[manton][aaronpk] I thought about it, but it hasn’t clicked for me yet. Perhaps because Micro.blog’s pages are really completely different than normal blog posts.
[manton]I store them in a separate database table with different fields. That’s an implementation detail, so I don’t want to get too hung up on it, though.
[manton]They mostly have _fewer_ properties. They are simpler. But they do have a few extra Micro.blog-specific fields: whether to show a page in a site’s navigation, whether it’s a special page like Photos that is automatically populated with your photos, etc. There are 3-4 fields like that.
[manton]My comment when you suggested “collections” was that they felt too much like categories. If we actually used categories for this, the next question would be whether some servers can have pages in multiple categories where it would be weird to have a “fake” pages category.
[manton]Yeah. I guess if a system already has something called “categories”, that’s where it could get a little weird. So, you’d have server logic like “if category == ‘pages’ then do something different”.
aaronpkI'm now realizing that I don't actually have a list of "pages" anywhere, so I don't even have anything to query to give me a list of all the pages, other than looking at the filesystem and looking for posts that exist outside the date-hierarchy storage. so I would actually benefit from adding a new "channel" called "pages" and putting them into there
[manton]I wonder if @GWG or anyone on the WordPress side has thoughts on this. WordPress essentially stores everything the same way and has the equivalent of a “post type”. I know the old API was simplified to use the type instead of e.g. separate API calls for posts vs. pages.
[manton]Here’s another question: let’s say we use categories for this. You’d need a way to ask q=source for a specific category. Fine. But what if no category was specified? Would both posts and pages get returned?
[manton]I just checked to see if any Micro.blog user already has a category called “Pages”. Luckily not yet. 🙂 Because I would have to keep that as a reserved category name.
[manton]I guess that’s my hesitation, though… It feels a little hacked on. If that’s just an implementation problem for Micro.blog, then I’m okay with it.
[manton]Does calling this “channel” help anything in terms of consistency with Microsub? Microsub’s channels are kind of like categories because new ones can be created, but they also have hardcoded ones like “notifications”.
[manton]This feels similar, but again I think it’s confusing to have 2 things that are kind of the same (categories and channels). Unless channels have a much more narrow focus.
[manton]Okay, that’s a good question. If we used category = “pages” for this, what if someone adds a “pages” category to move a post from a normal blog post to a standalone page? Would that be allowed?
[grantcodes]In general in WordPress I think posts and pages are the same but generally configured differently by default. Pages are hierarchical, don't support tags & categories, often different url structure, and option of a different template.
[manton]WordPress also only has posts and pages, right? The category/collection/channel approach kind of assumes that you might have many types of posts. But in practice, I just don’t see that.
aaronpk[grantcodes]: in wordpress the only post types are pages vs posts right? and if you then go and define custom templates, nothing really forces you to put only one post type into a particular category?
[tantek]a-ha, turning posts into pages and perhaps back again. that's another good argument for their distinction being about properties (and their values) rather than any top down absolute distinction
[manton]When using some IndieWeb tools (like OwnYourGram, etc.) this can create a lot of “tags” as categories. But that’s fine. That’s what people expect to happen.
[tantek]"category" in mf2 (h-entry, h-card, h-event) comes from classic microformats which comes vCard, iCalendar, which were created before "tags" were even a thing, and people called them "categories" back then (and you could have / label as many as you wanted, just like tags)
[manton]Another weirdness related to this: JSON Feed also only has “tags”. I still put the Micro.blog categories in there, calling them “tags”. Shrug. 🙂
aaronpkinteresting, does that mean if a micropub category value matches either a wordpress category or tag it's used, but if it doesn't match then it creates a tag?
[manton]This is a bit of a tangent, but personally after years of using WordPress with both categories and tags, I decided the tags were not useful. For Micro.blog, I wanted to have a single way to do this to make it simpler. Less for people to think about. (Your milage may vary.)
