busybee fluffy rambles Notes

IndieWeb! What if we suddenly… swap sites?

No, not actual sites with actual content, but site runtimes. Set up a subdomain on our server and then set up someone else’s software on that subdomain and try to blog on it for a certain timeframe, like a week maybe?

This will allow us to test each other’s sites, including their onboarding procedures and UX. Also it may be fun!

I love this idea, mostly because I’m all in favor of getting more eyes on Publ (especially improving its documentation!), and I’d also love to see how other people are solving the various problems with web publishing.

FWIW, Pushl also handles incremental webmention updates, including support for removals of targets and deletions of articles. Right now the only thing I feel like it’s missing for most IndieWeb folks is h-feed support, which should be fairly easy to add (I just need to get around to it).

It also could do with some better retry logic (namely saving failures in a queue for next time), which is also On The List.

Hey there Matt, welcome aboard.

I also manually send webmentions for each link in an article, but it would be nice to make a script to do that hard work for me. Additionally, I should make accounts on more sites (like Twitter) and join a service like brid.gy to sync my content between them. I would also like to experiment with owning my issues and pull requests, but that’s a thought for another day.

In addition to webmention.js which Jamie already, uh, mentioned, I’ve also written a tool called Pushl which automates the sending of webmentions. I have it set to run as part of my post-publish git hook on my site’s repository, as well as in a cron job that runs every 15 minutes. It requires an RSS or Atom feed at present (adding h-feed support is on my TODO list) but it only uses the feed for post discovery, rather than for target discovery, so it doesn’t need to be a full-content feed or whatever. It also maintains state so it can handle deletes and edits and so on.

There’s a few other automated Webmention sending things out there, like a lot of IndieWeb folks use webmention.app which can be used in combination with IFTTT, although I can’t speak to the reliability of that solution.

It looks like there are some percent-20 characters I need to clean up and I should try to show your posts in chronological order—so this has already been great for catching problems.

Yep, I’d noticed you weren’t handling spaces or dt-published. Glad you caught that too. :)

One thing to keep in mind is that your posts will really only show up under the first tag in the list.

Makes sense. What happens if I change what the primary tag is, and then re-ping?

Anyway, great work on Publ. It’s cool to see what you’re doing with logins—love the idea of IndieAuth on tilde.club.

Just to clarify, Publ can’t run on tilde.club as far as I know (it needs the ability to run WSGI apps); my mention of tilde.club was specifically about people having their IndieWeb profile live on there but delegating IndieAuth to an external endpoint (e.g. IndieLogin) – in theory a tilde.club user could delegate to an external endpoint which spoofs a different tilde.club identity (such as AnyAuth), which is an issue with the URL validation step of the IndieAuth spec.

Authl’s URL validation already adopts my proposed change, where the validated URL must be more specific than the requested one (for example, http://tilde.club/~fluffy can become http://tilde.club/~fluffy/ or http://tilde.club/~fluffy/blog/, but it can’t become http://tilde.club/~root or http://tilde.club).

Ahh—ok. Makes sense. I’m not doing this in my reader—I don’t want to risk rel=“self” being wrong. Is there a compelling reason to do this? I mean if I’m able to fetch the feed, why risk it?

Because sometimes sites migrate to new platforms or new domains and RSS feeds change location, and this helps to avoid linkrot or unpleasant surprises with realizing that you’ve missed a few years of updates because the feed quietly went missing.

Incidentally, I have implemented AutoAuth on this site. Gonna make a more formal announcement shortly.

FYI this is a webmention sent as mastodon reply :)

Oh yeah I meant to test your protocol-relative endpoint link in Pushl. I’m sure it’ll work but it’s worth checking anyway.

Oh hey welcome to Seattle! How long are you in town for?

Also congrats on finding the secret garden. Lots of folks I know have lived here for years without knowing that was a thing. (I only found out about it a few years ago, myself, because I was bored on a day that the rest of the market happened to be closed for a holiday.)

Testing the other side

Looks like dougbeal is trying to restart the Homebrew Website Club Seattle chapter. This is my “definitely maybe” RSVP. :)

I’m seeing what happens when I generate a webmention to a protocol-relative URL.

Also seeing if webmention.io preserves fragments.

Ángel Orgeta:

Oh, yes, and it’s great; I just wanted something much simpler. I took a look at it, but some requirements (like my ATOM feed needing WebSub compliance, which I didn’t know the meaning of, and other things that I sincerely didn’t understand) made me wish for something more straightforward. I run my script on the same computer that stores my atom.xml file, so I have no need for download support and/or caching further than knowing the timestamp of the file.

Ah, just to clarify, WebSub isn’t required, it’s just supported — it’s just one of the things Pushl supports. I hadn’t considered offline support as something that someone might want, so for that use case Gruta is definitely a better choice.

I’ll consider making it more clear what’s optional in the documentation, since I can see that being a point of confusion!

Ángel Ortega:

I’ve written a script to add Webmention support for static sites. It’s available from:

https://github.com/angelortega/aov-atom-to-webmention

That’s cool, but did you happen to see my tool Pushl that does the same thing? It has a few other features like feed autodiscovery, WebSub, and RFC5005 archive backfilling. And it’s pip-installable!

Just testing to see if fed.brid.gy is working now. Hopefully helps with issue 46.

Haha, sorry for the in-line links! I was thinking of tag-reply posts from the receiving side, as a way of letting others suggest tags for your posts. Readers of your comics post tag-replies on their site, your site would receive them as webmentions and you could add them to the comic post or not.

It’s all IndieWeb building blocks, but it’s a lot of plumbing on your side (accepting webmention data into your tags, moderating) and theirs (making a post on their own site with markup, sending webmentions).

Don’t apologize for the inline links, I could have just not added them. ;)

And okay, I understand what you’re getting at now! Yeah that seems like a possible way to do things although it’s a lot of setup for a lot of people and I like to use the principle of least effort for things like this.

Also this has inspired me to make a subcategory for the blog for conversational threads. I wonder if the webmentions will end up getting re-sent to the previous entry on this new category. I also wonder if I should set up a rule on my Atom feed to let people filter out posts like these.