Aaron Parecki

Earlier this year when I launched XRay, I connected Loqi the IRC bot to it so that we would get inline IRC text previews when people linked to web pages in IRC. XRay works by finding an h-entry on the page, and getting the content and author information from it. Here's what it normally looks like in IRC.

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. 

Facebook Live offers a seamless viewing experience for people to watch your livestream and then see an archived version after you're done broadcasting.

I often want to share screenshots in text chat from my computer, and I don't like sharing Dropbox links since they load a huge HTML+JS app just to show an image.Since I already have a Micropub Media Endpoint that apps like Quill use to upload photos, I thought that would be a good place to also share screenshots from. The Media Endpoint is a simple HTTP API. It accepts a file upload, and returns the URL to the file in the Location header.OSX has what's called "Folder Actions" where the system will trigger a script to run any time a file is added to a folder. I created an Automator script that will upload the newly added file to the media endpoint, and copy the resulting URL onto the clipboard.

Checkins can easily be faked. The Foursquare app does a reasonable job of preventing fake (and accidental fake) checkins, but it's still possible. If checkins weren't posted on Foursquare, but instead were posted on each person's own website, the possibility of fake checkins is much greater. What would it look like to have a way for a venue to know (and republish) checkins that it knows were real?

Here's a walkthrough of my multi-camera live switching rig that I use to record conferences and events. I've spent a while finding small enough parts so that the entire setup can fit on my bike. I intentionally created this rig with dedicated components so that no computer is required for any part of this workflow.

The thing I was most excited about at IndieWebCamp Brighton was coming up with a Private Webmention extension to Webmention. The version we outlined in Brighton was drastically simplified from previous iterations of potential ways to send private Webmentions.Nearly a week after speccing it out, I now have a first draft implementation of sending. My goal this week was to finish implementing sending private Webmentions, to get some real-world feedback on the spec.

I'm excited to announce that Micropub is now a W3C Candidate Recommendation!

When working on my photo album thumbnail navigation for this site, I wanted a way to show a square thumbnail of a photo, centered and cropped from the original version. I wanted this to work without pre-rendering a square version on the server, and without using background image tricks.

My favorite Git client is Tower. I wanted to find a way to sign my git commits despite that not being a supported feature of Tower. Turns out it only took a couple configuration options to make it work.

It's been an exciting year in the IndieWeb so far!

My DSLR camera doesn't have GPS, so normally all my photos would not include the location of where I was when I took the photo. I used to use the Eye-Fi card that did geotagging, but that is no longer supported in the new "mobi" line. I could get an external GPS unit for my camera, but that sounds cumbersome and would only work with that one camera.

I've been a long-time fan of the Eye-Fi SD cards. My primary use for them is to have all my photos automatically uploaded to Flickr from my camera. It turns out I'm lazy and having to manually copy photos off an SD card and upload them is too much work.

The videos from IndieWeb Summit are finished and online now! I put together separate video clips for the two keynote talks in the morning, and also for the demos on the second day. (Apologies for the somewhat noisy audio, the air conditioners in the space were loud!)State of the IndieWebTantek ÇelikCutting Edge IndieWebAaron Parecki, Ben Werdmüller, Kyle MahanDemos from IndieWeb Summit 2016

When I first built Monocle, I modeled it after the "timeline" or "stream" view now common in social networks, but made it possible to subscribe to h-entry feeds as well. The main UI showed a stream of posts, with the full post contents rendered inline, along with the author info and favorite/repost/reply buttons.

At IndieWebCamp Nürnberg, I didn't end up spending time on my home page design, despite a great day 1 discussion on the topic. Instead, I made a few fixes to my site, and built a quick indie reader in IRC, which shows me posts from people I'm following, and lets me reply to them from IRC as well.It's ugly, but it works!

I just launched an update to p3k which adds an integrated authorization server. This means that now when I sign in to Micropub apps like Quill, it will redirect me to my own server where I can have more fine-grained control over the access I am granting the application.

Since publishing the latest W3C draft of Micropub on March 1, there have been a few minor updates based on feedback from people who have implemented it.Simpler update syntaxThe update syntax had an extra nesting that was not necessary. The syntax changed from:replace[properties][content]=Hello+Moonto replace[content]=Hello+MoonMoving a postIf the update operation caused the post to be moved to a new URL (such as when the URL scheme is based off of the post's date, or has a custom slug that is editable), the Micropub client needs a way to know the new URL of the post.The Update Response section now includes HTTP 201 as a possible response, along with:If the update operation caused the URL of the post to change, the server must respond with HTTP 201 and include the new URL in the HTTP Location headerMore InformationYou can read the latest editor's draft of the spec here: http://micropub.net/draft/ as well as see the change log. The git commit history shows the full detailed changes.Thanks to Greg for providing feedback on his Micropub implementation.As always, feedback from implementation experience is appreciated! Feel free to file an issue, or join the #indiewebcamp chat!