Jeremy Cherfas

I’ve been thinking about Rob’s post and your notes on vHWC, and I agree that swapping the quiet writing hour for a question session makes a lot of sense. I’ve certainly learned a lot and look forward to the meetings.

One thing I’d like to suggest is a follow up on the idea of wiki pages for beginners. Someone was recently talking about a “for dummies” approach to setting up a web mention receiver, but from the context, I got the impression that they were dummies only about IndieWeb, not about PHP and servers and all the plumbing. Essentially Gen 1. A for dummies for that person would look very different to a for dummies for Gen 2 or Gen 3.

Would it be interesting if we picked a specific page and some of us (me, probably, although of course others too, and because it is a vHWC they could be anywhere) tried to do do a for Gen 2 dummies write up as a new version. Then at the vHWC you Gen 1people could take a look and explain in more detail, if necessary, or correct it, if wrong in some detail.

Does that sound worthwhile?

I don’t actually have a good sense of which page might be best to start with, but it could be setting up to receive webmentions without, for now, going into the complexities of bridgy. So, for static sites, or CMSs like Grav.

I get an error when trying to compute the signature:

Jeremys-iMac:~ jeremycherfas$ HMAC=$(echo -n “/status/edit” | openssl dgst -binary -sha256 -hmac ‘MY-API’ | base64 -w0) base64: invalid option – w

How do I use signed HTML?

Chris Aldrich is way too kind, but it is the kind of kindness I need. A couple of quick responses:

I will indeed tweak the regex as you suggest. That behaviour by reading.am does rather spoil using it as a repository for links I want to go back to, but hey ho. On posting to Wayback Machine, I thought I saw a blog post from Reading that this was now done automatically for all saved posts. Getting things into my Known stream is on the horizon, but I will have to learn a lot more about how to use the web publish tools.

The webmention form is now looking good and working well, and I think I may even have got email notifications up and running, thanks once again to great help from the IndieWeb community. I’m not happy submitting anything to the original plugin, because it is so very different in scope and approach. But I am definitely thinking about creating a plugin of my own, which would also make it very easy to send the notification email. That’s definitely on the cards. Putting it all on the wiki is next on my list.

And thanks again for being a guide and an encouragement.

I think we’re on about the same level, Rob, Gen 2 with a smattering of Gen 1, and I agree with most of the points you make. A couple of observations:

The real time Q is tricky, although I have found that using the !tell command to a named individual is handy, once you have made some friends on IRC. Slack works well too. I tend to either review the IRC logs or catch up on Slack and if I see something on which I can maybe help, I dive in.

I also think that the wiki is at different times too verbose and too terse and links, but I have been reluctant to dive in, even though I know all changes are reversible. I wonder how hard it would be to do an alternative beginners version of the important pages, with links back and forth. Very easy, probably. There must be an easy way for one of the gurus to tell us which pages are visited most often.

I’m alone in a big city with no other indiewebbers that I’m aware of, but I try to join the virtual IWC and the people there have been super helpful. You might want to give that a try. Mind you, I have no idea what timezone you are in … Most likely UK, but possibly not.

As for your final paragraph, all I can do is echo and say Amen.

What with the London and Dublin podcast festivals, I reckon #hearsay2017 should be a blast. @thisheadstuff @hearsayfestival

Just need to test a non webmention webmention

And Wired doesn’t want me to bookmark its page. Hey ho.

What is different about this iteration of white nationalism is how the movement is framing its ideas, and the place those ideas occupy in U.S. politics. One of the chants white nationalists repeatedly turned to as they marched in Charlottesville on Friday night and Saturday was “white lives matter” — a direct response to the “Black Lives Matter” movement that emerged after the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri, police in August 2014 and the resulting protests. So depressing, and salutary to read this minutes after finishing listening to the latest episode of the astonishingly good series Seeing White, from Scene on Radio.

