#dev 2019-08-12

2019-08-12 UTC
[snarfed], gRegorLove, [fluffy] and robdrake joined the channel
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robdrake
Hello
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robdrake
I'm trying to figure out what I need to install on a VPS I rent for an Indieweb blog / site
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robdrake
Web Server, check. PHP, check.
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[fluffy]
You don’t even need PHP if you’re going with static hosting.
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[fluffy]
Like jekyll or pelican or whatever.
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[fluffy]
Or if you’re using a non-PHP stack like Django/Flask/whatever.
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[fluffy]
I think the important question to ask is: what sort of interface do you want when you’re building/publishing your site?
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[fluffy]
and what sorts of capabilities do you want for your site?
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[fluffy]
Do you need the ability to, say, schedule posts? Or have comment sections? Do you want to accept live webmentions and have them published directly on your site, or is it okay to have them happen via JavaScript embed?
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[fluffy]
How much administrative overhead are you willing to tolerate?
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robdrake
interface? very comfortable with command-line text editors
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[fluffy]
also what sorts of content are you going to be posting? just text, or also images, or even other things like audio/video/etc.?
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robdrake
administration, I can ddg what I need to learn, or ask a user of the VPS to help out
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[fluffy]
Personally I use my own stack called Publ which is Python/Flask-based and is designed to be flexible and supports things like private content, but it’s also probably overkill for most websites.
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robdrake
maybe images, mostly text
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robdrake
and I like Python as much as vim users like emacs
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[fluffy]
That’s fair 🙂
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robdrake
can't think of the name, back to ddg, but there was / is a node.js blogging software
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robdrake
ghost is the name
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[fluffy]
Personally I can’t stand node, myself 😉
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[fluffy]
well, node’s okay, I’m just not a fan of javascript
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[fluffy]
anyway, for the most part, blogging/publishing tools are largely interchangeable.
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[fluffy]
Esepcially static systems which tend to all use the same common format as Jekyll.
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robdrake
[fluffy] emacs or vim?
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robdrake
chained to a desktop? :P
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KartikPrabhu
its a text editor, who cares
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robdrake
yeah, I guess, unless you only have ssh to work with your host
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KartikPrabhu
there are ssh clients too. I use FIlezilla
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KartikPrabhu
in any case, non of this is relevant to your question
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robdrake
no, just meandering a bit
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robdrake
installing ghost now
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robdrake
then setting the hcard
Babebraham, robdrake, rainmanjam and [tantek] joined the channel
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[fluffy]
I mostly use sublime text 😛
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[fluffy]
although I use vi if I’m sshed in somewhere
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[fluffy]
I used to use emacs for local editing and vi for remote, and I can’t explain why
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[fluffy]
probably inertia, as I first learned vi back in like 1991 on a Cray over a 1200 baud link
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[fluffy]
and by vi I mean vi, not vim 😛
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robdrake
wow
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robdrake
I've just used Vim
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robdrake
no 'Net access when 1200 baud modems were used
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robdrake
Sorry to bother again, but what should I put in the h-card?
cweiske and [KevinMarks] joined the channel
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[KevinMarks]
Name, photo, url are the basics, but you can add more. Indiewebify.me will suggest other fields
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robdrake
I just need to find a webmention implementation for node.js' ghost CMI
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robdrake
s/CMI/CMS/
loicm, [pfefferle], [Rose] and [fluffy] joined the channel
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[fluffy]
I just released a version of Authl that has direct support for IndieAuth (rather than requiring indielogin.com). Woo! [snarfed] if you see this message, mind checking http://beesbuzz.biz/_login/blog to see if you can log in with your site? It should support webfinger as well (including via bridgy fed), or at least it works for me.
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shokuninDiscord[
What does it do?
