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The IndieWeb community sometimes forgets that the community mostly consists of tech enthusiasts who know how to program and configure stuff, while many bloggers just want a way to interact with other blogs. They discover the Webmention system, read somewhere it’s a contemporary and maybe better alternative to Pingbacks (although I contested that), and just want to “make use” of it, without losing hours and hours of fiddling with scary code.

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Good overview of indieweb things.

(If I’d implemented webmentions this reply might be useful; as it is, I think no one shall ever see it!)

There’s an indieweb meeup this morning, and I’d thought I’d go to it and maybe talk about the vagaries of syndication links in posts (because that’s been confusing me), but actually before that I wanted to finish importing my entire Flickr collection to this site — and that’s taking longer than I thought it would. I’ve built the same Flickr importer about three times now, for Piwigo, MediaWiki, and a generic backup tool, but this fourth time is different enough. I’ll get it done soon though, and so maybe I’ll go to the next meetup.

Of course, ideally, I’d be able to write about what I’m working on here, and for it to be syndicated into the other feeds etc. — but I’ve got more work to do here first, and so keep putting off the actual writing.

In fact, the old truth is rearing its head again: that it’s probably not a good idea to write one’s own blogging software! I’m ignoring that still though, and having fun.

It seems like it’s also going to possible to use Twyne’s syndications to post to indieweb.xyz — https://indieweb.xyz/howto/en

It’s obviously the meaning of online writing, the blogiverse, and everything (because of the issue number: https://github.com/samwilson/twyne/issues/42 ) — so I’ve added support for “syndications” to Twyne. Each post can have a list of URLS (with labels) at which the post is duplicated. This is the first stage to making Twitter and Flickr imports work, so that each post can point back to where it came from (although, the import process will switch things around and pretend that the posts originate on my own site, even though that’s not stricktly the case). Hopefully this will work.

One key indieweb idea is that one can create a post wherever and syndicate that post to other sites. I’m attempting to switch completely to first posting on my own site, and then syndicating (i.e. duplicating my posts) on places such as Twitter and Flickr, as well as (for photos) Wikimedia Commons. It’s sort of coming into shape, the database that I’m using for all this. It’s got a great number of bits that I want to improve, and so sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time — but then, when I think of all the time I’ve wasted trying to wrangle other systems into the shape that I want, I think I’m actually moving much faster with this and that it’s completely worthwhile.

From the Indieweb wiki:

POOSNOW is an acronym for Post On One Silo, No Others on Web, the worst known web syndication or cross-posting model.

https://indieweb.org/POOSNOW

It’s far better to POSSE: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There’s a discussion on the #indieweb IRC channel (on Freenode) about whether people post to channels like that in order to get wider audiences for what they write, and whether this is in opposition to the indieweb ideal of being able to post on separate sites but still carry on a conversation. I’d not really thought about it clearly before, but I think that’s why I don’t like posting to channels like that. I like contributing to wikis, where central texts undergo collaborative continued editing, but for discussion it seems that it should be possible to post on one’s own site and still be part of the greater to-and-fro. I can’t quite do so (for example, with this post) because I’ve not got webmentions working here yet, but I think the theory is all there. To reply to someone someone else has said (anywhere) I can just make a post here and point it to their URL.

I seem to be building a blogging system here that’s interspersing blog posts, status updates, photos, and files all together in one timeline. That was my intention of course, but at some point I’m going to have to figure out good ways to create separate streams of things. I’d been thinking that this could be done just with tags, and I think that’s probably central to it, but there needs to be some better layouts for different tag results I think. I’m going to start, at least, with a timeline navigation sidebar (sort of akin to Flickr’s ‘camera roll’ page, I guess).

So Twyne now supports tags. That’s good. Bit by bit this is is becoming enough indiewebish for me to actually be able to use it. Can’t log in on the phone yet, nor upload photos and have their EXIF data read. But I think possibly I want to add a feed-reader before doing those things, and perhaps geotagging. I dare say it’d be easy to also now add some better POSH/microformats, but actually until I need to consume other sites’ HTML I don’t feel motivated to improve my own. Certainly higher on the todo list than that is a way to track old URLs (most of which currently lie broken, notably the feed ones which is pretty poor form on my part).