Breakfast and Coffee: A wiki for sharing food and drink recommendations
Published on under the Coffee category.
Update (April 29, 2024): breakfastand.coffee is no longer live as I seek to reduce the number of tools I run, but the code is still available on GitHub, licensed under an MIT license.
For all of those that subscribe to my website in a feed or social reader, you may have been wondering why a few pages that do not look like my regular blog posts showed up. The answer to that is that I am now working on a new project: a MediaWiki for sharing breakfast and coffee recommendations to which you can post from your own website.
The idea for this project started, somewhat unusually, with a domain name. I noticed that the domain breakfastand.coffee was available. For whatever reason, I decided to buy the domain. Then, I asked the IndieWeb what I could do with it. This started an infrequent discussion that spanned over multiple weeks about a site where you could share your coffee and breakfast recommendations, tagged by factors like location and distinguishing features (i.e. good WiFi).
This site would strive to curate not just recommendations but information about the places being recommended, from interesting facts to things you can do nearby. I don’t have an exact format in mind, that’s something that I believe will grow naturally as the wiki matures.
I am excited to announce that Breakfast and Coffee is now live.
To sign up, go to breakfastand.coffee and click “Log in.” At the moment, you can only sign up using IndieAuth. This means you will need a domain name. If you do not have a domain name or IndieAuth set up but would like to participate, let me know and I can get you set up. I know quite a bit about coffee shops in Scotland but I’ll need help from as many people as possible to make the wiki a more widely useful resource.
There are two ways you can write a post:
- Create a page on the wiki. You can do this by searching for a page. If the page doesn’t exist, the search page will ask you whether you want to create the page. If the page does exist, I would encourage you to add to the existing page so that information about the topic you are interested in is aggregated in one place.
- Write a post on your blog and send a Webmention to breakfastand.coffee.
The second way of posting is something I am really excited about. The blog posts yesterday that didn’t seem like blog posts were not in fact blog posts (yay to me for using “blog posts” three times in the same sentence!). They were wiki entries. I wrote the entries on my site, sent a Webmention to the wiki, and they showed up as posts. This is how I intend to start writing new pages.
For this functionality to work, your post must be marked up with the h-entry microformat. You must also include a u-syndication link to https://breakfastand.coffee. You can find out more about how to submit a post on the wiki Submit page. If this is all above your head, no worries; create a post directly from the wiki instead.
This wiki is an experiment both in how to represent information about breakfast and coffee stops as well as how to factilitate wiki entries from different sites. I am excited to see where it goes. If you have a coffee stop or eatery to recommend, feel free to sign up to breakfastand.coffee and submit a contribution.