Homebrew Website Club
I want to show off the demo of SWAT0 from indiewebcamp this weekend http://tantek.com/2015/193/t2/user-flow-permalinks-indieweb-swat0 video: https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2015/07/14/1/swat0
this test was first suggested 5 years ago - before we started indiewebcamp - we thought it would use hosted services
in fact it was realising that hosted services weren't goign to help that got us to set up indiewebcamp in the first place
how does this scale up across sites?
it scales like the web - all this happens peer to peer across different sites
seeing it as notifications is really interesting - that makes a bridge beyond the web
Aaron was using Prowl, but Ben is using web notifications which just shipped in Chrome and is in Firefox 42
anything that ships in firefox 42 also ships in mobile on firefox android too. so you get mobile notifications
Katie asks why it took so long - within 3 months in 2010 they had it working on statusnet and cliqset only, but didn't use it
so we had a proof of concept, but within 6 months cliqset went offline, and recently statusnet went offline too
so why did it take us so long to do this? We didn't start saying "we'll make things federate"
we said we want to empower every individual to own their own website and spend time inproving it in ways they want to
people built different things for their sites in an organic way - and we wrote up building blocks on how we solved problems
because of this organic nature we can't predict when things will happen in indieweb, but they tend to last and grow over time
what we realised this weekend was that we were very close to achieving this test, and we built the few missing bits
we made the canonical example on the wiki note the people who had implemented it
my tool noterlive.com also posts person tags when you use it (and copy the html to your site)
designing these notifications was interesting - getting the text right for @aaronpk's notifications worked
why use domain names rather than usernames?
people use URLs to identify each other with blogs - and twitter shows the @ handle as well as the name as people play
the identity currency on twitter is the @ name; on the indieweb it is the URL
what is a webmention?
a webmention is just the signal between the 2 sites that something on the web mentioned you
in order to know what the webmention means you have to look at the website that mentioned you and make sense of it
the webmention might be a like or a repost or an RSVP as well as a person tag
the other thing that was implemented this weel was salmentions - mentions that go upstream like salmon do
so when you receive comments you add them to your post and send a webmention upstream to the post you previously mentioned
the biggest problem with pingbacks was spam in the comment stream. How do we stop this getting flooded with crap too?
you can get webmentions form anyone so they can be spammy now. So far we have seen some from brid.gy containing twitter spam
there are 2 answers: for a webmention to mean something the sender has to do more markup work
longer term we have an extension to webmention called 'vouch' which is another URL that vouches for you
currently the kind of problem is like people showing up to your party and pitching you their startup
each role in the SWAT0 challenge has different implementation requirements - currently no implementation has all 3 roles
each of the players was using more than one piece of software to achieve this; we can combine them to pass it
what kartik has built is essentially medium on his own site - per paragraph comments https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia
a fragmention lets you link to a piece of text in any webpage; a webmention lets you annotate it too
the fun thing is that us distributed developers can keep up with the big companies in innovation
I'm showing off noterlive.com and it is live tweeting this talk
I have a domain, but no place to put it - what shoudl I use? there is thins think called Known
I hear known is pretty good… there are also lots of wordpress plugins
I've been cryogenically frozen for 10 years - what do I use now?
Known is kind of like a tumblr - you can self-host it or go to withknown.com to get a hosted version
showing off reader.kylewm.com which supports webmentions and micropub, so https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2015/07/14/1/swat0 got my comment
Known also has native comments so it doesn't require webmentiosn but they look the same internally
I had a static site, but I rebuilt it in flask http://giudici.us/blog
and I got a webmention working and sent by hand with curl http://giudici.us/blog/0
my next goal is to have my own endpoint to receive that
it's great to see woodwind and known as it is like early blogging, except it has a facebook feed ui running on your site