Chris Aldrich

@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!

Jeremy, congrats on owning your reading! I'd recently seen your note about using reading.am, but I've been on holiday and not had a chance to get back to you.

In general it seems like you've found most of the salient pieces I liked about it. For the record these include:
* I like the idea of "bookmarking" everything I'm reading as I read it. Even for things I don't quite finish, I often will want to know what the thing was or how to easily find it at a later date.
* It has an easy to use desktop bookmarklet that makes the friction of using it negligible. (On mobile I use the ubiquitous sharing icon and use my account's custom email address to email links to my account which is quick enough too.)
* Its RSS feed is useful (as you've discovered), but I've integrated it into my WordPress site using IFTTT.com for porting the data I want over. In my case I typically save the post as a draft and don't publicly publish everything that my lesser followed reading.am account does. Generally once a day I'll look at drafts to add some notes if necessary, or do some follow up reading/research (especially when I've read something interesting via mobile and didn't have the time), and then publish a subsection of the captured reads as public.

I've filed an issue with the developer to see if he'd include the comment data within Reading.am into the RSS feed so that it could be included in the passed data, so that when commenting there, the commentary could also be passed across to my site as well.

While I typically prefer to default to POSSE when I can, this PESOS workflow is generally acceptable to me because it required very little effort and I like having the drafts to determine which I should post publicly/privately as well as for a nudge on potential follow up for some of what I've read.

One other small thing I had done was (via plugin) to have any links on my site auto-post to the WayBackMachine on archive.org as I read/post them that way there's a back up version of what I'd read so that in the future copies are available even if the site goes down at a future date. I suspect you could do this with a simple POST call, an example of which I think is documented in the wiki.

As a subtle tweak you may wish to take a look at https://www.reading.am/p/4MDd/https://www.wired.com/2014/08/handle_change/. I noticed that you bookmarked something as read a second time having clicked through via a reading.am link. This causes reading.am to mark the second one as "Jeremy Cherfas is reading this because of Jeremy Cherfas" which means the "because of Jeremy Cherfas" manages to sneak into your RSS feed in the title. I suspect this wouldn't happen often, so you could probably ignore it, but you could throw it into your Regex filter to trim it out when it does happen. (When you click on reading.am links, they process to show that you're reading something as a result of someone else having posted it, which could show some interesting network effects though the reading.am network is relatively small.)

I know you're always saying that you're not a developer, but you've puzzled out a regex filter, implemented it, and posted it to your site for others to benefit. I would submit that you could now proudly wear the title even if you have no intention to do it professionally. Neither of us may be at the level of people like aaronpk or snarfed, but then, really, who is?

I also love that you've got a Webmention form set up, working, and looking great. Congratulations! If you want a small challenge, perhaps you could massage it to create a Grav plugin so others could easily implement it? If you want less challenge (and obligation for support), perhaps submit what you've got as an issue to the Grav Webemention plugin https://github.com/Perlkonig/grav-plugin-webmention and see if they'd add it into the bigger plugin where it would also make sense having it. (They may also default to having it use their own webmention implementation instead of the heroku version.) If nothing else, consider linking/documenting it on the wiki page for Grav where others may find it more easily in the future.

Congratulations again Mr. Developer!