I suspect that next, with a tad bit of parsing using microformats, you can add some display elements to your webmentions to indicate the author, their url, date/time, and actually include the reply text to have a better UI for them. Then they'll look a bit more like the traditional comments you may have envisioned. (Something along the lines seen in my comments at http://stream.boffosocko.com/2018/if-youve-got-incoming-webmentions-working-let-me-have-the). There's help to be had in the chat as surely someone has documented this somewhere before and you probably won't have to build from scratch unless you really want to.

#newwwyear resolution for BoffoSocko.com
1) Starting today
2) I'm going to improve the microformats markup and structure for the theme of my personal website
3) Before January 7
Thanks for the motivation @jensimmons!

@realkimhansen @blaine @kevinmarks @dsearls @Padraig The microformats wiki has a huge amount of research under http://microformats.org/wiki/haudio and related pages. https://indieweb.org/podcast has some examples, ideas, and brainstorming as well.

@realkimhansen @blaine @kevinmarks @dsearls @Padraig Keep in mind that many modern feed readers can consume microformats like h-feed which could make a simpler & more open standard than (or even in addition to) RSS. h-feed also has parser support in multiple languages as well.

@TracyAltheide Looks like maybe your microformats markup isn't quite right for use with Brid.gy publish I'm guessing? https://brid.gy/about#microformats

@khurtwilliams POSSE for WordPress can be tricky in part because, compared to most other IndieWeb pieces for WordPress, there are multiple different and varying ways to do it. Using one method could potentially conflict with another depending on how you set things up, though I think these are relatively few.

Your best bet is to hop into the #WordPress channel of the IndieWeb chat https://indieweb.org/discuss and ask for help, particularly to discuss the specifics of what you'd like to do and what you expect.

In general, the more control and flexibility you want over the display of your POSSE posts, the more set up and work you have to put into it (e.g. SNAP), while the less control you have the more simple the set up (e.g. JetPack Publicize).

Things like Brid.gy publish functionality (or via the Brid.gy Publish plugin) can be more finicky for POSSE copies to silos because Brid.gy is parsing your site for the proper data to publish. (It does have a preview button built in to do manual tests if you need to.) This means that if your WordPress theme doesn't have the correct microformats markup (and often they don't), then you can get spurious results, particularly when it comes to crossposting photos.

Most of the main POSSE plugins and tech are very stable in fact, but they do require that you do a bit of reading and understanding what they do and don't do and what you can and can't control with them. Most all of them have GitHub repositories that you can post issues to and almost all the devs, maintainers, and community are happy to help you out and/or make changes to make the UI and documentation better.

As for backfeed from Brid.gy, it generally requires that the URLs of your post and the syndicated post have matching permalinks to be able to match the two up to send you the webmentions properly. You may have changed your settings, but one piece you appear to be missing is the Syndication Links Plugin which allows you to add u-syndication links to your posts so that Brid.gy knows which ones to send your responses to. Much of this is documented at https://indieweb.org/WordPress_with_Bridgy It also looks like you don't have either an h-card or the appropriate rel-me links on your pages for Twitter, Facebook, et al. Brid.gy is pretty well documented, so you may want to take a look at some of the options there directly. https://brid.gy/about If it helps, you can do a lot of interactive stuff with Bridgy by manually creating posts with specific html in your posts directly. Understanding how to do this can be helpful later when you switch to using a plugin to help automate part of those processes.

I'm sure I've got a few odd posts from ages ago when I tested things out, but when you say "I can also see from some of the failed posts on your website that you may experience the same issues." I'm curious which particular posts you mean? To my knowledge things I intend to syndicate out are currently working as I expect them to (aside from one quirk that occasionally spams the Indieweb chat with micropubbed posts which continually redirect, but that's specific only to me because of some experimental code I've been running). It is the case that I don't always syndicate everything to each and every silo target I could. I do very much pick and choose which things to syndicate to particular networks.

We'll help you get there yet!

For wider adoption, your best bet is probably to pare down WordPress a tad and see what you can make of it. I know David Shanske has a starter version of Underscores with microformats in it already. I think a large portion of the micro.blog crowd that has gone IndieWeb are using it as their CMS of choice.

The other interesting platform to look at is WithKnown which was built from scratch with IndieWeb specifically in mind.

For adopt-a-bility and reach, you could also look at building things like webmentions into projects like Mastodon which already has some IndieWeb pieces built into it.

You could also try asking in the IndieWeb chat at https://indieweb.org/discuss for lots of additional ideas/thoughts.

Here's a rough chart that may give you some useful ideas too: https://indieweb.org/indieweb_network

Aaron, I suspect that the visible code <span class='p-author h-card'>Aaron Davis</span> which appears on your byline on your site is the result of the uf2 plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-uf2/ conflicting with your theme, which already has microformats baked into it. You should be able to disable that plugin without any ill effects for any other functionality while simultaneously getting rid of that visible span. If that's not the case, you might want to file an issue at https://github.com/pfefferle/SemPress.

