarns uses David’s excellent Parse This library. As well as contributing this library, David has made code contributions to Yarns itself and helped me think through several challenges, and I’m grateful for this help!

Since each website can be different, there are still some parsing bugs to be addressed. If you notice any feeds that are parsed with missing information or other problems, please let me know.