💬 Micro

This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Until enough websites are using Indieweb standards to publish content, it will remain a niche.

This makes the Indieweb necessarily a fairly tech-centric space. However, I don’t believe that this makes it less valuable. The Indieweb is a new technology, though it happens to be built on top of some very old ones. New technologies are always inhabited by tech types at the beginning.

I think it’s not a problem for non-IndieWeb users to read IndieWeb pages though. Most often they won’t even notice it’s an IndieWeb site, when they come there by accident (e.g. a search or link from somewhere else).

The first things I did this year was to create a media endpoint for my Micropub server. It works by uploading files to BunnyCDN via their storage API (great service and easy API!). However, now that I have this endpoint, I would also like to use it. It seems that there is a lack of clients that support uploading media to the media endpoint and then returning me the correct URL. I can use Indigenous to upload photos from my phone, but it seems like other file formats aren’t supported. How am I supposed to create posts with audio or other files? Also Micropublish (the client I usually use on PCs) doesn’t seem to support media at all.

Can someone please give me a tip, which client I should use or do I need to develop my own? Thanks!

Please also remind: My operating system are Linux, Windows and Android. Clients for macOS or iOS are pretty useless to me.

Update: Kristof De Jaeger replied to this post and promised some new features for Indigenous on Android. Thanks a lot! I’m still in search for a desktop solution though. I thought a bit about it and will probably create a basic web interface that allows me to upload any file until there’s better support in other Micropub clients.

Update 2: It seems like Jamie Tanna is in a similar situation. He gave the tip to look at Quill.

Happy New Year! 🎆🎉🥂

I should definitely checkout how to PESOS for Pocket. I use Pocket quite often, but don’t publish all links on my blog. For that I still need to improve bookmark support and than use something like IFTTT to publish recommended or starred articles to a bookmarks section.

Thanks for your tip to take a look at the post by Steve Layton! Unfortunately I’m not using micro.blog currently and rather want my setup to be self-hosted as much as possible. To do that I recently also started receiving webmentions myself instead of relying on webmention.io. It’s not that I don’t like these services, it’s more that I strive for full control over my setup.

I wrote about my Indieweb dream this morning. To come closer to this dream and to clean up some code, I started refactoring my hugo backend code. I made use of Go interfaces to later be able to easily add more storage, CDN or social network providers. It also made the code a bit cleaner and a bit more modular, but there’s still a lot of learning and work to do. What I still struggle with though is testing: I don’t have any automatic tests yet. How do I test HTTP calls to external APIs?

I plan to add a bit of ActivityPub to my blog to be able to interact with the fediverse, without the need to use Mastodon, Pleroma or my current microblog. Just my static Hugo blog with it’s dynamic Go-backend. Because I don’t want to implement everything from scratch - I haven’t yet added media support for MicroPub - I am in search for libraries that help implementing ActivityPub, or at least give me a starting point. I discovered the library activityserver, which is used by a tool called pherephone by write.as, maybe that can help me.

What I still have to think about though, is how I’m going to connect it with the rest of the system. And what’s also still missing: The media endpoint and update support for MicroPub (I should do this first).

Or should I just cancel my plans with ActivityPub and wait until Fediverse software supports IndieWeb technologies? :thinking_face:

I’m now receiving webmentions myself and also show them as “interactions” on this blog.

I implemented webmention receiving into my Hugo backend. Mentions are stored as a simple json file per webmention in the “data” folder of my blog and then I’m using some Hugo magic (data templates) to render them in my theme.

By doing it this way, I don’t need any JavaScript to show interactions and I don’t need to rely on a 3rd party service (I used webmention.io) for receiving anymore.

I just joined the Codeberg e.V. as an active member.

The mission of the Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for researching, creating, archiving, and preserving knowledge, code, and to document its development process.

I really like Codeberg and its mission and use the platform for some of my projects. Today, a fellow student / colleague asked me a few questions about it, then joined himself. That inspired me to actually join now too, instead of sometime in the future.

More Information about Codeberg on their website or blog. Joining is possible here.

Thanks to AddToAny, there’s now a “Share” option on my blog. If you find an article share-worthy, simply click on that link and select how to share this article. It should be pretty simple.

In Hugo I use the following line of code to create a share link:

<a href="https://www.addtoany.com/share#url={{ .Permalink }}{{ with .Title }}&title={{ . }}{{ end }}" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">{{ T "share" }}</a>

{{ T "share" }} is a translation string, but if you don’t care about translations, simply replace this with your preferred string.