Today I drafted a SiloAPI class in indieweb-toolkit. The idea is that it gives an easy way to interact with different Silo API's. In some ways this is a bad idea, because all API's work different and have different capabilities, but I like the idea, even if it's bad.

One API call that is available for both Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is to create a like. So that's where I focussed on first. Today, I made SiloAPI a wrapper for the TwitterOAuth PHP library, and it now supports ::like() just like micropub::like(). You still need to pass in the name of the silo though, but maybe I'll detecting the silo from the URL later.

siloapi::setToken('twitter', [
  'consumer_key'       => 'xxx',
  'consumer_secret'    => 'xxx',
  'oauth_token'        => 'xxx',
  'oauth_token_secret' => 'xxx',
]);

siloapi::like('https://twitter.com/_/status/123456', 'twitter');

Then I realised that Brid.gy probably can do this for me too, since it already syndicates my Tweets for me when I ask for it. So I just made my Micropub endpoint call Brid.gy publish for every like-of that is a twitter-URL.

I will add to SiloAPI though, because I want to autolike to Instagram too!

Today is a weird day. Fixed a lot of things, but also did kinda useless things. (I learned more about HTTP requests by trying to create a Micropub request using netcat, and at some point, I was chatting with myself in two Terminal windows with nc -l localhost 8080 in one and nc localhost 8080 in the other, completely by accident.)

Then it was 1:30 at night.

Earlier on in this series, I fixed my repost context. These contexts where based on a .json file I exported with my whole Twitter archive. A few days ago I made XRay look up likes for me. Today, I retweeted someone, and since .json files don't magically appear on your server (luckily), it didn't show any repost context.

So I combined the two and now XRay fetches the repost context for me. I don't use the .json file anymore, but keep the data the same way I keep likes: in a refs field.

And then it was 2:00 at night. I'm going to bed.

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.

Today my brother and I made a silly little movie. I used the light on my iPhone to shine through the Apple logo on his MacBook, from the back, while the brightness of his screen was all the way down. All this under a blanked. We had fun and I wanted to share it.

I made a commitment to post everything I post on Instagram or Twitter on my site first, so I used my standard ‘Foto op Seblog’ Workflow to post the video. But it turned out that just adding a video to my photo field didn’t work.

So I did a little tweaking and my site now does support video. In honor of the late Vine I looped it with autoplay. Let’s see how long that lasts.

Busy day today, so no big Indieweb updates. It’s not about the big updates though, it’s about useful updates.

Yesterday, I went to an event. I kind of got into the habit of just getting on my bike and cycling to events, without actually looking up any details at home. Sometimes I don’t even know the exact place I need to go, just that it’s somewhere in the city center. It’s a bad habit, but it’s a habit now.

Since I posted an RSVP to my site for yesterdays event, I was able to find the information I was looking for quickly on my phone. I have been away from Facebook for almost 3 years now and I forgot how useful this feature is.

A combined feed of my RSVPs and Events can now be found at /agenda (Dutch for ‘calendar’), so I can easily find information about where I have to go when I’m cycling and running late next time.

This is a thing I wanted for some time now. Since my weblog is now more a timeline than a blog, long posts disappear fast in the stream of short ones. But since the long posts hold their value longer, I wanted to show them longer.

Also, since I started with this #100daysofindieweb-thingy, I also started to blog in English, which I never did before. My stream of posts gets flooded with English posts.

Today I made a homepage widget. It only shows on the main page, and I can put different parts in it. It now contains a blog list for both Dutch and English, a list of blogposts with #100daysofindieweb, a stream of likes and bookmarks, and the most recent photo post.

This way I can provide a summary of what’s going on on my site. It gives me a framework, where I can always swap parts. The #100daysofindieweb tag, for example, is now a good thing to have, but is less needed 100 days from now.

I’ve been doing this #100daysofindieweb thing for 10 days now, so I thought it was time for a summary post. Here are the things I've been working on:

Presentation

I fixed how things look here on my site quite a lot. On Day 1 I fixed how my reposts look. They are not longer just a url, but now actually show the original post, which I stored during the Twitter dump. I don’t do an automated grab of the external page yet!

I also changed now my RSVPs look on Day 7. First they where just a reply post, with a weird textual representation of ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but now they have icons.

On Day 8 I launched a ‘new post type’. In a way, this is just an different presentation of the posts I write for the purpose of writing them. I now only show the word count on those posts, not the text, because the actual text is less important.

Webmentions plugin

On Day 3, I fixed some bugs regarding relative urls, not only in my own Webmentions plugin, but also in the Kirby Toolkit. It eventually led to a new test on Webmention.rocks.

Today I also added an auto-archive function to my plugin, so it triggers archival copies for any url I mention.

Importing posts

I spend Day 5 and Day 6 importing old posts, which was actually quite hard and is still not really finished. I’m quite picky about how things should look, and they don’t look very good at the moment. There are also a lot of duplicate posts, because I imported my Twitter, and I used to link to my blog on Twitter. I still need to fix these things, but since I already spend two days on this, I postpone it some more.

Markup and headers

On Day 2, I marked up my deleted posts. If a post has a dt-deleted in the past, it returns a 410 Gone header on it’s own page, and shows up as a hidden tombstone in the feed.

And on Day 4 I changed the HTTP header of posts with a dt-published in the future to 404 Not found. Together with hiding them from the feed, this makes scheduled posts.

