2019/Utrecht/buildingblocks

Building Blocks (with WordPress) was a session at IndieWebCamp Utrecht 2019.

IndieWebCamp Utrecht 2019
Session: Building Blocks and IndieWeb WordPress
When: 2019-05-18 12:20

Participants

Identity

own your own identity, don't let others decide what you can and can't put online

microformats

microformats.io
microformats is nearly at 15th birthday
you want to put info about yourself online - you want it to be also machine readable
many ways to do machine readability - schema.org, json-ld, microformats
add class names in to existing html, to allow parsing of class names
parsers available for lots of different languages on top of this spec
e.g. h-card - html version of v-card
php.microformats.io as a way of parsing microformats and seeing how it looks in json
rel=me as a way of connecting to other services e.g. github

posts

marked up with microformats again
specifications grown up by convention
if you're using a reader that understands these properties, they can figure out how to display them
posts can include citations - you would then send them a mention

(question about getting microformats in wordpress - use a specifically designed theme, or can try mf2 plugin)

mentions

first interaction building block
related to pingbacks, linkbacks, a way of interacting on early web
webmentions is a w3c spec
a way of figuring out that there is a webmention endpoint as somewhere to interacting with them
when you've been webmentioned, your site may then go and figure out what is the content of the post that mentions you - and pull it to your site

(question: how does in build on ping/linkbacks?)

in pingbacks you sent all the content of the interaction
led to a lot of spam
webmention only sends the ur
is it more resilient for spam? we hope!
it implicitly adds more hurdles for a spammer to spam via webmention
spec includes sections on how to verify if a webmention is real
Vouch is an extension that is currently being worked out
using a network of trust - Frank knows Ton, Frank mentions Martijn - Frank could then choose to trust Martijn
it might not be only means of spam, but could be an extra part of a heuristic
puts more work on the sender
you can choose to whitelist certain domains (or not, if you prefer)

login and IndieAuth

can use your own site as your authn provider
you could also make use of rel=me and then choose to use e.g. github as your authn provider
always starts with 'enter your web address'

Web Actions

allow a way to choose what like, reply buttons do when you click on them on someone else's site
it can call through to configuration on your own site to find out what action to invoke
some people are replacing this kind of interaction within readers instead, but this was an early attempt at this

Micropub

what should an API look like if every blog had the same API?
allows everyone to use the same writing applications for different websites
e.g. quill
3rd party tools may also make use of micropub - e.g. instagram syncing tool like ownyourgram

Microsub

an alternative to RSS readers, with extra goodies
e.g. Indigenous
channels - analogous to folders
special channel called Notifications - for receiving mentions from across various services
microsub clients usually allow interactions within the reader (via micropub!)

(also showing overland to pick up the weather of the current location when creating post!)

Wordpress for setting up the IndieWeb building blocks

completely fresh WordPress install
start with IndieWeb plugin
installing a theme to begin - SemPress is a good one to start with - has all the microformats needed built in
there's a fork of 2016 theme with all microformats built in
IndieAuth - makes our WP site own way to log in to other indie services
also set up Micropub
now we can use Quill as a posting interface
quill will ask us to authenticate, then we'll allow quill to perform certain actions
now can use it to post!
note: this is CMS independent!

(things like hootsuite and buffer do similar things - but with closed apis and charges etc)

post kinds

notes, photos, reading, listening, etc
we can configure in WP all the different kinds that we want
we now see these options when we create a new post
creating a like - paste the url in and the details of the post we're liking will be parsed

syndication links

we can use this to send our posts and interactions out to other sites (via brid.gy)
and interactions will come back too!
this allows you to interact with other networks that aren't indiewebifyied yet
from our site we're still using the usual building blocks - brid.gy does the heavy lifting of taking content from external networks and adding microformats