Aaron Parecki

Note: I will be keeping this post up to date based on the latest plans.

From Hollywood: 4:15am

Bike 3.7mi (~30m) to Gateway TC, arrive by 4:45.

From Gateway, attempt to get on any of the following Green Lines to Clackamas TC: 4:56 5:19 5:31 5:44 5:59

• If all trains are full, bike to Oregon City (14.3mi, 1h 45m) 6:00am-7:45am goo.gl/maps/FYUDCiRcu442

If all goes well catching the train, will arrive at Clackamas TC before 6:45

Clackamas TC to Oregon City: 7.5mi ~1 hour

• goo.gl/maps/vZEnXjvwhLF2 (warning: Google does not know about 205 path all the way)
• ridewithgps.com/routes/24258104

Oregon City

Arrival time in Oregon City will be between 6:20 - 7:20 by train+bike, or 7:45 by bike. Wait in Oregon City for people to meet up.

• Singer Hill Cafe opens at 6:30

From Oregon City: 7:45am

Leave Oregon City before 7:45am. It will be about 14 miles to the riverbank, ~1h 45m.

• Summary: goo.gl/maps/c1N9R2LfgRU2
• Details: ridewithgps.com/routes/24258326

Arrive at riverbank at 9:30am, during the partial eclipse. There will still be 45 minutes of partial eclipse until the peak.

Eclipse Times

• Start of partial: 09:06:02
• Start of total: 10:18:40
• Peak: 10:19:01
• End of total: 10:19:25
• End of partial: 11:38:37

Seriously Simple Podcasting is a great Wordpress plugin for hosting your own podcast. However, the number of episodes it includes in the RSS feed is tied to the number of items you include in all your other RSS feeds as well. 

If you want your podcast listeners to be able to find old episodes, you'll need to make sure that all your podcasts appear in the feed all the time, since some clients like iTunes will treat your RSS feed as authoritative, and delete episodes from their directory when they disappear from the feed.

Tonight I took a plunge into the WordPress plugin to see why it was only including the last 10 posts. It turns out the plugin will actually show the number of posts of all your other RSS feeds, and also provides a hook to override that. Why they don't expose that in the interface I don't know.

So, rather than making all your RSS feeds show all of your posts (which will slow down your site and use a lot more of your server's bandwidth), I wrote a plugin that overrides the default setting!

Download this plugin to your plugins folder, and enable it in the WordPress panel! You can download the zip linked below, or just copy and paste this super tiny amount of code into a file in your plugins folder.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Include All Podcast Episodes in RSS Feed
Plugin URI: https://aaronparecki.com/ssp-include-all-episodes-in-rss-feed
Description: This plugin enables displaying all podcast episodes in the Seriously Simple Podcast feed
Version: 1.0
Author: Aaron Parecki
Author URI: https://aaronparecki.com
License: CC0
*/

add_filter('ssp_feed_number_of_posts', 'ssp_modify_number_of_posts_in_feed');

function ssp_modify_number_of_posts_in_feed( $n ) {
  return 10000;
}

Note that after you install the plugin, you'll have to change something about your podcast (upload a new episode, change the description of an episode, whatever) in order to get the plugin to regenerate the RSS feed since it seems to cache it.

Below are notes from my workshop at the Quantified Self 2017 conference in Amsterdam. Thanks to everyone who participated in the workshop!

These are some criteria I use when determining whether a tool will actually be useful to me, and whether I want to invest money and time in the product.

Effort vs Value

How much active effort does it take to use? On a scale of:

• Completely automatic
  
  • FitBit is always on, tracks sleep automatically
    
• Easily accessible
  
  • Jawbone UP requires a button press to track sleep, but is always on my wrist so it's easy
    
  • Withings scale requires no additional effort to upload/sync after stepping on the scale
    
• App on a phone
  
  • Requires extra work to unlock the phone and find the app
    
  • e.g. Sleep Cycle app requires launching the app and setting the phone on your bed
• Manual data entry
  
  • e.g. in a paper notebook, or manually adding to Google Sheets

Once you determine the level of effort the tool requires, ask yourself whether you are willing to put in that effort. Sometimes the value of a tool is high enough that you're willing to go to great lengths to use the tool.