Finally I fiddled a bit with my Microformats on Day 9, so my site comes out better on Indiecards.

All in all it feels like a productive first 10 days! Only 9 of those sets to go :)

Yesterday Tantek encouraged people to trigger an archive in the Internet Archive for every url they mention. It is not that hard to do.

So today I added an auto-archive function to my Kirby webmentions plugin, which you can find here. I’m not aware of anyone using it beside myself, but it is set up more or less so that everyone with a Kirby site can use it. (I am planning some breaking changes though.)

I guess, by posting this to my blog, I trigger an archive to a page describing how to trigger an archive. How meta.

About your explanation of Micropub: it's not that it enables you to create Notes, it's that it enables you to use other services to post on your own site. This post, for example, I write in Aaronpk's Quill. Thanks to Micropub, Quill can actually post this reply to my site. But Micropub can be used to create whatever post on my site, as long as the client (Quill) and server (my site) both support that kind of post. See it as an open posting API :)

Oh, and I believe step 3 should be WebSub, which is just PubSub. I'm not at step 3 though.

Anyway, welcome to the Indieweb!

Yesterday I admitted on IRC that I have quit the #100dagen500woorden part of my challenge. I already stated some doubts but Tantek added me to the wiki anyway.

I felt bad for giving up (so early!) but I felt even worse about posting strange unfinished texts on my site. That’s why I quit: the challenge didn’t feel good.

Today I thought about it some more. I needed a new post-type, where I only post how many words I wrote in a day, not the actual words I wrote.

Compare it with NaNoWriMo, where thousands of people write a novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. The actual text you write in that month does not really matter. The only thing that matters is writing a certain amount of words.

I never participated in NaNoWriMo, so I have no data to export in this format, but I can actually participate this year without having to put my data into NaNoWriMo.org.

Now for the implementation details. I have the following .txt-file on my development server:

This translates to the following public post on my blog:

As you can see, Seblog calculates the amount of words for me, so the only thing I have to do, is write a text and put it under the wrote field. I mark up the number of words with a p-words class, which is probably not consumed by anyone, but hey, I publish this kind of data now.

Now I have no excuse anymore to pick up some writing again.

Last but not least I want to coin the term ‘iceberg post’. A ‘wrote’ in the way I implemented it is an example of an iceberg post: there is a public part and a non-public part to it. It’s just a case of Partial Page Privacy, but I think the term ‘iceberg post’ has a nice ring to it.

A little while ago I posted my first event, and soon after it came my own RSVP to that event. Back then I wrote a bit of text, because an Indieweb RSVP is a h-entry with a u-in-reply-to and a p-rsvp property. Since it’s a reply, I wrote reply text.

Most people don’t display the text for RSVP posts though, myself included. And today I RSVP’ed on a Meetup.com event, so after the ‘hey you need to post this on your own site first’ bells went off I made a new RSVP on my site. I forgot the text, so it looked like this:

It’s a bit yucky. So since I already have icons here for displaying the different RSVP values (yes, no, maybe and interested), I thought let’s re-use them.

I changed a lot of code behind the scenes too, because my h-entry template became a mess with all the different options it has. (But behind the scenes doesn’t count for #100daysofindieweb!) I now display RSVP’s as what I now call ‘shortposts’:

I also added my bookmarks to the feed at the homepage, because I like to show off my different types of shortposts. (They first where only available at /bookmarks, and I'm actually subscribed to that feed myself, so I can review my own bookmarks in my reader. Nice lifehack.)

I got my posts back! :D

Unfortunately the quality of the dump isn't very good. Markdown is sometimes not interpreted, there are double posts (Tweets linking to my blog or Instagram) and a lot of images are at width:500px, which was my default width for over 10 years.

I've been coding some kind of post-match code, too see if I can detect the double posts. It quite hard, because a lot of tweets that are not the same post, are send within 15 minutes of each other, so published is not a good predictor. Trying to calculate the text similarity with levenshtein() seemed like the solution to all my problems, but there are quite a few mismatches still. I probably can't do this fully automated.

I now really have to go to do some real-life stuff, so I guess today just has to be the day I imported the posts and added the images. It's not that I haven't put in the hours today, it's just that it's way too much. (Or I need to be more efficient) You can check things out by scrolling way down in my feed, or at /blog or /tekstbeelden.

I'm very late today. It's actually day 5 now in The Netherlands, but since I haven't slept yet I'm still calling this day 4.

Because I started so late, I chose an easy one for today. Unfortunately the easy ones always take longer than you expect. But hey, that makes this episode of #100daysofindieweb an episode!

I am now able to schedule posts on my blog. That's a simple one, because all I have to do is check wether the 'published' field of a post is in the past before I display it. It took a little longer because I had to do it in two places, the feed and the entry page.

The feed now only grabs posts where the 'published' is smaller than the current date, and my router now gives a 404 Not found if a post has a 'published' that is bigger than the current date.

Because my webmentions trigger on the first visit of the page, and the page never gets called, I effectively schedule webmentions with this too. Only one problem: I need to wait for a visitor to open the post once it's published to trigger the mentions. This includes the mention to Brid.gy/publish, to syndicate a post to Twitter. I leave that problem to another day though.

Anyway, it's a simple feature, but a neat one, so I'm happy with it.