User:Seblog.nl

From IndieWeb

Sebastiaan Andeweg

Hi, I'm Sebastiaan and I'm a Dutch writer who nerds in his spare time, more and more turning into a nerd who used to write stories. I’ve got my own site since 2006 (I was 16 years old and blogged about… 16-stuff) and even before I knew about IndieWebCamp, I was thinking of making my Seblog into a social media hub. Finding IndieWebCamp is so nice… now I know that what I wanted is possible :)

In the process of

  • I am buidling a Micropub plugin for Kirby. Not finished yet, but it's there.
  • I am also adding to the existing Webmentions plugin here.

Remind myself about

When you first look at it, Indieweb has a lot of things you 'need' to do in order to have an Indieweb-website: Webmentions, Microformats, Micropub, an Indiereader, likes and comments and posts about what you eat etc. etc.

But all you need is your own domain with some HTML about you on it.

Quotes about that by Zegnat and Aaronpk

How Seblog.nl works now

It's a Kirby 2 installation, with my own Micropub plugin and (an altered version of) Bastian Allgeiers Webmentions-plugin. I ditched the standard /panel/, because I have Micropub now, and my folder-setup didn't work great with the standard panel. As of writing this, not everything is finished nor working, but I have a site and I post things.

Kirby stores it's data in .txt-files in a folder-structure, so that's how my posts are stored. Visible pages start with a number and a dash. I don't use those for days and years, but I use a `HHMMSS` timestamp on the post. For example:

/content/2016/326/154852-1/entry.txt

Translates to <https://seblog.nl/2016/11/21/1/vandaag-kwamen-de-blog-domeinen-vrij>

I like Tantek's use of the number of the day in the year, but I want my url to have a 'traditional' date. The 'slug'-part of the url comes from the field Url-key in the .txt-file. (Due to Kirby's architecture that can't be 'slug'.) Kirby uses YAML-style fields inside the .txt file. Example:

Location: geo:[...this is just for myself...];u=65

----

Text: Vandaag kwamen de .blog-domeinen vrij. Natuurlijk [...]

----

Published: 2016-11-21 15:48:52

----

Updated: 2016-11-21 15:48:52

----

Url-key: vandaag-kwamen-de-blog-domeinen-vrij

Since I ditched the standard /panel, I can also ditch the required 'Title' field and replace it with the Microformats' 'Name'. I needed to rename 'Content' to 'Text', because Kirby refers to all the fields as $page->content(). Other than 'text' for 'content', I use Microformats-property names.

When the page has a 'Name' field, it's a blogpost, otherwise it's a note. Or, when it has a 'Like-of' field, it's a like, and with 'Photo' it's a photo post. Well, at this point I actually don't make a big distinction between those.

Photo's are saved in the folder of the post itself, and then referenced by just the filename.

My homepage just selects the last 'day'-folder of the current year, grabs it's children, and if it doesn't have the required (20) posts yet, it recursively checks the day before it until there are 20. It works fine for queries that actually have posts, but is slow and demanding if it needs to search the archives all the way back to 2006. Need to fix that, but since I do not have many custom queries, it's ok for now.

POSSE and OwnYourData

  • Instagram' - as of 2016-11 I imported all my data to my site, including the likes I still could find through the API.
    • I documented how I post photo's to my site and Instagram with Workflow.

Itches

Here are some of the topics I am thinking about or want to think more about. And eventually do something about. About, that’s what it’s about.

  • Teach Bridgy how Strava works, so I can use that, once I imported and POSSE/PESOS my runs to my site/Strava

Private / Public posting

As I mentioned earlier, I want my archives on one place. (And have a back up somewhere, but still: one archive.) But: not everything in my archive should be public available. I could mark things as private and thus only show it in the backend, but it would be nice if there was a way to share it with certain people. I saw some articles about this on this wiki. But this is something I want to work on / think about.

Multi-topic

This is me, thinking about the reader.

Blogging guru's say you have to pick a topic and then make interesting content for an audience. It was my excuse to quit blogging all together. But I kept posting on Facebook, little things about daily life, because that seemed to be a more appropriate place for it. Then I freaked out about the platform and left.

I still want to share little stories. But I also want to share more serious stuff. The difference between social media and a blog. How can I put everything in to one archive, but still be able to tell an interesting story with that data / those posts for the reader? That’s a question to work on for me.

Multi-lingual

When I start with IndieWeb, I have a topic to write about in English. I like that. But all my posts so far are in Dutch. I also have some basic knowledge about a few other European languages and I’m now quite seriously learning Japanese. I actually have some Japanese blogposts over on Lang-8.com. What to do with those? And what to do with possible future English posts?

This boils down to a similar point as the previous one: how do I get multiple languages on my site, while still maintaining user experience.

I want my data back from:

  • Twitter (already busy implementing / converting my archive)
  • Facebook (I quitted 2014-09-06, but I have my archive downloaded and I'm thinking about making private posts of it, so I have all my data in the same format at the same place, but not necessarily public to all)
  • Instagram done, 2016-11-26
  • Blog archive (I've been blogging since 2006 [again, I was 16]. I want that data back on my site as well, but maybe marked private, like with my Facebookposts. My site used to run on a homemade thing, then Wordpress, then homemade again, and now I'm running on .txt files with Kirby. I want those different archives together, public or partly private, but in one place.)
  • Hyves (Dutch social network, was quite big, but then came Facebook. Luckly I downloaded all my data. Some of the data is actually older than my weblog, but still, maybe post it there?)
  • Misc. (Sometimes you post things on different places around the internet… I want to grab everything I can find and copy it :) )


My username is a hashtag

I don’t know if this is the place to document this kind of stuff, so I think I’ll write a blogpost about it and link it here. Basicly: I’m @sebsel for quite some time now, but a Turkish (tv-series?) couple (Şebnem and Selin) are quite often refered to as #sebsel. I get mentions from time to time and every possible variation on my username is taken on Instagram.

Maybe I should change that silly name, but it's short and short is hard to come by these days. It's a nice question: how much identity gives a username like that, if someone can turn it into a hashtag and flood you away? (Okay, it's not thát bad yet, but imagine Justin Bieber doing this.)