Lastly I would say to any tech person trying to change the world—we already changed it quite a bit. Maybe take your foot off the gas and look around first. The tech startups that came up in the 1990s and 2000s had really excellent intentions and pure motives. It's not enough. https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1128857953937907714
Moved my reader actions inline... previously clicking an action in the reader would scroll to the top of the page, because that's where the editor was. It would helpfully scroll you back once the interaction was complete, but it was a bit clunky. :-)
There was something else I wanted to mention in my post the other day, but left it out because it was getting a bit long. The first screenshot contains the unexplained piece of text: "To follow indieweb add a reader" followed by a settings link. (Here it is again...)
I added this because it's an easy way to add a rel=feed to the page. It's a separate module in Dobrado that allows setting some values for the account. One of the options allows specifying what feeds you want to make discoverable, so in this case I have it set to indieweb/directory which is the microformats feed list for all the feeds shown on that page.
The module renders that link, marked up with rel=feed, along with the logo and account name as an h-card for the account. The other thing it does is provide a webaction, which is why rather than just being a link it mentions adding a reader. Clicking the settings link opens a dialog that lets you specify your web action config. If the dialog finds a valid config it will trigger an update to any indie-action tags it finds on the page. There just happens to be one in the module I've just mentioned, so it will now looks like this:
The link "follow indieweb" is now using my config! It's pointing at my own reader with a follow action set, so if I click on that link all I have to do is click ok in my reader to add the feed. As it turns out I'm already following the indieweb directory on unicyclic.com, and my webaction config has checked this too!
One of the options set in my config is status and it happens to work a little differently from the other actions. This config option supports CORS requests, and will provide information about urls when I'm logged in. The request is made during the config check mentioned above, so the page actually looks like this for me:
The status endpoint supports multiple urls at a time, so it gets called for all indie-action tags on a page, and returns information for other actions too such as likes, replies and reposts. When it finds an action set for a url, that action will also be highlighted on the page.
This is going to be a long one, so the short version is summed up in this screenshot:
That's from the top of this page: unicyclic.com/indieweb, which is a feed combined from different sources, commonly referred to as a planet. Up until now I've been adding new feeds to that page as people join the IndieWeb community, but I've now automated that process using follow webmentions.
What is a follow webmention? Well you start by writing a post on your own website containing a link to someone you've started following in your reader, with an extra bit of microformats in the markup of the link: class="u-follow-of". Then you would send webmentions for the post, so that the recipient can check your content and discover that you have indeed started following them.
That is what the indieweb account on unicyclic.com is now looking for, but with one extra step. When it receives a follow webmention, it will follow you back by adding you to the planet it manages. It does this by looking at the author of the post, and then doing feed discovery based on that URL. If it all works out you will be notified in the response to your webmention.
If you don't want to be listed in the planet you can unfollow the indieweb account too, no hard feelings! This is done by removing your follow post and re-sending webmentions, which should result in a 410 Gone status code from your site.
So that's how this planet now works, but what is really fun is connecting this to reading lists. I'm not sure what the right terminology is here... reading lists are also known as subscriptions lists, or dynamic OPML files. Whatever they are Dobrado now supports them, so you can subscribe to unicyclic.com/indieweb and stay up to date with the feeds of whoever happens to have joined.
Both OPML and microformats versions are available to subscribe to and are linked from that page for discovery. Since microformats is just HTML it is also a nice web page to browse, and adds to the growing list of directories in a year that is widely regarded as the year of the indieweb directory. If you parse the microformats on that page you will notice the reading list is an h-feed of h-cards. Whichever version you subscribe to, if your reader supports this type of subscription it should add feeds to your reader when they are added to the list, and remove the feed when they are taken off.
When thinking about implementing this I realised I didn't always want to stop following people just because they were removed from a reading list, so I added an extra option to manually add feeds that you're automatically subscribed to. Dobrado now provides a dialog that looks like this when viewing a reading list:
Every feed allows setting a channel, the new bit here is the description at the bottom of the dialog that mentions manually adding the feeds below. Scrolling down allows you to go through the feeds you've been subscribed to and manually add them, which just means they won't be removed from your reader if they are removed from the reading list or if you unsubscribe from that list completely. If you're already following a feed that just happens to be on a reading list you subscribe to, this also means your original subscription will be kept.
Up until now I've been reading feeds from some indieweb members in my own reader, and then also visiting the indieweb page to check out the rest, which of course meant reading things twice! Pretty happy that I can now just set a channel for it and also provide a version for others to check out or subscribe to themselves.
