To Live and Write in LA - Share Your Blog: Los Angeles Bloggers (Los Angeles, CA) | Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Share-Your-Blog-Los-Angeles-Bloggers/messages/boards/thread/50202990/#129703401

Leo, I find it tough to keep up with even one or two sites, so I'm impressed that you're wrangling 3 (or maybe even more)...

http://toliveandwriteinla.com/
I love the magazine style set up you've got here and with a humongous amount of well-written and well thought out content. My one note here is that stylistically, the theme is probably getting a bit long in the tooth. As you'd commented to me, something that's responsive would certainly be cool.

Some small things you might consider:
On the next/last links under articles, articles with longer titles aren't properly buffered which causes the text from one to overwrite the other.
Notify me of comments/new posts renders oddly with some quirky overlap that could be tweaked.

http://leosopicki.com/
Personally I was never a fan of the "masonry" movement (I always felt it was too "busy", though here it does help to highlight a larger number of articles to help get the first time visitor into a topic they might enjoy.

On individual articles, I like the way you intersperse the visuals to change up the flow. However your line lengths are a bit too long to read as comfortably. If you added some more white space on the sides of your text blocks, things would be much more readable. (Try to shoot for 58-70 characters per line for ease of reading -- I'm guessing you're running almost as high as 125 in full-width which makes it harder to move one's eyes from one line to the next. Notice it's easier to read, especially for longer periods of time, with the left/right aligned photos because they shorten the line lengths.)

You really have a great voice in most of your posts that draw the reader into the experiences you're sharing. The captions on the photos really add to the experience too. You've obviously been doing this for a while and are good at what you're doing (which is also seen in some of the great feedback you've given to others here on meetup... thanks by the way.)

Your "Writer" menu link just goes to the homepage, which I understand to some extent as everything on the site is writer-centric, but I might have expected something a bit narrower and focused on screenwriting posts perhaps.

I would more likely have suspected to find a Twitter account, but was a bit surprised to see you pull out Pinterest in the left rail. Further I was shocked that there was some interesting stuff to be seen on Pinterest! I'm sure you can't do too much about the Pinterest widget, but the content shown there was so small and the vertical slider was a bit weird, you might see if you can either dig into it and fix it or perhaps find a better one.

Though speaking of Twitter accounts, I know you've got one, but one's really got to dig for it. Perhaps you could be leveraging the social media portion of things to help your work find more eyeballs?

Overall:
I know that changing themes can be difficult with lots of potential pitfalls and work (especially with a large portfolio), but as a writer, you might consider some themes with more white space and really fantastic readable typography to make your words a bit more front and center (without minimizing your great use and placement of photography). Even if you don't completely change themes, you might consider just punching up the typography and adding some extra whitespace to make things more readable.

Given that you're a photographer, you might also consider finding something that allows for adding some larger photos to better feature your work there. (I wish I knew of something to recommend that does a great job of melding both pictures and words, they're hard to come by.) Often I was disappointed that some of the photos were relatively so small and wished I could have seen full res versions.

@evrenk WordPress.org is DEFINITELY #IndieWeb compatible!! If you want to get started take a look at https://wordpress.org/plugins/indieweb/ and https://indieweb.org/WordPress for more details.

While the siren song of Medium seems strong, you don't necessarily own it all and can't control it to the extent you can on your own site. I'd recommend checking out IndieWeb-ifying your WordPress install and leverage the value of your existing social networks like Medium, Twitter, Facebook, et al by syndicating your content from WordPress to those other sites. Medium has a good WordPress plugin [https://wordpress.org/plugins/medium/] for copying (selectively at your discretion) your content from WordPress to Medium quickly and easily. Even better, the IndieWeb portion that covers WebMentions brings the comments and likes from many corporate silos back to the comment section of your posts -- this way you own not only the parts you wrote and put on the silos, but you'll also own the comments too!

I've supercharged my WordPress install with IndieWeb tools and now use it as my primary hub on the internet for writing and responding. I don't spend as much time on Facebook and Twitter as all the comments I want to see on my own material come back directly to me.

If it helps, follow the advice of Dave Winer: Anywhere but Medium [http://scripting.com/liveblog/users/davewiner/2016/01/20/0900.html].

If you need help, don't hesitate to find any of the helpful folks at IndieWeb: https://indieweb.org/discuss

@RikMende Hope it helps. Did webmentions on your site break? I'm surprised my reply didn't show up as a comment there? I also tried putting it into the comment field directly and it didn't show up that way either... Unless maybe you're moderating comments/webmentions (and I didn't think that was currently possible, unless you've got some magic I'm unaware of).

