Geeking out with IndieWeb and Micro.blog

Nathan mentioned me in a conversation recently that prompted me to revisit Micro.blog. I backed Micro.blog on Kickstarter initially, created my account when it launched, and then didn’t really return to it after initially testing it out.

I took another look today, and noticed that my blog posts have been shared to my Micro.blog feed automatically (I added my RSS feed, then forgot about it). I didn’t have a blog active over there, because I want to have this site as my primary blog.

Still, I poked around a little, and took some time to make more sense of what this Micro.blog thing is all about. Brent Simmons described how he sees Micro.blog fitting into the broader Web ecosystem nicely when he said the following:

Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.

This talk at the recent IndieWeb Summit also offered a nice overview of where Micro.blog is at the moment, and some of the challenges that lie ahead:

While I’m on the topic of IndieWeb, this “State of the IndieWeb” keynote is a great overview of what’s been going on in the IndieWeb community in the last year or so:

How can I do that?

On yet another related note, I came across Chris Aldrich’s reply to a tweet from one of my colleagues. The reply is interesting, in itself, but what I’m particularly curious about is how to create replies like this that publish to the source site, and populate the syndication link fields.

I’ve installed a series of IndieWeb plugins on my site, including –

  • Bridgy
  • IndieAuth
  • IndieWeb
  • Microformats 2
  • Micropub
  • Post Kinds
  • Symantic Linkbacks
  • Syndication Links
  • Web Actions
  • Webmention
  • Websub

The challenge, now, is figuring out how to use them to publish replies that cross-post, and so on. Installing the plugins is only part of the process. I’m pretty sure there’s a degree of configuration involved too to make it all work.

On the one hand, using these tools/extensions will transform your site from a “simple” blog into a pretty interactive, connected hub on the Web. On the other hand, this is not the sort of setup that mainstream users are going to want to configure.

This is where services like Micro.blog fit into the picture. It integrates a number of IndieWeb technologies to produce a pretty seamless experience.

“Held down by algorithms that are like axes”

No matter where I go on the Internet, I feel like I am trapped in the “feed,” held down by algorithms that are like axes trying to make bespoke shirts out of silk.

Source: Om Malik

Write: where handwriting and digital editing meet

Write is a curious product. The goal is to take your handwritten notes, and make them editable in a digital format. You have to watch the demo video to really see how this works:

I’m not sure what to think about it. I take handwritten notes quite a bit these days, so the idea of making my handwritten notes more useful to me than a static PDF or image (at the moment, I capture many of my handwritten notes into Evernote where they’re OCR’d – hypothetically).

At the same time, being able to edit my notes almost like I’d edit typed notes seems a little weird. One of the reasons that handwritten notes are helpful is because writing apparently helps improve retention, and because I don’t need to open an app on a device to take notes. I can just open my notebook and start writing.

Bringing those notes into a digital editor seems to remove some of the benefit of writing in the first place. Or perhaps a better way to think about this is to see it as a sort of post-processing stage where you take your raw notes, and finish them off in some way.

Deleted tweets on Facebook are a reminder about controlling your content

I noticed this story on TechCrunch about how cross-posted tweets were removed from Facebook, along with the conversations that formed around them.

Facebook users are complaining the company has removed the cross-posted tweets they had published to their profiles as Facebook updates. The posts’ removal took place following the recent API change that prevented Twitter users from continuing to automatically publish their tweets to Facebook. According to the affected parties, both the Facebook posts themselves, as well as the conversation around those posts that had taken place directly on Facebook, are now gone. Reached for comment, Facebook says it’s aware of the issue and is looking into it.

Axios published a post clarifying what happened:

Here’s what happened, according to a source close to Twitter.: Twitter had initially asked Facebook for more time to see if there was a way for users to continue joint posting to both social networks, but Facebook said no.

As a result, the Twitter app for the Facebook platform was essentially made useless earlier this month once Facebook officially removed the ability to cross-post. With the app’s sole function eliminated, Twitter decided to delete it from the Facebook platform, having no reason to think that doing so would remove old tweets that were cross-posted. It’s not clear whether Facebook knew this would happen, either.

