Chris Aldrich

@finiteeyes Congratulations on what appears to be a new site. As you think about public/private and provide an example to others, I'm curious if your comments are avatar-less on purpose or if you've just not come across Gravatar yet?
https://boffosocko.com/2016/10/26/give-your-web-presence-a-more-personal-identity-photos-on-wordpress-with-gravatar/

@cathieleblanc I've been using Livescribe pens to do pencasts for 8 years or so, primarily for mathematics lectures. While it's not great at capturing images/slides in a classroom setting (which I do with cell phone photos typically), the pen can capture audio and everything that's written down in a chalkboard lecture. The pen also allows you to go back and to write down additional notes after-the-fact and link those with the spoken audio as well. This makes it a great low bandwidth method for capturing class notes to share with students/classmates who missed class without the need to videotape which generally is both high bandwidth (for sharing) and poor quality for showing what's being written/presented on a board or projector.

I've also used the pen for working my way through problems for students/colleagues in areas where it's necessary to have something written down, but it's useful to have the supplement of spoken audio to add to the problem-solving process.

The magic is likely courtesy of the fact that my post has a meta tag for og:image that includes (or transcludes) that image from Naughton's website. It's something I added in for syndicating to sites like Twitter or Facebook to add a little visual interest. I suspect that whatever you're using to unfurl the page on your site is picking up that data to display it as context for your like. You'll notice that the same photo appears on Twitter as well: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/985421744348381184

I'm currently doing this with fields in the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress, though I suspect that Yoast and other Open Graph meta related plugins will do it as well. More often than not I use the functionality to force particular photos to be shown in syndicated services. Usually I'll also transclude the photo in my own post, so in most cases you probably wouldn't have guessed. Sharp eye for having noticed here Jeremy.

Jeremy, if you haven't tried it before, take a look at Ryan Barrett's Instagram Atom Feeds tool https://instagram-atom.appspot.com/ which will give you the ability to put your Instagram account into a feed reader and allow you to have both an ad-free and chronological stream of your Instagram feed. The UI you get may be somewhat dependent on the reader (and its settings) you use to consume it, but it's better than the slightly prettier and draconian alternative.

As for extracting your own photo data, I've heard this week that although Instagram is cutting off more and more API access, while confronting the Facebook problem lately and the looming GDPR, they've apparently enabled the ability to download all of your photos. I haven't tried it yet to see what the data looks like or the quality of the images is, but it's a tiny step forward for data freedom that they didn't have before.

@khurtwilliams Some checkins have an alternate primary kind (food, drink, watches, photos, exercise), so the category link includes a fuller picture of the actual checkin data. You'll also notice some links to post formats in that list as well.

@khurtwilliams It might be worth syndicating your photos to Instagram if that's where most of your friends and family tend to consume them. It's really the only reason I use it any more as I doubt many of my family/friends subscribe to my photos or site directly.

@cleverdevil That is wicked awesome! I really want a feed reader that can differentiate and sort between photos, checkins, podcasts, etc. in addition to being able to post likes, replies, and reposts directly to my own site through the UI! Watch out @feedly, @Inoreader, et al.

@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!

I'm in roughly the same situation and as a result have been posting more photos and details/status update material to my checkins.

Doug, I suspect that you may be using something like OwnYourGram to attempt to import photos to WordPress. While it does generally work pretty well, you might also appreciate https://wordpress.org/plugins/dsgnwrks-instagram-importer/ which is a VERY solid WordPress specific service that does much the same thing. Since it was written specifically for WordPress it's got a lot more finely tuned settings for improving how things display on your site. Perhaps better, it also has the ability to import ALL of your prior Instagram posts.

@EddieHinkle Clicking through will show that the text in the Twitter card is a quote of the original, in some part a reminder to me about what it was I had listened to. (It also serves as an advertisement for the thing itself--I like to promote good podcasts.) Most often these posts are just an emoji indicating the post type with the title and source of the thing I listened to. Occasionally I'll add some bit of a reply or commentary and bury the true post type into the Twitter Card along with a quote from the original. eg: https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/825206436305137664

Once in a rarer blue moon I'll throw a snippet of commentary into the Twitter card, but not often. See also https://indieweb.org/bookmark##How+to+POSSE for some thoughts on this. It's ever evolving. I'd love to hear your thoughts on improvement or alternate methods. I particularly like dumping additional data into the twitter cards when I can, though I'm aware that not all Twitter clients make use of them.

If you want to listen to what I'm listening to, you can subscribe to it via http://boffosocko.com/kind/listen/feed/. This feed format also works for other post types like "read", "like", "favorite", "photos", "checkins", "watches", etc.

@EddieHinkle Looking back on it, I think that the Swarm App/Foursquare decided to send three copies, one for each of the photos I took on the checkin. I've never seen that behavior before. I'm not sure how it decided to arbitrarily add the mention of erteencouncil on the Tweet however. I suppose this is what happens when you accidentally put together a POSSE like this.

@abautze Welcome to LA! Did we miss you at Hopkins in Hollywood? http://boffosocko.com/2017/01/15/recap-and-photos-from-hopkins-in-hollywood