As I mentioned, one of the reasons for trying to tweet from WordPress is to consolidate my various web presences. For Eat This Podcast, I want to be able to do the social stuff on the website and then send it out into the wide-open, tightly closed world of social media. So far that has been a frustrating experience, but I did accomplish something worth sharing.
I have immense respect for all the people involved in the IndieWeb who devote their time and expertise to helping people like me make use of their efforts. I also know that it can be a frustrating experience, and not for me alone. So I decided to reflect on this attempt to get onboard with a set-up that will enable me to tweet more easily about interesting things directly from my website. I'll try to do a walkthough that others can follow when I understand better the things I don't understand now.
Having got webmentions and comments working on the Mothership, I thought it high time I started giving some of the satellite sites more of an identity and more independence. First up, Eat This Podcast.
That runs on WordPress, and some time ago I moved it over to a more IndieWeb theme and implemented some of the IndieWeb principles. Notably, I POSSE longer articles using a plugin called All in One SEO.1 That actually does far more than POSSE, and one of the reasons I want to move forward is to use tools that are less of a Swiss army knife and more of a scalpel. I’m still using my @WithKnown stream, which really is part of the Mothership, to Tweet and reply to Tweets. So that seemed like a nice low-hanging fruit.
Not entirely.
Finally managed to get webmentions working on this site, to my great satisfaction. There are, of course, plenty of things left to sort out. One relates to formatting, or presentation. Some of that I can control. Some I cannot, as it depends on what the person at the other end sends. A
...I know this only an ego trip, but I'd like to get back to having comments enabled on my website. That part is actually quite easy. There is a good Comments plugin for Grav that I have tested locally and it does a nice job. More than comments, though, I want IndieWeb comments. That is, I want people to be able to comment on, link to, like or otherwise engage with my content on their own site1 and have that show up here, on my site. In other words, I want it all.
The key to all this is a technology called webmentions. Webmentions are somewhat fundamental to the way the IndieWeb deals with conversations, because they allow all the participants to own their contributions. In essence, if you react to something I've published, your site sends a message to my site. What I choose to do with that is completely up to me.
Continuing my efforts to bring old stuff into this new bottle, I came across a post from 3 January 2006.
my favourite list of 2005: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. The parent site looks worth bookmarking for future entertainment.
Alas, Wayback Machine knows it not. At least the l...