I mentioned last week that I’ve installed the SemPress theme to take advantage of IndieWeb features like microformat labeling to enable parsing in webmentions, a kind of new-era trackback but better. Well, it’s more than just that. As I’m sure most people reading this are aware, there’s been a lot of activity in the world of social media in the past month or so. A new owner at Twitter, people moving to different platforms, and Elon Musk having a bit of a meltdown. All of this has gotten me thinking about the future of my own online presence and has encouraged me to look into revving this blog back up and using it as a hub for my own content of all types.
Tag: indieweb
@meadowhawk JSON-LD seems to have taken over for sure but a lot of the #IndieWeb folks are strongly in favor of microformats for blog & ActivityPub-enabled post markup/parsing. I'm guessing because the primary JSON-LD format is in large part guided by Google but I am not sure.
The ultimate goal is to be able to transform #WordPress into a full #IndieWeb instance since right now the offerings, though great, lack the ability to fully engage with content in one spot like you can on Mastodon and other services. With the goal achieved, content ownership is secured and essentially extends IndieWeb-style social networking to all web content that can be consumed with an RSS feed and supports #ActivityPub, #webmentions, and old-timey trackbacks.
Been having fun testing my #IndieWeb setup on my #WordPress blog. So far can post from it to Mastodon but not Twitter and can reply to posts on both.
I'm also experimenting with the #WPFriends plugin, trying to see if it can replicate feed features to some degree. I've successfully added a Reply button to incoming feed entries, which is not OOB. It works just okay for now. Have to see if the reply source can be more seamlessly integrated to generate a u-in-reply-to.
Theme Updated
Today I updated the site theme to Sempress, the great offering by Matthias Pfefferle, to take advantage of the built-in Indieweb features such as Microformat labeling for use in Webmentions. Though the theme itself is updated, for the most part the layout won’t change. However, there have been some improvements to the comments section to make them threaded.
It was a long past time for the update. This site was using a theme based on the very old Default theme that was created back in 2005 and was custom-coded to a great degree, meaning some newer features were unusable. Though the site styling is mostly finished, a few pages still need to be worked on and will look a little off, and a few other styles need to be tweaked here and there. I’m planning on more updates in the coming weeks and months as I try to turn this into more of a hub for my content of all kinds, not just long-form posts.
Stay tuned!
Finally time to make an #introduction. Only a month late!
My name is Mike. I'm a web developer from Connecticut currently acting as a Senior Data Engineer for an insurance company. I was happy to learn about Mastodon, #activitypub and #indieweb since it fills that techie gap in my heart.
Outside tech, I like to #travel, and am always planning my next trip. In 2023, I'll be resuming international travel. Plans are in progress!