#indiewebcamp 2012-10-30

2012-10-30 UTC
dascher, ybit and ybit2 joined the channel
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@chrisDAPS
It's fun to know that all of the bigger sites are having outages, and there DAPS is fully functional, and we're not posting #indieweb
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joshr_
good day everyone
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joshr_
i'm experimenting with wordpress as a central node for my own person indie site http://test.joshrussell.com
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joshr_
just wondered if anyone has documented a good content posting flow? i.e. post in wordpress updates twitter, instagram photo updates wordpress which updates twitter, etc etc
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joshr_
the idea being to have a central location on wordpress but have content originate or end up at sources or destinations
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joshr_
i'm using IFTTT for most of it, which sets post categories (no post format support yet, which is a shame)
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tommorris
joshr_: not sure, sorry.
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joshr_
ok
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joshr_
i know there's no single answer to that question really :)
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joshr_
but good example flows would be a good starting point to set this up
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tantek
joshr_ awesome!
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tantek
sounds like you're asking for documentation of POSSE content posting flow?
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joshr_
ah yes!
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joshr_
most of getting an answer is knowing how to ask the question ;)
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joshr_
ok that's a good start
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joshr_
so that's essentially a first stab at a best practice?
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tantek.com
edited /POSSE (+69) "/* Publishing Flows */ add reference to content posting flow for better discoverability"
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tantek
joshr_ it's a generalized description of what Falcon (on my site), and barnabywalter's site do.
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joshr_
right
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tantek
current best practice, yes
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tantek
not necessarily a theoretical ideal, you may come up with something better :)
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joshr_
lol, i'm having a go ;)
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tantek
but perhaps better to start with minimum viable POSSE :)
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joshr_
yeah, that's my first step
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joshrussell.com
created /User:Joshrussell.com (+198) "Created page with "= Josh Russell = * http://joshrussell.com Attempting to bootstrap something indie on top of Wordpress. Probably not the first, but starting fresh to learn the issues! * http://...""
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joshrussell.com
edited /User:Joshrussell.com (+27) "/* Josh Russell */"
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tantek
great start joshr_!
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tantek
maybe add something about your UI/design background & skills
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joshr_
will do :)
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tommorris
joshr_: there's definitely design problems on the indieweb. I've been meaning to write something about how visually signifying something as being an indieweb version of a "tweet" is hard work.
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tommorris
otherwise, we're gonna have a nightmare of a problem when people give the same significance to goofy tweet type things as they do to long considered blog posts.
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tommorris
Twitter has become a genre in the same way Sellotape, Hoover and Xerox have become types of products rather than brands.
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barnabywalters
joshr_: RE Wordpress+indieweb, Beau Lebens has written some useful stuff about WP plugins and such things
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tommorris
New blog post: The Sellotape Problem, design and the indie web http://tommorris.org/posts/2488
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@tommorris
The Sellotape Problem, design and the indie web — http://tommorris.org/posts/2488 #indiewebcamp
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aaronpk
...that gives me an idea...
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barnabywalters
tommorris: fabulous article.
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tommorris
this is why we need more designers. you know, the sort of people who look at Eclipse or Emacs and go "what, seriously, you guys use that?"
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barnabywalters
tommorris: one of the biggest design differences I’ve noticed between things considered 'articles' and things considered 'tweets' is the presence of a profile photo/name in the top left
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barnabywalters
that is quite significant as it gives it more of an IM/conversation “look”
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aaronpk
I don't necessarily agree with that
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aaronpk
i've seen lots of articles with peoples' photos next to them
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aaronpk
also google's verified author thing puts photos next to search results of articles
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barnabywalters
actually, I’ve just noticed that the difference isn’t in the photo at all
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barnabywalters
it’s that articles have a distinct title, but for tweets, the authors name is the title
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tommorris
big text. ;-)
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barnabywalters
tommorris: yeah, and that ;)
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tommorris
barnabywalters: thanks for the repost.
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@BarnabyWalters
The Sellotape Problem, #design and the #indieweb /by @tommorris http://tommorris.org/posts/2488 #bookmark (http://waterpigs.co.uk/notes/503)
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aaronpk
so much meta data in that tweet :)
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barnabywalters
aaronpk: now you mention it, damn! I forgot <cite> ;)
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barnabywalters
tommorris: np. I’m experimenting with #bookmark in notes instead of having a separate content type
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tommorris
still delegates bookmarking to pinboard.
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tantek
tommorris - joshr_ was recently relenting about not knowing how to contribute here as a designer/UX type person.
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tantek
re: article vs. note - it's the presence/absence of structure
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aaronpk
paragraph structure?
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tantek
articles typically have *some* structure to them, a heading/title/name, subheadings etc.
