Jeremy Cherfas

Rats! All links, here and at boffosocko, link back to the article, not out to NYT.

I’ve been reminded by Chris Aldrich of something I think I knew before:[M]ost major CMSes (including Known) strip out or severely limit (for security reasons) the html that is accepted in comment fields. … Many also will mark as spam comments that have one or more URLs in them. As a result doing fancy or even mildly complicated html or markdown in replies is something for which most platforms just don’t build.That’s fair enough. As ever, spammers are spoiling things for everyone. I do have an objection, though. If I am legitimately signed into my own site which, in the #indieweb, is where I will be if replying to some other site, then I’m unlikely to inject malicious code. And if I’m a spammer, and signed in under a false flag, then I’m not likely to need such subterfuges.A really helpful CMS would, surely, allow me to do all the formatting I want on something I am generating myself, regardless of the specific type of entry.Chris makes another point:The other issue in status updates and replies is that they’re often syndicated to other platforms and it’s a more difficult issue to properly do this with each snowflake social media silo depending on how they individually handle html/markdown (or not).Well, yes. But that’s not my problem on my site. Let them strip all they want, frankly, as long as the leave the link to my reply alone. As Chris acknowledges …Either way, the end result on the other person’s site isn’t something I can ever control for, so I try not to sweat it too much. :)For now, I think I’ll sweat this just a little, and add the u-in-reply-to by hand, and hope that does the needful.

Peter Molnar’s excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That’s the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.

Flippin’ useless, @withknown import.

I winnowed the stopping place down by searching for things, using that splitting by halves technique, and discovered that the Import had choked after 318 lines – of 12058.

In reality, I ought to just give this up, but I’ll have a quick look at the database and see if I can’t screw that up.

I should have guessed; looks like it may well screw up on photos. But almost all of them are originally from Instagram, and I have the originals.

For the sake of completeness, and as a necessary stage in my web plans, I am now going to attempt to extract my files from vaviblog.com and import them here.

We’re both on the same version of #withknown, so it Should Just Work, right?

Using Quill gives me the option to create a new post as a reply. Again, my useless brain cannot remember whether Quill speaks Markdown. And currently, the bookmark opens in the same window, which means I have to remember to copy the URL I want to reply to.

Seconds later: … Nope, Quill does not speak Markdown.

Disable Markdown, and nothing changes in the bookmarklet editing window. So there IS an issue.

I pray that you’ve known this all along, you’ll forgive my “indiesplain”, and that I’m not catching the subtlety of your original post.

That post is here.

Thanks to Chris Aldrich for reminding me of the bookmarklet, which I do sometimes use, and which I sometimes forget to use.

I do seem to vaguely remember that there was a bit of a problem with Markdown. So let me test that here, with some bold and italics.

Seconds later: As I feared …

I probably have to abandon Markdown. But why should I have to? People have been asking for the ability to switch on a per post basis forever.