Jeremy Cherfas

It can be so hard to debug IndieWeb problems when they arise in Known. For now, this should be a webmention of the linked post, because Chris Aldrich reported a problem. But even if this works, I may need to go outside this installation to test properly. Or, perhaps, try webmention.rocks.

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.

#IndieWeb

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.

#IndieWeb

The past 24 hours saw perhaps more activity in the #known 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.

“Amazingly, the link still works” 

Two amazing things

1) In a piece looking back over 1000 of his linkblog posts, Charles Arthur finds it remarkable that a link from 2010 still works.

2) The piece seems to be on Medium and nowhere else.

I reckon the two observatiuons are linked (haha). Which makes me wonder whether to even share this link. Will it still work in 2028? Or would Charles be better of owning his stuff somewhere else?

#indieweb

One of the developers of Sunlit, a photo-sharing app that is part of the Micro.blog ecosystem, contacted me to say that “the images on your site have a MIME type of application/data”. I’d like to say I understood immediately what the problem was and what it meant, but I had to do some learning first. It wasn’t as simple as the extension, the bit after the filename that indicates whether it is a JPEG or PNG kind of image. Rather, it was about what my server tells your browser about the image.

To backtrack, Known stores all files as blobs that contain the actual file data, the 1s and 0s. Your browser, when it receives a post from my server, can often sniff out what kind of thing (image, audio, text etc) that blob of data represents and do a good job of showing it to you. Normally, you wouldn’t even notice. One clue is that if you right-click on an image, and ask to open it in a new tab, it actually gets downloaded instead, I suppose because the new tab doesn’t know what else to do with it.

Anyway, I confirmed that the source file for most images did not have an extension (which would have told the browser directly how to deal with it). Most, but not all. Files I had uploaded to my site directly did have an extension and the correct MIME type. The “bad” files had come from OwnYourGram or Quill, both of which are part of the joyful #IndieWeb. They use a standard called Micropub to send things to a suitably equipped website.

It seemed unlikely that both Quill and OYG would fail to send the requisite information to identify a photo, so I went digging into the code that Known uses to decide what to do with a post sent by Micropub. I made a bit of progress but although I could see more or less what was happening, I couldn’t see how to make it right.

Fortunately Aaron Parecki, who built Quill and OwnYourGram (and so much else), was around and gave me the clue I needed to investigate: curl -I example.com/file.

One beautiful feature of Quill is that if it is sending a photo and if the receiving site has a media endpoint for receiving files (which Known does) it uploads the file, shows you a preview and tells you the location of the file. With that, the curl command shows that the temporary file has the correct description of Content-Type: image/jpeg. Once Known has processed the whole post from Quill, though, the file that contains the image shows as Content-Type: application/data.

Somewhere between receiving the temporary file from Quill and storing it permanently, Known fails to give it the proper MIME type.

I wish I knew enough to discover where the problem lies. Most likely Marcus Povey – who keeps the wheels spinning at Known – will be able to do the needful, now that I have submitted an issue. And Sunlit will be able to share my photos far and wide.

@phoneboy kindly shared a screenshot of the "webmention" spam he said he had received.

As I suspected, it looks to me like common or garden spam, hence the scare quotes. Of course, I can't be absolutely certain without digging further into the actual URLs, which I'm not about to do, but everything about these comments screams pingbacks or trackbacks. And the solution is obviously Akismet which, to be honest, I am suprised Phoneboy has not already installed and activated.

The day may come when webmention spam is a thing, and #indieweb people have been thinking about a protocol called Vouch for that eventuality.

A couple of days ago, @phoneboy mentioned the fun he had deleting the spam webmentions he had received on WordPress.

I asked him to document them.

Now Phoneboy replies:

Once I figure out the right settings, I’ll let you know.

And I’m not sure what that means. What right settings? Doesn’t WordPress keep a copy of all comments it receives? It would be really useful to see the contents of those “spam webmentions,” where they came from, what they contained, who sent them, simply because, as I said before, so few of these imagined evils have so far been spotted in the open. Not sure what settings that requires.

Also, the irony of this question has not escaped me:

Also, where did you post this comment? Didn’t see it in micro.blog.

I posted it here. Where else would I post it?

