Aaron Parecki

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

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.

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

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.

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! 

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 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. 

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.

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:

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

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

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.

Sometimes, I've posted content to my website that is directed at a specific group, such as a mailing list or an IRC channel. When viewed on my website, these posts end up looking out of context.

I realized that I had actually made a few of the Micropub.rocks tests more strict than they should have been. There were a few tests about uploading photos, when really the thing they were testing was how to upload files of any sort. The spec even mentions video and audio explicitly, so the test suite should accept those as well.

Today I added support for person-tags and mentioning users to OwnYourSwarm. If you tag someone in your Swarm checkin (e.g. tap the + icon and find them in the list), then it will be converted to a person-tag in the h-entry. In addition, any usernames you mention in the text of your checkin will cause the content to be sent to your Micropub endpoint as HTML, including hyperlinks for the names of people mentioned.