Words to live by -- and not just for web developers. Your job is to make it easy for the people who use what you make, not for yourself.

Installed wandering.gs just for the fun of it. It'll be a very dull picture, that's for sure.

IndieWeb and homemade sauerkraut. I wonder how many other people are in this particular intersection?

Thanks @nickykylegarden, although I have also noticed that there now seem to be a fair few small commercial companies in the UK and elsewhere that have taken up the burden of supplying varieties that really suit home growers.

Fascinating post from Jon Udell about bookmarking and sharing audio sound-bites. I hope to be able to get to grips with the details and maybe even get to the point of being able to do the same, once the New Year clean-up is over.

I don't really understand any of the details of how people install, use and monitor personal renewable energy resources, but I love following along with Chris Neale's efforts. I'd really like to read a comprehensive, but low-level, account of the whole story, even though there is currently no chance I could do anything similar myself.

Two very good pieces of news from my friend Jason.

Language Log has set out its stall and its intentions for 2018, which I applaud. There's talk of a redesign. I hope that in doing that, they consider adopting some Indieweb ideas.

Such fun to read this, and others like it. I really want to know how one eats a goose barnacle, and what it tastes like. Also a good reminder to try better to track these things for myself, maybe as part of my very new monthly roundup posts.

Lazymention sounds really interesting and potentially a welcome release from the Telegraph fandango. I do wonder, though, how it will play with my non-static but heavily cached Grav site.

According to one food writer, "dried chili peppers are grown in the Southwest and dehydrated onion and garlic are grown in California and Oregon" That's some impressive growing, right there.

Thanks to Daniel Goldsmith for both the shoutout and, even more so, the recommendations. But if Tanis turns out to resemble a recent podcast series about the Polybius Conspiracy in any way I will be well cross.

Good point about the transaction fees -- which is why I offer primarily a season ticket for six months of Eat This Podcast, at different levels. Of course I'm also happy to accept one-off donations, but the season ticket is what I'm hoping people will buy.

Entirely by coincidence, I am sure, this morning I once again turned my attention to the possibility of beefing up my raging iMac's performance buy adding an external SSD as startup disc. Seems a lot more doable than cracking the computer open, and a lot more affordable than a new machine. I'm in the land of cheaper for a little longer yet, so time for more research, but I think I am going to continue down this road.

Patreon's change of heart is indeed welcome, although I am withholding final judgement until I see exactly how things pan out. In a sense you can of course take your patrons with you, as a download of the basic details, and with all the other tools available I suspect it would not be too difficult to reconstruct a similar experience that might even be better for managing privileged content. I've yet to do that myself, but it is in my plans. I'm also having a little trouble with Stripe, which was easy enough to set up, harder to get working efficiently.

Overall, I'm glad to have been goaded into doing something to make it easy for people who don't want the hassle of signing up for Patreon, perhaps because they only have one person to whom they want to donate.

I'm late getting to this, but I would say it depends partly on which CMS you're talking about. I almost always compose directly in Known, and almost never compose directly in either WP or my main site, which runs on Grav. For WP sites, I usually use MarsEdit, which has just shipped version 4 and which is really good and Mac only. For Grav, I tend to compose in Byword and proofread in Marked2.

There's a lot that's quite dodgy about the Guardian's farmer suicides article. See link at https://www.eatthispodcast.com/those-farmer-suicides/

If only these self-same people were aware of the power of feeds. I get a pure timeline of Instagram photos from the people I follow in my feed reader and it has made me like it all over again.

@DropboxSupport I've fixed permissions and checked for symlinks; thanks. The only app accessing often is nvALT. So, we'll see if things improve. I hope so.

Curses and blessings in equal measure, @ChrisAldrich. Subscribed!

This person thinks it is easy to cook good french-fried potatoes. I think they are wrong, because they omit an essential step: take them out of the oil and allow it to reheat. Of course, our idea of what constitutes a "good" fry might be different. Our understanding of how to cook certainly is.

