Mike, it's an edge case for many to be sure (I don't expect my mother to encounter it often), but just another of hundreds of other reasons to be part of the Indieweb. The "big reasons" sell themselves but aren't the entire raison d'etre, and I like to document some of the others when I encounter them.

I and others in academia (most of my audience) run up against it fairly frequently in relation to scientific journal articles. It's particularly egregious when big publishers like Elsevier, who insist they're adding value for their steep subscription rates, under-manage their sites and don't always approve comments that further scientific communication or require additional work on their part to editorially change/modify what they've published in print.

The particular case that spawned this particular "rant", still hasn't "approved" the comment/question I made, yet they approved a dozen or more "me too" congratulatory comments around mine that did nothing to further the conversation in the community in which it was posted.

Further proof that you can't please all of the people all of the time...

I have just gone through the process of setting up Medium's plugin, so I'm giving that a spin for a couple weeks prior to kicking the tires of SNAP's integration. SNAP has done an excellent job on other platforms, so I'm guessing they're using all the available features there and probably have a stronger 1-1 mapping of data from one platform to the other, particularly as Medium is aiming at WordPress directly first. The one thing you might want to be careful about with Medium is making sure you don't have a "rel=canonical" tag [https://indieweb.org/rel-canonical] showing up on your Medium post, otherwise you might be getting docked by Google and others with respect to SEO. I know the Medium plugin handles this well, but haven't checked on how IFTTT or SNAP handle this yet.

I'm curious what specifically you found confusing about IndieWeb? Some of us in the WordPress group have been trying to make the value proposition and workflow better, particularly over the past several months. (Admittedly, before about April, the onboarding process was MUCH messier and the end user had to do a lot more reading/discovery and work to set things up, but I think the hurdle has moved much lower since then.) If you take a look at it again, I'd love to know where you experience problems/issues, so we can make things better for others. If you need help, there are many of us on IRC [https://indieweb.org/IRC] who can often help in real time.

As for privacy, in general, Facebook, Google+, et all are all public facing networks, so people posting there are really posting for everyone to see in the first place. If they're posting privately, I believe that the IndieWeb protocols respect that and don't import private webmentions. Most of the rest is about data ownership for you and your blog as well as trying to maintain a central repository for your blogs posts of all the conversation taking place around what you're posting. Part of the downfall of social media is that it can often fragment conversations. In some sense IndieWeb helps glue them all back together.

On your last point, I had a bit of cognitive dissonance with this as well when I started into IndieWeb, but I've just streamlined my workflow significantly (and for the better). I've turned off all the emails and notifications from individual social media platforms (at least as they relate to my content) and I rely on my WordPress install to do all the notifications. This way, for example, when someone replies to one of my posts on Facebook, I see the webmention via WordPress, and then use that to click on the contained link to the reply on Facebook. I'll then reply natively on Facebook so the other party sees it there (typically by Facebook notification), but then the IndieWeb backend ports over my comment back to the comments section of my own blog. My "audience" can follow me on their platform of choice, and I can still interact, but I still own all the resulting data: Win-win-win!

David, This is some excellent code for adding some microformats to @WordPress. Thanks @dshanske! https://david.shanske.com/2016/06/22/converting-wordpress-themes-microformats-2-part-1

For those with less technical expertise, could I pose a few questions which you may or may not cover in part 2?

If I recall, there's microformats version 1 and a more recent, updated microformats2. Most of what you're adding here is the mf2 spec and not backwards compatible mf1 mark up, right?

When you say that a theme shouldn't "style" hfeed or hentry, you mean that the CSS shouldn't include these classes as they're used only for semantic mark up and not meant to be used for CSS at all?

If hfeed is already added into a theme, do you recommend removing it from the theme code directly with search and replace (particularly if it wasn't added in the correct place) and then adding it with the snippet you provided, or is it best to leave it in the theme and remove it from the code? If we remove it from the code you provided, which line(s) should we omit? What happens if it is duplicated (ie, what will the output look like, or what happens to parsers that read the code)?

What exactly are the post, body and comment class functions? What do they look like and where would one find them in a particular theme?

