14/11/2017

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

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.

While I currently use Workflow to post likes and replies from my phone there is a distinct possibility that Apple will eventually remove it from the App Store should they add some form of automation to future versions of iOS.

I, therefore, wanted to explore alternatives and this meant installing Ryan Barrett’s plugin to provide a micropub endpoint thus allowing the app to post to the blog.

It's early days but Eddie has got a lot planned and the app - which works by way of a share extension, already seems pretty robust with the functionality it's got.

I don't use the indieweb Post Kinds plugin for WordPress as it's never played nicely with my theme so I do things manually with my own plugin.

Consequently, I don't have post types such as like, reply, bookmark and RSVP - such interactions are published as status posts on the blog and include the relevant microformats2 markup.

This difference lead to the rogue likes mentioned above; they were published as standard posts so didn’t display as they normally would.

I needed to find a way for the two to work together so made a few changes.

The micropub plugin adds a hook after_micropub so I used this to change the post format of the latest post to ‘status’:

function micropub_format($post){
  $args = array(
    'numberposts' => '1',
  );
  $recent_posts = wp_get_recent_posts( $args );
  foreach( $recent_posts as $recent );
    $post_id = $recent['ID'];
    set_post_format( $post_id, 'status');
  endforeach;
}

add_action('after_micropub','micropub_format',1,2);

Next, to better match my own implementation, I have edited the plugin to display the page title in the post rather than the link (this uses the same method as my plugin) and alter the styling.

I currently have all posts submitted via the micropub endpoint published as drafts, so you likely won’t see any posted this way for now, but it’s fun to explore this as an alternative.

I look forward to watching Eddie’s progress.

# Apologies to Eddie for accidentally calling his app Ingenious rather than Indigenous. Although it is ingenious.

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# Liked: CompuServe’s forums, which still exist, are finally shutting down...

Long before Facebook became the centre of the universe internet for some there was CompuServe, and then AOL.

People used to sign up for these services and think that whatever was presented by the app was the internet.

I never realised the forums were still a thing.

I spent a while working in CompuServe technical support (way back) and genuinely had conversations with people along the lines of:

Customer: I put your CD in and can’t hear anything. Me: Where did you put it and what happened? Customer: I put it in my stereo and it didn’t play. Me: Ah, you actually need to put it in your computer’s CD drive. Customer: Oh, do I need a computer? Okay, I’ll go and buy one.

And:

Customer: Why has my account been deactivated? Me: Because you haven’t paid your bill for three months. Customer: I demand that you reactivate it right now! Me: It’s one o’clock on Sunday morning, we can’t do anything until Monday. Customer: That’s ridiculous, do it NOW! Me: Tell you what, I’ll do you a deal. If you can get your bank manager to reinstate your direct debit now then I’ll get you reconnected. Customer: {silent pause} Okay, I see your point. I’ll call on Monday.

Fun times.

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