Today, I started experimenting using SNAP as part of my POSSE regimen and noticed the following quirk with syndication-links installed:


SNAP seems to be adding the top line saying "Also on" along with the three written text social networks Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter (verified by disabling SNAP), while syndication-links plugin adds the bottom line saying "Syndicated to:" followed by the much prettier social media icons. (For comparison, the Google+ and LinkedIn icons are as a result of manually placing the URLs into syndication-links's box on the post's editor.)

Naturally, I'd much prefer (and I'm sure most others would as well) syndication-links's method of output given that it's more flexible and customizable. The question is how can one hide/disable the output from SNAP, but while still keeping the additional URL data they're backporting from POSSE for display into syndication-links?

Is it worth adding a configuration toggle in the settings to disable the SNAP output version for future cases/conflicts like this?

With #indieweb webmentions, @wordpress @automattic @photomatt could easily replace Facebook and Twitter http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/18/remember_wordpress_pingbacks_the_w3c_wants_us_to_use_them_across_the_whole_web

How to find/create a URL to a status update post on LinkedIn

In addition to the manual method mentioned by Brannigan (on 7/14/15) [http://community.linkedin.com/questions/135682/url-for-a-status-update.html] one can also use a "stem" URL to which must be added a unique topic ID number corresponding to the particular post.

The two "stem" URL formats are as follows:
https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/updates?topic=XXXXX
https://www.linkedin.com/hp/update/urn:li:activity:XXXXX
Where the XXXXX indicates the topic ID number that is unique to each post.

To get this ID number:
* Find the post (either natively or on their own page by using the menubar: Profile / My Updates).
* Then highlight the word "share" in the bottom of the post and right click "Inspect" (in Chrome, though other browsers allow means of viewing source code/CSS for pages as well, see also firebug for Firefox).
* The topic ID will appear just below the <span> for the share button in the <form class="comment-box"> tag.
* Take the topic ID number and replace the XXXXX with it at the end of one of the two stem URL's above and you've now got a direct URL for your particular status update.

Example: https://www.linkedin.com/nhome/updates?topic=6103960927751651328

Naturally, it would be far better if LinkedIn would just wrap a direct anchor tag around one of the post elements so it could be more easily cut and pasted when necessary. (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and most other social media networks do this or even provide embed code to make it easier.)

I'll also note for those with programming skills that LinkedIn provides at least limited API access for posting updates and returning the resulting URL. The opensource Known platform uses it and there's a plugin available on Github with sample code for those who might appreciate it: https://github.com/mapkyca/KnownLinkedin

+John Baez "When in doubt, Goole it out." G+ defaults to have jetpack cross posts only seen by you (private rather than public). You can change this by following the details at https://jetpack.me/support/publicize/google/ and following the instructions under "Changing who can see your Publicized posts on Google+". For self-hosted blogs, you're somewhat limited in what/how things get posted to G+, most of them tend to be the "title" and the "excerpt" portions of your post, though within the publicize portion of the "publish" block, you can also enter a custom message that will override the "title" if you wish. You also have the option to add a "featured image" as well that will add some visual interest. From self-hosted blogs you can use modules like "All in one SEO pack" to better customize what gets ported over to social media platforms.

Ideally, you should be able to post enough to help remind your obviously devoted G+ following to click through and read the details on your blog, so that your readership doesn't suffer as much as going cold turkey. Those who are seriously engaged will take the G+ posts as a reminder to come and read your material (and honestly this is most of the reason that platforms like Facebook and Twitter took off in the first place.) Given your reach here, you might also find it easy enough to get a Twitter account, plug in your addressbook and mass-follow those you know and similarly "ghost" post to Twitter as well. You may find that you can vastly improve your reach and readership doing this.

Naturally, if you wanted to, you could manually cut and paste most/all of your entire post with a link to your blog, but this is probably more time intensive than you'd prefer.

From a PR perspective, you're taking back most of your "John Baez Brand" from Google and moving it to something you directly own and control. I'd also recommend that you encourage your readers to go to the siderail of your blog and simply sign up via email as I'm sure most all of them live as much in email as anything else. Then instead of relying on not missing anything in the flowing stream of G+, they'll get a physical notification of everything you post and have the option of not missing as much.

Feel free to call if you need specific help. I hope I'm easily enough found on the web.