#indieweb

If you're looking for a really good introduction to the #IndieWeb and insights into how it all works, you could do a lot worse than listen to Jeena's podcast with Martijn. They do a tip-top job of explaining for people less knowledgeable than they are, and the audio quality is very acceptable.

I think I just need to remind myself and others of the natural progresion of things.

1. Everything not forbidden is permitted.
2. Everything not permitted is forbidden.
3. Everything not forbidden is compulsory

That is all. #indieweb

I managed to fix a long-standing niggle with my #indieweb 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.

#indieweb

One of the good things about WordPress is how flexible it seems on the surface, able to perform all sorts of wizardry. One of the bad things about WordPress is how that very flexibility often makes it extremely difficult to achieve any sort of wizardry. That seems particularly true of anything to do with the #indieweb.

So I was surprised to learn that Aaron Davis was having difficulty implementing a ZenPress child theme

Surprised because I run fornacalia.com with a ZenPress child theme and cannot recall any difficulties in setting that up. I think there may have been some issues with capitalisation of various names, but beyond that, I'm at a loss. I'd love to help -- but not sure how best to do that.

Maybe I should just share my child theme.

Webmentions are the glue that sticks all the bits in all the sites together.

That’s my one-liner about one of the core ideas about the #IndieWeb, but it doesn’t actually tell you very much if you want to know how the glue works. I’ve kind of absorbed a moderately high-level abstraction over the past little while of playing with webmentions, but a friend asked for more:

Do you know of any diagrams that explain how this stuff works without all the … words that web communities seem to enjoy creating? I keep coming back to this topic every so often, and every time I return things just appear more complicated and broken than before …

I don’t think that last opinion is merited, but then I would say that. And right now I don’t have the time to write up my understanding. I’m pretty sure I saw something clear and to the point a little while back, but I’m blowed if I can find it now. So here are four pieces I have found.

• Implementing Webmentions, which contains a good verbal description of the flow.
• Adactio: Journal—Parsing webmentions, which explains some the technology too.
• So long Disqus, hello Webmention has a go at why webmentions are a good idea and some of the nuts and bolts of implementation.
• Webmentions · Rudiger Meyer is another good verbal description of the how, along with the why and the what.

These may not answer the question fully, but they are a start. And they might inspire me to write my own version, especially if I could have a synchronous discussion about it with my interlocuter.

It is always interesting to read of someone else deciding to give the IndieWeb a try. I like what Michael Singletary has to say, especially this

Most of my online friends and acquaintances will never understand or participate in the IndieWeb, and so I require a bridge between these worlds. On one side I choose what content to post and how it is stored, and it exists mainly on an island that few visit regularly. On the other side is nearly everyone I know, blissfully ignorant of my real home on the web and unable to see any content shared there without manual intervention or working plugins.

What really struck me, though, was the line in his bio: “Blogging since 2002, taking control of my content since 2018.”

I lost some of my pre–2002 posts, not through the actions of any evil silo (were there any, then?), but through my own idiocy in misplacing a crucial backup. And I never really got on board the silo first band-wagon, so in a sense I have always owned the content I care about owning. Most of my friends do consider it kind of weird that I didn’t see the photo they posted only to FB, but they’re only too happy to show them to me one on one. So yes, for now few people visit this island, and that’s OK. I enjoy the ones who do.

I'm using the IndieWeb in an attempt to make it easier for everyone to visit, and that works too.

For all the joy of the #indieweb, and the pleasure of civil discourse, I am becoming incredibly confused by aspects of micro.blog. There’s the question of titleless posts, of which is this is one as an experiment, versus status updates. There are posts that appear to be contributions to an interesting conversation but aren’t because they have been cross-posted automatically from elsewhere. And there is the lack of a scroll back, which means that as I follow more people and choose not to check in the middle of my night, stuff vanishes irretrievably from my timeline. 

There are also issues with Known that are nothing to do with micro.blog.

None of this is insurmountable. For me, though, it does add friction. 

During the virtual IWC tonight, we were discussing third-party clients for publishing to websites, essentially Micropub clients and MarsEdit. And it occurred to us more or less simultaneously, that I do not use Micropub for the site that supports it out of the box, whereas I do use a client for the site that does not support Micropub out of the box. And that is because the post-creation UI is nice and simple for Known, and a right mess for WordPress.

