Chris Aldrich

If you haven't come across it, related to the vagaries of keeping up with corporate APIs, I remember Gina Trapani and Anil Dash indicating that they closed their product Think Up (available on GitHub) because their engineering team was spending huge amounts of time keeping up with changing APIs of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Perhaps it could serve as an additional and illustrative case study?

@davewiner I've had some reasonable experience with using https://www.subtome.com/ to create a better modern interface for users as a gateway into RSS. We need to make it easier for people to want to consume things outside of Facebook and Twitter.

@EddieHinkle @jackyalcine @wilkieii Almost as a joke on Facebook functionality a while back, I posted this voting related post: https://boffosocko.com/2016/11/08/i-voted/
There are some interesting suggestions and use cases here as well: http://microformats.org/wiki/vote-links

@rupl @jsruppel I love that my mom does much the same thing!
Of course I wrote a little about it and it put me at the top of HackerNews for most of a day... :)
http://boffosocko.com/2017/07/11/the-facebook-algorithm-mom-problem/

John, I like your much broader view of the syndication idea. I keep it in the back of my head, but too often just deal with the immediate idea with regard to silos. I'd love to have additional examples of the type you mentioned.

Separately, in Ben's original post, I don't think he explicitly mentioned it, but I suspect one of the motivating reasons behind his having written it was the fact that Facebook had just announced that on August 1st they're going to cut off the part of their API that allows outside services to syndicate content into Facebook. They recently just shut off the ability to RSVP to events remotely.

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.

@fionajvoss It looks like I've been automatically syndicating many of my short reviews to multiple places like Twitter, Facebook, GoodReads et al. Less often I send them to Amazon, Yelp, IMDb, but I suspect more friends seem them that way anyway. http://boffosocko.com/category/review/

Khürt, I can feel your pain. I know that SNAP just made a recent major release that changed a lot of it's code base, so I've been half purposely waiting to update while they work out some of the kinks. I'm just about to download the most recent and test it out on a server before I upgrade to the latest version on my production site, since the old version is still doing a relatively good job and it's a lot of overhead to update/upgrade going into the holidays.

There's a frequent phrase that many in the chat will use: #ManualUntilItHurts by which they mean try doing everything manually to work on getting the output and workflow to work the way you want it to and only then try automating things based on your manual experience.

There are many ways of doing syndication, so before settling on one, try doing things by hand for a bit while you're testing out other potential options. I often find that even though I've got automated means of doing things very quickly, I actually often prefer the manual methods sometimes, particularly when it means I know exactly what the output will be. With POSSE you'll find that with some of the automated means, the easier it is to set up, the less options you'll have for control, while the more control you get means a much more difficult set up.

Try a few options and then go with what works for your needs until it drives you so crazy you have to change it. In the meanwhile, documenting the issues and problems either on your site or in issue queues will slowly help things get better.

In the end it can't be much worse than people who are syndicating their Facebook content to Twitter that simply shows up as just the raw https://fb.me/123456789 URLs and nothing else. ;)

Which sites are you syndicating to? I know it's the case that not all sites that SNAP supports are supported by Syndication Links. Most of the major ones like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr are, but some of the lesser ones like Flipboard, 500px aren't.

@khurtwilliams A bunch of us are working on making it all easier in steps, but we're also doing it on a volunteer basis. Some of the key is knowing what it all comprises from a top-down perspective, then knowing what each of the individual pieces are and how they work. Nearly every week there's something new and cool. The key is to figure out which things you find the most useful and valuable and work on those one at a time.

It's a LOT easier now that it was even 8 months ago and will be measurably easier as time goes by. I'm currently writing a book on how to do it all at the level of "IndieWeb with WordPress for Dummies". Ideally it'll be as easy to do as signing up for a Twitter or Facebook account and just going, but we're not quite there yet, but it's getting easier to do the set up without knowing a lot of (or any) code. Hoping into the chat, going to a Homebrew Website Club or IndieWebCamp can be immeasurably helpful as well.

Again, if you want to do a quick conference call/video chat, I'm happy to help you out.

@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!