Syncing

How does the device sync? Does it require that a company run servers? Does the device download directly to your own computer?

For example, the Withings scale only talks to the Withings servers. You can download the data from their servers later.

The Eye-Fi card can download directly from the card to your computer, which doesn't require a third party service to be running in order for the device to work.

Exportability

What kind of export options are available from the tool? Planning on the service at some point shutting down or planning on moving to a new tool later will mean you will want to choose a tool that ranks higher on this list.

• Full data portability - The tool provides a complete export and import, and you can expect to be able to import the data into another tool later. Almost no services support this, likely because there aren't very good standards defined for what the raw data should look like.
  
• API to export data continuously - The tool provides an API that exposes the data and can be used to connect with things like IFTTT.
• Export in machine-readable format - The tool does not provide an API, but does allow manual exporting in a machine-readable format. Things like exporting CSV files, JSON files, etc. This is the minimum bar a service must hit before I will consider using it.
• Export in non-machine-readable format - The tool provides an export, but it is in a format that is not machine readable, e.g. PDFs or images.
• No data export - The tool does not support exporting data at all.

How does the tool make money?

There are several ways tools make money, and you should be aware of the profit motive of any tool you use. There is no "right answer" and no "wrong answer" for whether you should use a tool based on this, but it's important to be aware of.

Did you pay just one time to buy a device?

• Things like FitBit charge exponentially more for the device than the manufacturing of it costs, because they don't charge you for membership later. 
  
• If you've paid only once but continue to cost the company money because they have to maintain servers for the device to work, then the company will likely try to sell you a new device in order to continue making money from you.
• Customer acquisition is often a huge cost to companies, and if each customer only pays once (how many wifi scales do you really need), then each customer is not going to be very profitable especially if the customers also incur costs on the company.

Are you paying a monthly subscription?

• If you are paying monthly for a tool, then chances are the company is working in your best interests since they will want to retain you as a customer.
  

Is the company making money off your data?

• Often times a company will be making money off the data they collect from their customers. The data can be useful in aggregate, so the company might want to encourage lots of people to use the tool to be able to collect enough data to make it valuable.
  
• This is not necessarily bad, but you need to be aware of this tradeoff.
• I've never paid any money to Foursquare, but I continue to use the app and allow them to use my data because I get a lot of value out of their tool.

Battery Life

For portable devices, battery life is often a huge concern. People often have different preferences for this as well. Some people are willing to charge a device every night, others want to not think about it for months.

My FitBit battery lasts around 5-7 days. That's enough to go out of town for the weekend and not worry about bringing my charger. I also can't charge my FitBit at night, since I wear it to track my sleep.

Related to battery life is what connector the device uses to charge. Is it a proprietary connector? That's usually less ideal since it can be more expensive to replace, and is harder to borrow chargers if you need. Thankfully most devices are moving towards charging via Micro USB or USB-C, so it's usually not too hard to find connectors.

Competition

Another thing to keep in mind is whether the tool you're considering has competition in the market. Are there other options you can switch to if this service shuts down, or if your device breaks?

Are there other services that provide this or similar functionality? If not, you might end up "stuck" as a customer, and the company will have little incentive to improve things or reduce costs.

Longevity

What will happen to the device if the company shuts down?

A Jawbone UP is completely tied to the company existing. The band has no interface, and requires syncing with their iOS or Android app to continue working. If the company shuts down their servers and unpublishes the app from the stores, the device will be nothing more than a decorative bracelet.

A Withings scale will still be a scale if the servers shut down, since it actually has a visual display on the device.

The listing for my house in Eugene just went live! If you know anyone looking for a house in a great location, feel free to send them this listing!

http://www.barbarawest.com/listing/OR/Eugene/1910-Charnelton-St-97405/58441596

I'm excited to announce that Micropub is now a W3C Recommendation! It's been a long road, but we made it! This is the final stage in the W3C spec lifecycle, and means that the spec has gone through several stages of review, and all parts of the spec have been implemented by at least two people.