Lastly I would say to any tech person trying to change the world—we already changed it quite a bit. Maybe take your foot off the gas and look around first. The tech startups that came up in the 1990s and 2000s had really excellent intentions and pure motives. It's not enough.
https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1128857953937907714
Moved my reader actions inline... previously clicking an action in the reader would scroll to the top of the page, because that's where the editor was. It would helpfully scroll you back once the interaction was complete, but it was a bit clunky. :-)
I added this because it's an easy way to add a rel=feed to the page. It's a separate module in Dobrado that allows setting some values for the account. One of the options allows specifying what feeds you want to make discoverable, so in this case I have it set to indieweb/directory which is the microformats feed list for all the feeds shown on that page.
The module renders that link, marked up with rel=feed, along with the logo and account name as an h-card for the account. The other thing it does is provide a webaction, which is why rather than just being a link it mentions adding a reader. Clicking the settings link opens a dialog that lets you specify your web action config. If the dialog finds a valid config it will trigger an update to any indie-action tags it finds on the page. There just happens to be one in the module I've just mentioned, so it will now looks like this:
The link "follow indieweb" is now using my config! It's pointing at my own reader with a follow action set, so if I click on that link all I have to do is click ok in my reader to add the feed. As it turns out I'm already following the indieweb directory on unicyclic.com, and my webaction config has checked this too!
One of the options set in my config is status and it happens to work a little differently from the other actions. This config option supports CORS requests, and will provide information about urls when I'm logged in. The request is made during the config check mentioned above, so the page actually looks like this for me:
The status endpoint supports multiple urls at a time, so it gets called for all indie-action tags on a page, and returns information for other actions too such as likes, replies and reposts. When it finds an action set for a url, that action will also be highlighted on the page.
On planets and reading lists
That's from the top of this page: unicyclic.com/indieweb, which is a feed combined from different sources, commonly referred to as a planet. Up until now I've been adding new feeds to that page as people join the IndieWeb community, but I've now automated that process using follow webmentions.
What is a follow webmention? Well you start by writing a post on your own website containing a link to someone you've started following in your reader, with an extra bit of microformats in the markup of the link: class="u-follow-of". Then you would send webmentions for the post, so that the recipient can check your content and discover that you have indeed started following them.
That is what the indieweb account on unicyclic.com is now looking for, but with one extra step. When it receives a follow webmention, it will follow you back by adding you to the planet it manages. It does this by looking at the author of the post, and then doing feed discovery based on that URL. If it all works out you will be notified in the response to your webmention.
If you don't want to be listed in the planet you can unfollow the indieweb account too, no hard feelings! This is done by removing your follow post and re-sending webmentions, which should result in a 410 Gone status code from your site.
So that's how this planet now works, but what is really fun is connecting this to reading lists. I'm not sure what the right terminology is here... reading lists are also known as subscriptions lists, or dynamic OPML files. Whatever they are Dobrado now supports them, so you can subscribe to unicyclic.com/indieweb and stay up to date with the feeds of whoever happens to have joined.
Both OPML and microformats versions are available to subscribe to and are linked from that page for discovery. Since microformats is just HTML it is also a nice web page to browse, and adds to the growing list of directories in a year that is widely regarded as the year of the indieweb directory. If you parse the microformats on that page you will notice the reading list is an h-feed of h-cards. Whichever version you subscribe to, if your reader supports this type of subscription it should add feeds to your reader when they are added to the list, and remove the feed when they are taken off.
When thinking about implementing this I realised I didn't always want to stop following people just because they were removed from a reading list, so I added an extra option to manually add feeds that you're automatically subscribed to. Dobrado now provides a dialog that looks like this when viewing a reading list:
Every feed allows setting a channel, the new bit here is the description at the bottom of the dialog that mentions manually adding the feeds below. Scrolling down allows you to go through the feeds you've been subscribed to and manually add them, which just means they won't be removed from your reader if they are removed from the reading list or if you unsubscribe from that list completely. If you're already following a feed that just happens to be on a reading list you subscribe to, this also means your original subscription will be kept.
Up until now I've been reading feeds from some indieweb members in my own reader, and then also visiting the indieweb page to check out the rest, which of course meant reading things twice! Pretty happy that I can now just set a channel for it and also provide a version for others to check out or subscribe to themselves.
#SocialistSunday