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shokuninDiscord[
We’re looking at using indielogin.com
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shokuninDiscord[
So I’m curious what’s different about this service
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[fluffy]
indielogin is a wrapper to indieauth et al but it requires registering your site as a client with it, which Aaron is hesitant to allow for various reasons
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[fluffy]
indieauth is the protocol, indielogin is a protocol broker
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[fluffy]
beesbuzz.biz now supports indieauth directly so there’s no reason to use a broker
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shokuninDiscord[
Is it a service to login to thingns, like auth0, or like a platform for something?
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[fluffy]
which ‘it’ are you asking about?
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[fluffy]
indielogin.com is a service to broker logins via a bunch of protocols including indieauth and relmeauth
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[fluffy]
indieauth is a protocol based on a subset of oauth
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[fluffy]
relmeauth is a protocol based on providing external links to other providers including email, github, etc.
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[fluffy]
beesbuzz.biz is my personal site
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[fluffy]
authl is my authentication library that I use to provide login to my personal site for private posts
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[fluffy]
authl currently supports email, mastodon, indieauth, and indielogin, and I’m going to also eventually add more oauth providers like twitter, github, facebook, etc., although that will still require people to register their own apps with said providers
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[fluffy]
my own site is configured to support email, mastodon, and indieauth; I have an open request to aaron to enable indielogin but, as I mentioned, he’s hesitant to open up client registrations for various reasons, some of which I agree with.
prtksxna[m], rittmeDiscord[m], Lolicon[m], j4y_funabashi[m], M011000100111010, pierrebocDiscord, marcusrbrownDisc, RealSnazzyDiscor, cyluDiscord[m], jmac, IWSlackGateway, Kongaloosh, jeremycherfas, [fluffy] and KartikPrabhu joined the channel
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shokuninDiscord[
Thanks!
KartikPrabhu, djmoch, jgmac1106, [Lewis_Cowles], [Rose], ola, loicm, IWSlackGateway, aleksip, [prtksxna], [dave], [grantcodes], [snarfed] and gRegorLove joined the channel
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aaronpk
[snarfed]: aperture should be being intelligent about not fetching pages repeatedly unless they are changing
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aaronpk
tho turns out deciding what is a change is not trivial, so i have some stuff in there to decide
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robdrake
Hello
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[snarfed]
and bridgy user pages do change regularly, meaningfully. they're just not useful to subscribe to in a reader
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aaronpk
i currently see two user pages in the subscriptions, it looks like one was unsubscribed in june, but there is one active right now
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[snarfed]
ok, dropped the block on bridgy's side
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[snarfed]
apologies for the outage, aaronpk. i can look into finding and re-sending all the missing wms
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aaronpk
looks like it's also on the lowest polling tier
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aaronpk
i wonder if i should implement a sort of global block list in aperture to prevent people from attempting to subscribe to certain URLs
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aaronpk
that's probably the easiest solution
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[snarfed]
definitely easiest, yes
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[snarfed]
this is also not a huge deal for bridgy, i could just allow low tier polling of user pages
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aaronpk
so telegraph (the one petermolnar reported) only has 1 of those errors in the logs trying to send to bridgy publish
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aaronpk
i don't have logs on what webmention.io has failed to receive, because I don't log those kinds of failures because it's the same failure as spam pingbacks/webmentions
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[snarfed]
oh good point
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[snarfed]
sorry, nm, i misspoke. i planned to try on my (bridgy's) end. i don't permanently store endpoint for each wm, but i may be able to find the sites on wm.io and go from ther
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[snarfed]
actually hmm wm.io has been receiving bridgy wms fine, eg https://aaronparecki.com/2019/08/08/52/
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Loqi
[Aaron Parecki] Update: it was touch and go for a while there but I made it home! ⁣ ⁣p.s. Flying in to #PDX at sunset is my favorite. https://aaronparecki.com/2019/08/08/52/photo.jpg [video]
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[snarfed]
maybe it fetches source URLs from a different IP?
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aaronpk
oh hey it does! it fetches from xray which is running in GCP!
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aaronpk
*whew* ok
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[snarfed]
phew indeed. that IP block had been in place since 7/1 (!)