Incubation and Selfdogfooding

Micropub began in 2013 when I outlined a simple API to create blog posts and short notes for my website, and published it on the IndieWeb wiki. I implemented it on my server as well as in a few new client applications, and was quickly using it day-to-day. The main design goal with Micropub is that it should be easy to implement, and it should build on top of existing standards: OAuth 2.0 and the Microformats 2 vocabulary.

Micropub is also intended to be implemented incrementally. Rather than having to read, understand, and implement the whole spec, you can start by implementing the basics of just creating simple text posts. You can later expand your implementation to support more complex objects, as well as editing and deleting posts.

Implementations and Interoperability

One of the benefits of supporting Micropub on your server is that it allows you to leverage other peoples' work in building an interface to create posts on your own website. By 2014, there were already six independent server implementations, and four client implementations other than my own.

Over the next years, more and more people built out Micropub support in their blogging systems, including plugins for WordPress, Known, Kirby and more. Many client implementations have popped up as well, for a variety of platforms including the Micro.blog iOS application, a Ruby web app, an XMPP chat bot, and more. I also wrote a Micropub proxy service OwnYourGram which imports your Instagram photos to your website, and another called OwnYourSwarm that does the same for Foursquare checkins.

Micropub at the W3C

In 2015, the Social Web Working Group decided to adopt the Micropub spec to fulfill the client-to-server API aspect of our charter. 

After taking the initial spec from the IndieWeb wiki and writing it up in W3C format, I brought it to the working group as an Editor's Draft. After working on it within the group for a few months, we resolved to publish it as a Working Draft in January 2016. 

W3C Spec Lifecycle

Publishing a Working Draft is typically the first time the spec will be noticed by other groups within the W3C, as it's the first time a working group signals that a spec is intending to reach Recommendation status. Micropub went through 5 revisions of Working Drafts from January to July 2016, gathering feedback from implementers and incorporating it into the spec. The changes ranged from editorial clarifications, to changes that affect the implementations such as names of properties or response formats. You can see all of the changes in the Micropub working drafts here.

At the point the working group is satisfied that the spec is in good shape, the group can request that the spec be promoted to a Candidate Recommendation. To do so, the group must demonstrate that the spec has received "wide review" from people outside of the working group. We used GitHub Issues to get and track feedback, to make it easy to show the feedback received and how any feedback was incorporated into the spec. Publishing a Candidate Recommendation requires the approval of the W3C director.

Test Suite and Implementation Reports

The spec then stays in the Candidate Recommendation stage for a minimum of four weeks. This time is used to gather feedback from other W3C member companies, as well as gathering implementation reports from anyone interested in the spec. Implementation reports are meant to collect information on which parts of the spec are being implemented, in order to get a sense of how mature the spec is and how well it's written. While the implementation report may look like a checklist you have to complete, it's totally fine to submit it with only a few boxes checked. It's more of an evaluation of the spec than an evaluation of your implementation.

In the W3C Social Web Working Group, we set an intentionally high bar for our specs to graduate out of Candidate Recommendation. In order to be promoted from Candidate Recommendation to Proposed Recommendation, our group decided that each feature of the spec must be implemented by at least two independent implementations. This helps ensure that the spec really does encourage interop between implementations.

I created a test suite, micropub.rocks, that you can use to test your client and server implementations. The test suite helps you fill out the implementation report, and also is a great tool for debugging your application as you're building it out.

If you're building a server, micropub.rocks will pretend to be a client and will send you requests that hit all the edge cases of the spec. If you're building a client, you can use micropub.rocks as a server to test how well your client can create and edit posts.

Proposed Recommendation

At the point the working group has determined that all features of the spec have been implemented, and that the spec has been reviewed by people outside the working group, the group can decide to request that the spec be promoted to Proposed Recommendation. The spec can't have any substantive changes between Candidate Recommendation and Proposed Recommendation, but things like typo fixes are okay. The W3C director must approve the request to transition to Proposed Recommendation. The Proposed Recommendation step is one last chance to broadcast widely that the W3C believes the spec is ready to publish as a Recommendation, and gives the W3C Advisory Committee an opportunity to formally object to any aspect of the spec.

