#indiewebcamp 2013-02-23

2013-02-23 UTC
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@brennannovak @0x17h my URL shortener is a @socialigniter app, code is here https://github.com/brennannovak/links but to answer your question: LAMP stack :) #IndieWeb
tantek, bnvk_, scor, bnvk, jedahan, eschnou, andreypopp, barnabywalters, Nadreck, laurian and zztr joined the channel
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barnabywalters good evening all
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barnabywalters tantek: I followed some links and ended up at some of your old log pages — they’re quite fascinating (layout, content, etc). Were the comments done automatically or manually or a mixture?
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barnabywalters I particularly like the comment layout — names, a flag for language, and sometimes a small annotation
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tantek all manually
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tantek I'd typically find the links as they showed up via Technorati
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tantek and then create new hyperlinks by hand, using known names for each blog, and lang / hreflang attributes as needed. the flags are all automatic via the CSS.
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barnabywalters nice
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tantek I'd add annotations if I though the commenter got something wrong or otherwise needed some kind of follow-up clarification.
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tantek s/though/thought
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Loqi tantek meant to say: I'd add annotations if I thought the commenter got something wrong or otherwise needed some kind of follow-up clarification.
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barnabywalters it’s effective. Certainly a really interesting example of self-hosted commenting UI
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tantek it was effective back when blog posts would beget blog posts in response or follow-up, which seems to rarely happen these days :/
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tantek maybe we can help bring that back
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tantek and people would blog things instead of tweet them
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tantek (or retweet them)
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barnabywalters part of me thinks "we need an indieweb version of the passive, no-effort retweet/fave/like action"
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tantek which doesn't have the same (any?) value as comments did, because they don't add anything to the conversation
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barnabywalters but the rest of me thinks that isn’t actually valuable
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barnabywalters and so not worth working on
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tantek barnabywalters - yeah - that first conclusion is what I figured out during the first indiewebcamp in 2011 hence webactions
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tantek and then I also became disillusioned with the value of them
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barnabywalters tantek: well, I am close to being able to retweet any tweet in seconds from twitter.com via web actions
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tantek the only value left for adding webactions as far as I can tell, is to actually *replace* the UI of twitter for folks
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tantek who are viewing one of my notes on my domain
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tantek so there's kind of two use cases that may be worthy of still exploring for webactions:
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tantek 1. provide the UI of twitter, so that notes on your own site feel "at least as useful" as the syndicated tweet copies.
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tantek 2. provide a UI for indieweb folks to comment / linkblog your notes/articles on their own site
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tantek that's all I've come up with
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tantek maybe I should add that to the page
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tantek *wiki
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barnabywalters so by the first one you literally mean recreate twitter actions for doing stuff on twitter, as per twitters “requirements”?
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tantek not per twitter's pub guidelines, but just to give people a familiar experience. so when they click a permalink on my tweets back to the original (perhaps to read more or view better embedded images / video), they can still favorite/reply/retweet/tweet etc.
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barnabywalters that would have the further benefit of providing entry points for UI hijacking
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barnabywalters instead of trying to inject UI elements, or having them out of context in some browser menu
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tantek right, it's a serverside way of doing that.
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barnabywalters server side? I’m talking about the publisher providing UI for taking actions (reply, fave, etc) which default to working with twitter, but which can be hijacked by browser extensions to work however the user wants
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tantek right. publisher = server
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barnabywalters sure
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tantek oh ok, so the client could build upon those
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tantek yes
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barnabywalters yeah — it’s the *actions* which are the important thing — that they work with twitter (or fb or whatever) by default is like POSSE — providing hooks back to silos
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barnabywalters whilst fellow indiewebcampers can hijack them for their own purposes
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tantek re: use-case 1: https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/24224682530050048
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@zeldman .@glenda @kevinmarks @t If I want to reply to t's tweet, I can't do it from his site. I have to back-button back to Twitter. Lotta clicks.
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tantek and: https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/24224559787941888
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@zeldman .@glenda @kevinmarks @t Oops, the page I clicked thru to doesn't amplify the tweet, it simply repeats it. Bad UX. But there's more.
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tantek (sorry I posted those in the wrong order)
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barnabywalters right, I’m going to try rolling out markup for use case 1, with some markup allowing people to hijack them
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tantek a good webactions markup pattern should provide enough information for clientside overrides
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tantek did you see the strawman proposal in my presentation at OSBridge 2012?