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tantek
notes are just text
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tantek
a couple of paragraphs - likely just a note
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tantek
a few paragraphs - likely still just a note
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barnabywalters
For me philosophically and technologically it depends mainly on structure and a little on how likely I am to edit it in the future
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tantek
as soon as you feel like adding a name or subsections, that pushes it over from note to article IMHO
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barnabywalters
hm, this needs a wiki page
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aaronpk
after my talk with tantek last week, i'm actually leaning in favor of two post types: article and notes (or posts, not sure what to call it yet) where the second one has everything including text notes, photos, checkins, events, etc
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barnabywalters
aaronpk: I am in agreement with that
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barnabywalters
I am relegating my “activity” abstraction for internal use such as building edit histories of things
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barnabywalters
and using notes for pretty much anything which isn’t a structured article
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tommorris
barnabywalters: you need a favicon. ;-)
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barnabywalters
tommorris: I do indeed! Also apple-touch-x-y-etc
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tantek
aaronpk - I think it's reasonable to style other non-article post types to look like "notes" until you have a reason to style them specially
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tantek
what I showed you and we discussed were examples of notes *with* photos etc. in them
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tantek
the checkin example is interesting for sure
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tantek
note with geo tag
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tantek
vs. checkin with a note
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tantek
for the reasons I think you brought up
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tantek
where you often put the location as an FYI, perhaps even vague, piece of metadata. like maybe just the city, state, or country.
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tantek
whereas a check-in is at venue-resolution
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tommorris
tantek: inferring a reasonable city/state/country thing from geo-coordinates is hard. ;-)
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tantek
but I'm still not sure that a note that is geotagged with a venue-resolution location is the same (or not) as a "check-in" to a venue with a note
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tantek
this is from a UI/UX perspective of course
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tantek
tommorris - sometimes. hence why it's a user publishing choice thing.
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tommorris
so, from the user perspective, there's a difference between "I'm writing a post about something unrelated, I just happen to be in Chinatown" and "I'm in this particular bar and want to share something interesting"
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tantek
at the point of authoring, the user can decided to geotag (or not) with what resolution of location
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tantek
the UI can suggest a city/state/country, and the user could customize/fix it.
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barnabywalters
class="h-as-checkin" vs "h-as-note"?
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tantek
barnabywalters - right, that's what the microformats2 classes would be
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tantek
we're just discussing the conceptual difference between the two types
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tantek
prefers to just use the short names for the types from AS
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tantek
looks up the AS object type taxonomy
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tommorris
I've just fired up Foursquare on my phone. let's see. from my unscientific sample of people, I'd say it's about 60% raw checkin vs. 40% with extra stuff.
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barnabywalters
__SO MANY__
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tantek
what a long and ugly URL
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tantek
goes to wikify
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tommorris
where the extra stuff is… a photo, a tiny review like "good service, great prices" at a cafe, or a snarky little comment like "oh, it's Christmas already"
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barnabywalters
tommorris: so, use cases for that sample are “I am here and it looks nice”, “I am here an the sevice is good/bad”, ”I am here and I am goddamn witty”
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tommorris
yup, but for the people who are just checking in, a lot of those are just doing it routinely
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barnabywalters
“I am here and I want others to know about it”
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tommorris
like, a friend of mine who checks in every day at the office. well, that's just the gamification crack addict nature of Foursquare. is everyone gonna want to post that to their own site? again, there are genre differences
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barnabywalters
personally, I am only likely to explicitly tell people I am in a place if have some extra content to broadcast
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tantek.com
edited /ActivityStreams (+407) "quick refs to object types and verbs, and updated my actual use of h-as-note and h-as-article"
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barnabywalters
on my own site, that is
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tommorris
so, two of mine with geolocations recently.
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tommorris
http://tommorris.org/posts/2484 – just posted a little link I found interesting while in a bar.
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tommorris
http://tommorris.org/posts/2483 – that's basically a review of an ice cream place.
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barnabywalters
so that’s another use case: to give context to a note
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tommorris
the context in this case being "it's a Saturday night, you are in a gay bar and you are blogging, you sad, sad fuckwit".
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barnabywalters
tommorris: not that all of that is obvious from the location data :)
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tommorris
only because I haven't got the checkin fully wired up yet.
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barnabywalters
how about this as a test of whether or not a note is conceptually text-with-geo or geo-with-text: should there be a big map of the geo data next to the text?
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barnabywalters
if so, it’s geo-with-text
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barnabywalters
else, it’s text supported by geo
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tommorris
yes. that's not a bad test actually
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tommorris
or at least an address
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tommorris
(the addresses on my posts link to OSM, obviously)
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barnabywalters
I am not yet doing reverse geocoding, or otherwise exposing geo data in HTML
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barnabywalters
but what I suspect I will do is mimic your “in [[address
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barnabywalters
unless the note is tagged with "checkin"
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barnabywalters
or "geo" or something
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tantek
btw I do tend to agree that there are too many object types
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barnabywalters
in which case, display a map properly
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tantek
I think I even noted an issue as such
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barnabywalters
goes into nonexistent ruby-reading mode
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tommorris
barnabywalters: the only complicated bit is << which is just add to array.
