collection

From IndieWeb

A collection is a type of post that explicitly lists and/or embeds multiple other posts chosen by the author.

Alternately, a collection may refer to a (possibly unhealthy and potentially ever-growing) number of domain names that some people purchase with high hopes of creating additional websites or for hosting other projects. These collections are sometimes the focus of meetups called domain swaps.

How to markup

Currently, no readers or parsers really pay attention to collection posts, as such there is no official way on how to mark them up since markup needs a parsing use case. Current markup ideas can be seen in the Brainstorming section.

IndieWeb Examples

Kyle Mahan

Kyle Mahan uses Red Wind to publish collection posts on kylewm.com since 2014-04-14. Example:

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki uses p3k to publish collection posts on aaronparecki.com since 2014-08-14. Example:

Stephen Paul Weber

singpolyma uses WordPress to publish collection posts on singpolyma.net Example:

hmans.io

following list http://hmans.io/following (~ contact list)

Kongaloosh

kongaloosh has been publishing collection posts on kongaloosh.com since 2015/07/25. Collections are responses to multiple posts on the site. So, an album of pictures would merely be in-response-to many image posts. Example:

To better format albums has also been publishing collections of images, or albums, since since 2016/08/1. Albums are collections of images with text associated with sub-groups of images.

Grant Richmond

Grant Richmond uses his PhotoPostr micropub client to create collections as albums. Example:

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich has a collection of posts about the IndieWeb: https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/

Dan Q

Dan Q is retroactively producing summary "digests" represented by collections his posts of various kinds, grouped by month (or other time period). Example:

He's also looking into ways of improving machine- and human-readability of his archives and ways of "grouping" related content (e.g. checkins to a geohashpoint and the geocaches found along the way, an accompanying article describing the adventure on the whole, and a video vlog) - real examples of all of the above (without a single overarching collection at the time of writing) can also be found in the above digest.

Maxwell Joslyn

Maxwell Joslyn's poem index is a non-chronological collection. He's planning to apply the same approach to his books page, which currently is all one big file (instead of indieweb-friendly "one post per item").

Silo Examples

Storify

Storify is a silo for collecting tweets (Twitter notes). Examples:

Twitter Moments

Twitter made Moment creation available to all users around 2016-09-30. Moments are collections of tweets with text and a featured imge, and can be added to once published. https://twitter.com/i/moments/781914771150876672

Foursquare

Foursquare allows users to create lists of related venues, then they have a 'best of' which I suppose is a collection of collections

Buzzfeed

Buzzfeed gets a lot of its traffic by collating things from elsewhere on the net. The post editor expects you to create 'subbuzzes' and asks for title, URL and credit for each on along with commentary. The editor UI explained

Changes

Collections can change over time but typically don't change often. Changes to collections typically consist of additions, rarely is something removed from a collection. Things may be added to the collection in a specific location within the collection, since the order of the items in the collection is significant.

Changes might be reflected by update posts, e.g. the photos that have been added to a set or notification of a correction to a post.

Different from a feed

Feeds are typically automatically-generated sets of date-ordered posts where the set changes often, new posts showing up at the top of the feed, and old posts dropping off.

Brainstorming

pull request

A pull request post could be modeled as a collection post of edit posts of individual files.

how to markup

The prevailing idea on marking up collection posts is that a collection is an h-entry that contains children h-entries. Any properties on the top-level h-entry are seen to apply to the collection as a whole, whereas properties on the child h-entries are seen to apply to their individual posts. Each child post should have it's own permalink (or else it's not considered a collection). This allows someone to send a webmention to either the collection as a whole or to individual post on the collection.

This markup method is followed by Aaron Parecki and Grant Richmond.

Post Type Discovery

Grant Richmond has implemented collection post type discovery into his own site by simply adding a check for children, after checking for in-reply-to

Silo Examples

Apple has defined extensions to RSS for podcasts that define ordering markup that affects display:

  • itunes:type at the feed level which can be:
    • episodic - the episodes stand alone. Will be shown newest first.
    • serial - the episodes should be listened to in order. Will be listed by episode number within a season.
  • itunes:complete at the feed level for a serial that is completed (all episodes available)

At the entry level there are some other tags:

  • itunes:episode to mark an episode number (possibly within a season)
  • itunes:season to mark the episode as part of season n
  • itunes:episodeType which can be
    • full - a regular episode
    • trailer - promotional short episode - can be labelled with season or episode if it is trialling that specific one
    • bonus - extra material like making of that is outside the story flow - can also be bound to season or episode

Sessions


See Also