Those tweets have apparently since been restored to Facebook, so the harm was short-lived. At the same time, this incident serves as an important reminder that you rarely have effective control over your content on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

It’s also a big reason why I prefer the POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere),  approach to publishing my content. That said, moves like Facebook’s changes to their API at the beginning of August 2018 have the effect of frustrating this to a degree.

It’s affected people’s ability to publish to their Facebook News Feeds automatically using external services (although you can still publish automatically to your Facebook Page). That said, this just reinforces the importance of having your own space on the Web where you have considerably more control over your content.

Swimming and anxiety

I just watched a short documentary, titled “Waterlog”, about writer Joe Minihane’s journey towards a better understanding of his anxiety, and a healthier perspective on his life through “wild swimming“:

One of Minihane’s insights is that it’s cathartic to talk about experiences with anxiety, depression, and other conditions. This reminds me of how Wil Wheaton makes a point of speaking, and writing, openly about his experiences with depression, panic attacks, and more.

My name is Wil Wheaton. I live with chronic Depression, and I am not ashamed.

It’s inspiring to read about people like Joe Minihane, and Wil Wheaton who have the courage to speak openly about their challenges. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by anxiety and depression, and pretty tough to find your way out of it when it happens.

Stories like these offer more hope that it can get better.

A feed reader that lets me comment and like?

I use Feedly to subscribe to sites that I follow. I was just reading through some of the feeds, and I realised that I don’t seem to have a way to give feedback on posts, from Feedly.

For example, if I read something that I like, I’d like to, well, “Like” the post, or leave a comment from my feed reader.

The only feed reader that has this capability is the WordPress.com Reader, and that’s pretty much focused on WordPress sites.

Do other feed readers do this too? 🤔

Learning Flask with Corey Schafer

My Summer project is to finish an initial version of my Practice Math site for our kids. I’ve hit a bit of a snag with fractions, but the functionality for whole numbers is almost ready.

The next step is to create a web site for the project so our kids can use the app through their browsers, rather than using the command line (somehow, I don’t think a CLI interface will grab our kids).

My plan was to learn Django, and use that to create a front-end for my Python back-end. I decided to follow along with Brad Traversy to help me learn how to create a basic Django app. It was a little trickier than I expected, and I hit a snag with my database configuration.

I then thought I’d take a look at Flask, and see if that would be a little easier for me to grok. I noticed that Corey Schafer has a Flask tutorial series where you build a basic blog with Python and Flask, so I decided to work through Schafer’s tutorial videos.

This has proven to be a terrific idea. Schafer’s tutorials are detailed, and really clear. There are times when he speeds up a little but, for the most part, I can follow along pretty comfortably, and understand what he’s doing.

Even though the goal of Schafer’s series is to build a blog, it covers a range of topics that I can incorporate into Practice Math down the line. It’s really an awesome introduction to building web sites with Flask, and well worth the time.

Not only does Schafer take you through the process, step-by-step, but he also provides links to snapshots of his code at each step of the process, along with useful code snippets in his GitHub repos.

You probably need about an hour for each episode. I binged for most of today (I’m on vacation this week), and worked through about four or five videos.

If you’re interested in Corey Schafer, listen to this TalkPython interview with him:

On a related, side note, working through this tutorial series just reinforces how glad I am that I returned to Python to start learning it (again). I still have a long way to go, but it feels like I’m picking up bits of it easier than I did with JavaScript.

I’ll return to JavaScript, for sure (you can’t really ignore JavaScript these days). For now, though, I love all the things I’m learning to do with Python.

Featured image by Sharon McCutcheon

Screenshots from my browser console? Oh Firefox, you spoil me!

This is awesome, particularly the ability to screenshot specific elements using element-specific flags:

Firefox DevTools has now added a screenshot command, so you can take screenshots directly from the Console

https://twitter.com/FirefoxDevTools/status/1032625326302617600