#indieweb 2021-12-02
2021-12-02 UTC
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Loqi [indienews] New post: "Lifecycle of a post on the indieweb" https://samwilson.id.au/P25077
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Tommi[m] <petermolnar> "http://dr.amy.gy/ "The Presentat..." <- Thank you very much!
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# Don Howdy! This was me -> https://chat.indieweb.org/meta/2021-12-02/1638450603752100
# Don Kevin Marks invited me here to discuss.
# Loqi [DEGoodmanWilson] Trying very hard to understand the #indieweb and how to implement various bits of it, but I'm finding the resources at http://indieweb.org essentially incomprehensible. Is there a better resource for the complete beginner? Does this even exist?
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capjamesg[d] Welcome!
# capjamesg[d] How can we help?
# Don Well, at the encouragement of some friends, I decided to have a look at what's going on in this space. A little background: I come from the first wave of blogging, I've had my own website and domain on and off over the years, and have experimented with a huge range of technologies back in the day.
# Don (Current site: https://goodman-wilson.com)
# Don https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started and hit a wall pretty quickly.
# Don *I visited
# Don I'm quite overwhelmed by the amount of information, and its organization. There's no clear thread to follow.
# Don Well, trying to figure out what the first step even is. Got the domain, got the site. But the next step for me is totally opaque.
# Don I get of course that there are…untold numbers of different ways of doing things and that complicates the story a lot.
# Don And of course _my_ way is very different from others (I gave up on WP a long time ago, because I'm a terrible DB admin, for example)
# capjamesg[d] Indeed, there are a lot of things you can do. Do you have any particular goals in mind?
# capjamesg[d] For instance, do you want to add comments to your site? Or add a new way to show content?
# Don For me, the first step is simply to understand a) what the various possibilities even are and b) how they work together to solve the bigger problem of moving away from corporate silos
# Don THere's a lot of jargon floating around, and little explanation of the concepts behind it. FOr example, I'm not entirely sure what "webmention" is or "syndication" (although I can guess at that one)
# Don Or what my priorities should be—what's the happy path?
# capjamesg[d] A webmention is essentially a response to a piece of content that you have posted on your own site. Webmentions enable a way for you to create, say, a comment or a "like" on your site and send it to someone. The person who receives it can then show your like / reply on their site and link back to yours.
# Don (A little background, I'm using a static site generator, so the three paths in the Getting Started don't speak to me)
# capjamesg[d] I am using one too 🙂
# capjamesg[d] The post JamieTanna just sent to you via Twitter might be enlightening re: his experience.
# capjamesg[d] Syndication just means being able to post content from your own site elsewhere.
# capjamesg[d] For instance, Jamie actually posted his Tweet to you on his own site, and then a tool turned that into a Tweet.
# Don I think, to be more concrete about my situation, is that the Getting Started feels like word salad a bit. I can find a bit of a path through the page, but once I hit upon something that seems relevant, too many unfamiliar terms are being thrown at me too quickly. It's not that I need them explained just now, but that the docs feel like they were written for someone who already knows what they're doing
# Don A good technical document starts from a point of empathy: It identifies a problem the reader is already experiencing, and describes it in terms they already understand. Then it uses that shared context to lead them into what a solution looks like, and how to implement it (whether from scratch or using an existing service).
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aaronpk Have you stumbled across this page yet? It might be a good next step https://aaronparecki.com/2018/06/30/11/your-first-webmention
# Don (running off to check Twitter…)
# capjamesg[d] The post Jamie sent was from [Murray]. I realise I wasn't clear on that earlier 🤦
# Don Aaron: I had not, thanks
# Don I think JVT's questions are all very good ones—they aim to get at the problem I want to solve, which is an excellent first step in a self-service getting started! I would not have expected that the steps I shoudl consider might vary depending on my goals (nor have I reflected deeply on those goals in fact)
# capjamesg[d] Indeed! A lot of what you'll find on the wiki is a choose your own path way of thinking.
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petermolnar Don: re "what's the happy path?", I can only give you my example. A long while ago I was cross-posting my content that I put on my site to social media, and someone, somewhere pointed me at indieweb. Here, cross posting has a different name ( POSSE if it's a push, PESOS if it's pull ), so I started marking up my HTML to be able to use existing tools that would pick up my content and send it to social
# petermolnar media.
# petermolnar The rest followed.
# capjamesg[d] re: happy path. I started by chatting here and perusing the wiki every now and again. My first project was just blogging and then I started to look into webmentions so that people could easily reply to my content on their site (and so that I could do the same).
# Don Sorry, maybe "happy path" is itself a bit of jargon! The idea is that there should be a clear, uncluttered path through the documentation that takes the reader quickly from square one through a minimally working solution with as little opportunity for distraction or confusion as possible.
# Don Again, recognizing that what's happening here is a little harrier than most technical projects :D
# petermolnar I'm going to quite the Perl motto on this: TMTOWTDI
# petermolnar "There's more than one way to do it"
# petermolnar think of all the indieweb tools as building blocks: first you need to know what you want to do with them, then use the one(s) you need.
# Don And of course that's fine! A happy path can be part of a choose your own adventure. But from a cognitive psychology perspective, it's better to present one option and one concept at a time…
# petermolnar (that said, I'm with you, the Getting Started page is horrible)
# capjamesg[d] This is helpful feedback Don.
# Don The building blocks thing is great, that makes things easier—you only need one to get started, right? I think it could be interesting to present the building blocks (perhaps graphically) conceptually, that is, distinct from the underlying implementations, to help someone like me get a grasp on which ones I should be considering—i.e., how to match the building blocks with my nebulous and ill-defined goals.