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[snarfed]
i guess we would have heard complaints way before now
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aaronpk
i would have thought i would have noticed something
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aaronpk
but a sporadic failure would have been tricky to notice
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petermolnar
realises he was barely ever posting
[tonz] and [schmarty] joined the channel
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robdrake
I got tired of trying to wrestle the node.js CMS ghost to work wiht indieweb, goin with Drupal rsn
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[grantcodes]
Yeah ghost seems really nice, but not very easy to extend - probably by design
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[tantek]
robdrake it would be useful if you could summarize what was tiring with wrestling with getting Ghost to work, maybe a sentence or two. Ideally add it to a section on /Ghost
loicm, [jgmac1106], [Will_Monroe] and [Rose] joined the channel; zoglesby left the channel
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[jgmac1106]
went to go add Charlie's tweet to /plurality https://twitter.com/sonniesedge/status/1160840361079709696 can't find her hyperlink, why does the Bridgy link point to a Twitter help article
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@sonniesedge
What I absolutely adore about the #indieweb community is that it is free of the "one true way" mentality that infects the rest of the web industry. Do what works for you, on your website! Bespoke is good! https://twitter.com/mxbck/status/1160834037113675782
(twitter.com/_/status/1160840361079709696)
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aaronpk
perks up
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[tantek]
I don't think they understand what "simple" means
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aaronpk
podcasting and authentication.. two of my favorite things
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aaronpk
oh gosh it's in a google doc
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[tantek]
yeahhhhh
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[tantek]
Though this sounds intriguing: https://www.syndicated.media/
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Loqi
Medium has -1 karma in this channel over the last year (-4 in all channels)
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aaronpk
ok this actually looks not that complicated
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[tantek]
!tell manton I'm stuck on how to get any of my photos to show up in micro.blog/t and nothing "micro.blog" is web searchable in practice (for obvious reasons) — are there limitations to micro.blog photo syndication? E.g. only one photo (no /multiphoto support), or max "caption" length, or something else? Am about to give-up or stick 🖼 in Atom feed photo entries to indicate to Atom consumers that there are photos there they are missing.
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Loqi
Ok, I'll tell them that when I see them next
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aaronpk
a little funny that they specifically define it as a JS API
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[jgmac1106]
thx for og link
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[tantek]
if only there was an original post discovery service that would do that for us 🙂
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[tantek]
what is original post discovery?
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Loqi
original post discovery is a discovery algorithm for starting with a POSSE copy of a post and finding the original post https://indieweb.org/original-post-discovery
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[tantek]
it's like an extension of following redirects, and following rel=canonical if any, and following /original-post-discovery as well
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[KevinMarks]
So PodPass is a private posts attempt?
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aaronpk
private feed more than posts
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[snarfed]
interesting. so it maybe complements NPR's RAD more than competes with it. https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-rad/
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[snarfed]
[jgmac1106] yeah sad that twitter app links go to twitter help instead of the app itself. for bridgy you can always look at their user page, eg https://brid.gy/twitter/sonniesedge#publishes
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[KevinMarks]
Seems to me that a public feed with private audio would make more sense
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[KevinMarks]
The way I'd do it would be a WebSub extension, where you got sent a post with a one shot audio link in, or a ui to log in to get it. As the websub subscriber gets a personal ping already
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[jgmac1106]
Snarfed thx for link and with NPRs investment in pocketcast they will be in place to push standards
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[jgmac1106]
Excited maybe something like Soli (forget you iOS folk) may fibally add the gesture based podcasting and possibly video input voice for notes I need (though latter should already be possible)
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[tantek]
Wow: not like I was using Instagram's embed codes anyway, and why you shouldn't either: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-instagram-embeds-indexing-28036.html
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[tantek]
what is embed
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Loqi
embed is code (usually just HTML like an iframe, sometimes with JS) for showing content from another website on your website or inside a post that is included by viewer’s browser and typically has some interactive aspect (more than just a static image / audio / video file) https://indieweb.org/embed