I moved everything to Fastmail too, a couple of years ago, but I didn’t actually delete my gmail or Mac mail. I just have everything, including some other domains, forwarded to fastmail. But I’ve never thought about unifying contacts between Mac and Fastmail. Is there a way to have a single canonical contacts list that will sync to all devices?

@oxfordfarming I find this hard to swallow. Have you really “teamed up” with @ORFC or are you just burnishing your reputation by basking in their halo?

@denials I absolutely need to check that I am not talking through my hat when I say that I can post more than 140 characters here @withknown and see them show up via POSSE on Twitter. Which means I need to blab a little more than usual.

Amazing work from @chrisaldrich explaining how and why he's gone about bringing his blogroll into the 21st century. I'm honoured to be on the list, with just one comment: the Vaviblog site, while still live, will not be updated, until it reverts to its original purpose. I have not yet found a way to import all the data from that instance of Known to my current instance, as I would like, so for now that site is a relic of my first steps onto the IndieWeb.

That's a real pity. And these things are so hard to troubleshoot. I can't help with that, but I can send replies.

Received in good order, although you may want to look at the detailed microformatting.

Oh, and thanks.

Too terse for this human to parse. Do you mean that at-mentions do not show up in your micro.blog stream? And where are the posts showing up?

Thanks Chris for adding the issue. Imposter Syndrome often prevents me from doing the same.

More power to @ChrisAldrich A nanowrimo book on indieweb will be novel even if it isn't a novel.

I do hope the indieweb dinner includes some spam for the bots.

I'm still a little hazy on the plumbing details of all the bits and pieces of IndieWeb but I would have thought that if withKnown has a micropub endpoint and micro.blog can send to the WordPress endpoint, it ought to be able to send to WithKnown. But I'm probably exposing my ignorance. And maybe it is on the roadmap.

Right. I had seen @jeffperry's profile elsewhere, and typed it by hand, making it easier for others to find it. If I hadn't found it elsewhere, I would not have been able to do that. At least, until @cn reminded me of Search in Discover

"botcotting" is the possibly accidental neologism of the day. As my POSSEs to that particular silo are manual, I cannot use it. But I admire the heck out of it.

One of these geniuses fell down on the job: Parts 1 and 2 link to the same post. https://source.opennews.org/articles/what-do-you-do-3

13 October; now fixed.

It may well be a known bug, but as it isn't my site that is affected, I cannot investigate in any detail. I feel odd about reporting "issues" that don't affect me directly and that I have only witnessed and wondered about. So I just draw attention to them. I haven't seen similar behaviour on my child of Independent Publisher, I don't think.

If anyone is going to report it, I would think it would be you or James

A #followfriday for micro.blogs is certainly a good idea, but there's something odd about the way Jimmy Baum's site renders webmentions. I'm seeing Chris Aldrich's comment -- which brought me there in the first place -- as "Chris Aldrich mentioned this Article on amongthestones.com".

Shouldn't it be "Chris Aldrich mentioned this Article on boffosocko.com"?

I do wish people wouldn't do Medium's dirty work for it. John Naughton (and plenty of others) said what a great couple of pieces Dave Eggars had written in Medium, without saying that the work wasn't available without signing up for Medium. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but is it too much to hope that Dave Eggars will syndicate his own work to a place where anyone can enjoy it? Maybe eventually it will be in a book I will happily pay for.

I haven't used it,but I think Jared Sinclair's Stormcrow app is intended to build a tweetstorm from z bigger chunk of text, so it would be reasonably easy to use either before or after writing the blog post, if that's what you're doing. There's clearly a difference between text and tweetstorm, though, and, like @nitin, i would prefer to promote something I had written with selected tweets.

This anguishing about comments has been going a good long while. Fun to uncover this one.

John Naughton's bookmark about the Douglas Bader story ("... these f***ers were in Messerschmitts") reminds me of the equally good, and possibly equally apocryphal, one about the celebrated Antarctic explorer Sir Vivian Fuchs giving a lecture in Leeds.