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barnabywalters nope, I didn’t
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barnabywalters ah, found it
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tantek.com edited /webactions (+1556) "add a couple of constrained use cases that still make sense for webactions" (view diff)
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barnabywalters do=post, with=permalink… interesting
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barnabywalters so the challenge I have noticed building and using the fairly configurable Indieweb Reply is matching verbs up with the various bits of data you can expand into the URL
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tantek.com edited /webactions (+244) "added 2012-06-28 Web Actions session at OSBridge" (view diff)
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barnabywalters most of which I took directly from the data available from existing social sharing button markup
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tantek which is pretty horrific in general
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barnabywalters the thing I am wondering is: just how much data should the WA provider (extension) give the consumer (e.g. indie site) — as much as it can find, or just a URL and leave the rest to the consumer server
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tantek Twitter's isn't bad
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barnabywalters oh god yes
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barnabywalters to get at some of the data, I had do do *horrible* URL mangling
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tantek I think it's best to start simple
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tantek hence just <action do=verb with=permalink>
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tantek I think we can do a lot with that
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barnabywalters and leave the rest to the consumer server. agreed, that’s the best place to start
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tantek and since HTML5 parsers/browsers will see and parse the <action> tag into the DOM, browser extensions can detect it and customize it ("hijack" as you say) to do whatever the user/reader wants the button to do
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barnabywalters how acceptable is it to throw custom attributes into HTML? I know data-* is for nonpublic stuff
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tantek I myself will probably start with <action do=verb with=permalink><a href=twitter>..</a></action> patterns for the web action buttons on my site - that is, only providing the twitter fallback/default
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tantek well if you use a custom tag, all the attributes are up to you
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tantek which is why I'm suggesting using <action> in that way: http://tantek.com/presentations/2012/06/osb12-web-actions/#slide15
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barnabywalters heh — this really is going to be one for my experimental-markup document :)
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tantek.com edited /webactions (+760) "document brainstorming from 2012-06-28 OSBridge "Web Actions" presentation" (view diff)
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tantek ok there that should help things along
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tantek somehow I forgot to update the wiki page for webactions with the thinking/discussion that went into my OSBridge 2012 session
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barnabywalters great, thanks
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tantek.com edited /webactions (+1146) "/* Brainstorming */ add a few sample verbs for Twitter equivalents and a bit more of the thinking behind them" (view diff)
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tantek barnabywalters - there I just braindumped some more of the thinking that's been stuck in my head on this topic for a year or more. hopefully it makes some sense and you find it useful.
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tantek http://indiewebcamp.com/webactions#Brainstorming
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barnabywalters fab. let’s make this happen
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barnabywalters I’m leaving indieweb reply as it is (it’s useful but reached local maxima), starting a new Web Actions cross-browser extension
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tantek sounds good
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tantek.com edited /webactions (+15) "/* Brainstorming */ repost is a generalization" (view diff)
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aaronpk tantek: re: blog posts begetting blog posts, i've seen it happen quite a lot still, mostly by following hackernews. http://www.flickr.com/photos/aaronpk/7270298474/in/set-72157630291326504
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aaronpk there will be a front-page article that gets a ton of comments, and then the next day there will be a follow-up post from someone else that hits the front page again
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aaronpk so that gives me hope for the indie web still
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tantek I think if we figure out and build UIs that make it easy for us to blog upon each others blog posts (and have the pingbacks show up with decent presentation - note - current pingpack displays pretty much all suck), then we can create a critical mass ourselves.
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barnabywalters tantek: +1 that current pingback UI sucks
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tantek barnabywalters - re: old log pages — they’re quite fascinating (layout, content, etc)
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tantek any particular blog post that you liked in terms of the layout, content, comments presentation?
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tantek would be good to get your perspective on which ones you thought were worthy of re-exploring in terms of UI etc. (I tended to change my blog presentation a lot more back then)
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tantek (and the presentation is baked in for the archives)
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tantek just some example old /log blog post urls is what I'm looking for here
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barnabywalters well, it was one announcing XFN where I saw the most interesting comment UI (names, annotations, flags)
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barnabywalters I’ll try to find the URL
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aaronpk oh tantek don't know if you were following, but I made some edits that sandeep launched on http://webmention.org/, and wrote a proxy service to support backwards compatibility with pingback https://github.com/aaronpk/Pingback#webmention
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tantek oh neat!
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tantek thanks barnabywalters
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barnabywalters tantek: that would be this one: http://tantek.com/log/2003/12.html#L20031215
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barnabywalters liking the lego minifig too :)
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tantek :)
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tantek yes, back in the days where blog bling was more of a thing
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tantek yes, I do really like that inline list style of listing who commented (blogged!) about something.
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tantek the only change I'd make today to that would be to add icons for each person
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tantek I wonder how many of those comment links still work
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tantek it's amazing how many blog posts back then were essentially tweet length (or maybe double tweet length)
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barnabywalters tantek: I was surprised by just how many are still around
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tantek the indieweb endures
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tantek goodness. december will be the 10 year anniversary of XFN.
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barnabywalters wow, cool!
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barnabywalters and RE interesting content: the sidebar is particularly rich (watching, listening, reading, writing, desktop wallpapers)
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tantek we used to be so much more creative with our blogs
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tantek "social media" dumbed everyone down and stuck ads in the sidebar instead
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aaronpk that sidebar is an interesting peek into your life in 2003
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barnabywalters had a look at (AFAI can tell) your earliest logs: http://tantek.com/log/2002/08.html
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barnabywalters 1996? your blog is almost as old as me ;)
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aaronpk makes me want to have a sidebar on my site that is fixed in the point in time of the post
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barnabywalters aaronpk: yeah, this stuff is kinda valuable
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barnabywalters it’s one of the reasons I solidify my XFN in notes as it was at the time of publishing
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barnabywalters that way my notes are also a record of how my online relationships change over time
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barnabywalters goodnight all
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Loqi don't let the bed bugs bite
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tantek aaronpk - for me, it seemed like monthly "freezings" of the sidebar worked pretty well
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tantek since my archives were monthly back then
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tantek and included the sidebar
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aaronpk that seems like a reasonable approach
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