IndieWebCamp June 26 through July 3, 2015

Firefox Share

Created by Tantek.com on June 26

• Fri, June 26 tantek.com move Share to its own page
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com indieweb examples
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com why, how to with demo social provider
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com Brainstorming / Micropub share provider
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com /* Micropub share provider */ your site provides the post UI
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com expand brainstorming of how a micropub based social share provider could work
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com /* Micropub share provider */ add steps for the micropub proxy
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com /* Brainstorming */ Micropub Next Steps
• Fri, June 26 tantek.com link Activations Directory to the live directory

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWebCamp wiki by expanding it.

Firefox Share is a new toolbar button (Firefox 23 and later) to share the current page to a share provider of the user’s choice.

The "Share" toolbar button in is represented as a paper airplane icon.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Social_API/Guide/Share

Clicking the button gives you an option of sharing the current page to whatever share providers you have installed. If you don't have any installed, it has a link to the Activations Directory where you can install share providers for various services, including:

• Known - a share service that lets you use any Known installation, on withknown.com, or your own server.

Why

By setting up a Firefox share social provider for your site, you can then post a page directly from the Firefox toolbar to your site.

How to

See the Demo Social Provider and try it out.

Open source:

• https://github.com/mixedpuppy/socialapi-demo

Documentation:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API

IndieWeb Examples

Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmülller uses the Known share provider to share from Firefox to his site werd.io.

Brainstorming

Micropub share provider

It would be great to have a Firefox share provider in the Activations Directory that works with any micropub supporting IndieWeb site. It could work something like this:

From your own site:

• User navigates to the "Install Micropub Share Provider Page" on their own website
  • See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Social_API/Manifest for a sample HTML page that provides a button to install a share provider
• User clicks the "Activate Micropub Share Provider" button
• Page posts a "ActivateSocialFeature" event with the JSON data of the share manifest
• Firefox provides a dropdown asking the user if they want to activate it "Would you like to enable services from ..." with a button (Enable Services)
• User clicks (Enable Services) - Firefox installs that share manifest

That's it. Now clicking the share (airplane) icon will drop down a UI rendered by your website from the "shareURL" property in the share manifest with the following %{url}, %{text}, etc. properties as documented in https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/Social_API/Share#Share_URL_Template

• url, medium, source, sitename, title, description, text, image

Equivalent to microformats properties:

• u-url, ??? type on a href, og:type ???, u-video | u-audio, ???, p-name, p-summary | p-description, p-content, u-photo

Once activated from the toolbar:

• The shareURL that the user's site renders provides a sign-in UI (assuming they're not already signed-in)
  • The user signs-in with IndieAuth as they would on their own homepage
• The shareURL provides a UI for posting the information from the page to the user's website, using GET query params for the information from the site as documented above as the shareURL.

OR - from the Mozilla Activations Directory

• User installs "Micropub" share provider from Activations Directory
• Choosing the "Micropub" share provider drops down a UI page from a micropub sign-in proxy (maybe at indiewebcamp.com) with a URL field for the user to enter their own site
• The micropub share provider does micropub discovery on the user's site
• Then same steps above as "Once activated from the toolbar"

Micropub Next Steps

1. Get one indieweb site working with its own activation UI/page
2. Get a second indieweb site working with its own activation UI/page
3. Figure out how to build a micropub proxy activation UI/page that can forward onto either of those first two indieweb sites, by them just entering their site URL, and following micropub/indieauth sign-in
4. Have the micropub proxy remember (with a cookie) what was the user's personal site URL, and either present a simple sign-in button where it uses the site they used before, or a text field to enter another site.
5. Get that micropub proxy activation UI/page included in the Firefox Activations Directory

After that any Firefox user should be able to install that micropub proxy activation provider, enter the micropub-supporting indieweb site URL, and use Firefox Share to post to their own website via micropub.

Activations Directory

Sample templates from the Activations Directory:

• https://github.com/mixedpuppy/socialapi-directory/blob/master/templates/data-en.json

Social API

Firefox exposes a Social API, allowing sites to easily integrate their UIs into the browser’s native UI

See Also

• Firefox