# petermolnar in my opinion, the first step is - once you have a website - is to add extra markup in HTML, so your website becomes possible to be parsed with tools
# Don Peter—that was my suspicion too. But I actually couldn't figure out how to do that. The validators I found are all very cool, bit I couldn't find an introduction to the bits of metadata, their purpose, and how to add them, only a couple of partial examples.
# petermolnar Form there you can pursuit the different routes according to your own priority. One route is to cross-post to social media; another is to be able to reply to other websites with your own site, yet another is to be able to get replies from other websites.
# petermolnar the missing piece you're looking for is microformats, and it lives in it's own land: http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page
# petermolnar shuhs Loqi
# petermolnar Loqi is our bot, but sometimes he's trigger happy
# Don Hehehehe
# Don Oh wow I hadn't even seen that page yet.
# Don It's not (obviously) linked to here: https://indieweb.org/h-card
# Don And I'm assuming we're talking about h-cards? Maybe I'm not.
# petermolnar the very first word links to microformats in /h-card :)
# Don Indeed it is d'oh.
# Don Yeah, that's always a problem, and I suspect a bigger one for IndieWeb than for most projects.
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[jeremycherfas] Perhaps everyone has already seen https://xkcd.com/2549/ but if not, I know a few people here will empathise.
# Loqi [XKCD] Edge Cake https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/edge_cake_2x.png
# Don For me, no I can skip all that. OF course not everyone can. But it does feel like there is a path that could be made clearer:
# Don Starting with getting a domain, choosing a publishing tool, and ancillary to that a CMS. But of course, this is true for…every website.
# Don Important stuff! But the kind of thing that can be put on a page (pages) of its own as an aside.
# kloenk Hi BTW. Heared of indieweb this weekend, and no creating a git forge, so patches can be proposed via webmentions :)
# Don My own opinion is that hosting etc can be linked to, in just the same way a React tutorial might link to resources for learning Javascript. But I don'T claim to have the one true answer there. What is interesting to me is what comes next, and it sounds like there are some opinions here about the right places to begin digging in once the foundational steps are sorted.
# Don Docs organization and discoverability is always a tricky thing. I'm a fan of the way the Algolia docs use the sidebar—each item is a particular goal a developer might have. https://www.algolia.com/doc/
# Don I'm also a fan of how they present everying in bite-sized chunks. Even their use of whitespace helps with that.
# Don (I almost wonder if MediaWiki itself is (ironically) making the organization of information more difficult than it might otherwise be?)
# petermolnar I think it could be useful to stress that indieweb is not a goal, it's a tool, and you need to already have a goal
# [jeremycherfas] That's a good point @petermolnar and is probably the single biggest obstacle to docs that meet the expectations and needs of all comers.
# capjamesg[d] Indeed. I like the https://indiewebguides.org/ approach that feels like it's choose your own adventure. But the site is not as rich in content as the wiki right now.
# capjamesg[d] I would like to see more on that initiative in terms of templates / a list of what's needed.
# Don That's a very interestingly structured site!
# [jeremycherfas] I think there is a case to be made that the richness of content on the wiki is sometimes a deterrent.
# capjamesg[d] Indeed [jeremycherfas]. The wiki is a wiki in terms of its structure so content can be better more as a reference material than an actual guide.
# capjamesg[d] *some content, not all
# [jeremycherfas] Right. Wiki as backup. But the distributed work that goes into the wiki is not easily replicated in more guidelike or tutorial items.
# capjamesg[d] +1
# Don OK, I've gotta run, but this has been really interesting for me. I hope some of my feedback was helpful! I'm going to keep plugging at it, will let y'all know how it goes.
# [jeremycherfas] Even contributing to https://indiewebguides.org/contribute/ seems to me to be hugely complex if, say, you have just accomplished something and want to share. A buddy scheme, where someone else could handle some of the technical aspects might be beneficial.
# [jeremycherfas] And that's what many of us do. Those do not often show up on a search, and on the wiki may be buried as a See also.
# [jeremycherfas] Agreed fully, doc writing is extremely difficult.
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[KevinMarks] indiewebify.me starts from the 'so you have a website, what next' premise, but it does imply an ordering rather than a set of building blocks
# [KevinMarks] but it does have tests for each kind of thing
# petermolnar calumryan++ for indiewebguides.org
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# [jeremycherfas] Good point petermolnar++
# [jeremycherfas] calumryan++
# capjamesg[d] Dan++ for the feedback
# [jeremycherfas] I'm tickled by Phil Gyford's characterisation of webmentions as "Trackbacks for Millennials"
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# petermolnar he's not wrong though...
# petermolnar but just like milennials and gen-x: next generation
# petermolnar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback is a nice table to compare it all
# [jeremycherfas] Oh, I don't hold with the idea of the gens at all, but it sounds better than Trackbacks for Younger People
# [jeremycherfas] Haven't seen any of those.
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# [tantek]1 Loqi is correct that once you're starting to discuss markup, you've crossed into #indieweb-dev territory.
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# [snarfed]1 hmm, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback 's info on webmention seems mostly good, but this part is wrong? "Verifying that linking page does indeed link to linked page is recommended, not explicitly required"
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# [tantek]1 -> #indieweb-dev or maybe #indieweb-meta
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# capjamesg[d] aaronpk++
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[tantek] samwilson++ for https://samwilson.id.au/P25077
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tracydurnell[d] reading back through the morning's conversation about Getting Started, I would endorse the idea of moving each of those very detailed sections to their own pages
# tracydurnell[d] I wonder if some of what people are looking for when they're getting started is more like what's on this page https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb