Posts Tagged "indieweb" from 2019

If you look at the bottom of this post, after the main text, you'll see that I've added tags to categorize the pages of my website. Clicking one of the links in the "Tags" section will take you to a summary page, listing all the posts with that tag.

Originally, a bug was causing the phrase "Tags: " to show up even on pages without any tags, but as of 2019-12-08 I've rewritten the code to take care of that.

Update: Material below the (old) marker is incorrect. I'm going to go live in a cave and never touch a computer again, but before I pack my bags, here's the real scoop.

A person mention is the act of linking to someone's homepage when mentioning them in post content. It's worth having a special name to distinguish homepage links because it's a common IndieWeb practice to handle WebMentions sent to a homepage differently from those sent to other paths on the site.

Hey, Chris, the layout of your main page is slightly borked. It looks like the problem is related to some of the category names being longer than others. See image below, and good luck fixing it. [2019-12-03: Chris fixed this problem a few days ago.]

I've coded a new feature for the blog: "previous" and "next" links! As you can see below, each post now links to its predecessor and/or successor. (IndieWeb people, those links have rel="prev"/rel="next" classes on them for machine consumption.)

Further improvements will include post tags, on the index and on individual posts; I also want to display approximate wordcounts for each post. And of course, I'm still missing comments (but that will take more doing than the other two.)

I'd like to represent my Chinese name in the h-card markup that makes this website's authorship information machine-readable. How should I do that?

The answer seems to be "use the p-nickname property." The wiki documentation of that property clearly states that it can be used for a handle or alias. I don't like that "nickname" is the microformats keyword for this purpose: I prefer "alias," since all nicknames are aliases, but not all aliases are nicknames. However, I'm glad to at least have solved my problem.

(Another scenario where using this property would be useful: a European friend named "Juerg" spells his name "George" when communicating in English. On his business cards, he writes Juerg 'George' Lastname; on his website, he could mark up the 'George' with the p-nickname property.)

Today I upgraded my website publishing software. From now on, new articles (individual pages which are longer and less time-dependent than blog posts) will automatically come with a date and time of publication. I'll be manually adding publication dates to prior articles over the next week or so.

Along the way, I fixed a problem I was having with adding "time last updated" to pages and blog posts. I had to manually position the mouse in the right spot before running a command to add the current time and date. Now all that is done automatically with one command, mj/insert-webpage-update-time. Having this command written also puts me 90% of the way toward the next logical step, which is automatically setting the "time last updated" every time I save a file for the site. I'll get to that in the future.

Here I go, testing out a minimal IndieWeb reply context.

Damn, it's not working. If you caught this post before I updated it, you may have seen a stupid link to "www.maxwelljoslyn.com/notes/2019/11/01/1/www.maxwelljoslyn.com/blog/2019/10/31/1".

I'll go after the problem when I have time. At the very least, I do know the blame ultimately lies with how relative and absolute hyperlinks are handled by my blogging software.

Naughty software! I will punish it at once.

With advice from Greg McVerry, Aaron Parecki, and Ryan Barrett, I finished getting this blog set up for subscription using the `h-feed` microformat, and made other improvements along the way.

In addition to the above, all pages' titles now link to themselves, and each link in the blog index now has proper h-entry markup.

In a blog post yesterday, I discussed adding time-of-publication information to future blog posts. In that post, I decided against adding a fake publication time to prior posts which were made without recording that information.

Today, I've reversed my decision. I added time information as one step toward making the blog available to subscription tools. Adding my blog to your viewer of choice will be easier if all my blog posts come with a canonical publication time.

If you visit posts made before 2019-10-20, such as this one, you'll see I've changed their publication notices to indicate that the time given is suspect. That's good enough for me.

As of right now, the publication timestamp before this paragraph reads "Published on 2019-10-20, around 18:14:20". This timestamp is also a permalink for this page.

The dates on these posts ("2019-10-20") have been there since soon after I started this blog, but I just added the time-of-day information ("around 18:14:20") today. A machine-readable version of the time, including the time zone, has also been invisibly included in the permalink's HTML.

I did this as one step in upgrading my website so that other people can subscribe to it. If I only provided the date of publication, but not the time, someone else's reader program wouldn't be able to put my post in chronological order when compared with another post.

Today, I worked toward adding simple text notes. You are reading one of them right now!

Remaining items include:

• figure out something better to put in <h1> tags for individual posts [2019-09-18: done]
• create year/month/day listing pages [planning to reuse the code for creating the blog/feed, which is still evolving]
• redirect attempts to access a directory to the appropriate listing page

Introduction

The IndieWeb is a group of independent creators who use their websites as the foundations of digital identity. Web technologies both extant and under development are used to copy data from one site to another, which forms the basis of a distributed social network where each participant's posts, likes, comments, and other personal output are stored on his or her personal site.

IndieWeb held the 2019 IndieWeb Summit in Portland on 2019-06-29 and 2019-06-30 (with a pre-conference meet-and-greet on 2019-06-28). I attended, and enjoyed myself despite an all-weekend headache.

To taste the flavor of this gathering, consider the process by which I gave my RSVP.