+Mark van Walraven To strip cruft (ads, widgets, and other distractions) off of blog articles and general web pages for a cleaner and easier reading/concentrating experience, you might consider using Readability, which has a handy bookmarklet that you can put in your browser toolbar for quick and easy use: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets. If you're an avid Evernote user, they have a product called Clearly that's pretty good as well: https://evernote.com/clearly/. Similarly Pocket and Instapaper have this type of functionality (with bookmarklets as well), though they typically require one to save articles to one's account first prior to reading, though this is rather handy when skimming through G+, Twitter, and Facebook feeds for interesting material one wants to read later.

+John Baez For RSS, the heir apparent to Google Reader's old product is Feedly (http://feedly.com/). There are certainly a small handful of others, but I suspect most would say that Feedly is the clear winner. They use a freemium model in which they give the majority of their useful functionality away for free and charge a small and reasonably modest subscription fee for a set of advanced functionality that most probably don't need or use. If you want to add a simple Feedly button to your blog siderail (via widget), you can find details and instructions here: http://feedly.com/factory.html

In a past life and as a side hobby, I spent several years running and building a large portion of social media for Johns Hopkins, so I've played with nearly every platform in existence. I've been pecking away for a while at blog post describing how researchers and academics can best use blogging and social media presence to improve their work & speed up their workflow - a topic that could actually be a reasonable sized book. Some of the commentary here has motivated me to get back to it presently.

Happy New Year to you!

RE: Your blog vs. G+, what if I told you that you might have your cake and eat it too? I too have a WordPress blog, but I've tacked a few bits on to the back end and this allows me to use my blog as the primary hub for my work as you're suggesting you plan on doing. I then use platforms (walled silos) like Google+, Twitter, and Facebook to syndicate my material out to allow for a broader reach by leveraging social networks effects to my benefit. Even better, I've got things set up so that comments on platforms like Google+ feed back to my blog, which allows me to not only live on my own site, but it also allows me to "own" all of the content and commentary that's generated from it. (This way if Google+ is shut down next month, I'd still have all of the generated commentary, which could live indefinitely on my own site.) Thus your followers who prefer to read your material on other platforms (G+, in your case) aren't left without the content you're generating, but their commentary also appears back on the blog to add to the larger conversation.

First, consider using the "Jetpack" module (free software built by the same company that makes WordPress) and its publicize functionality to connect your G+ account and auto-post (syndicate) your Azimuth content automatically to G+. (This also frees up a good bit of time to not have to do it manually.) If nothing else, this will help to keep some of your audience engaged.

Second, to port the comments from the syndicated G+ post back to your original post on Azimuth (comments from G+ will show up as comments in WordPress that you can approve/delete just like other WP comments; this also prevents you from spending so much time in G+ after you turn off comment notifications) you can follow the details at the IndieWebCamp site (http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started_on_WordPress) to add/configure a few simple plugins as well as to connect http://brid.gy to allow social networks to communicate with your blog.

If you need help/assistance to make the technical hurdles a bit lower, I'm happy to help walk you through the details or even do it for you (gratis) if you'd like. All of the modules I've mentioned are free and open source and under very active development.

For a simple example see the comments on this post http://boffosocko.com/2014/07/05/the-mnemonic-major-system-and-gregg-shorthand-have-the-same-underlying-structure/#comment-27045 which originated from G+
https://plus.google.com/+ChrisAldrich1/posts/ZfvtRPmwhtj

For a brief overview, you might appreciate the opening few paragraphs of http://indiewebcamp.com/.

@kevinmarks @kylewmahan I also imagine that status updates for @goodreads also have two different and mutually exclusive data indicators for progress: one by page (for physical/printed books) and one by percentage (%) for ebooks which don't have 1 to 1 mappings for pages. The final field is likely a text one with a max of 420 characters. I also image that they have fields for indicating crossposting the status update to Facebook/Twitter which are done separately in their backend settings. Twitter is done in the back end settings as a default if permission is given while they actually have a checkbox for crossposting to Facebook. (I'm not sure why they have this odd difference in the UI)

Sorry for the delay, but my work schedule and travel have been awfully heavy lately. It does sound like the issue I'm having is somewhat related to the discussion on https://github.com/raamdev/independent-publisher/issues/155

I've got two separate installs with the same IndieWeb plugins installed. One uses Independent Publisher and the other is a slightly older version of the Academica Theme (v1.2.3 downloadable from https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ym0c78uyzltpeu1/AAByejNd8MG83I2MVOFXOuPaa?dl=0) which is outputting the facebook likes, twitter favorites, and reposts properly (or at least as I would expect.)

