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?