I have completed the first version of my blogroll plugin and you can view the results here. At present it includes ten people as I wanted to stay true to James Shelley’s notion about value.
A new blogroll
Indigenous
I have been briefly testing Indigenous by Eddie Hinkle, a native micropub client for iOS, so you may have seen a couple of rogue ‘likes’ appear in the RSS feed recently.
Doing things properly
More on comment spam
I’ve been getting more comment spam that’s not automatically nixed by Akismet. Under Settings > Discussion you can add terms to a blacklist so that comments are automatically placed in the bin but I wanted to go one step further.
Rethinking the feeds
Colin Devroe made a good point.
He is subscribed to my main feed and wondered why he didn’t see my Watch follow-up post about the woman on the train.
The answer was that it was a microblog post and, therefore, in the /feed/microblog feed instead.
Life without Workflow
From originally not knowing how I would ever use it, Workflow has become such a big part of how I do things that I’d be pretty lost without it. So, just like a lot of others I had a moment of panic when the app was bought by Apple.
Getting plugged in – epilogue
Since raising the version of the ‘Likes and Replies’ plugin to 0.9.0 and calling it a release candidate I don’t think I’ve come across any problems. It’s hard to believe that the last commit logged on GitHub was 17 days ago.
One thing I like that Dave Winer does on his blog is have posts listed chronologically for any given day – you start the day at the top and read down in time order. We read top to bottom normally so it’s natural.
Sonant Thoughts – Episode 23: In The Wild
Tinkering with code to fill gaps in your own workflow is one thing but having other people use it in the wild is something else.
Links:
Des asked if I was planning to release my Webmentions Directory as a plugin rather than a page template.
I hadn’t considered it but he got me thinking.
I wondered about the best way to do it and came up with creating a shortcode that can be entered on any post or page, and also in a template with the do_shortcode() function.
Getting plugged in – part 6: includes
There are times when I feel like a bit of an idiot. This is one of those times!
As you will no doubt recall, I was trying to separate out the plugin actions into various included files. The relevant code triggered correctly when posting via the REST API (I.e. from Workflow) but the action that should be run when posting natively failed.
Getting plugged in – part 5: settings
What started as a quick update to split the plugin into parts (so that it wasn’t all one monolithic file) became quite a major one.
My original plan was to move both hooks for updating the post content to separate included files – it hasn’t quite gone according to plan.
Getting plugged in – part 4.5
After getting the meta box working I realised that the code hooked into save_post wasn’t being triggered when posting via the Workflow app.
The app is probably using the WordPress REST API to create the post which doesn’t behave in the same way as native posting and bypasses the hook.
Getting plugged in – part 4: meta boxes
Numerous tutorials exist for adding and using meta boxes; some manage to make it seem like a dark art by rushing through too much in one go without explaining exactly what is going on.
After getting the directory page to display all replies, I thought:
“What if when a comment is received we immediately perform the linkbacks type check and, if true, rewrite the comment_type value back to the comments table in the database?”
Improving the webmentions directory
When creating my webmentions author directory I originally wanted to avoid any reliance on the #indieweb Semantic Linkbacks plugin, as not everyone will be using it, and I wanted to keep things fairly self-contained.
Getting plugged in – part 3: getting it wrong
A big part of learning by doing is getting things wrong. You’re never going to get it right first time, every time and just have to accept that.
It’s what prompted me to write that I needed a second WordPress installation to test against rather than keep breaking the blog.
CSS needs full dependency selectors.
There, I’ve said it. Not that I’m the first and certainly won’t be the last.
CSS should let you choose what to do with something based on what’s inside it but this isn’t possible. We can only style an element based on what contains it and not the other way around.
On comments and webmentions
There seems to be a lot of inconsistency in the way webmentions and microformats are handled or implemented between different platforms, especially Known and WordPress.
I added a filter to functions.php to truncate posts in the RSS feed of type ‘status’ that were longer than 280 characters, then insert a permalink at the end, so that they would play nicer with Micro.blog.