In reply to a bookmark by John Johnston

The templates contain what I want to have inside a blogposting for a reply, favourite, bookmark, rsvp or check-in. I apply them before I submit something to WordPress, so they are fully outside of my blog and get send as HTML to my blog.

Two main ways: if I type something in my editor (e.g. WordPress back-end or in my local text editor) I have text expansion snippets that paste the right template into my text. The little header above this post with the SVG image and the bit that contains the right microformat, I add by typing .ureply, and I have similar set-ups for .ufav, .ubmark, .ursvp and .uplaze. This is what I did to reply to you now.

A second way is that I have integrated these same little templates into the response form I have in my feedreader, and in a little blogform on my local device. There I indicate with a radio button if something is a reply etc, and the php script that processes the form adds in the right HTML before sending it to my WordPress site’s micropub endpoint.

I wonder if these are an alternative to IndieBlocks or something else.

John Johnston

I disabled the PostKinds WordPress plugin, created by David Shanske. I stopped using it 3 years ago for new postings but disabling it then would have broken many older postings.

What makes the plugin useful is that it allows you to turn postings into different, well, kinds of posts. Such as a reply, or a check-in, rsvp, bookmark or favourite. It adds the right microformats so that computers can semantically analyse a post’s purpose, and adds the styling to display them.

My main issue with it was that it places key elements such as the weblink you’re responding to outside the posting itself. It gets stored in the database as belonging to the PostKinds plugin. Meaning if you ever switch it off, that gets wiped from your posting (although it’s still in the database then). This was a dependency I needed to get rid of.
For new postings from summer 2021 I did that by deploying small templates that allow me to mark a posting as reply, rsvp, favourite, bookmark, or check-in, within the postings I’m writing.

I used the PostKinds plugin heavily for 3 years, and most heavily in 2019. That legacy from 2018-2021 was still there, requiring the PostKinds plugin to remain enabled. Until today. Over time I had slowly changed posts when I encountered them, and in the past week I did the remainder.

Another issue is that PostKinds only works in the classic WordPress editor, and not in the now default Gutenberg editor. At some point that would hinder the ability to upgrade WordPress.

Solong PostKinds, thanks for all the fish!

In reply to Een rsvp op Seblog by Sebastiaan Andeweg

Have fun, it’s been a while since I visited (or rather organised) an IndieWebCamp. Dropped of the radar somewhat. Mostly as I was playing around with the local stuff that interacts with my website but isn’t my website, and with ActivityPub. Less IndieWeb in other words than indie personal tools. Didn’t feel those tangents fit the IndieWebCamp community or efforts.

Maybe we should organise an IndieWebCamp in NL at some point again?

I will be going to IWC Nuremburg this weekend.

Sebastiaan Andeweg

(also posted to Indienews)

Bookmarked Twitter Has Stopped Working in NetNewsWire (by NetNewsWire)

By the end of the month the free tier of the Twitter API will disappear. Some apps using the API will stop doing so because of too high costs to continue, such as Brid.gy. Others are being kicked out by Twitter itself even before the deadline at the end of April, such as Netnewswire. These steps have one thing in common: they disable the ability of reading Twitter without using Twitter directly. Tightening the walls of the silo, in short. The Web is much better off with at least semi-permeable boundaries between services, so that one can interact and read from their own preferred perch. That of course clashes with various business models, although at this point I’m not sure Twitter knows what its businessmodel is supposed to be.

Twitter suspended NetNewsWire today. …. Twitter has stopped working a little sooner than expected. We’ll have updates to NetNewsWire soon that stop trying to connect to Twitter

Bookmarked So long, Twitter API, and thanks for all the fish (by Ryan Barrett)

The Twitter API is moving to paid tiers for anything but the tiniest use cases by the end of the month. I’ve been using Brid.gy to get back webmention notifications about interactions on Twitter with my blogposts here. Brid.gy depends on the Twitter API obviously, and the scale of their needs puts them above the free and affordable tier, even if well below the more expensive tier above it. Therefore Brid.gy will stop supporting Twitter. Silo’s gonna silo I suppose.
It does help remove an action from my backlog: changing the way I show such backfeed on my blog without going counter to Twitter users’ common expectations of where their interaction and avatar might end up.
Unless Musk changes his mind once again, or can’t find an employee capable of implementing the changes.

…assuming it sticks, Bridgy Twitter will stop working on April 29, if not before.

Ryan Barrett

For some time I have been able to directly post things to this blog from my feed reader. My feed reading client is connected to a simple feed server, the Yarns WordPress plugin. Now I have connected my feed reading client to the API of the FreshRSS instance I use for feedreading daily.

The Yarns feeds server works, but it requires a WordPress install to run in and is somewhat limited. I could run it in this here WordPress, but then the many feeds I follow would pollute my blogs database. So until now I ran it in a separate WordPress install. All a bit hacky, and more proof of concept than really a smooth fit for my daily routines.

I do however daily use FreshRSS, which I run as a self-hosted instance on a VPS. FreshRSS has an API, or rather it has two API’s, meaning that I could run my feed reading client on top of FreshRSS by talking to its API.

FreshRSS has two APIs, one is the Fever API, the other is the Google Reader API of old. Both aren’t very well documentend w.r.t. their implementation in FreshRSS, because they assume you’d use it for a mobile client using a local database. I don’t want to replicate the database, I want to only directly talk to the API to fetch the things I need. After some experimentation in Postman I could talk to the Fever API, but haven’t worked out how to talk to the Google Reader API of FreshRSS.
The Fever API doesn’t support calling items by feeds and feeds by groups, the way I actually read in my ‘reading by social distance set-up‘. It can give me groups, feeds and items, but not cross-referenced. In terms of content it can basically only give me a bunch of feed items, at most limited by the item number of the oldest unread item. But it works. The previous post was created directly from my feed reading client, while fetching the item itself from FreshRSS.

Now, I need to figure out how to use the other API, so I can do more of the things that I want from my ideal RSS reader.