# Liked: Once, We Were Explorers – Rhoneisms...
"We called it surfing because the web was an ocean; vast and limitless as far as the eye could see from the shore of one’s sandy colored monitor. It was a bit scary, at first. You weren’t quite certain where it would take you. But, you knew just beyond the horizon was probably something you wanted to know about, all you had to do was get in the boat and set sail." "Now, too many no longer explore. They sit on the shore and wait for bottled messages to float right to their feet. They don’t question where the bottles come from, who wrote the messages, or why they always seem to tell them what they want to hear."
To extend the metaphor:
When we weren't exploring we would return like heroes from our travels with untold treasures and place them in our readers for display.
We would sit by these majestic rivers fishing for the best catch and we still marvelled at the wondrous beasts those rivers held.
But then it was suggested we move upriver, ever further from the roiling ocean, where we sat by mere streams supporting little more than stunted minnows.
The call of the ocean is still strong but we must be brave enough to leave the comforts offered on the banks of these streams and strike out again, sailing into the unknown.
# This is just a test of the new micro.blog URL scheme introduced in the latest version of the iOS app using an action from Drafts: microblog://post?text=[[draft]]
Comments
# It looks like there might be an issue with posts submitted via XML-RPC not respecting the default 'Allow Comments' states in WordPress. This will serve as a test but I may need to add a function to check.
Micro.blog open to all
Massive congratulations to Manton Reece as he has announced today that, to close out 2017, micro.blog is now open to the public:
”Micro.blog is now available to anyone. There’s a limit of 100 new sign-ups each day, so that we can better respond to feedback as the community grows.”
This year has been one of significant change for me, as I’ve said before, thanks in no small part to the influence of micro.blog and how it has made me think about how I should treat my own site.
So, what is micro.blog and why should you use it?
Rather than just another social network m.b is a network of “micro blogs” that lets you follow and reply to other people in a Twitter-like timeline but the posts don’t solely exist within that timeline, they live on the blogs and are brought in via RSS.
I personally tend to think of micro.blog as like an RSS reader with a social layer allowing you to comment on other people’s posts via the timeline. It’s very much a hybrid environment and what it does depends on how you use it.
In addition to having blogs hosted on the service itself you can hook it up to your own site - as I do with this WordPress blog. This lets you post either via your own site or the m.b apps or website and, if your blog supports IndieWeb Webmentions, receive any replies as native comments. In that regard, I use micro.blog as a comment system like Disqus.
It’s this distinction that justifies why I still engage in a quasi-social environment when I have sworn off of the likes of Twitter.
The benefit of using micro.blog is that you own your posts and can, should you want to, automatically cross-post them to Twitter or Facebook as the service supports this. The IndieWeb is not out to replace existing social avenues but to interact with them while allowing people to retain greater ownership and control.
If you have your own blog but don’t want a separate microblog you don’t need to do anything differently, just hook up your RSS feed and simply use it as an extra layer of engagement.
We put so much on social networks and the majority is quickly lost and forgotten - it’s such a waste of effort. I firmly believe that people should get back to writing for themselves in their own spaces and micro.blog is a great facilitator for this.
So, well done Manton and thanks for a great year!
Comments
# As mentioned, it looks like posts coming from micro.blog via XML-RPC are not respecting the default of having comments enabled.
What's strange is that 'comment_status' should have a value of whatever 'default_comment_status' is set to so I'm not sure why posts made in this way have comments turned off.
It looks like I've worked around it by adding the following to my functions.php file:
add_filter( 'wp_insert_post_data', 'enable_comments', '100', 1 );
function enable_comments ($postarr) {
$postarr[comment_status] = 'open';
return $postarr;
}
@manton Is there any way to post automatically via the URL scheme or do you have hit post?Also, does it support title as well as text for longer posts?
@colinwalker For now, you have to click Post. I thought we'd start with the basics and then add automatic posting, titles, and x-callback-url later.
@manton Cool. Look forward to it. I might be just a little excited ;)
@colinwalker I've just downloaded your Drafts action.
@devilgate It’s only simple but saves people having to recreate it.
@colinwalker Did you turn traditional comments off on your blog?
@cdevroe Hmm... not intentionally. Thanks for pointing it out, I'll have to have a look at what's happened.
@cdevroe It looks as though it was only for the post which came via the micro.blog app. All others look okay. I’ve enabled them on that post. Any thoughts @manton ?
@colinwalker @cdevroe I've seen this before, but Micro.blog isn't sending any comment-related parameters. Something causes the default to be ignored on the WordPress side, I think.
@manton Some weird XML-RPC thing perhaps?
@colinwalker I'm not sure. Let me know if it happens on your next post too. I don't think it's a bug in Micro.blog, but if it keeps happening we can add a setting to Micro.blog to control it.
@manton Will do. I'm also looking to see if there's something I can add programatically from my side to force comments to be open on new posts submitted via XML-RPC.
@colinwalker @manton Looks like an expected behavior, if the field is totally omitted WordPress uses an internal default for the post type. This should be derived from the wp-admin discussion settings. Is yours unchecked?
@danielpunkass @manton Nope, mine is checked to allow comments on new posts and works fine except for those coming in via this method. It should be inheriting the ‘allowed by default’ setting but isn’t.
@colinwalker I noticed the same thing. No comment field on my Micro.blog posts, only my posts from MarsEdit. Maybe the “status” post type does it?
@colinwalker Ah, funky!