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Jeremy Cherfas"/>

A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.

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Jeremy Cherfas

Found another person who syndicated from WithKnown to Mastodon, and wondering what technology they used. Probably the Mastodon plugin that is not working for me.

Jeremy Cherfas

Well, this is a drag. Just discovered that all my Checkins at WithKnown show an error because they are not authenticated at Stadia Maps. I hope I can find the problem and fix it.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on werd.io :

Very interesting personal history from @benwerd ... and here I remain, ready and willing to move from one-off donations to paying a real price for WithKnown.

Jeremy Cherfas

Very odd. Simone got an error each time he replied via webmention to my link to his manifesto, and yet I see each of the replies and each of the emails he sent me to warn me of the error. A clear sign that I should upgrade WithKnown, and soon.

Jeremy Cherfas

I wonder what it would take to adapt the WithKnown Twitter plugin to use V2 of the API? Might need to look into that before throwing in the towel completely.

Jeremy Cherfas

Is today the day I stop being able to POSSE here from @withknown? One failed yesterday, but that could have been an error.

Jeremy Cherfas

My conclusion now is that WithKnown actually does a lot of the heavy lifting itself, with reverse geolookups and so forth. Maybe try something a lot simpler, and send only lat-long

Jeremy Cherfas

At home, thinking about a location shortcut for WithKnown, and starting with the easy stuff.

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on werd.io :

If Ben Werdmuller is wondering about the look of his front page, maybe that means that @WithKnown will get a template system that mere mortals can understand ... but probaby not.

Jeremy Cherfas

@cll2606 This is annoying. It seems that my install of WithKnown is not playing nicely to POSSE Twitter replies. It might be something to do with Quilll, but I doubt it. More likely to be accumulating cruft in WithKnown. I want to keep using it, but ...

Jeremy Cherfas

Today is the five year anniversary of installing WithKnown here. We’ve had our ups and downs, and it has been generally positive. Not sure about the future though, I must be honest.

Jeremy Cherfas

Can anyone tell me which template I need to edit to add an extra link to <head> in @withknown CMS?

Jeremy Cherfas

@drhitchcocknz There's brid.gy that can do a lot of the work of POSSE for you. I use @withknown, which has plugins for that, like the one that will send this reply to Twitter. Depends partially on whether you already have a web publishing tool set up.

Jeremy Cherfas

One step closer to PESOS from Instagram

1 min read

I had been barking up the wrong tree, trying to address `photo/edit` in order to create a photo post in WithKnown. Going through my old notes, I figured out how to do it through `micropub/endpoint` instead, which makes a whole lot more sense. Probably I should have started there.

Anyway, I know have the bare bones of being able to post automatically to WithKnown from the RSS feed of my Instagram account. Now I "just" need to build out all the rest; read the RSS feed, extract the relevant bits of data, construct the API request and bung it off.

Which will probably take forever, but hey.

Jeremy Cherfas

With a little time to pursue this idea, I first upgraded to WithKnown 1.2.2 and then experimented with various API calls. I was able to create a Photo post, which included the description. But no image. At a loss, now, because the image from Bibliogram is definitely available and my RSS reader can see it. So I wonder why WithKnown cannot. Or maybe it can, but then fails to insert the image into the post. Also, apologies for spamming the micro.blog timeline.

Jeremy Cherfas

PESOS from Instagram?

1 min read

At last night's online HWC we talked a bit about getting pictures in and out of Instagram, now that they have become so much stricter about the API. Getting images into Instagram except through approved apps seems to be getting harder and harder, and is probably impossible by now. Getting images out of Instagram is also not obviously easy. But ...

A new (to me) thing, called Bibliogram, can, under the right conditions, create an RSS or Atom feed from one's profile. I poked around, and the feed contains a link to the image, caption and  date and time. The link to the image works. So maybe ...

I could send the feed to IFTTT or Zapier or similar, and have that create a post via Micropub to my instance of WithKnown. Or even, if I ever get it working, to my main site, which uses Grav.

But I can't even try for a couple of days.

Jeremy Cherfas

Meeting of the WithKnown Open Collective

To discuss possible next steps

Location: Online

-

Time Zone: Europe/Rome (GMT +01:00)

See note of previous meeting

Jeremy Cherfas

An ad-hoc meeting of the WithKnown Open Collective

5 min read

The past 24 hours saw perhaps more activity in the IRC channel (yesterday and today) and than I have ever seen before. Near the end of it all, jgmac1106, having previously voluntold me to be the first rotating organiser, voluntold me to “call all of today a meeting of the Open Collective”. Obviously you can’t have a meeting without minutes,[1] so here they are.

It all started with jgmac1106’s heartfelt plea that he just wanted to publish his site, “not learn backend engineering” and contemplating starting afresh. LewisCowles raised the question of how to reward Open Source software developers and maintainers, and that started a discussion of what it would take to put Known on a commercial footing.

Jgmac1106 was of the opinion that easier install with auto-update was needed. Lewiscowles and jeremycherfas thought that better direction of the project was needed, with a model that offered installation, domain management and updates, for a fee.

“Make it Known would be such a great tagline if we could get Sir Patrick Stewart on board.” Lewiscowles

There followed further discussion of operational models, including micro.blog; pay for hosting, including updates, and some backfeed, with a free offering open to IndieWeb if you have a capable site elsewhere.

On funding, jeremycherfas related his early experience hosting through IndieHosters and jgmac1106 talked about applying for grants to fund specific pieces of Known development. We played around with numbers, concluding that nobody knew enough to build even an outline business plan. There did seem to be agreement that venture capital should be rejected from the outset, while collectives and cooperatives could provide a more desirable structure, and that any kind of structure needs direction.

After a gap, some other people joined the channel and mapkyca explained that right now, a bigger block than money was time as he is working flat out. He also said that the maths does not work out for SaaS.

Benatwork then rejoined the meeting and explained in some depth the history of Known, including funding decisions and his original vision.

The original intention was to build a community platform that could be hosted securely, with discussion not monitored by the likes of a Facebook. … [I]t was never built to be an indieweb platform or an individual blogging engine from the start. The core idea was: flexible, social feeds that one or more people could contribute to, with per-item access control and integrations both in and out. I still believe that it has most value as a multi-user platform.

Major problem: we gave our entire platform away as open source, and it turns out there was a strong correlation between people who wanted to use it and people who didn’t want to pay. Although they were happy to pay for an account on a shared host, which of course didn’t go to us. So it didn’t really work as a scalable business.

Benatwork then filled us in on recent developments and why his direct involvement has dwindled, all of which is very understandable, closing with his belief that SaaS is not the way forward.

Jgmac1106 then voluntold jeremycherfas to take the lead on setting up monthly meetings for the next three months, as the first rotating organiser.[2] He also shared his idea of having something like Known to offer local media as something they can sell to subscribers as a built in social platform.

In response to a question from Aaron_Klemm, Benatwork shared the Known roadmap on github. He also explained some of the past technical decisions and that maybe some of those should be revisited to improve the product as a whole.

People shared their different ideas of what Known could become for them, with the question of the current admin tax prominent. Cleverdevil said he would be happy to pay mapkyca to update his site, raising again the potential demand for SaaS.

Benatwork’s vision is Known not as a blog CMS exclusively, but rather:

What Known can do is create a stream of many different kinds of content, and present it differently based on context. Filtering is a similarly powerful idea. “Show me all posts that are sensor readings and photos tagged with bats, from January 1st.”

There was some discussion of other aspects of Known that need attention, including the templating engine, which mapkyca said he hopes to separate completely from the back end.

Chrisaldrich raised the possibility of working with Reclaim Hosting to devise a package similar to what Reclaim offers universities, i.e. Reclaim does the heavy lifting for turnkey Known installs while allowing a small group of others to support people who signed up. Aaron_Klemm supported this idea strongly.