Can it be the case that @withknown doesn't default to rel-nofollow in comments? :O

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...

Feature suggestion: Site Owner push notifications · Issue #1 · pushpad/pushpad-wordpress https://github.com/pushpad/pushpad-wordpress/issues/1

WordPress.com announced push notifications for site owners regarding likes/comments yesterday: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/instant-browser-notifications/

Given the infrastructure you've got, it would be cool to have this as an engagement option too... I don't think many of the current push plugins have this type of functionality, so this could be a nice differentiator.

WordPress.com announced push notifications for site owners regarding likes/comments yesterday: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/08/10/instant-browser-notifications/

Given the infrastructure you've got, it would be cool to have this as an engagement option too...

You're probably correct and it generally won't cause too many issues. Except for when I figure out how to break things in new and creative ways... ;)

But for most themes, it also means that there's a lot of additional cruft that could accidentally be sucked in by parsers: header images, menu items, etc. as well as additional body elements below the content, including the comments, footer, widgets, other plugins, etc. Having it canonically further into the structure narrows down the scope of things that could potentially go wrong, particularly as it gets tested in a growing circle of themes that will eventually use it.

Some of it comes down to what one should expect h-entry to contain versus what one should expect e-content to contain just after it. Where do most themes put author information for the author h-card? You'd want h-entry to contain that as well as the publish time and other meta data too.

The other issue to possibly consider in terms of conflicts is how non-compliant themes which style on the older hentry (or other microformats) may behave/misbehave going forward. These may be lost causes, but could they potentially be "fixed" by injecting h-entry further down? If newer parsers look for mf2 over mf1, then not including hentry (presumably a second time) and injecting h-entry into the correct spot would override the potential error.

I ultimately defer to your better judgment...

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!

Five out of Five Stars! Own All of Your Instagram Data

This plugin is fantastic and thorough in the sheer quantity of data that it will export out of Instagram for you. It has a simple and relatively elegant interface to help you display and format your post(s) automatically including all the meta data, post types, tags, categories, etc. They truly have thought of everything in making a spectacular little plugin!

I use this in combination with Brid.gy and some IndieWeb.org related WordPress plugins which also allows me to backport all of the likes and comments from Instagram as well, and between the two, Instagram could go down tomorrow and I would own all of the data I've put into the service. DsgnWrks has literally done all of the heavy lifting.

Mitch, I also love SNAP! If you didn't see it, they added Medium support in their last update after Medium released their write API. Medium also has their own WordPress plugin which will allow you to broadcast there easily and quickly too.

if you're game, there's a few other tools you might think about adding to your workflow:
First you should know about http://indieweb.org and take a look at their WordPress section at indieweb.org/WordPress. It'll help you more easily suck back likes and replies of your syndicated posts to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et al. so that you own all the data and comments from them. (This will also make your blog look more "lived in". They've got a cool range of other nifty tools for making/using your WordPress blog -- all of them free.

One particular one that integrates well with SNAP is Syndication Links [https://wordpress.org/plugins/syndication-links/] which pulls in the URLS of the social sites you send your content to with SNAP and displays them under your content so you (and others) have a better idea of where you've sent them in the past.

From an indieweb perspective, it's probably far easier, more productive, and better interface hypothes.is both accepted the webmention protocol as well as sending webmentions. This way one could post their comments (highlights may be slightly tougher) directly to their Known (or other site) and the webmention protocol could handle the posting to hypothes.is. Similarly when one annotates a page, hypothes.is could webmention the page, so the post author/site admin would be aware that the page was marked up.

#hypothesis #indieweb

Andreas, I'm pretty sure my experiment with OwnYourGram was well after I updated to 0.9.2. I never worked on it further to get brid.gy to push the comments/likes back to my Known install, but did spend some time to get OwnYourGram to work with WordPress and eventually have brid.gy backfeed the comments/likes from Instagram.

Ultimately I decided for data portability reasons that it was far easier (and prettier) to import all of my old instagram posts into my WordPress install where I know the code base a bit better. I just finished importing all of my instagram activity to my main site over the weekend, but it'll take some more work to get them to display the way I want them to along with the correct microformats2 markup.

For Instagram/Known, if I recall, you have to correctly specify either http or https properly to make sure the two link up properly, which was an early problem I had. I also had issues with trying to use two sites simultaneously, but apparently putting the URLS of your sites into your bio on instagram works just fine for authentication.

I don't think I went so far as to register my instagram account for known with brid.gy, but I could dig back into it if you need some help. I need to document some of the process for some user manual work I've promised to do for Known.

You could also try the #indieweb IRC channel: https://indiewebcamp.com/IRC