#indiewebcamp 2012-06-10

2012-06-10 UTC
spinnerin, tantek_ and dascher joined the channel
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aaronpk well I just finished the proof-of-concept pingback service I was talking about the other day: https://github.com/aaronpk/Pingback
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aaronparecki.com edited /User:Aaronparecki.com (+64) (view diff)
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aaronpk is now collecting data from pingbacks on all of his sites using https://github.com/aaronpk/Pingback
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waterpigs.co.uk created /backfeed (+2085) "Initial brain dump" (view diff)
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waterpigs.co.uk edited /backfeed (+1) "/* Backfeed, AKA Reverse Syndication */" (view diff)
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waterpigs.co.uk edited /backfeed (+59) "/* Debate */" (view diff)
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aaronpk barnabywalters: awesome notes! I'm very interested in exploring this as well!
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barnabywalters aaronpk: cheers, I've just got to the point in my system where I'm thinking about displaying this data, and possibly accepting pingbacks
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aaronpk coincidentally, I just implemented a pingback server
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barnabywalters I've been storing twitter and facebook ids for my syndicated content for a month or so now. the deficiency in the twitter api is really irritating, as is the slowness of the facebook API :(
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barnabywalters yeah, I saw that, haven't had a proper look yet
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aaronpk I didn't feel like implementing the xmlrpc calls and a system for storing and viewing pingbacks on all the sites I wanted to track them on, so I made it into a service
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barnabywalters I'm no good at reading ruby - how does it work? The pingback server is separate to the pingedback things, and is accessible through an API or something?
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aaronpk yep, this server takes care of speaking the pingback language. all you have to do to enable it on your site is add a tag like <link rel="pingback" href="http://pingback.me/aaronpk/xmlrpc" />
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aaronpk the idea is then i'll expose a simple web UI for viewing pings you've collected, and also expose it through an API
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aaronpk i'm running pingback.me, but you could easily set it up on your own server as ping.yourdomain.com or such
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barnabywalters I thought pingback could be useful for handling 'mentions', e.g. pinging aaronparecki.com if I mentioned you in a note
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barnabywalters been thinking a bit about how to handle that - syntax and the like
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aaronpk totally
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barnabywalters not sure if webfinger is the way forward or not
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barnabywalters there are too many discrepancies, e.g. people who have a separate email address will be confusing, duplication happens if people use a different accnt: to keep their email address private…
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aaronpk agreed
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aaronpk I think pingback is a relatively under-recognized protocol
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aaronpk it's very simple to understand, and it's already implemented by most of the major blogging platforms
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barnabywalters yeah, if the server is well-implemented then it's a great protocol
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barnabywalters my one niggle with it is the weight of xml-rpc
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barnabywalters json-rpc looks like a much lighter weight format, but I doubt it's used at all
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aaronpk yea, xml-rpc is kind of cumbersome, but there are lots of good libraries that abstract that all away
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aaronpk I know PHP and ruby both have libraries that end up just calling a method in your code with native objects as arguments, so you never have to deal with the xml part
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barnabywalters yep, I'm using codeigniter, which has nice simple client and server libraries — so I should be able to get it set up fairly quickly
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aaronpk here's the method in my code that gets called when it gets the pingback.ping xmlrpc call: https://github.com/aaronpk/Pingback/blob/master/controller.rb#L79
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aaronpk args is an array, which is split out into the two variables source and target
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aaronpk so this code just goes and verifies that source does actually link to target, and then it's done
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barnabywalters ha - liking https://github.com/aaronpk/Pingback/blob/master/controller.rb#L106
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aaronpk heh yea I got that from wordpress!
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aaronpk I noticed they were saying that in their responses when I was testing things
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barnabywalters so does wordpress do pingbacks by default, or is a plugin required?
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aaronpk I believe it's on by default
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aaronpk I don't think they display the by default anymore tho, but you do see "incoming links" on the dashboard now
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barnabywalters making it extremely widely used, then! it'd be worth testing to see if it navigates shortlinks successfully
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aaronpk I don't think it's supposed to work with shortlinks: http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback-1.0
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aaronpk "sourceURI: The absolute URI of the post on the source page containing the link to the target site"
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barnabywalters I wonder how often shortlinks (or other redirects) are used by bloggers, then? off the top of my head I can't remember having seen any
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barnabywalters but if we're using this for notes to be tweeted, people are likely to use them
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aaronpk sort of. Twitter kind of made shortlinks irrelevant tho with their t.co domain
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barnabywalters yes. very irritating if you have a short linking service which produces shorter links than they do!
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barnabywalters I think that's why tantek leaves the / after the domain name out of his links to notes
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barnabywalters it's getting late here so I'm off - bye for the mo!
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aaronpk have a good evening!
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barnabywalters you too!
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aaronparecki.com edited /backfeed (+212) (view diff)
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