Category: Indieweb

There are 45 posts filed in Indieweb (this is page 6 of 8).

I use Jetpack on some of my sites, as well as some client sites. It provides a lot of features that site owners will need, without having to install a bunch of plugins, and does so reasonably accessibly. However, the latest release, (7.1), quietly adds Jetpack feature suggestions to the plugin search screen. From The Tavern:

If a user searches for a plugin that has a feature that is already offered by Jetpack, the plugin will insert an artificial (and dismissible) search result into the first plugin card slot, identifying the corresponding Jetpack feature.

This is so far over the line of what’s acceptable and what’s not, it’s not funny. I’d be livid if any other plugin did this, and the fact that Automattic is doing it, combined with its incredibly large amount of influence over the WordPress ecosystem, is enough to make me seriously consider uninstalling Jetpack from every one of my sites. The WordPress dashboard and administration screens are already choked with advertisements and useless nags thanks to other plugins and themes. The fact that Automattic is essentially giving this a blessing is, I suspect, going to make this problem worse than it is. The web is supposed to be independent and decentralized. Automattic is supposed to be helping to ensure that an open, independent web survives, or at least that’s what its CEO appears to be leading us to believe. Driving an ecosystem to use the features of one plugin over everything else is an attempt at centralization, which is obviously in direct opposition to an open, decentralized web. Getting back to the accessibility question, while Jetpack does some of the things it does reasonably accessibly, does this mean that Automattic is going to put some extra muscle behind making sure that every one of its features are accessible? If you’re going to exercise undue influence over plugin search results, effectively cutting off the air supply of anything that may provide a Jetpack feature more accessibly, then you take on the responsibility of ensuring that accessibility is looked after. I think I already know the answer to these questions, but I decided to pose them just in case. You know, in case I happen to be dead wrong in my supposition. At the end of the day though, I’d rather Automattic just not game the plugin search results.

Happy thirtieth birthday World Wide Web. You may be held together by peanut butter and goblins, but you’ve provided so much joy and prosperity for all of us who have careers thanks to you. I promise to promote your health through the standards that make you great and enjoyable for everyone on this earth, and to encourage everyone who builds things on your foundation to do the same.
Liked Simple Location 3.6.0 Released by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (David Shanske The Definitive Location)

There is a new update to Simple Locations which adds some new features. A query option for Micropub was added in a prior version and adjusted in this one. This is currently only supported in the Indigenous for Android app.  It allows the Android app to query the plugin for the name of the current location…

Bookmarked Static Indieweb pt2: Using Webmentions by Max Böck (Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer)

How to pull interactions from social media platforms like Twitter back to your own site, using Webmentions, webmention.io and Bridgy.

Syndicating your content to social networks is all well and good, but the real fun happens when you can bring back the reactions from those social networks to your own site and display them all regardless of which site or network they come from. If your site is static, you’ll need to employ a couple of third-party services to accomplish this, whereas with WordPress or Drupal you’ll need to install some plugins. Even if you’re not a developer, the fact that you can pull in reactions to your content from all over the web is a beautiful thing to behold. And I’m looking forward to the time when most domains on the web support both syndication out and bringing reactions back in. Neither of these takes much effort, and they’re taking less and less. There’s not a lot of cost to implementing these things either anymore, and if we can get to a point where everyone who’s now using social media as their primary platform has their own domain and their own website and is able to syndicate out and bring reactions back in, then all the data currently being sucked up by the large social media platforms no longer is as plentiful, and therefore loses its value. This will, however, take work on the part of all of us, whether that’s building solutions for otheres to use or helping others use those solutions.
Bookmarked Static Indieweb pt1: Syndicating Content by Max Böck (Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer)

How to automatically publish content from a static site on Twitter, using Eleventy and Netlify’s lambda functions.

This tutorial on implementing syndication on static sites should be useful for those who don’t want to use something like WordPress or another database-driven content management system to power their site. As much as some of us would like silos like Twitter or Facebook to disappear, for most people they’re currently necessary, (the network effect), and so syndication is something that has to be part of the mix. And the more you can automate, the better.