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barnabywalters
should learn some ruby sometime
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tommorris
there's a Python version if that's any easier: https://gist.github.com/3923307
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tommorris
it's basically the same but with more significant whitespace. ;-)
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barnabywalters
awesome, got it
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barnabywalters
I’ll add it to my helpers package when I implement it, so there’ll be a PHP version too
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tommorris
it's not quite finished yet.
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tommorris
the problem is OpenStreetMap reverse geocoding is okay.
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tommorris
not great.
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barnabywalters
is that a problem which has to be solved at the source, then?
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tommorris
so for instance, St Pancras comes back as being in "Somers Town". Now, this is technically correct. Nobody actually refers to it as "Somers Town", they refer to it as Euston Road.
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tommorris
similarly, Duncannon Road, where aforementioned bar is, isn't in Chinatown.
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tommorris
Duncannon Street rather
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barnabywalters
so where actually is the problem? In the geocoding algos or the OSM data?
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tommorris
a mixture of the two
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tommorris
if it were an easy, uncontroversial fix in OSM, I'd fix it. ;-)
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aaronpk
turns out location is hard
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tantek
so says the man selling location ;)
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aaronpk
that's why there's a business in it :)
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tantek
will postpone implementing his geo hacks until aaronpk is a made man then.
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tantek
back to AS types
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tantek
wow, 33 object types and 78 verbs in the latest AS taxonomy of such things.
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tantek
that seems like a lot
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barnabywalters
my biggest problem with AS is not the number of verbs and object types, but the large amounts of different places content can be put and the lack of clarity as to what should go where
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barnabywalters
e.g. displayName, title, summary, content,
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barnabywalters
and then all the properties of the object associated with the activity
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tantek
oh that's interesting
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barnabywalters
what goes where? In what context is the summary going to be used in?
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tantek
well those are issues with Atom more than AS
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tantek
Atom has title, summary, content
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barnabywalters
not an issue with Atom. Atom is very clear about what is what
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barnabywalters
and has no nesting
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barnabywalters
e.g. activity -> object
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barnabywalters
what goes in the activity as opposed to the object? it is not clear
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barnabywalters
and there are few implementations to look at for reference
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tantek
what do you mean by object?
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barnabywalters
with ATOM, you can look at your feed in some readers and immediately see what is being displayed where
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tantek
Atom has entries
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tantek
and each entry is equivalent to an AS activity
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barnabywalters
AS has activities which have titles and summaries, and contain objects which have displayNames, summaries and possibly content too
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tantek.com
edited /ActivityStreams (+1060) "Issues section, Too Many Object Types and Verbs issue"
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barnabywalters
so the classic example is a “reshare”…
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barnabywalters
I want to reshare some bit of content
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barnabywalters
and add an annotation
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barnabywalters
AS is not clear about where that goes
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tantek
that's not an AS thing
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barnabywalters
does it go in activity.summary? or in a separate note attached to activity.attachments?
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tantek
in fact, if you're adding an annotation, you're doing a simple reshare/retumbl/retweet
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tantek
you're NOT doing a simple ....
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tantek
you're just doing a post with a blockquote of some other content in it
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tantek
plus your annotation
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barnabywalters
well, yes. that is the more sensible way of doing things. but AS allows for reshares and such things to have annotations
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barnabywalters
I’m assuming this is because FB allows this behaviour
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tantek
calling them "reshares" is a misconception
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tantek
FB allows quoting posts in other posts
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tantek
or maybe we're talking about different things
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tantek.com
edited /ActivityStreams (+167) "/* Issues */ Lack of clients problem - AS vs Atom"
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barnabywalters
okay, just tried this out on FB
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barnabywalters
sharing something with an annotation vs without
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barnabywalters
but going back to this in AS: a plain “share” is an share activity with the shared link as the object, whereas a share with an annotation is a post activity where the note containing the annotation is the object
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barnabywalters
so the verbs and structure are different
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tantek
more importantly, the UI is different
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tantek
from such different UI, it's worth figuring out different object types and/or verbs and/or properties
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tantek.com
edited /ActivityStreams (+2) "/* Too many object types and verbs */ 78!"
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tantek
Twitter's "retweets" are the best "reshare" UI/presentation of current attempts that I know of. Where they show the original author, and some icon indication that it has been reshared
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barnabywalters
they also differentiate between retweeting and quoting the tweet
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tantek
quoting a tweet is just a tweet with some quoted text. there is no other display aspect
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tantek
nor linking back to the original or anything
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tantek
only replies seem to show the tweet they are in-reply-to
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tantek.com
edited /ActivityStreams (+111) "issue: are verbs necessary?"
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tommorris
so, tommorris.org now has full text search.
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tommorris
admittedly, not working full text search. ;-)
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aaronpk
deferred to google on that one
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@Trustyd
What does the acquisition of #3XSystems by #Trustyd mean? Read about it here: http://trustydofficial.blogspot.com/2012/10/trustyd-acquires-3x-systems.html #OwnYourData
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