[KevinMarks]I think they're the same thing at heart, and the history is that things were supposed to have exactly 1 category because of leftover thinking from hierarchical shelving. A small minority of people enjoy making those kinds of things, for everyone else the cognitive load is too high and tags work
[fluffy]In Publ the “category” is really more of the “section” which is how I used it in MT, but Publ makes a much stronger distinction about what a category even *is*
[fluffy]I don’t like the presentational aspect of hashtags or how people #willjusthashtag #randomphrases but yeah it’s a pretty low-friction way to do things
[fluffy]also, how does one set up bridgy to do the POSSE to Twitter? I’ve just been using it to receive mentions of my posts that are POSSE’d via ifttt
[manton][aaronpk] For creating a post via JSON, does `channel` go inside `properties` like other MF2 properties, or does it go at the top-level of the object like `type`?
[manton]I’m trying really hard to ignore the singular vs. plural inconsistencies we have. 🙂 Microsub has action=channels and a channels array. Micropub usually has e.g. q=contact but “contacts” array. But not always! “destination” is singular from q=config.
[manton]Okay. I kind of figured contacts was implemented enough in the wild that it was stuck. But I only implemented it yesterday so easy to change. 🙂
[manton]Yeah, I don’t think it was discussed specifically. All the examples in the GitHub issue used “category”, and no one objected. That goes back to 2018.
[manton]If we went plural everywhere like q=categories, I would need to support both versions for the foreseeable future. I’m okay with that if other folks are. But it’s also kind of a slippery slope… For example, should the post list query really be q=source without a URL, or should it be q=items?
aaronpki'm assuming it was backwards-engineered from `q=source&url=X` to return a single post, but in that case it would imply that it should return the full source contents of all posts, which isn't actually useful or what it does
[manton]I think I’ll write up a GitHub issue with a few of these differences. This is kind of a style guide issue. I’m not sure it’s worth changing, but seems worth documenting and discussing at least.
[manton][KevinMarks] Good point about Microformats. I guess the counter-argument is that those Microformats arrays almost always have just 1 item in them.
LoqiIt looks like we don't have a page for "even happening" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "even happening is ____", a sentence describing the term)
[chrisaldrich]tantek: scheduling is definitely tied to the idea of post status... that's why I'm thinking that the WordPress Micropub plugin may already support scheduling if it were to receive a micropub request that had a future date/time.
[chrisaldrich]That reminds me that I need to document some of the RSS feed time formats used as I think the differences cause my IFTTT/Webhook/Micropub workflow to fail when the time shows up in an unexpected format.
jacky I think I'm using something else right now in /Koype/Publish
aaronpk https://i.imgur.com/EwXq3Wz.png this is for "@j"
[snarfed] aaronpk: reminds me of the weighting formula i used for indiemap’s site to site relationship scores: https://indiemap.org/docs.html#social-graph-api (scroll down past the JSON blob)
[manton] I’ve updated Micro.blog with several improvements discussed at the Micropub popup session. Blogged a summary of some of the changes here: https://www.manton.org/2020/07/27/micropub-improvements.html
[grantcodes] If pages were "collections" I would expect every other post type to also be a "collection" as well.
[KevinMarks] We had tags, but defined them with rel=tag
@WarHappens Sierra One: A Yankee Stretch Story – with a moonbay for microsub Paltus http://warhappens.com/sierra-one-a-yankee-stretch-story/ (twitter.com/_/status/1287808400143847424)
@ShivEnigma ↩️ @jsjoeio I learned about the webmentions standard and about http://webmentions.io yesterday, and thinking about i… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1287788016753205256 (twitter.com/_/status/1287788016753205256)
[schmarty] it's a one-letter difference 😂
Loqi [Aaron Parecki] Habanero Hot Sauce https://aaronparecki.com/img/1240x0/2018/12/25/8/habaneros.jpg
[tantek] aaronpk, GWG, I feel like this overlaps your interests https://github.com/Maps4HTML/MapML
[chrisaldrich] tantek: scheduling is definitely tied to the idea of post status... that's why I'm thinking that the WordPress Micropub plugin may already support scheduling if it were to receive a micropub request that had a future date/time.