Aaron Parecki

Back in October, I wrote a bunch of short mini-reviews on products and services that I use regularly. I published them all on a single page called "Favorite Things". In the past, I've written a couple of reviews on Amazon and then copied them to my website as a blog post.I decided it was time to be able to publish proper reviews from my own website, including having them show up in Google with the little stars, what Google now calls "Rich Snippets."Searching for Google's documentation on how to mark up a web page to show the Rich Snippet reveals an interesting pattern. Currently, their documentation provides three recommended markup styles: Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD. All three use the Schema.org vocabulary.

This is a description of all the pieces and tools that I use to post to my website and handle comments and responses. Many of the pieces are open source and/or based on open protocols that you can implement yourself.WritingI write posts using an app called Quill. It's an open source application that I wrote. I run a hosted version at quill.p3k.io, and you can run it on your own server if you want as well. Quill provides an interface for posting longer blog posts with embedded images like this, as well as short text notes, and a handful of other kinds of posts like bookmarks.Quill doesn't actually store any posts itself. It is just an interface for writing posts.When I click the "post" button in Quill, it sends a Micropub request to my own website, which then creates the post and displays it on my website. Micropub is an API standard for creating short notes and posts, and it supports photos and videos too!You can start using Quill if your website supports Micropub. There are some Micropub plugins for various CMSs, and it's also not too hard to write an endpoint yourself if you're into that sort of thing.Posting to Twitter/FacebookI never write posts directly on Twitter or Facebook. Instead, I write a post in Quill, and then check the boxes for where I want to syndicate the post.