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.

Clammr was a service that enabled you to tweet little bits of audio. I signed up in the hope that I could use it to market my podcasts. In the end, I barely used it, because its audience didn’t seem to include people who wanted to listen to my stuff.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email

Dear Clammr Users:

It’s time for our team to move on to new adventures. We write to inform you that we will be shutting down the Clammr service at 11:59pm ET on 2 July 2017.

Thank you for all of the creativity and joy that you have shared with the world using Clammr. We’ve been inspired by the community every day and cherish having had the opportunity to get to know so many amazing and talented people.

We realize that some of you may wish to keep the Clammr clips you created. We have posted instructions with a hack on how to do that in Section XIX of the User Guide. In short, you need to take three steps (1) share the clip to twitter using the Clammr app; (2) go to twitter and copy the url of the tweet; (3) enter the url on a tweet-to-MP4 conversion site to generate an MP4 video file that you can download.

On the same day I saw a link to an item on Hacker News from someone at SoundCloud who was concerned that the company was in financial trouble, and wanted advice.

Once is coincidence

The HN article dated to a couple of weeks before the Clammr email, and I made a note to maybe write about it here, but I was in catch-up mode and the HN piece wasn’t signed. So, it slipped. Then Chris Aldrich linked to a piece in the New York Times announcing layoffs at SoundCloud. That offers a cloak of respectability to cover my schadenfreude.

I can see why people found SoundCloud attractive: in return for an easy audio life, you put your stuff behind bars, bars that prevented other people, like me, sharing it without jumping through an absurd number of hoops. Some of those people did the smart thing, and syndicated to SoundCloud from sites they controlled, but many, many did not. Too bad. I hope some of them are now thinking about securing the availability of their work.

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 #indieweb, 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.

Finally reached a key milestone in the deliverables of a big work-for-money, so was able to treat myself to an excellent video from the [IndieWebSummit 2017](https://2017.indieweb.org).

First up, for me, [Lillian Karabaic](http://anomalily.net) offering [A brief history of my website](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VGX8iBWrTE&index=4&list=PLk3TtIJ31hqrLIPqz55TczawWu-30cnXM). I noted a few things.

First, the video, audio and editing were top notch. Huge kudos to everyone who made this happen. They say content trumps technical quality, and it does, but when you're not fighting quality, the value of the content is so much more obvious.

Second, and much more important, Lillian's trajectory mirrors my own and, not surprisingly, I can relate strongly to everything she said -- good and bad -- about the #indieweb. The help available is stellar, the documentation isn't great (I hope to work on that) and it is hard to evangelise.

So much left to do ...

Richard MacManus is indiewebifying his site, and [had this to say](https://richardmacmanus.com/2017/06/22/openness-rivers-indieweb/):

> I’ve found the IndieWeb tools to be tremendously helpful, and the community to be open and friendly. But I think my own goals are a little different. I’m less interested in the technologies themselves (like microformats and webmention) and more interested in how they’re being used in the wider Web community. Not dissimilar to my interests when I started ReadWriteWeb. But of course to do this, I need to stand on the shoulders of the developers who build the tools.

All of which sums up my own position exactly. I'd go slightly further. I'm not as interested in how the technologies are being used in the wider Web community as I am in putting them to use myself.

*p.s. A major drawback of Withknown's excellent engine is that it doesn't allow New Posts to be replies, and that means I can't use the MarkDown formatting.*

Dave Winer offers [three reasons why he will not point to a Facebook post](http://scripting.com/2017/05/31.html#a110526)

No. 2 is my favourite:

> It's supporting their downgrading and killing the web. Your post sucks because it doesn't contain links, styling, and you can't enclose a podcast if you want. The more people post there, the more the web dies. I'm sorry no matter how good your idea is fuck you I won't help you and Facebook kill the open web.

I've been moaning to anyone who'll listen that there seems to be something wrong with Known; Micropubs could not seem to find the syndication targets. And other people had the same problem, I believe. But after a really enjoyable virtual Homebrew Web Club meeting, the problem might after all be at my end.

@zegnat created a fresh install of Known as we watched, hooked it up to Twitter, and was instantly rewarded with Quill seeing his syndication target, which it resolutely refused to do on my instance of Known. (It failed actually to syndicate, but that's a separate issue.)

So, now I need to try a fresh install myself. And as @Jeena suggested, better to do that on a new and different subdomain than risk messing everything up.

Alas, there is no way on Earth I can do this until near the end of the month.

I can wait.

https://vimeo.com/184028817

[Astonishing juggling](https://vimeo.com/184028817).

The question "does @WithKnown have a future?" is cropping up increasingly frequently of late. And the "official" answer is that it most definitely does, look at all the activity on github, nothing has changed. And it's true, there has been a lot of activity and things are moving, if you go and look. But for someone just looking in and trying to decide whether to use the software, the lack of outward facing activity must be a bit off-putting.

Or maybe it isn't.

I have no idea.

All this was [kicked back and forth on the WithKnown IRC channel yesterday](https://github.com/mapkyca/KnownchatLogs/blob/master/2017-03-23.md), with -- alas -- no input (yet?) from the developers.

I'm going to continue trying to understand Known because right now it seems to me the best place to continue pursuing #indieweb ideals.

