Kind: Replies

For what it’s worth, I think IndieAuth is reliable enough that supporting external auth is no longer needed. If there are cases where people have trouble getting the IndieAuth plugin to work for them, then a fallback is handy. However I think you’re correct that the added work (and complexibity) of maintaining secondary authorization methods across multiple plugins is not ideal.

As long as there is a visible prompt or other explanation informing users that they must install IndieAuth to user Micropub or Microsub, I’m in favour of removing the fallback.

Great, I hope it’s useful.  Let me know if there are issues I can help with.  Also, if you get stopped by an auth error – I’m working on that bug and can let you know when it’s fixed

Indeed! Thanks @jgmac1106.  Yarns is at http://github.com/jackjamieson2/yarns-microsub-server.  Currently working out a pernicious bug with authorization, but once that’s resolved it’s fairly full featured. Suggestions and contributions are welcome

Thanks Chris,

Actually we didn’t talk journalism very much. Most of the people there were from other parts of the same parent faculty as the journalism school (Communication and Design).  I briefly talked about Storify’s shutdown since a lot of news outlets used Storify in its heyday.

Most of the discussion was a bit more general —  future directions for alternative social media, regulatory responses, considerations for maintaining one’s values when using social media, etc.

Thanks Tantek! I’ll try to get some photos and post a summary

@dshanske wrote a nice review about the state of IndieWeb in WordPress.

Overall, 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.
  1. Instructions in text/screenshots, probably just as a blog post;
  2. Video instructions – a brief demo of me adding a channel, adding a feed, and then replying to a post;
  3. 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.

Testing a reply – this post should be marked up as a reply to https://github.com/dshanske/indieweb-post-kinds

@jgmac1106 Just read your discussion section — I was having trouble thinking that through from the IndieWeb side alone and the #ds106 side put it into perspective.

I think you’re right, two different approaches to the same basic goal. Highlights an opportunity for the two communities to learn from one another (which seems well served by your work)

@jackjamieson came to conclusion last #ds106 and #IndieWeb had same goal: getting people on their own sites.#IndieWeb using their generations model focused on the most technicalky skilled learnerstop down, #ds106 focused on gen4 and wanted to go… https://t.co/76WnRt7zOH

— Greg McVerry (@jgmac1106) November 11, 2018

Greg, your post reminded me of my ongoing inability to add your site to my Microsub reader.

Last I checked (was back in August), when I tried to curl your site from my web server it failed. I tried again today and it worked, so that’s a step in the right direction.

Then I tried adding your site to Yarns, and got a 403 forbidden error:

Warning: file_get_contents(http://jgregorymcverry.com/): failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden

I haven’t been paying close attention to your Webmention saga, so maybe this is old news, but I suspect it’s the same problem