# Latest updates: comment permalinks, making use of fragmentions, and automatic addition of date as post title if blank (e.g. posted by Micro.blog app.)
The ideals behind the #indieweb and, to an extent, Micro.blog are about ownership and control: you own your content, not the network, not the platform, not a silo.
But let me play devil's advocate for a moment.
I wrote back in 2010 that the real social currency is relationships. Not likes, not retweets, not the number of followers but the actual relationships we have with them.
It is the relationships between people, relationships between us and our interests, relationships between data points and their intersections.
Big data.
The value of a social platform lies within its graphs, social and interest, the connections between its users, what they like and how that relates to others. Trends, patterns, spikes, correlations - everything that makes the data useful.
Who owns what?
What do we mean by ownership? Do we associate it with having control over our data or just mean having a copy of everything we post should the services we use disappear?
If it's the former we are deluding ourselves.
Even though we may hold the original version of our posts or photos, and even hold the keys to our base online identity, how much control do we actually have?
As soon as we pass our data to platforms or silos, as soon as we express our interests and connect with others we are handing control of so much more than our posts to those platforms.
Ownership extends far beyond the items themselves to the relationships and data points surrounding them as there is no way for us to own that.
Should we also be asking how much of this we need to own?
Do we need to hold every post, or reply? Is there really value in retaining everything? Or, is it merely our vanity?
Control
We claim to be taking back control from the silos but, if we cross-post in the name of distribution, they still have the power to mine our data (of which we freely hand them a copy) and use it for their own ends.
Unless we keep all our data within a silo of our own we will never have full ownership and total control but that flies in the face of the interactivity the indieweb movement tries to promote.
I previously detailed a method of automatically replacing blank post titles so that I didn’t have multiple items (posted from the Micro.blog app) listed as ‘(no title)’ in the WordPress back end.
Micro.blog wants posts to not have titles but will treat certain text as blank, such as the date, hence the above.
If a status coming from a blog (via RSS) has a title, or one not in a recognised format, Micro.blog will treat it as a long form post and just display it as a title and link. Not ideal.
Jimmy Baum (@jimmymansaray) wanted to have just the date as status titles but this falls foul of these limitations.
So, how to allow different title formats on your own blog but then pass data to Micro.blog in such a way it displays those statuses correctly?
the_title_rss
WordPress allows you to customise your RSS feed on the fly by accessing different aspects of it and applying a filter. Just like modifying post contents prior to saving or display.
The post title in an RSS feed is logically called using the_title_rss() so we need to find a way to modify this based on the specific set of requirements.
Just as I do, Jimmy uses a category called ‘microblog’ with a dedicated feed so this is what we need to filter on. After a few tests it seemed the most reliable way was to check against the_category_rss() which lists the categories for the current post as would be displayed in the feed itself, like the below for my previous post:
<category><![CDATA[Podcast]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Distribution]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Microcast]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Syndication]]></category>
We can then simply check for the presence of the required category within that string and return an empty title.
The code to do so should be as follows:
function remove_post_title_rss ( $title ) {
$categories = get_the_category_rss();
$pos = strpos($categories, 'microblog');
if ( $pos != '' ) {
$title = '';
}
return $title;
}
@colinwalker interesting that my reply didn't get through.