In his article A Problem with Apple News Sites, Gabe says: "I don't wonder why indie blogs are dying any more. Link posts are killing them." I'm not sure it is blogs that are dying, but I do agree that it is why most "independent" news sites are dead, at least to me.

On your own site, you can at least distinguish between quick one liners, like this, and longer posts that are also replies. Of course, the recipient may not be able to see them, but that's just a question of implementation.

I cannot for the life of me explain why I like nvALT, but I do. Maybe it is a question of looking at some good explanations of how other people use it. I did that and stole some things that made my life easier.

I've been thinking about Rob's post and your notes on vHWC, and I agree that swapping the quiet writing hour for a question session makes a lot of sense. I've certainly learned a lot and look forward to the meetings.

One thing I'd like to suggest is a follow up on the idea of wiki pages for beginners. Someone was recently talking about a "for dummies" approach to setting up a web mention receiver, but from the context, I got the impression that they were dummies only about IndieWeb, not about PHP and servers and all the plumbing. Essentially Gen 1. A for dummies for that person would look very different to a for dummies for Gen 2 or Gen 3.

Would it be interesting if we picked a specific page and some of us (me, probably, although of course others too, and because it is a vHWC they could be anywhere) tried to do do a for Gen 2 dummies write up as a new version. Then at the vHWC you Gen 1people could take a look and explain in more detail, if necessary, or correct it, if wrong in some detail.

Does that sound worthwhile?

I don't actually have a good sense of which page might be best to start with, but it could be setting up to receive webmentions without, for now, going into the complexities of bridgy. So, for static sites, or CMSs like Grav.

I get an error when trying to compute the signature:

Jeremys-iMac:~ jeremycherfas$ HMAC=$(echo -n "/status/edit" | openssl dgst -binary -sha256 -hmac 'MY-API' | base64 -w0)
base64: invalid option -- w

How do I use signed HTML?

Chris Aldrich is way too kind, but it is the kind of kindness I need. A couple of quick responses:

I will indeed tweak the regex as you suggest. That behaviour by reading.am does rather spoil using it as a repository for links I want to go back to, but hey ho. On posting to Wayback Machine, I thought I saw a blog post from Reading that this was now done automatically for all saved posts. Getting things into my Known stream is on the horizon, but I will have to learn a lot more about how to use the web publish tools.

The webmention form is now looking good and working well, and I think I may even have got email notifications up and running, thanks once again to great help from the IndieWeb community. I'm not happy submitting anything to the original plugin, because it is so very different in scope and approach. But I am definitely thinking about creating a plugin of my own, which would also make it very easy to send the notification email. That's definitely on the cards. Putting it all on the wiki is next on my list.

And thanks again for being a guide and an encouragement.

I think we're on about the same level, Rob, Gen 2 with a smattering of Gen 1, and I agree with most of the points you make. A couple of observations:

The real time Q&A is tricky, although I have found that using the !tell command to a named individual is handy, once you have made some friends on IRC. Slack works well too. I tend to either review the IRC logs or catch up on Slack and if I see something on which I can maybe help, I dive in.

I also think that the wiki is at different times too verbose and too terse and links, but I have been reluctant to dive in, even though I know all changes are reversible. I wonder how hard it would be to do an alternative beginners version of the important pages, with links back and forth. Very easy, probably. There must be an easy way for one of the gurus to tell us which pages are visited most often.

I'm alone in a big city with no other indiewebbers that I'm aware of, but I try to join the virtual IWC and the people there have been super helpful. You might want to give that a try. Mind you, I have no idea what timezone you are in ... Most likely UK, but possibly not.

As for your final paragraph, all I can do is echo and say Amen.

.@schmarty Thanks to your terrific write-up I amazed myself and got #Audiogram working. Looking forward to trying it for real.

Really interesting write up from Marty McGuire about how he made use of WNYC's Audiogram to create audio snippets to syndicate to silos. Aside from the use of Docker -- which I don't understand in the slightest -- this seems like something I could manage. clammr was a complete bust for me. It'll be interesting to see how this works out for Marty, whether it brings new listeners.