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

A cup of coffee here, a cup of coffee there, pretty soon you're talking about a bottle of wine. Nevertheless, I thought it worth dropping 2.5 coffees to check out fsnotes, which bills itself as a "lightweight notational velocity reinvention".

I depend totally on nvALT as my general place for keeping scraps, vital information, inchoate thoughts and more besides, and the one thing that has always bugged me has been the inability to have more than one folder. Mainly, I envisage using an additional folder as an archive; notes that I truly believe I have finished with but that I really do not want to throw away because there might be something in them I need later. NvALT's blazing search speed would be fabulous for that kind of treasure hunt, but I honestly don't want currently dead notes cluttering up my view of all that stuff.

I asked about multiple folders 21 days ago and a couple of days ago the developer, Oleksandr Glushchenko, delivered just that. Definitely deserving of my support.

First impressions are that fsnotes is every bit as fast as nvALT. I haven't been able to give multiple folders a good workout yet, because I only have one big folder of notes. My minor niggle is that the display of links is different from nvALT's. A well-formed Markdown link is clickable in the preview mode, but not in "native" mode. I suppose I could fix that easily enough in my existing notes, and it need not be a problem going forward, but it is an annoyance right now that might stop me switching completely over to fsnotes.

Maybe I'll raise an issue on github for that.

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

As suggestedby @mrhenko, a test post containing a photo but no title.

Just an old snap.

Ah, the old chestnut about audio quality of podcasts. So I'll give my standard answer. If what you're saying is interesting, audio quality is less important. Asymcar is my goto example for that. And if what you say is not interesting, no level of production value will make me listen longer.

In between is a grey area. So, specifically addressing Henrik's question, that microcast was perfectly OK, except that once we had dealt with the weather and the question, I had had enough. On all outdoor recording wind noise, handling noise and bumps are the most distressing to me because they are always a shock to my ears. But if I know it is going to be over in three minutes, I can survive.

I've recorded outdoors and walking along myself, almost always with either the built-in microphone on the earbuds or else with an external Zoom iQ-6. The Zoom is actually worse, because it is so much more sensitive to wind and handling. A few times, when I was doing Dog Days of Podcasting, I cheated and recorded while walking along only to shadow myself with a decent mic when I got home. That's fun because you get the spontaneity of unscripted speech with much better sound quality.

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.

Finished the first phase of moving two WordPress driven sites from one hosting service to another this morning. I was a bit wary, having read all the things that can go wrong, and I took a few wrong turns into dead ends. But I managed to back out and didn't screw up too badly on the first one. The screwing up I did accomplish was mainly the result of my impatience, doing things in quick succession when I should have given them time to settle down in between. But I learned my lessons, and this morning's transfer went much more smoothly. Scarily so, in fact.

There's plenty left to do, moving various ancillary things, all part of an ongoing effort to tidy up in general, but I don't foresee any more difficulties, touch wood.

And in case anyone cares, I couldn't have done it nearly as easily without the Duplicator plugin for WordPress, which truly is a life saver.

Funny, as I continue slowly to bring old posts in, to see what I wrote about my tools, in 2007 and then again in 2013.

The conclusion remains as it ever was; although the tools change, the jobs they need to do remain more or less the same. Find things and write about them.

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.