How is the code you've provided different from what the WordPress plugin uf2 does? Is it more or less extensive?

In the end, this is also just a stop-gap measure to quickly add a small, but high level subset of microformats to current themes that don't support it? Ideally we would hope more modern themes will add a more full version of microformats natively?

Scott, in case you don't get the webmention/comment from http://stream.boffosocko.com/2016/semantic-linkbacks-plugin-is-for-showing-comments-like-this-on

Semantic linkbacks plugin is for showing comments like this on your site. Separately there are also syndication links which show you where you syndicated your posts to (Facebook, Twitter, et al.)

Do you have brid.gy set up properly? Also sometimes comments can be caught up in your spam/Akismet filter. Occasionally (but not usually -- I've only seen one case) some comments.php sections can be wonky and webmentions won't show up in your comments at all.

I know I sent you a webmention to one of your posts the other day. I'm presuming now that you didn't see it...

UX/UI enhancement: Blank syndication links being syndicated · Issue #23 · dshanske/syndication-links


I've seen blank versions of syndicated links appear on various platforms, the one above is a capture from the reader Woodwind.xyz. I've also noticed it when syndicating to tumblr.com and Facebook (though I've removed it programatically since). I'm not sure if I've seen them display on other sources (in most cases I choose to use the icon versions rather than text, but could do a quick test to see if the text at least appears.) Since I'm sure there are others, I'm curious if there's a way to either fix how these show up (or not) or simply move them for POSSEd copies?

Thoughts on UX/UI:
I'm presuming that they're hooked onto the end of the_content(), which then means that they're being syndicated out as part of the body of the content. I would suggest that on most platforms, most people don't/won't care about the fact that there are syndicated copies (though for the near term of advertising the concept for the IndieWeb, keeping them may be valuable), particularly when they can view the primary source which ought to presumably have all the commentary and webmentions (by backfeed or other means).

Interestingly, I occasionally see, though not as often, the "Share This" data flow through in the same manner. In my case the share this appears _above_ the list of syndicated links: viz:
Is there some type of processing that Jetpack is doing to prevent this from syndicating as "content"?

The way I typically think about it, knowing about syndicated copies is mostly useful as a function of commenting rather than content, so that if someone comments in Facebook, for example, I go back to that silo to post a response, so their chosen platform can send notifications/emails etc about the interaction, and rely on webmentions to backport my own comment onto my site and to keep the flow of conversation on the original post rather than a separate post on my own site that points back to another. Perhaps then, the best default location for syndication links is within the comments section? This then solves the problem of syndicating out blank versions, but more closely associates the syndicated copies with the "conversation" about the post. Potentially putting them at the top of the comments section could also keep them relatively close to where they currently live as a default.

I pose most of this as ideas/potential suggestions, but I'm curious what others think in terms of what/how they use this functionality.

rel-feed support for Bridgy and Instagram #40
While I'm thinking about Bridgy/Instagram support and mf2, I thought I'd cross post this issue https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy/issues/671#issuecomment-219580229 snarfed/bridgy#671 (comment) here as it doesn't look like SemPress supports this out of the box.

What about major publishers spending huge amounts on modern web interfaces? @sciencemagazine @Marcia4Science #Comment #Fail It would appear that you're falling down on the job and allowing trolls like CPO_C_Ryback (and even CPO_C_Rybacks_Mother) to destroy your own value on your own website (particularly http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone). It's appalling and atrocious that you're apparently "moderating" comments, yet the potential thoughtful discourse is being shouted down.

#Comment #Fail @sciencemagazine You'll allow CPO_C_Ryback to troll comments, but won't approve reasoned thought? http://boffosocko.com/2016/04/29/some-thoughts-on-academic-publishing/

I found your post through the POSSE'd version on Medium, so cheers for discovery through syndication! But since neither your nor I would "own" this comment and you'd be less likely to see it if I posted it on Medium, I'm replying from my own site instead. Thanks for writing such a nice and lucid piece on the #IndieWeb!

@KevinMarks FYI, the time posts on your webmentions appear to be off by 7 hours. See also my last comment on: http://www.kevinmarks.com/fragmentions.html