Chris Aldrich

I just wrote up a quick description for the IndieWeb plugin for WordPress. As a native IndieWebber, I thought I'd PESOS it from GitHub and share it out for those who might be interested. It's also a somewhat self-contained description why one should join the movement and points to some great resources.

Description

The IndieWeb Plugin for Wordpress is a bundled installer for a core set of IndieWeb-related plugins. It's meant to be a one-stop shop to help WordPress users quickly and easily join the growing IndieWeb movement (see below). Some of these sub-plugins are required while others are optional.

Some of these plugins allow you to:

• send and receive comments, likes, reposts, and other kinds of post responses using your own site
• allow comments on others' sites to show up as comments on your posts
• help make IndieWeb comments and mentions look better on your site
• allow support for threaded comments and webmentions
• more easily syndicate your content to other sites to take advantage of network effects and other communities while still owning all of your original content
• link to syndicated versions of a post so that comments on your content in silos like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ can come back to your original post as comments there
• allow you to add bookmarklets to easily respond/comment on other sites with one click
• set up a MicroPub Server to use other posting interfaces. (You could potentially use services like Instagram, Foursquare, and others to post to your WordPress site.)
• set up a personal URL shortener
• log into your WordPress site with services like Twitter, GitHub, SMS, or even email using IndieAuth.

The IndieWeb

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’ that allows you to be the humb of your own web presence. It's been written about in Wired, The Atlantic, Slate, and Gigaom amongst others.

The IndieWeb, like WordPress, feels that your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

The IndieWeb is here to help you be better connected

Your articles and status messages can be syndicated to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone in your social network/social graph. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

Interested in connecting your WordPress site to the IndieWeb? Let us help you get started.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get Started?

IndieWeb for WordPress includes a plugin installer program. A Getting Started Guide can be found under Plugins->IndieWeb.

Where can I find help? Can I contribute?

A group of web developers (including those knowledgeable about WordPress, among many other web technologies) can be found discussing and working on IndieWeb related technologies in the wiki at IndieWebCamp.com or in the #IndieWeb IRC on Freenode. WordPress specific portions of the IndieWeb camp can be found at WordPress, Getting Started on WordPress, Examples, and other plugins.

If you need additional assistance, feel free to reach out to any of the WordPress Outreach Club members via the website, our individual websites, or our social media presences -- we're happy to help!

Why IndieWeb?

Find more information and details for the motivations for joining the IndieWeb at http://indiewebcamp.com/Why

What about plugin XYZ?

If you think we missed a plugin reference, please file an issue on Github.

What plugins are included in this package? Can I install them separately?

• Webmention (Required) - allows you to send and receive by adding webmention support to WordPress. Mentions show up as comments on your site.
• Semantic Linkbacks (Required) - makes IndieWeb comments and mentions look better on your site.
• Webmention for (Threaded) Comments - Adds support for threaded comments for webmentions.
• Webactions - Adds webaction markups to WordPress elements.
• Post Kinds - Allows you to reply/like/RSVP etc to another site from your own, by adding support for kinds of posts to WordPress.
• Syndication Links - Adds fields to a post to allow manual entry of syndication links as well as automatically from a supported syndication plugin. Fully supports Social, partial support for NextScripts: Social Networks Auto-Poster (aka SNAP).
• MicroPub - A MicroPub Server
• IndieWeb Press-This - Adds IndieWeb markup to the WordPress Press-This bookmarkets to allow you to respond on your site with one-click.
• Hum URL Shortener - A personal URL shortener.
• Indieauth - The plugin lets you login to the WordPress backend via IndieAuth. It uses the URL from the profile page to identify the blog user.

One could certainly download, install, and activate some or all of these plugins separately, but it is much quicker and easier to utilize the interface provided by this IndieWeb plugin to install and activate them. Note that some of these plugins may only be available on GitHub and are not yet on WordPress.org.

Also posted to GitHub:

wordpress-indieweb/readme.md at ee1cfb72203f1feef05b9225c4bb465abc82e094 · chrisaldrich/wordpress-indieweb https://github.com/chrisaldrich/wordpress-indieweb/blob/ee1cfb72203f1feef05b9225c4bb465abc82e094/readme.md

Last week I wrote up "Some Thoughts on Academic Publishing" after reading “Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone” from Science | AAAS which made some heavy rounds in social media, particularly in academic spheres. Originally I began typing my thoughts/comments into the Disqus box on their website. After getting to the third graph, I began thinking, I should be writing this on my own website as a standalone comment/piece of content and just POSSE it over to their Disqus box.

Despite the fact that the editors/moderators of one of the most venerable science journals of our day will allow internet trolls like CPO_C_Ryback and CPO_C_Rybacks_Mother to go thirty rounds on nearly every comment on their featured piece for the week, my slightly more tempered comment is still sitting in their moderation queue untouched. 

Fortunately I had the foresight to have self-published it before hand, or the not-insignificant time I spent thinking and writing about the topic at hand would have been gone the moment I pressed send. It's one thing to get lost in the shuffle of hundreds of comments amidst trolls, it's another thing altogether to be moderated out of existence. The IndieWeb movement has prevented me from feeling like I did two decades ago after writing a term paper for hours only to lose it after discovering that I hadn't hit control-s to save what I'd written. The additional benefit was that I was able to post those same thoughts on multiple other networks effortlessly while still being able to own what I'd originally written.

The greatest irony of the whole affair is that in conjunction with the particular article I was commenting on, Marcia McNutt, Editor-in-Chief Science Journals, published a companion piece about the high costs and attention to detail and quality that journals try to maintain in their digital presence. Apparently this massive expense and terrific effort doesn't go as far as preventing internet trolls like those mentioned from running roughshod over their own site (which is "moderated" by the way) while keeping out commentary that may add to the discussion and community that they're apparently not attempting to foster.

#sciencecommunication #publishing #indieweb #academicsamizdat 

In reply to: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/surprised-by-all-the-bad-reviews

I agree wholeheartedly with Adam, though I don't think I'd really seen any small issues except perhaps for an odd CSS issue in formatting an h2 tag somewhere. (Note: This comment applies to v1.2.3 of Academica as on 4/2/15, the theme publisher made a DRASTIC change to the theme, so take caution in upgrading!!)

I have created a child-theme with one or two small customizations (slightly larger headings in side widgets and some color/text size changes), but otherwise have v1.2.3 working as perfectly as it was intended to. This includes the slideshow functionality on the homepage. See BoffoSocko as an example.

For those, perhaps including Adam, wanting to get the slider to work properly:

• Go to your WP Dashboard hover on the menu tab "appearance" and click on "customize"
• On the "Featured Content" tab, enter a tag you want to use to feature content on the homepage of your site. (In my case, I chose "featured" and also clicked "Hide tag from displaying in post meta and tag clouds".)
• Go to one or more posts (I think it works on up to 10 featurable posts) and tag them with the word you just used in the featured content setting (in my case "featured"
• Next be sure to actually set a "Featured photo" for the post--930x300 pixels is the optimal photo size if I recall.
• Now when you visit your home page, the slider should work properly and include arrows to scroll through them (these aren't as obvious on featured photos with white backgrounds).
• Note that on individual pages, you'll still have static header image(s) which are also customizable in the "customize" section of the WP dashboard, which was mentioned in step 1.

I hope this helps.