In the past couple of days, prompted by Marty McGuire’s write-up, I raved about the potential of Audiogram to help promote the podcast by making it easier to share audio clips to social media – by turning them into video clips. This afternoon, having managed to get tomorrow’s episode edited early, and having had to chop quite a few interesting digressions, I thought I would have a serious play.Tl;dr: It worked. I’d show you here, but I haven’t found an easy way to upload video to Known yet. If you want to see the result, you can go to Patreon right now.Installing Audiogram was not entirely plain sailing. Marty used Docker, and so despite warnings from other IndieWeb friends, I tried the same. All went well out of the gate, but then fell at the first. Something to do with virtualbox. So I switched to Homebrew and that did the needfull. Even then, though, Audiogram wouldn’t start, but the error message made it clear that I needed to update node.js and npm. That done, it still wouldn’t start.Turned out I already had a local server running, via MAMP, and that was getting in the way. Switching off that server, and all was good.That was two days ago. Today, I tried to use it for serious, and although there were plenty of hiccups along the way, I got there.The instructions for modifying the theme are very straightforward, and with a bit of trial and error I was able to create a background for any future clips.Uploading the audio, inserting the caption, all that was dead simple thanks to Audiogram’s editor. Actually generating the videos, though, generated error after error, and some of them scrolled through several screens. But I kept my nerve, turned to search engines and StackOverflow and eventually got there.Some of the fixes seemed to be pure voodoo. There’s an invisible file that one of the Audiogram developers suggested deleting. The first time I tried that, it worked beautifully. The second time, not so much. Nor the third. But then, it worked again, at which point I called a halt, for now; a wise decision in my opinion.I’m looking forward to seeing whether clips will attract listeners to the podcasts in their entirety. I put the first one on Patreon because the episode is not yet public, although Patreons have received it. I’ll probably use clips there as bait and see how it goes. Once episodes are public I’ll send clips to Twitter and, maybe, Facebook which will, I think make it relatively easy to trace any impact. And if the whole process isn’t too hard (getting to the first video uploaded took almost three hours today) then I can imagine it might be useful to promote older epsiodes too, when there is a news peg.So, grateful thanks to Marty McGuire and WNYC.

.@schmarty Thanks to your terrific write-up I amazed myself and got #Audiogram working. Looking forward to trying it for real.

A link to a paper by Rich Borschelt, describing his frustration at the failed model of science communication. As Hawks notes:The sad thing is that such workshops and conferences are funded again and again by organizations on the logic that they are going to do something about science literacy.Amen.

Really super, fully comprehensive explanation that should make life easier for anyone wanting to make more use of WordPress in the IndieWeb.

Really interesting write up from Marty McGuire about how he made use of WNYC’s Audiogram to create audio snippets to syndicate to silos. Aside from the use of Docker – which I don’t understand in the slightest – this seems like something I could manage. clammr was a complete bust for me. It’ll be interesting to see how this works out for Marty, whether it brings new listeners.

I wonder what Jonathan Meades means when he describes a specific kind of English meatball as “a big ralph”

Meanwhile, in California, pollution is coming from somewhere else entirely … www.motherjones.com/environme…

@_MatthewDillon And, of course, you won’t be surprised to learn that we got a lot of utterly misdirected flak for that.

Of course, and I wasn’t suggesting for a minute that not being able to grok something is any reason to give up on it.

It was more my way of excusing myself from having so much difficulty understanding what was happening in the black box without opening it up to investigate fully.

In the meantime, my Mom uses FB (but not Twitter) and doesn’t see much from me there because I don’t cross-post much. And we’re both OK with that.

Struggling to understand how different bits of the #IndieWeb work in WordPress, I received some very sound advice from lots of people, including this little exhortation from @chrisaldrich:I’ll admit I had to read it about 3 times before I grokked it myself, but it also was a great general and practical intro to the inherent value of microformats.If that were what it took to grok Facebook or Twitter, would anyone beyond a small, self-selecting cadre of geeks be using them?I thought not.

Not sure whether you mean incoming webmentions or outgoing webmentions that aren’t working, but for outgoing, there’s no class=“u-in-reply-to” on your post about Colin Walker’s post.