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[tantek]
embed << AVOID Instagram’s embed code because adding it will lower your page ranking due to norobots from IG https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-instagram-embeds-indexing-28036.html
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Loqi
ok, I added "AVOID Instagram’s embed code because adding it will lower your page ranking due to norobots from IG https://www.seroundtable.com/google-warns-about-instagram-embeds-indexing-28036.html" to the "See Also" section of /embed https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=64336&oldid=48108
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@glenngabe
Via @johnmu: Switch from normal embedded images to Instagram embeds & see a big drop in image search traffic? That's because IG uses iframes & the meta robots tag using noimageindex. That's a big problem. John tested this & I just ran a quick test too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm7mn2sGuyw&t=29m38s https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBxHwT-WwAASw4H.png
(twitter.com/_/status/1160881702211936256)
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[jgmac1106]
Maybe even add to robots.txt page (as I learn about that) as real world example
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[tantek]
what is meta robots
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Loqi
meta robots is a tag to give instructions to robots how to handle the current page and links on it https://indieweb.org/meta_robots
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[tantek]
probably better there ^^^
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[tantek]
meta robots << noimageindex apparent abuse or unintended bad interaction by IG embed code per https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1160881702211936256
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@glenngabe
Via @johnmu: Switch from normal embedded images to Instagram embeds & see a big drop in image search traffic? That's because IG uses iframes & the meta robots tag using noimageindex. That's a big problem. John tested this & I just ran a quick test too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm7mn2sGuyw&t=29m38s https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EBxHwT-WwAASw4H.png
(twitter.com/_/status/1160881702211936256)
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Loqi
ok, I added "noimageindex apparent abuse or unintended bad interaction by IG embed code per https://twitter.com/glenngabe/status/1160881702211936256" to the "See Also" section of /meta_robots https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?diff=64338&oldid=35135
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[tantek]
Also "noimageindex" didn't even appear anywhere in Wikipedia!
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[snarfed]
emergent
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[tantek]
Added it here to start with in case I'm missing something: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Robots_exclusion_standard#noimageindex
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[jgmac1106]
tantek++ for Wikipedia article
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Loqi
tantek has 21 karma in this channel over the last year (117 in all channels)
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[tantek]
well not quite - I just added a section to to Talk: page
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[snarfed]
[fluffy] just fyi your site sent me two wms for the same post today, one from http and one from https. https://snarfed.org/about#comment-2739698
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Loqi
fluffy
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GWG
I never liked what WordPress does with homepage mentions
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GWG
But it's better than before when it just discarded them
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[fluffy]
[snarfed] yeah I was trying to track down a pushl bug
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GWG
I had this idea to explore improving them
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GWG
I remember talking to gRegorLove about them at an airport
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[fluffy]
Normally I only send Webmentions from https but sometime last month it stopped sending Webmentions entirely
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GWG
I think Austin
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[fluffy]
which is also why there was a huge backfill o fposts sent to fed.brid.gy earlier 😛
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[fluffy]
anyway I still have no idea what’s going on and it’s really annoying
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[fluffy]
anyway as far as http vs https, this is why I’d love for webmention things to understand that sometimes websites speak *two* protocols
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[fluffy]
and just like automatically consolidate them
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[tantek]
as a publisher you may need to make that assertion of equivalency yourself, or preferably of which is canonical
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[tantek]
e.g. using rel=canonical
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[tantek]
(presuming you're not redirecting one to the other already)
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[tantek]
to enable such automatic (user level) consolidation
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[fluffy]
yeah I purposefully don’t redirect. I’ll probably start adding rel=canonical instead.
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[tantek]
searching for my own recent slugs has produced some very odd results
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[tantek]
e.g. why is this page showing *my* latest tweets instead of theirs?!?