Nick Quah's Hot Pod newsletter is a lode from which I occasionally extract a nugget. [Today](http://us12.campaign-archive1.com/?u=e7175619f87bd6b29429572aa&id=732cf5e4b1&e=07840946c7), in the wake of the latest Edison Report on podcast listening (in the US) he quotes a bloke from Audible who says:

> To me, the fact that 40% of US adults have tried podcasting, yet only half of them listen regularly, that's astounding. Show me any other medium that has that gap. None. When people sample and don't habituate, it speaks to interest that isn't being met by the content that's available today. There either isn't enough variety of things for people to listen to —or there isn't enough of what they like to meet their appetite. With 350,000 podcasts, that seems like a strange thing to say, but the simple truth is that potential listeners aren't sticking with it — and there are only two potential reasons: not enough good stuff — or they simply can't find it. Solving this could go as far as doubling the audience for podcasting.

I wonder why "Eric Nuzum, Audible’s SVP of Original Content," even bothers to raise the straw man of not enough content. And why he does not raise the question that discovery and subscription are two sides of the same coin. Right now, neither discovery nor subscription is easy.

Nick Quah himself doesn't think discovery is a problem, and that's a problem for me. He says:

> It has always occurred to me that discovery functions in the podcasting space along the same dynamics as the rest of the internet; there is simply so much stuff out there, and so the problem isn’t the discovering an experience in and of itself — it’s discovering a worthwhile or meaningful experience within a universe of deeply suboptimal experiences.

But to me that seems to miss the essential difference between audio and the other things on the internet.

It is hard to get audio at a glance. And the solution is not to make ever shorter bits of attention-grabbing audio. It is to find other ways to recommend and share audio in ways that make it easy to hear a piece, to sample a show and eventually, maybe, to subscribe.

> I guess hiring a card designer wasn’t in the budget this year.

Simple and straightforward explanation of how the design of the card inside the envelope makes all the difference.

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/why-typography-matters-especially-at-the-oscars-f7b00e202f22#.qarf9s...

Writing something nice again, but I have enabled the Markdown plugin on Known.

And maybe a headline too

Like this

Utterly bizarre; when I went to write a new post, the above was already there. In other words, the content of the post from Quill, without the block quote.

>This should be a markdown block quote.

I'm knackered. Will try some more tomorrow.

#withknown

Writing something nice again, but I have enabled the Markdown plugin on Known.

So need something in HTML, like this block quote

And maybe a headline too

Like this

I'm writing something nice, as instructed.

> Does Quill do Markdown?

I don't think so, although I just noticed that there is a hover that seems to create quotes.

Let me test that.

How about tags? Like #quill and #indieweb? Oh no, they're in the publish box.

#quill #indieweb

I cannot get my head around how @withknown is handling posts.

I bookmark a page, with a quote from the page:

I don't like the yellow behind the text. So I click on edit, expecting to be able to at least look around.

Where is the quote?

Beats me.

Further to my note about a new #podcast about #indieweb things, I listened to Marty McGuire's rendering of This Week in the Indieweb. I really enjoyed it, even though I had read the text version. Production and audio were top notch, and it was very clear. My only quibbles concern the pace and the audience.

Even as a native English speaker, and despite Marty's very clear diction, it seemed a bit speedy to me. I wonder whether less fluent listeners manage to get it all.

A second, similar point, about the audience. In my estimate, as a newcomer to indieweb and a less than expert person, some of the stuff whizzed right by me. But if I were familiar with it all, I'd probably be keeping up with the IRC channels and the indieweb.org pages and so I'm not too sure why I'd need an audio version. But that's just a matter of choice.

The slightly bigger question is, would there be an audience for a more discursive podcast about the indieweb? Marty would be in favour. So would Chris Aldrich, who started this ball rolling for me. There's a fair bit of audio tagged indieweb at huff duffer, but nothing, apparently, dedicated to the topic.

We certainly have the technology to produce something that captures the history, what's happening now and how things might develop. There's no way I could do that on my own -- not least because I don't know enough to ask intelligent questions -- but with a co-host or two it would be a really interesting project.

Further to this morning's minirant about blocking Instapaper, I've now discovered that some sites -- I'm looking at you, HuffPo -- don't want me to be able to speed read, which I'm doing with a nifty little thing called Spritz. Or maybe they're just unaware there's a problem. The good news is that HuffPo does not appear to block Instapaper, so in the fullness of time, I will read the piece anyway. It looks really interesting.

Bummed out by the fact that Quill wasn't enabling me to syndicate directly to Twitter, I followed up on some good advice from Daniel Gold: Back to basics, uninstall and reinstall plugins one by one. Shades of WordPress. So I did that, and here's what I found:

With IndieSyndicate configured (*via* silo.pub) I can posts to Twitter just fine, but Quill still does not see that as a Syndication target and Quill cannot post to my site.

In retrospect, that's obvious, because there is no endpoint at my site.

So I enabled IndiePub and now Quill posts fine, but it still does not see any Syndication target.

I probably just have to live with that. At least for now.

Finally, re-enabled Brid.gy and everything looks good once again.

Just for the record, here, I've decided that for now I do not need these plugins: Static pages, Firefox, Events, Custom JS, Custom CSS, Comics, Audio, API tester. That may change in time.

#withknown #indieweb

Extract disarms MRSA. But Quill bookmark fails to pull in URL, which is https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-02/ehs-bpp020917.php #antibiotics

This is just a mock post to test Bridgy.