So, just to be difficult, I'm using Quill for the first time in a long while to create a Post in Known.

#IndieWeb

Rather happy to have scratched a long-standing itch into submission. I use the semantic-linkbacks plugin to display webmentions on one of my WordPress sites. It has an option for displaying webmentions as facepiles, which keeps things neat. But my WordPress theme also displays webmentions as comments, which is mostly redundant. Not entirely, though, because a few webmentions contain actual content, which is not visible in the facepile. I could completely void display of the webmentions, but that loses the little bit of content there.

Fortunately, the latest master of the plugin has settings to display the facepile for  each kind of webmention, so I could stop it making facepiles for actual mentions. Then all I needed to do was hide the theme's display of any webmentions that are just likes or reposts. And that is easily done by adding

.p-like {
	display: none;
}

.p-repost {
	display: none;
}

to styles.css.

I'll probably have to revisit that if I ever get any other kinds of webmention, but for now I am content.

#indieweb #webmention

More good help from Manton, cleverdevil and others, but alas no nearer (although I may have eliminated some possibilities).

1. I was allowing both HTTP and HTTPS. There could have been some kind of mismatch, I suppose, but after editing .htaccess to force SSL, it made no difference to micro.blog's OS X app.
2. Then thought that possibly a different endpoint would help (despite the fact that I know all the same details are on the home page). 
3. Pointed micro.blog first at /profile and then at /profile/jeremy; still no good.

At this stage, given that Manton managed to get everything working from a clean install of Known out of the box, I think I need to try the same. If that works, well, if nothing else, it works.

I had been fretting about losing data, but if I install into a new sub-domain and it works there, I can always edit the config.ini to point back at the old database. It will be a good opportunity to see how good the instructions are to install at Dreamhost. Last time I managed without any instructions, and I also didn't write up my experiences. This could be an opportunity to pay back.

#indieweb

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.

#indieweb

I dunno. I see this Add a "tweetstorm" UI for chaining status updates with chained POSSE tweets and I think of something I wrote a while back: Or you could write a blog post. Does the #IndieWeb really need to make indie copies of everything the silos offer? Even the workarounds?

Maybe I misunderstand, and a feature like this is what weans people off the silo pap. All I know is, I don't think it would work for me.

Playing Lyle Lovett singing Texas River Song, even though I know it's a stretch, to celebrate having eaten a giant bowl of my own dogfood.

A couple of weeks ago I followed Chris Aldrich to reading.am, which is a neat little spot for just putting down a marker for something that you're reading. I wanted more. I wanted to be able to save links to the things I marked. And now, a little over two weeks later, I've done it.

I have a PHP file that fetches the RSS feeds of things I've marked in reading.am, looks for any that are new since the last time the program ran, and then POSTS the results to Known's micropub endpoint. #IndieWeb PESOS for my bookmarks!

There is no way I could have done it without amazing help from people on the IndieWeb IRC, and it isn't perfect by any means. There's more work to be done, for sure, before I even think about sharing the code.

But hey, it works.

And, as my main helper said, "Launch early and iterate often".

I'll be doing that.

We had a virtual meeting of the Homebrew Website Club yesterday evening, and as usual it was interesting and informative. We all forgot to take notes, but sketchess was prompted to do a brain dump, which I have added to and tightened up slightly to capture the main points.

• There was a lot of discussion of the confusion among people new to #IndieWeb caused by having so many different ways to achieve the same thing. Some people thought it would be good if there were, maybe, a recommended approach for specific circumstances. However, that does require the user to be clear what they are trying to achieve.
• sketchess suggested that directed tutorials to achieve a specific outcome would be helpful. There was some support for this but, as ever, the issue of time can be a constraint.
• We talked about the potential usefulness of different levels of wiki pages, or a special section, or something completely independent of the wiki.
• aaronpk reminded us that the difficulty with independent offerings is that there can be difficulties in maintaining momentum. The wiki, as a collective effort, is more likely to be managed by individuals.
• We noted that sometimes developers simply do not remember what it was like to start some activity, and also that a “getting started” for an experienced developer would be completely different from a “getting started” for someone who perhaps only knows silos. A beginner's guide written by recent beginners, with expert input from more experienced people, might be useful.
• We talked about self-dogfooding, and that this may be inhibiting Generation 2 and up. They are not necessarily interested in building things themselves, although they want to make use of IndieWeb principles and practices.
• Several people seem to be exploring the IndieWeb without making use of IRC or the wiki. Their efforts sometimes show up in IRC thanks to Loqi. Would it be useful to reach out directly and suggest they join and use the wiki?