There was a lot more discussion of various ways in which Known could contribute to community internet literacy and how it might be used alongside other web publishing tools.

This summary is an entirely personal capture of the discussion; corrections and comments welcome. (You know how to do that, right?) I’ll suggest some times for an online meeting through the channel.


  1. Though apparently you can have one without an agenda.  ↩

  2. Which I will do, bearing in mind that, with exceptions, I am really only available Monday to Friday from 08:00 to 19:00 CEST.  ↩

Jeremy Cherfas

2020-03-17

1 min read

There's no way I know of to find old spam that came into WithKnown while I was not getting notifications. I had thought that my scheme of jumping on spam as soon as possible after receiving (restarted) notifications had found them all. But no. Today surfaced a bookmark post that had accumulated 10 spams since August 2018.

Lotta continua!

Jeremy Cherfas

Replied to a post on dem.cx :

I very much share and understand Amani Mena's frustrations, and often feel the same way myself. That's the problem with plurality, and building blocks, and many things, loosely joined. Too much choice. That's why when I started I went for WithKnown out of the box. Today I might recommend micro.blog. Once you're up and running, and have everything on your domain, you can learn and change systems as you do so. The key is to have everything on your domain.

Jeremy Cherfas

Yay, and welcome to WithKnown. Glad to see you got it working. One comment, I think that the twitter logo might be missing from the syndicated link for this post.

Jeremy Cherfas

@noffle I know absolutely nothing about server admin but I am very happy using bits of indieweb. There is also micro.blog which is even more accessible than WithKnown.

Jeremy Cherfas

Just confirmed that my little script for posting podcasts I've listened to from Overcast to WithKnown fails when there is more than one episode of the same show in the queue. Pinning that down is going to be ... tricky.

Jeremy Cherfas

This is a test reply from Omnibear, to try and isolate why webmentions appear not to be being sent by WithKnown.





Jeremy Cherfas

@mapkyca Amen to that, and thanks so much for your invaluable help with all things WithKnown.

Jeremy Cherfas

Just upgraded my WithKnown site to the latest master. Slightly hair raising, but excellent help from @mapkyca got me over the hurdles. Only downside, currently, seems to be the plugin that syndicates to Twitter.

Jeremy Cherfas

#Hashtags & HTML

1 min read

Once again, there is chatter about how @Withknown deals with hashtags and HTML I still believe that it often removes a hashtag from the content of an Instagram description, sent here by OwnYourGram. I'll test that in a moment. And there certainly were problems with certain characters in Titles and body. So this is a test of this <- and that.

Jeremy Cherfas

I stopped sharing photo posts to micro.blog because they were being duplicated. Pretty sure now that's because the RSS contains the image twice, as part of the CDATA and again as an enclosure. Not sure whether to fix in @WithKnown or ask @help at micro.blog to ignore enclosure.

Jeremy Cherfas

Updated to latest HEAD of WithKnown and hoping that might solve the multiple-photo problem. Better create a multiple photo post on Instagram, then.

Jeremy Cherfas

Successfully updated WithKnown to latest master with no (apparent) ill effects. Now to see whether it permits things that it previously did not.





Jeremy Cherfas

I feed @WithKnown into micro.blog and POSSE to Twitter just fine. Known also makes it easy to feed micro.blog only certain kinds of post because the RSS is easy to adapt.

Jeremy Cherfas

Anyone using OwnYourGram with the latest master of @WithKnown? Since updating, my photos no longer come back to my site. Everything else is improved, but no actual image. I have no idea why this is happening, and would welcome clues.

Jeremy Cherfas

You could do worse than look at @WithKnown for a reasonably simple solution. It isn't quite as easy to use, but it isn't that difficult either.

Jeremy Cherfas

2018-04-11

1 min read

Digging into how withknown creates RSS feeds, I can see two things.

One is that for a status post, which has no title, `<title>` is a truncated version of the post content, although the level of truncation seems to vary. Not sure why.