@dauwhe On first blush it looks like something superceded by microformats h-cards and other pieces within #indieweb community for identity.

Andreas, The best way I'm aware of to do read posts with #WithKnown currently is to post a status update to the effect. I've been considering doing a plugin similar to Jonathan LaCour's Watching https://github.com/cleverdevil/Known-Watching but for books. In fact, other than some cut and paste work and changing the microformats, it should be a simple thing. I'd almost feel guilty for "stealing" it.

I've started hacking away at a Read plugin similar to the bookmark or like functionalities that simply bookmarks articles which I've read online, but it's got some quirky upstream issues that need to be solved before I can finish it. Ultimately it's really for online content more so than books (or even magazines) though. I may circle back around to it sometime toward the end of the summer as I'm trying to finish up some last pieces on my Reading workflows for WordPress.

Some of the issue is that WordPress has a huge number of plugins which adds a lot of additional complexity (especially for Micropub clients) which isn't always going to be handled by every client.

As for webmentions, they're being bolted onto WordPress which doesn't have (or allow) a custom comment type, so they're jury-rigged in the best manner possible. There is still ongoing work, especially with the Semantic Linkbacks Plugin which does a lot of the heavy lifting here, if you've got thoughts/ideas, you should certainly weigh in on those Github issues as they are evolving.

I know there were a handful of quirks that have been changed in Known in the past months to fix some issues with microformats that were being parsed incorrectly, and thus caused other platforms like WordPress not to let them display as nicely when received. I think most have been merged and a new release of Known was pushed yesterday and should hopefully clear up some of these issues. I think the developers of the WordPress plugins and even the Known community are very responsive, so feel free to jump in with feedback, suggestions, or even pull requests on any of the pieces which are all on GitHub.

I'm sure there will be some remaining rough edges, but in general a lot of them have been smoothed over in the past year and most improvements now seem to be geared towards making the suite of tools more user friendly or to better extend the functionality.

@eatpodcast @jimpick @realkimhansen @abrams @Feedly Jeremy, I agree with you wholeheartedly that SoundCloud is a dreadful option overall--apologies if I gave the impression otherwise. Given it's cost and the fact that it's what I would call a super-silo make it a non-starter unless you're looking for a very sort term solution or if you're a mega-media company and have the money to burn to try to reach another tiny sliver of audience you didn't have before.

Sadly, given their position in the space, companies like Apple, SoundCloud, and perhaps a few others haven't continued building out and innovating. (Marco Arment, who you mentioned in this particular podcast, recently had an episode on being "Sherlocked" that touches on the economics of perhaps why they haven't gone the extra mile http://boffosocko.com/2017/02/02/%F0%9F%8E%A7-under-the-radar-65-getting-sherlocked-under-the-radar/ ) Given the technology they've already got, they could/should go the next several steps to leverage their position to make things easier for everyone. The search and AI portions could also be done by Google, but presumably they'd need some additional motivation to do this as it's the type of niche area they've been getting out of lately. (And could we really take another GoogleReader-type shutdown?) Perhaps it might be a rich area for a feed reader company like Feedly to get into? Or maybe Jonathan Abrams with Nuzzel has some of the search/algorithm technology to be able to extend into this area, particularly for the discovery portion which Nuzzel is quite good at for articles.

We also need a better/easier solution for the average Jane who wants to create a simple podcast without spending two weeks doing a mini-startup to set it all up and get it going with the widest distribution possible.

I'm honestly puzzled that YouTube doesn't get into the space as they've already got a huge piece of the puzzle built. Just provide the ability to strip out an .mp3 file from a video (there's a huffduffer bookmarklet that allows this: http://huffduff-video.snarfed.org/ ) and make that available for download/subscription within their ecosystem. I'd suspect that with a week of coding, they could completely corner the entire podcast market from soup to nuts. One of the toughest parts of web is audio/video, and it's one of the few places that indie developers don't/can't touch because of the high technical and even intellectual property hurdles.

I do appreciate larger companies like This American Life doing things like Shortcut [https://m.thisamericanlife.org/blog/2016/10/introducing-shortcut ] though it would be better if the technology was opensourced. (See also thread at: https://twitter.com/rdhyee/status/809556321871622144 )

As an aside, I've just noticed at http://indieweb.org/podcast that Kevin Marks' ever useful unmung.com will apparently "turn podcast feeds into playable HTML5 audio with microformats markup".

JetPack has shortcode support for recipes that adds some markup (schema if I remember). I'm not a huge fan of shortcodes, but I've been meaning to finish tweaking their code to add microformats markup too. https://en.support.wordpress.com/recipes/

https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/4470 if you'd like to pile on...