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[tantek]
(in their footer)
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[KevinMarks]
"my recent slugs" sounds like niche gardening content
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[tantek]
"Latest Tweets"
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[tantek]
🐌 🐌 🐌
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[tantek]
[KevinMarks] you saw Chris Wilson's viral "slug hospital" tweet right?
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[KevinMarks]
My guess is that they put t&f in as their twitter account
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[tantek]
amazing
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KartikPrabhu
lol! that's a big gaffe for a "cyber policy" journal!!
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aaronpk
wow that's something
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[tantek]
maybe I should submit a paper for publication in their journal?
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KartikPrabhu
was just going to say that :P
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@photomatt
@anildash Taking future feature requests now. 😁
(twitter.com/_/status/1161026670788317184)
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KartikPrabhu
[tantek]: or you should tweet about it so it appears on their page :D
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[tantek]
[fluffy] I have that on my home page (canonical to https) but not yet on my permalinks (only have a path relative canonical to their slugs), so I should do that too!
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vika_nezrimaya
Is passing JSON in query args (i.e. "?jsonparam={...}") considered a bad thing? 'cause I think the current filter syntax for "?q=source" is clunky and I want an alternative...
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aaronpk
gonna be escaping hell
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vika_nezrimaya
aaronpk: was that for me?
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vika_nezrimaya
O.O
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aaronpk
%7B%22key%22%3A%22value%22%7D
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vika_nezrimaya
(is swearing allowed here?)
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vika_nezrimaya
('cause this looks like a computer spewing out swearwords to me :3)
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aaronpk
lol exactly
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aaronpk
%7B is {
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vika_nezrimaya
that made me want to say an f-word when I first saw it, to be honest
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vika_nezrimaya
'cause this looks like swearing
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aaronpk
I don't think i've ever seen a JSON query syntax that was any good anyway
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aaronpk
it gets out of hand pretty quick
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aaronpk
ever tried to write an elasticsearch query? 🙈
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vika_nezrimaya
I don't even know what elasticsearch is
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vika_nezrimaya
I mean
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vika_nezrimaya
I heard of it
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vika_nezrimaya
somewhere
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vika_nezrimaya
ugh something something big data something something
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aaronpk
it's a search engine, lots of prior art there for defining a query syntax
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Loqi
[Aaron Parecki] query-example
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aaronpk
also some interesting examples of a query/filter language here https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/scripts/conditions/
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vika_nezrimaya
basically why I wanted JSON - because I could then do a match on properties without using any variation of property-name={}&property-value={} and property-{}={} which both have problems because arrays, for example - I think I have an allergy for PHP array syntax (this abomination came from PHP, right?) and Python frameworks don't really support it - in the first version of what grew into pyindieblog I had a cludge for parsing arrays
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vika_nezrimaya
from query parameters because Flask expects arrays to be without any []s
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vika_nezrimaya
and while I could write a parser for associative arrays (which are required for a variant of the syntax) I just thought - why not make it JSON? Something like filter={"category": ["indieweb"]} to search for a certain tag
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vika_nezrimaya
and I think this could grow into Elasticsearch-like syntax over time >.<
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vika_nezrimaya
now I'm scared
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vika_nezrimaya
I don't know what to do!!!
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[snarfed]
literally tons of query languages/syntaxes out there. vika_nezrimaya our main advice may be just not to invent your own 😁
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vika_nezrimaya
then... any recommendations?
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vika_nezrimaya
It's not urget
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vika_nezrimaya
I can implement the functionality requiring this (hashtag feeds and full-text search maybe?) later
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[snarfed]
yeah prioritize and punt is always a good idea
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[snarfed]
also don't generalize too early. implement those two directly, and see how far you get before you need any others
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vika_nezrimaya
@snarfed punt?
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vika_nezrimaya
oh nvm found it
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[snarfed]
postpone
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vika_nezrimaya
TIL
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[snarfed]
sorry, american slang
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vika_nezrimaya
not planning to move to USA (not until I get a lot of money and it gets safer for trans people) but still useful to know