Testing out a webmention from Known into micro.blog!

@louisgray I hope that open W3C specs like Webmention and Micropub can help to turn the tide. #indieweb

@kartik_prabhu Webmentions to things other than posts-pages, archives, etc. In this particular case, to my homepage https://github.com/pfefferle/wordpress-webmention#how-can-i-handle-webmentions-to-my-homepage-or-archive-pages

@cswordpress @megarush1024 Another webmention test both natively and via Twitter.

Jeremy, no worries, it's not openly transparent unless you look at the html source of the page directly. WordPress has a nifty feature that if you add an .mp3 URL to the text field, it will automatically format it as a player (much like embedding a youtube video), in my case I used an <audio> element wrapped around a .mp3 URL which creates a slightly different player (based on the web browser implementation of the spec) with somewhat different functionality.

As for replying to multiple sites at once on Known, on a "reply" post you'll have one URL in a field by itself, then you can click on the "Reply to a site" link under the "New Status Update" box to add another box, and so on. Thus, this particular post will send three replies. One to your response about the media player, one to your question about multiple replies, and a third which I'm sending to my original post which preceded your reply, so that it contains a full chain of the replies. There's also a "Remove URL" link in case you add too many--I don't think the post will publish if you have empty reply fields.

If you look on the wiki, there's a thing called salmentions (salmon+webmention) which programatically checks all the replies to replies and syndicates one's response everywhere so that all the posts in a chain of conversation get webmentions to have a complete record of a conversation. Few sites do this yet in practice, but if you're diligent on Known, you can effect salmentions manually.

Jeremy, this seemed a little long for Loqi to handle, and seemed worth keeping for later, so my response is below:

I understand your situation and have been following some of the discussion about content ownership and reposting. I'm all about giving credit where it's due, and bend over backwards (as far as I'm technically able) to do so. (Wait until you see some of the chicanery I'm trying to pull of for simple bookmark posts...)

It's for that reason that I provided a direct link to the podcast itself in the post as well as a blockquote synopsis in an effort to advertise on your show's behalf. Embedding the mp3 directly on my page was done as a means of helping people easily "sample" the podcast to get them hooked, in which case they would need to subscribe directly to the source. (I also did it to make it easier for me to relisten to it later if I like.) I'm still trying to get Twitter Player Cards to work properly so that could be an additional avenue for sampling on POSSE copies.

Additionally, by embedding the mp3 (I could have scraped it and then hosted it myself, but really, what's the point of that? unless I really wanted to steal it and run advertising against it for myself), your hosting server gets pinged for the "listen" or for any potential downloads because it's being served directly from your site (and not mine), which presumably most podcasters are tracking for advertising purposes. (YouTube and other video hosters do this for embedded videos.)

What I did was not much different than what Huffduffer is doing in bookmarking audio from your podcast on its site. Huffduffer isn't hosting a separate audio file itself, it's hosting a pointer to your file on its site and also syndicating it via RSS and/or Apple iTunes to others who will ultimately stream it or download it directly from your server. In fact, given this, I'm just acting like a mini-Apple iTunes without as much functionality, but I'm only advertising your podcast and not hundreds of thousands of others.

If you did have sponsors, you would presumably also give them airtime in your podcast which would then be heard as well, and tracked by your own server as a stream start or download. I suspect if you had visual advertising on your site, I could/might also embed that so you get a ping for the page load on my site as well. :)

If you're not aware or need it for clients, WordPress gives you the ability to customize your site's ability to provide oEmbeds, so with/for advertisers, you could add text, media, and even a visual advertisement to the pages for your audio podcasts. Other WordPress sites (or sites that consume oEmbed data) that include your URL in their pages then re-render it as a "player card" which presumably pings your server with a "hit" thus giving you credit for the work. Here's an example of an oEmbed for another WordPress site at the top of this post: http://boffosocko.com/2016/08/29/my-first-pull-request/ See videos for potentially setting this up at: https://wordpress.tv/?s=oembed. This type of set up isn't far removed from publishers who embedded advertising directly into their RSS feeds so that those consuming content via RSS weren't taking a free ride.

Perhaps I'm mistaken about the process, and you may be far more knowledgeable than I given your experience in the space, but I'm pretty sure that by embedding and not copying and hosting it myself, you should be able to garner the lion's share of the credit while I'm just serving as free advertising on your behalf.

As an alternate example, things are somewhat different in Marty's case of creating a separate piece of audio and copying and embedding it into his podcast as aaronpk's music didn't register a ping of any sort (other than possibly a webmention which only happened once), so aaronpk couldn't have monetized his audio the way you could have with a sponsored podcast.

Bridgy won't send webmentions (for Instagram) properly without it, so I'd submit it's more of a webmention issue. It's definitely not a theme issue, and even if it were, only the smallest number of themes would ever be aware to support it anyway.

Given the broader number of users this could potentially affect, it should be sitting some where towards the top of the stack. I'd recommend webmention first, otherwise, perhaps the IndieWeb Plugin itself?