Comments and edits welcome.

In the past couple of days, prompted by Marty McGuire's write-up, I raved about the potential of Audiogram to help promote the podcast by making it easier to share audio clips to social media -- by turning them into video clips. This afternoon, having managed to get tomorrow's episode edited early, and having had to chop quite a few interesting digressions, I thought I would have a serious play.

Tl;dr: It worked. I'd show you here, but I haven't found an easy way to upload video to Known yet. If you want to see the result, you can go to Patreon right now.

Installing Audiogram was not entirely plain sailing. Marty used Docker, and so despite warnings from other IndieWeb friends, I tried the same. All went well out of the gate, but then fell at the first. Something to do with virtualbox. So I switched to Homebrew and that did the needfull. Even then, though, Audiogram wouldn't start, but the error message made it clear that I needed to update node.js and npm. That done, it still wouldn't start.

Turned out I already had a local server running, via MAMP, and that was getting in the way. Switching off that server, and all was good.

That was two days ago. Today, I tried to use it for serious, and although there were plenty of hiccups along the way, I got there.

The instructions for modifying the theme are very straightforward, and with a bit of trial and error I was able to create a background for any future clips.

Uploading the audio, inserting the caption, all that was dead simple thanks to Audiogram's editor. Actually generating the videos, though, generated error after error, and some of them scrolled through several screens. But I kept my nerve, turned to search engines and StackOverflow and eventually got there.

Some of the fixes seemed to be pure voodoo. There's an invisible file that one of the Audiogram developers suggested deleting. The first time I tried that, it worked beautifully. The second time, not so much. Nor the third. But then, it worked again, at which point I called a halt, for now; a wise decision in my opinion.

I'm looking forward to seeing whether clips will attract listeners to the podcasts in their entirety. I put the first one on Patreon because the episode is not yet public, although Patreons have received it. I'll probably use clips there as bait and see how it goes. Once episodes are public I'll send clips to Twitter and, maybe, Facebook which will, I think make it relatively easy to trace any impact. And if the whole process isn't too hard (getting to the first video uploaded took almost three hours today) then I can imagine it might be useful to promote older epsiodes too, when there is a news peg.

So, grateful thanks to Marty McGuire and WNYC.

Struggling to understand how different bits of the #IndieWeb work in WordPress, I received some very sound advice from lots of people, including this little exhortation from @chrisaldrich:

I'll admit I had to read it about 3 times before I grokked it myself, but it also was a great general and practical intro to the inherent value of microformats.

If that were what it took to grok Facebook or Twitter, would anyone beyond a small, self-selecting cadre of geeks be using them?

I thought not.

Blast. Just when I was reaching around to pat myself on the back for making webmentions work on the Mothership, I notice some big problems.

First, the home page is all messed up with duplicates of many things. Doesn't seem to happen on the local version, which means it is going to be tricky as all get out to solve.

Secondly, the markup on the Mothership leaves a lot to be desired. That one will be a lot easier.

There are probably others too.

#IndieWeb

Language Log -- a useful site I really enjoy -- recently wrote again about the big debate on whether language shapes, constrains or otherwise has any effect on thought. But that's not why I'm noting it here. Instead, there's the reason why they're talking about it again.

In 2010 The Econonomist hosted a big debate on Language and Thought. It used a very spiffy web-enabled platform to host the debate, and a language academic thought it would make a dandy introduction to some readings she is poutting together on the topic. Alas ...

[T]he Economist's intro page on this debate leads only to an debate archive site that doesn't include this one; and the links in old LLOG posts are now redirected to the same unhelpful location.

A source at the magazine explained:

We vastly over-designed the debate platform (and over-thought it generally, in various ways), and when we stopped running the debates that way, we stopped running that bit of the website. The old debates are now unavailable online.

Fortunately for all concerned Language Log was able to find copies in the Internet Archive. 

But if it hadn't ...

#indieweb

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.

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.*

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.

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

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.

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