Micropub reached Proposed Recommendation status in April 2017.

Recommendation

The final step is to publish the spec as a W3C Recommendation. In order to be promoted from Proposed Recommendation to Recommendation, the W3C Advisory Committee and the Director must approve the request. Once a Recommendation, the spec is finished, and can only be changed by submitting Errata.

Getting Started

In addition to the test suite, there are already many clients and servers you can try out yourself! We've been documenting Micropub clients and servers on the IndieWeb wiki, so have a look around!

If you're building a blogging platform, you can allow your users choose from a wide variety of posting clients by implementing the Micropub spec.

If you're building a posting client and want it to work with many different server backends instead of hard-coding it to Twitter or other proprietary APIs, implement the Micropub spec and you'll quickly have people eager to start using the app!

I hope this post has been a useful overview of what I've been working on for the past several years, and gives you a bit of a sense of what it's like to work on specs at the W3C!

I just added my favorite new relatively unimportant feature to my website!

I added my Swarm checkins to my website a few weeks ago, which has been super fun. One thing I always thought was missing from Swarm was knowing whether a friend was still at a venue they checked in to. Since I have checkins on my own website, I can do that now!

So now, when you're viewing a checkin on my site, if I am still at that location, you will see a pulsing blue dot next to the venue name!

This works because my phone always tracks my GPS location and reports it to my website already. My website compares my last location with the last checkin, and if I'm still nearby, will show the dot!

I am on the fence about whether to count today's sprint towards this goal. I started this morning by diving into catching up on accounting in my 3 Quickbooks files, which is something I've been trying to get better about doing regularly since I finally filed my taxes on time for the first time in 6 years. I spent a little over 2.5 hours on the accounting, and managed to get all caught up. (Of course I didn't screenshot that for obvious reasons.) So on that front, it was a successful morning. However, it was also over 80 degrees today which is way hotter than my comfort level and we don't have A/C in the apartment. This led to a relatively unproductive afternoon, and I never got enough energy up to do anything more creative. So on that front, I didn't make progress on my more interesting projects today. Overall, at least I have another data point to reaffirm that I am definitely more productive in the mornings!

At the end of March, I finished my #100DaysOfIndieWeb and #100DaysOfMusic projects. It was a lot of fun to focus on those during the winter months, but I'm also glad to free up my days now that they are done. It turns out 100 days is a lot of days, and I don't think I'll do such a hard #100days project again. However I did enjoy the focus I was able to achieve, and enjoyed knowing every day what I needed to work on. So for the month of May, I'm starting a new, slightly different experiment.

Along with @anomalily and @beeminder, I'm dedicating May to "Maniac Mornings". We've done some "Maniac Weekends" in the past, which is essentially a 2-day sprint trying to cram in as much focused time as possible, and is a shorter version of "Maniac Week" which is like locking yourself in the basement for a whole week with no outside distractions. With my upcoming travel to IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf and Nürnberg, and with the goal of not feeling completely overwhelmed or burnt out at the end, "Maniac Mornings" is an attempt to scale back the idea to a sustainable level.

For the month of May, the goal is to spend 2+ hours every morning on focused and high-impact work, with no distractions. High-impact work is things that have a direct impact on my goals, which at the moment are getting the WebSub spec through the W3C process, updating and printing my OAuth 2.0 book, and a new as-yet-unnamed secret project.

Part of the "Maniac" aspect is that I will also be recording a timelapse of my computer screen including a picture from my webcam!

I'll try to post these every day, and I'll also stitch them together at the end of the month into one long video!

The large clock on the screen is a small Electron app that embeds a tiny bit of Javascript and CSS to render the clock. It also sets a background timer that runs the OSX "screenshot" command every 30 seconds, and saves the images to a folder. You can download "Maniac Clock" here!

I'm super excited to announce that DreamHost will be hosting our Homebrew Website Club PDX meetups for the rest of 2017! We've got all the dates planned out, so put them on your calendar! 

