Aaron Parecki

Yesterday I added a Webmention form at the bottom of my posts. If you used this form, it would show you a "check status" link after accepting the Webmention request. My Webmentions are all handled by webmention.io, and its status URLs return a JSON response. This isn't particularly friendly when someone views one of these URLs in a browser, since they just see a raw JSON blob.Today I updated webmention.io to return all responses in HTML if they're made from a browser. It checks to see if there is text/html in the Accept header, and returns HTML if so, otherwise returns JSON as normal. Now when you view one of these status links, you'll see something like this.

I finally brought back the Webmention form on my website! At the bottom of my posts, you'll see a Webmention form now!

I've never really been a fan of using pinned posts on my Twitter profile, so I didn't expect this would be something I wanted on my own website. On my own home page I can just write whatever I want above my posts, so I don't really need "pinned posts" there either. However I just found a use for pinned posts, but not on my home page!I've been sharing the link to my 100 days tags with people as a way to share the content quickly. I wanted to be able to have a little intro post above the list of posts, and I realized that "pinned posts" matched the pattern of what I wanted pretty nicely! So now, on tag and channel pages on my site, I can mark a post as "pinned" and it will always show up on top! The first post I've pinned is on my #100DaysOfIndieWeb tag page.

A while ago, inspired by @adactio, I had added sparklines to my home page and tag pages. After having them for a while, I realized that my tag pages would look better as sparkline bar charts instead of as a plain line.The lines looked fine for tags that had a lot of data, but didn't look good when there were only a few data points.

Previously, OwnYourGram would check all users' Instagram feeds once an hour. I changed it to have four polling tiers, and the interval for the top tier is every 15 minutes now. This means people who post lots of photos will now see their photos on their site sooner, and because of the tiered approach, I won't be wasting resources on feeds that post infrequently.The four tiers are:Every 15 minutes (on the 0, 15, 30 and 45 minute mark) - 11 usersEvery hour (5 minutes after the hour) - 12 usersEvery 6 hours (at 00:10, 06:10, 12:10, 18:10 UTC) - 11 usersOnce a day (at 01:10 UTC) - 38 usersUsers are sorted into tiers based on the number of photos posted in the last 14 days. The more you post, the more often OwnYourGram checks your feed! If your Micropub endpoint returns an error, then you're bumped down a tier. If you're at the lowest tier and there's an error, then polling will be disabled completely until you log back in.Thanks to snarfed for suggesting the tiered approach!

I finished two updates to OwnYourGram today.There is a new page when you log in where you can see a list of your 20 most recent photos on Instagram, check whether they've been posted to your website already, and re-post any if you need to!

Knocked out a couple of minor UI improvements to Quill this morning. Previously, the reply context field would show the whole note, so super long notes or blog posts would take over the whole screen. (Issue 62)

Whenever my website receives a comment, like, repost, or other mention, I display those responses on the post's permalink, along with author information if available. For likes and reposts, I show the profile photo in a list, so there are sometimes lots of photos there.

Inspired by the "100 Day Project", I'm setting out on a goal to accomplish 100 days of visible improvements to my IndieWeb projects. The challenge is to ship something visible and post about it for 100 days. Some of the improvements may be super tiny, some of them might be big. The only requirements are that it is an improvement to something I use myself, and it must also have a publicly visible result. This means an improvement to a closed source tool that only I use doesn't count, but if it's an improvement to something like Quill, which others can use, then that counts.The other part of the challenge is to make a post illustrating each improvement with a screenshot or short video. I am posting them with the "#100DaysOfIndieWeb" tag on my website so they all appear there!If you're interested in joining the challenge, it's never too late to start! Read more on the IndieWeb wiki, and add yourself there!

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.