Today I extended my new Indieweb Toolkit with a Micropub helper class. This allows you to easily send Micropub requests from your PHP code. Here’s an example:

// Set URL and access token of the endpoint to use
micropub::setEndpoint('http://yoursite.com/micropub', 'xxx');

micropub::reply('http://example.com/a-nice-post', "Oh what a post!");
micropub::like('http://example.com/another-post');
micropub::rsvp('http://example.com/an-event', 'maybe');

$newURL = micropub::post([
  'name' => 'Custom posts are possible!',
  'content' => 'This is a story about (...)',
  'category' => ['story', 'custom'],
  'mp-slug' => 'custom-posts-are-possible',
  'mp-syndicate-to' => 'https://twitter.com/example',
]);

go($newURL);

Note that this only creates posts, and relies havily on the server you are making requests to. The mp-syndicate-to in the above example indicates that the remote server needs to post the entry to Twitter also, this helper doesn’t do a thing for that.

A drop-in Micropub endpoint is hard, because every site stores it’s data different, but I intend to extend this toolkit so that the different parts involved will be easier. (De facto making my own code more re-usable.)

Posted this post with use of todays code :D

With the recent events in the USA, I’ve decided that I want to move away from having data on American servers as much as possible. The first thing I want to tackle in that area is my e-mail. Although I do have an address at seblog.nl, I still just redirect it to Gmail.

My computer is currently in the process of backing up my main Gmail. I documented how I do it on the Indieweb Wiki:

Gmvault seems to be very simple and straight forward. It's on the command line, so it's scary for some users, but it does a good job of describing what it does. I did the following on my Mac, and since I can't remember installing pip, I think this works out of the box:

• sudo pip install --upgrade pip
• sudo pip install gmvault
• gmvault sync example@gmail.com
• Gmvault prompts for OAuth, with a description. Press enter to open the browser, and you have to make sure you are logged in at that browser to the Gmail account.
• Do the OAuth in de browser and copy the key. Paste it in the Terminal
• Gmvault does things! I got 6351 mails out of an old account in 16m 14s. It creates a folder called 'gmvault-db' in your home folder, with (in /db/) folders for every month. In those folders are, per e-mail, an '[id].meta' and an '[id].eml.gz'. The .meta is a JSON with info from Gmail (labels/tags, subject) and the .eml.gz is a gzipped .eml, which is just the plain-text e-mail with all the headers.

Having the data is just one step. I will need to think about how I want to manage my e-mail in the future. For now I’m on Gmail still, but I am making plans.

To make today a bit more IndieWeb-relevant (e-mail is not web), I backed Micro.blog, because today is the last day of their Kickstarter campaign.

Although I really like that the project gives Indieweb a lot of attention, it felt wrong to only give to Micro.blog. So I also backed Aaron Parecki with the same amount, for his ongoing 100daysofindieweb. I use a lot of things he made or did first.

I really like XRays way of storing things (flat, knowing which properties will be string or array, and the rels list), and I wanted to use it with my reader. Having it as a library with #17 would be nice for that, but parsing the whole h-feed at once is also very handy.

So, allow me to brainstorm / share some h-feed stuff I learned with sebsel/lees :)

• I agree: the feed does not have to have an author. It can be used to define the author of the posts, but the feed itself can be authorless. Example of a mixed h-feed is Twitter > HTML through Granary.

• Different ways of presenting:

  1. have a children property with an array [] of objects {} that are just what you get in data when you look at a h-entry
  2. have a children property with an array [] of urls, and put the h-entry objects in refs

• Some h-feeds have no u-url for each h-entry. This makes it impossible to do 2. in those cases. But it might not be XRays task to fix that.
  (Same for dt-published. A lot of WP sites have hentry class with sometimes a article-name class, but dropped the rest of the Mf1. Again: might not be XRays task to fix that.)

• what to do with h-event and h-review within the h-feed? -> have to detect type for each child.

• when looking at a home page (i.e. aaronparecki.com), I get a card, which is great because that's the main object on that page. But when using XRay in a /reader, I want a feed. Would be nice to have a type=feed parameter, to point XRay to the type of data you are looking for.

• Once you go h-feed, should you go RSS/Atom?

Today I hacked my own site. I don't want to give details now, because it's late and it needs a proper write-up, but I will soon. It is fixed now. This post gets updated with a link to a more detailed article when it’s there.

When can one officially put ‘hacker’ in one’s Twitter bio? I think I’m close.

Update: I wrote the post! It's here.

I’ve been posting likes to Seblog for a few weeks now. I like the likes, but they al looked like ‘Seb likes this’, so I was like: looks like I like to fix my likes.

Today I hooked up XRay to Seblog, so now my site can see things on URLs I link to. (I actually run a version on a ’secret’ URL, to keep things on my own server.) This way I can grab the name of the post I liked and show that, together with the author. If it has no name, but a photo, it says ‘Seb likes a photo’. It adds the author if it knows who it is. If it really doesn’t know anything about the page, it still defaults to ‘this’. I can fix those manual if I want.

XRay’s format consists of two parts: a data part, with information about the page it looked at, and a refs part, which is a list of URLs that are mentioned or embedded on the page. Retweets, for example, show the original tweet in the refs. I added a refs field to my pages, where I store the data part under the url of the page I mentioned and the refs part under the urls they came with.

An example, with Kirby Data and YAML:

Like-of: http://example.com/a-post

​----

Refs:
  "http://example.com/a-post":
    name: A Post
    author: Someone
    repost-of: http://another-example.com/a-photo
  "http://another-example.com/a-photo":
    photo: http://another-example.com/a-photo/img.jpg
    author: Someone Else

I can be more efficient with the moment I grab the data. For example: to send webmentions, my server already reaches out to all links in the post to find their Webmention Endpoint. If I parse the page then, I don’t need another call from XRay later on.

I also need to fiddle a bit with the things I want to display. But for now it’s okay: my server has the data for my likes. I even download pictures if a post has a photo property. I now not only own my likes, I also have my own archive of the things I like.