• April 5th
  
• May 10th
• June 7th
• July 12th
• August 2nd
• September 13th
• October 4th
• November 8th
• December 6th

The meetups are from 5:30-7:30pm at the DreamHost Portland office, at 621 Southwest Morrison St, 14th floor.

You can see all the events on the IndieWeb wiki and on Calagator.

I wanted a way to quickly browse and share songs from my 100 Days of Music, so I thought I would make a page with links to each song. Clicking on any of the tracks opens up a video player with the description of the song.

I am curious to find out which songs people like the best, so to start with, I added some Google Analytics code to the page. I track events for each time a video is started, paused, when the video finishes playing completely, and if a video was interrupted by starting another. Hopefully this will provide some interesting data over time.

I want to add a more robust feedback mechanism, possibly even a simple "heart" button people can click, but I'm not sure how I want to handle that yet so that will have to wait until later.

I've made download links available for each track, in case you want to use these songs in your own projects! At the bottom of the page you'll see the copyright notice. I've decided to make these all available via a Creative Commons Attribution license, so feel free to use them for various projects! All I ask is that you let me know when you've used a song, preferably by writing a post about it and linking to the track on my website! That way it will show up as a comment on my post, like Marty's podcasts!

The URL of the website is:

100.aaronparecki.com

and because emoji are fun, I made an emoji subdomain redirect to it as well, for no practical purpose:

💯🎶.aaronpk.com

The Micropub implementation report summaries had gotten kind of scattered around various URLs, so today I cleaned it up and consolidated everything. I also added the number of submitted reports to the home page, along with links, so that they are much easier to find.

I am making the report summaries all live under micropub.rocks, rather than be split between micropub.rocks and micropub.net. I updated the URL structure for the summaries on micropub.rocks to be more consistent:

• https://micropub.rocks/implementation-reports/servers/
• https://micropub.rocks/implementation-reports/clients/

The corresponding URLs on micropub.net now redirect to micropub.rocks. I also added a header bar on the spreadsheet views so that you can navigate back to the home page as well as to the other set of reports while viewing the spreadsheet.

Hopefully this makes things a little easier to find!

I normally don't like to launch a feature that's this rough around the edges, but I decided to anyway. I added a section to the OwnYourSwarm dashboard that will let you import a specific checkin by its Foursquare checkin ID. 

When you click "Import", the processing flow for that checkin is started in the background. There is unfortunately no feedback in the UI on its progress yet, but in a couple of seconds you should see the checkin appear at your website. Shortly after, any coins, likes, and comments are sent via Webmention as well.

This is mostly laying the groundwork for adding the ability to backfill checkins that were made via the "offline" checkin feature, as well as the ability to do a mass import of your checkin history.

In the mean time, you can at least enter a checkin ID manually to trigger an import if any were missed because they were "offline" checkins.

I think this is the first time in the 100days project that I've worked on a project that is not my own! Today I added support for JSON requests to Known's Micropub endpoint. I also added support for JSON checkins that OwnYourSwarm sends.

I tried writing as little code as I could, and changing as little as possible about how it worked, so essentially I am just extracting the properties it knows about from the JSON request to the variables the plugin expects to find. This does mean that a few Micropub JSON features are still not supported, such as sending HTML content (Known seems to strip HTML tags from all content sent to it), and Known doesn't provide a mechanism for storing arbitrary nested JSON objects. However, I was able to get it to pass tests 200, 201 and 203 from the micropub.rocks test suite, which is enough for basic support. 

It also is able to create checkins from the payload that OwnYourSwarm sends! I also made it download the photo that is attached to a checkin, rather than hotlink the Foursquare image URL.

Since I don't have commit access to the Known repo, I sent a pull request to Known with these changes. I tested everything with a local Known installation. Hopefully benwerd or mapkyca can merge the PR soon!

Hopefully this improves people's experience using tools like OwnYourSwarm and OwnYourGram with Known!