The other is that even status posts, with a truncated `<title>`, have a full `<description>` that includes `p-name` and `e-content` and even `entry-content`.

But micro.blog does not seem to read `<description>` at least not when it is coming from my withknown RSS feed.

Puzzling.

Jeremy Cherfas

You can get good help

1 min read

I managed to fix a long-standing niggle with my practice this afternoon, thanks to some great help from cweiske and others. For the longest time Quill, a micropub client that I can use to publish here, wasn't showing me an option to syndicate directly to Twitter. That meant that I tended reply to tweets and stuff right there in the silo and not bring them back here. Fair enough, especially when a reply without context is like an egg without salt. But we figured it out, in part by that old standby of "switch it off and then switch it back on again". That got things working, and was enough of an impetus to upgrade WithKnown to the latest build. And so far, everything looks good.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Why I cannot post bookmarks to Known automatically | Jeremy Cherfas

I've set out in as much detail as I can understand what is happening when I try to POST a Bookmark with a Description to WithKnown.

And to add insult to injury, I'm adding this Description by hand, so I can include a blockquote:

[I]f you try to POST anything other than the URL of the bookmark, it simply never appears. With the help of good IndieWeb people, especially zegnat and cweiske, we worked out what was happening.

Jeremy Cherfas

bookmark - IndieWeb

But now here's the thing, when I do this by hand directly in WithKnown, it allows me to post some lines of description.

And a

But I ddo not seem to be able to do the same thing with micropub. Probably because I am doing it wrong.

Jeremy Cherfas

@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.

Jeremy Cherfas

Blast. I can’t seem to upload images to micro.blog or to WithKnown. I’ll have to work on that tomorrow.

Jeremy Cherfas

I really want to use micro.blog and WithKnown, but ...

3 min read

I have never yet been able to post from my micro.blog to this stream, although the feed from here is reliably picked up there, and brid.gy reliably pulls replies from there to here. @manton suggested we move my complaints to help@micro.blog, but I can see no way of actually engaging with that account. So this afternoon, I decided to attempt to go back to the beginning.

It was a miserable failure.

Here's how it went:

  1. Revoke all current authorisations for micro.blog
  2. There were four of them, two from yesterday when I last tried.
  3. Launch OS X app
  4. OK!
  5. “If you’re using WordPress or another server, first open the preferences window and enter your web site URL to set it up for posting within the app.”
  6. Roger that. But the old website was still there. Is that going to be a problem?
  7. Start a new post; the old website is there at the bottom. This is going to be a problem.
  8. Same old Same old; Error sending post.
  9. Post does not arrive at micro.blog
  10. Post does not arrive at WithKnown
  11. WithKnown Error log is empty.
  12. Access log shows no sign of anything from recent attempt to post from micro.blog
  13. Check to make sure I have up to date micro.blog app
  14. “Micro.blog can’t be updated when it’s running from a read-only volume like a disk image or an optical drive.” Move Micro.blog to Applications folder using Finder, relaunch it from there, and try again.
  15. Strange. Check path to micro.blog.
  16. Path is “/Applications/Micro.blog.app”.
  17. Check the App Store; disappointed but also content that there is not an update.
  18. Delete web site URL from preferences; quit micro.blog, mostly for superstitious reasons; launch micro.blog.
  19. Very strange; web site URL is still there. Or back? Maybe the app pulls it from micro.blog?
  20. Repeat; same outcome. Superstition justified. Go to my account at micro.blog.
  21. See I have three App tokens. The one for MarsEdit is definitely pointless, as I am not hosted at micro.blog. Remove it.
  22. Throw caution to the winds; remove the tokens for IOS and OS X
  23. OK, IOS now says “Internal Server Error” on attempting to connect. I think I ought to sign out now and then sign back in.
  24. Phew. All is good. And I have a new app token.
  25. On iOS, try to write a new post; insert my Known site; authorise micro.blog; write a test post. Post it.
  26. “Error sending post”. Tear hair out, as now I do not seem to be able to post to micro.blog from iOS app.
  27. Go back to 22; remove iOS app token and authorisation token at WithKnown.
  28. Log back in. Can no longer post without adding WithKnown, and posting gives an error, as at 26.
  29. Try again from OS X; same error as at 8.
  30. Post to WithKnown; feed is picked up.