For some reason Independent Publisher isn't outputting Brid.gy likes, favorites, or resahares from Twitter and Facebook out of the box the way that Academica (or even WP common themes like Twenty Fourteen or Twenty Fifteen) does. They're not showing up at all. On the site with Academica Theme, I've tried doing a "Live Preview" of the Independent Publisher theme and there, it also seems to be "eating" (not showing) these additional comments from Brid.gy while all the other traditional comments do show up.

However, while you're tracking down the issue(s), you might also consider tweaking one additional output issue with respect to these types of comments. From a UI standpoint for themes using IndieWeb, I would recommend that the comment section sort out the comments and display them somewhat differently. For simple Facebook likes and Twitter favorites, it might be best to aggregate all of them into a facepile [http://indiewebcamp.com/facepile] with a simple header ("Liked on Facebook"/"Favorited on Twitter") followed by the photo icons of the people who liked/favorited the article within those platforms. (This is similar to how most Wordpress sites handle Likes/Stars natively within WordPress.) Following this it could create a facepile of people who reposted/reshared the post. Then after this the rest of the comments should be sorted by date/time as comments traditionally are as this will allow people to more easily read/consume the actual commentary.

This post has an example of a combination of likes/favorites/reposts and actual comments that would be better sorted into a facepile section followed by a more "traditional" comments section. http://boffosocko.com/2015/07/27/algebraic-number-theory-ucla-extension/

I'm supposing that it's how Independent Publisher is rendering the output of wp_commentmeta into its comment section that causes some of these brid.gy-fed likes/favorites/reposts to disappear.

If it helps, I'll also point out a previous and possibly related issue I'd run across vis-a-vis IndieWeb and output of comments: https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-webmention-for-comments/issues/1. The solution was most likely the way that the Semantic Linkbacks plugin (an IndieWeb WP-specific plugin) was handling its output. Here it's likely that @dshanske or pfefferle may be of more assistance in sorting things out if necessary.

I'm supposing it's a simple CSS display issue that's been baked in from the start, but I've noticed that when hovering over the individual output links indicating where a particular post has been syndicated to, the icon and the word (eg, the Facebook icon and the world "Facebook") shift over a few pixels, I'm supposing in part to indicate they're being hovered over. In general this isn't horrible, but there are some examples where it make the functionality difficult or nearly impossible to use and at best simply wonky.

As an example, try hovering over the Facebook link at http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/12/todays-books-august-12-2015/ and it shifts things enough that one block of text at the end of the line shifts to the next line.

Even worse, on that same page it becomes nearly impossible to click on the "adamshillca" synidcated link because it shifts incessantly from it's initial position to the following line.

Perhaps it's my particular CSS, but, that I'm aware of, I haven't handcoded any of the relevant CSS, and have the same issue on two separate sites with different themes/CSS. I'm also supposing it's done purposefully as it occurs on https://david.shanske.com/ as well, though it's not as obvious there as you're just outputting the social media icons only.

I'm still attempting to understand the larger world of indieweb code for WP, but I'm relatively sure that the issue I'm seeing is potentially coming out of the WP Semantic-Linkbacks plugin.

The issue:
Likes from Facebook as well as likes and RT's from Facebook are feeding into the the WP comments dashboard from brid.gy properly, but once being approved, aren't actually showing up in the comments section of the related WP post.
I've done a quick test with a comment with text on the same Facebook post and don't seem to be seeing the same issue and it seems to show up fine in the comments on the post once approved.

Example:
WP post: <a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/">http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/</a>;
Associated facebook post: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/ChrisAldrich/posts/10100846770831315">https://www.facebook.com/ChrisAldrich/posts/10100846770831315</a>;

As this is a relatively new site, perhaps there's some small thing that I'm missing or forgetting? I set it all up with the WP IndieWeb plugin (v2.2.0) and everything within it is current and installed/configured (except Hum and Micropub).

Its possible that it's something similar to a related issue I'd had before on a different WP install (see: https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-webmention-for-comments/issues/1) though that seemed to be fixed (by itself?) shortly thereafter.

Within the WP admin interface, (http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=25)
in the editable comment section, I'm seeing something similar to the following:

<code><a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015" rel="nofollow"></a>
<a href="http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/2015/08/20/todays-books-august-20-2015/" rel="nofollow"></a></code>

So there is data there, it's just not being parsed/rendered properly somewhere.

Since I've got another WP set up that seems to be operating properly with the same general set up, has anyone got any ideas?