Today I wrote up documentation on OwnYourSwarm. It actually took quite a bit longer than I expected to write everything up. The documentation walks through each component:

• Authentication
  
• Checkins
• Photos as a Micropub update
• Receiving coins via Webmention
• Receiving backfed likes and comments

Rather than repeat any of the information here, I will just send you off to read the docs! Please let me know if you have any questions! I hope to see some more implementations of people receiving checkins via Micropub soon!

I'm pretty excited to say that OwnYourSwarm is now backfeeding likes and comments from Swarm checkins!

Thankfully, the Foursquare API is well documented, and has quite reasonable rate limits. It also seems to have a well-documented change policy, so is unlikely to arbitrarily change out from under me. I'm hoping this backfeed feature will be relatively stable.

Like bridgy, I implemented proxy pages for individual likes and comments on Swarm. The page is marked up with h-entry, and includes the author name, photo, URL, as well as the comment text. Swarm also has the ability to send "sticker comments", which I render as an <img> tag in the comment body. 

Regular comments look like you'd expect.

Likes look similar, and have fallback text in the comment body.

I took advantage of specific behavior I've seen on my checkins in order to build a polling schedule that won't overload my server. For the most part, people only like and comment on recent checkins. After a couple days, a checkin is unlikely to get any new comments.

When a new checkin is posted, the user's polling interval is reset. OwnYourSwarm will check for new responses after 30 seconds. If none are found, it will wait 60 seconds, then 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, then finally a few more long-term tiers: 1 day, 2 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days. Of course as soon as you post a new checkin, your polling interval will be reset to 30 seconds and will start the cycle over. This hopefully will provide a good balance between quickly sending feedback for recent checkins, while also finding feedback on older checkins as well.

The nice thing about the Foursquare API is they provide an endpoint for retrieving the last N checkins for a user, and the data returned includes the number of likes and comments. This means I only need to hit one API endpoint to retrieve the last 100 checkins and can tell if there is new activity on any of them. I then make another API request to retrieve the checkin details only when there are new comments.

OwnYourSwarm will now send webmentions for all the coins that Swarm awards to your checkins!

Here's a checkin on Swarm:

Here's how it looks on my website:

OwnYourSwarm creates a web page for each coin award on your checkin, then sends a webmention to your post!

Here's what one of the comments above looks like on the OwnYourSwarm web page:

Of course it's marked up with the Microformats2 h-entry, so that my website can parse out the icon, text and number of coins!

To get my website to recognize the number of coins awarded, I used a vendor-specific Microformats2 property, "p-swarm-coins". Based on the recommendations for vendor-specific properties in Microformats2, I chose the prefix "swarm" and the property "coins".

This is consumed by p3k, and added to a new property of the comment. I had to also add support for this property to XRay and webmention.io since they are part of the chain of how I receive comments.

Now I'm excited about getting points on Swarm again!

An interesting feature of the Swarm app is how it handles photos uploaded to checkins. If you check in and attach a photo, the checkin is actually created before the photo is uploaded. If you're on a spotty Internet connection, you'll see this because your checkin will exist and you'll get points for it, but there won't be a photo yet. The app will then continue to upload the photo separately, retrying if it fails. This is actually a really great app design on the part of Foursquare, but does lead to some tricks with the API.

Since OwnYourSwarm uses Foursquare's realtime API, it will receive a POST request almost immediately, often before the photo exists at the API. This means the initial Micropub request might be missing the photo.

Today I made OwnYourSwarm send a Micropub update request to update your post after the photo is uploaded. When you post a checkin, if there is no photo, then OwnYourSwarm queues a background job on a 15-second delay. It will then check after 15 seconds to see if a photo exists, and sends an update request with the photo URL if so. If still no photo is found after 15 seconds, it will wait another 30 seconds and try again. This continues for the following schedule: 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour. We'll see if this is too much polling, but the rate limits on Foursquare are relatively high. (500 requests per user per hour). This does mean that every checkin with intentionally no photo will be requested from Foursquare 8 times.

I had originally planned on using this same polling schedule to later pull back responses to your checkins (likes, and comments), but Ryan pointed out that I can probably use a simpler and more efficient polling schedule since the Foursquare API provides a method to return the last N checkins.