Any and all suggestions gratefully received.

Jeremy Cherfas

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.

Jeremy Cherfas

Wouldn't it be nice if micro.blog could talk to WithKnown as well as listening to it.

Jeremy Cherfas

Quick gotcha: I moved this WithKnown site from shared hosting to a VPS yesterday, and today photos were not displaying and not uploading. Turned out that in the move the path to the Uploads directory had not changed. Fixed that, and all seems to be well again. I hope.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Reflections on Two Years of #Indieweb

Really good debriefing on two years of progress in the . I found this rather familiar:

While learning all of the requisite skills was challenging, the real struggle in joining the indieweb was piecing all the components together to hold a mental image in my head of what an indiewebsite should be. I spent a great deal of time trawling through the wiki and absorbing all of the ideas on disparate pages. At the time, there were many pages which would all have slightly different variations of the similar information.

There's still a ways to go, mind. When I did this reply to automatically, the title of the entry came though as "kongaloosh". I added the correct title by hand myself. The entry title is there, as `p-name` and I cannot tell whether the issue is at my end (WithKnown) or at Alex's end.

link

Jeremy Cherfas

The value of explaining yourself

2 min read

My father was devoted to cryptic crossword puzzles. He was good, too, but every now and then a clue would stump him. If I was around, he would read the clue aloud to me and, more often than not, before I'd even had time to think about it, he had solved it.

There's something about the act of saying it aloud that makes a different kind of thinking possible.

So it was last night, during the Homebrew Web Club virtual meeting in Europe. There was only me and Zegnat, much of the time, and first we explored further his comment, during the recent Indieweb Summit talk about Events, that "most of the things discussed are already available and possible with the current IndieWeb building blocks". So I fired up WithKnown and created an event for the virtual HWC and he replied and the reply was received and published. Just like that. Of course there are some things that could be improved, but it does Just Work.

Thinking more about improving things, I shamelessly took advantage by asking a lot of ill-informed questions about how to move further in the indiewebification of my presence on the web. Martijn was so helpful and patient with me, and I learned a lot. But the truth is also that just by asking the questions out loud, and having to think clearly about how to do so, I was able to see more clearly how things might work.

It's still pretty cryptic, but I'm getting there.

Jeremy Cherfas

The continuing saga of marking up status updates in @WithKnown

2 min read

I’ve been reminded by Chris Aldrich of something I think I knew before:

[M]ost major CMSes (including Known) strip out or severely limit (for security reasons) the html that is accepted in comment fields. … Many also will mark as spam comments that have one or more URLs in them. As a result doing fancy or even mildly complicated html or markdown in replies is something for which most platforms just don’t build.

That’s fair enough. As ever, spammers are spoiling things for everyone. I do have an objection, though. If I am legitimately signed into my own site which, in the , is where I will be if replying to some other site, then I’m unlikely to inject malicious code. And if I’m a spammer, and signed in under a false flag, then I’m not likely to need such subterfuges.

A really helpful CMS would, surely, allow me to do all the formatting I want on something I am generating myself, regardless of the specific type of entry.

Chris makes another point:

The other issue in status updates and replies is that they’re often syndicated to other platforms and it’s a more difficult issue to properly do this with each snowflake social media silo depending on how they individually handle html/markdown (or not).

Well, yes. But that’s not my problem on my site. Let them strip all they want, frankly, as long as the leave the link to my reply alone. As Chris acknowledges …

Either way, the end result on the other person’s site isn’t something I can ever control for, so I try not to sweat it too much. :)

For now, I think I’ll sweat this just a little, and add the u-in-reply-to by hand, and hope that does the needful.