I think the biggest hurdle to wider adoption is simply the fact that there are so many individual plugins and this takes up far more mental space for the user than it should.

So, another option which I'd like to suggest and advocate for is to **bundle all the plugins into one big single plugin** instead of sub-plugins. You could almost sell it as "the part of WordPress core you always wished you had" and now you can with two clicks: download and activate. (That's got to sound good, even to your mom who's still figuring out how to upload her profile picture.)

From the user's standpoint, this wouldn't require much more than some slightly better UI/descriptions. (And I'm more than happy to write them.) This could consist of a single main settings page with on/off toggles for Post Kinds, Syndication Links, Webactions(?), Micropub, Hum, and IndieAuth. A tabbed interface on this same page with tabs primarily for settings/set up and usage description for all of these (except for maybe Webactions?) would complete the cycle.

Most of the sub plugins don't have many (if any) actual settings other than installation/activation right now which is creating the biggest part of the (mostly mental) hurdle for every day users. I think the average WordPress user probably wouldn't know that they had Webmentions, Semantic Linkbacks, or Webmentions for Threaded Comments installed because they "just work", require no configuration, but are far prettier than any of their predecessors. Why make them carry the mental overhead of what they are and what they do aside from a few subtle lines that they exist? In fact, treating them as if they should have been in WordPress core all along may actually make it more likely to happen.

Additionally things like Micropub which would only have an on/off toggle wouldn't be noticed or used by many unless they had interest in alternate posting interfaces. (And based on the popularity and growth in Twitter interfaces/apps a few years ago, I'm surprised WordPress didn't do this, though perhaps it's part of the reason they're adding a more robust API over the past few years?)

It also means having slightly better or more intuitive explanations of what the individual pieces are (mostly Syndication Links and Post Kinds) near their on/off toggles to better explain what is being activated. Much of this can be taken from the current interface or from the WordPress wiki pages, or added on the individual tabs for the settings for these portions.

I would suggest that doing this would not only make it easier on end users who then wouldn't have to spend the mental space and capacity to keep track of what 10 individual plugins are doing (in addition to the space these take up on the plugin admin page and the fact that, once activated, they disappear from the IndieWeb plugin's list of plugins), but that it would actually dramatically increase the uptake of the single big plugin and its functionality and simultaneously the use of the all the sub plugins individually.

I'd argue that bigger plugins like Yoast SEO or something like PressForward have huge numbers of options and settings and could have been done as separate sub-plugins (the way IndieWeb Plugin is now), but that their value proposition is such that it's well worth spending the handful of minutes reading through the interface to know what the options are, what they mean, and using them to their fullest advantage. I think that Indieweb (and the suite of tools offered on WordPress) is at this tipping point in terms of offering must-have functionality for the future web and that having a simpler integrated set up would help to push it over the edge to broader adoption. (Certainly simpler than the old WP-Social, which users have indicated that they thought was far simpler than Indieweb plugin, though Social actually required more set up.) Additionally all of the seemingly dense text in the "getting started" page could be moved into smaller bit-sized chunks relating to individual portions on a tabbed-interface, for example.

I come to this in part after having spent part of the weekend revamping a bit of the IndieWeb.org documentation on getting started with WordPress and setting up Bridgy with WordPress. A lot of the description is "get this plugin, install, and activate" which takes up a big piece of mental space for the user as well--particularly for the Gen2, 3, 4 users who want a plug and play experience. Far better would be to install one plugin and then modify these handful of settings.

If this is done, then the only remaining (small) hurdle is making sure that the underpinning rel-me data input required of the user is done in a more explicit manner, because this seems to be the lynch-pin holding a lot of it together and making it work. As a result, I'd recommend unbundling the reliance on the User Profile page and put all the rel-me URL fields on their own page in the settings interface for such a single plugin (with all important links just underneath them to encourage users to visit, for example, Twitter's edit profile page to include their website URL in either the website field or in the bio field to enable the bi-directional rel-me.)

Finally a "Tools" tab in the settings page could provide pointer links to additional things like the H-Card Widget or the IndieWeb-PressThis bookmarklets.

When all of this is done, it could also be a simple manner of adding another settings tab to the interface to set up Bridgy with one button links from the plugin to the set up pages for each of the main backfeed services there. Bridgy then automatically checks for the webmention endpoint and checks for rel-me to do it's work, so that part is already automated and relatively user friendly too.

The one caveat I can imagine is that making it all into one big plugin potentially means some small added overhead in development with maintaining some of them as stand alone pieces. I'd recommend keeping them as standalone objects as I honestly believe that pieces like webmentions and micropub are so fundamental to the web, that they should be part of WordPress core and maintaining them separately could help speed this along.

Unless they're moderating comments, it looks like there's little chance they actually saw your reply.

In some cases where others don't support webmention, if you want them to see your response, you should @mention their Twitter account directly and syndicate your reply to Twitter, and/or you can manually POSSE your response to their page directly via comments.

@jbjohansson Mine isn't as refined as @dshanske, @pfefferle, or @schnarfed. If you haven't come across it yet: https://webmention.io/