Aaron Parecki

Tantek had an idea for a community challenge to ship some sort of IndieWeb feature every day of December. Anyone can contribute, just make sure you blog about it!

After far too long, I finally launched support for importing multi-photos from Instagram via OwnYourGram!

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'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! 

For quite some time, we've been running my IRC/Slack gateway so that our main #indieweb IRC channel is also available in Slack. It's great because it allows people to use the nice mobile-friendly Slack client, while also not locking ourselves into a proprietary platform. The bridge is also used to allow people to join the chat from our web interface.

Today I closed a long-standing request on XRay to return the HTTP status code from the retrieved page, as well as parsing the <meta http-equiv="Status" content="410 Gone"> tag in the HTML. I also now return the final URL that XRay retrieved the document from, after following any HTTP redirects that were sent.

Last week, Barry Frost released Micropublish, a Micropub client written in Ruby. It's a very slick interface for posting a few kinds of posts. I noticed that his "category" field looked really nice, and discovered that he was using a Bootstrap plugin called "Token Field". Today I added this plugin to Quill, so now everywhere that you previously had to enter tags as comma-separated values, it's now using this "token field" UI.

aaronparecki.comDay 18: I updated my reposts to show the full contents of the post I reposted rather than just the URL.Day 19: I updated my website to automatically fetch the contents of my reposted URLs when I make new reposts.Day 24: I updated my reply posts to be able to show the full contents of the post I'm replying to.Day 25: I updated my website to automatically fetch the contents of the posts I reply to.XRayDay 20: I added Instagram support to XRay, so now XRay returns data when given Instagram URLs.Day 21: I added Twitter support to XRay, although you need to pass your own OAuth keys to XRay in order for it to fetch tweets.Day 22: I updated a few things in XRay to make it easier to deploy to shared hosting, and simplified its dependencies.LibrariesDay 23: I published my timezone lookup tools as a standalone library, and updated XRay and Quill to use the library instead of the duplicated class.

Today I worked on automatically expanding the contents of my reply contexts whenever a new post is created. I also have a utility to fetch the reply context for older posts. I ran it for the first page of replies on my replies feed, and I'm super excited that they are looking pretty good now!

Following last week's work on displaying full repost content, I modified those templates to be used to display reply context in my reply posts.

Today I published my code for finding the timezone of a specific location as a standalone library.

Today I made a few changes to XRay to make it easier to deploy in more kinds of environments. I also removed a bunch of CSS/JS dependencies and simplified the UI a bit.

Continuing yesterday's work, today I added support for parsing Twitter URLs to XRay.There were a couple tricks to make this work. I wanted to make sure that Tweets are always expanded to include the most data possible, and also wanted to avoid needing to make a bunch of HTTP requests. Scraping from the twitter.com website wasn't an option, since some of the data isn't available or would require additional HTTP calls to fetch. (For example I would have to fetch every t.co URL to expand them.) So I set to work using the Twitter API to fetch the tweets.

XRay is my service that parses web pages and extracts information from them. Right now I mostly use it to parse comments, but now that I've been adding support for reposts, it's used there as well.Today I added support for XRay to extract data from Instagram URLs!This means anything that uses XRay will now return structured data when given an Instagram URL, just like how it parses h-entry and other Microformats. Unfortunately, Instagram does not provide timezone data for the published date, only a Unix timestamp. So if the photo is tagged at a location, then XRay will look up the appropriate timezone for that location and adjust the timezone of the published date accordingly!Here's what the parsed JSON looks like for this photo. Note that the timezone is set to East Coast because this photo was taken at MIT.{ "data":{ "type":"entry", "url":"https://www.instagram.com/p/BM4rGs-lApG/", "author":{ "type":"card", "name":"Aaron Parecki", "url":"http://aaronparecki.com/", "photo":"https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-19/s320x320/14240576_268350536897085_1129715662_a.jpg" }, "content":{ "text":"Here again" }, "photo":[ "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/e35/14269001_1162908790471145_6084871298582839296_n.jpg?ig_cache_key=MTM4NTA0NjQ2MjAyNzc5NTAxNA%3D%3D.2" ], "location":[ "https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/" ], "published":"2016-11-16T16:07:06-05:00" }, "refs":{ "https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/":{ "type":"card", "name":"Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)", "url":"https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/206258876/", "latitude":42.360011410484, "longitude":-71.091869836761 } }}In addition to my website using this for reposts and comments, when I paste that URL into IRC, Loqi uses XRay to expand it and provide a little text preview.

Yesterday, I updated my website to show the full contents of reposts. Today, I took that to the next step, and I now automatically fetch the contents of reposts when they are made. I also expanded the repost display to include showing the photo if I reposted a photo!

At the beginning of last year when I was working on rebuilding p3k, I made the decision to drop showing the full contents of my reposts in favor of launching the new site sooner. It's been bugging me for a long time, since it means that my reposts aren't really reposts at all, they're just a list of links.Today I took the first step in showing the full contents of my reposts. Since my posts are all based on mf2 property storage, I updated my templates to display the post like one of my posts if the "repost-of" property is an object rather than just a string.Now my reposts look like this!

aaronparecki.comDay 11: I dropped the web font in favor of a handful of system fonts for various platforms.Day 13: I added support for drawing curved maps lines to Atlas, which I use to generate the maps on my site. Now my travel plans show a nice line for each flight leg.Day 16: I improved the display of comments on my posts, including displaying some basic HTML formatting from comments, autolinking comment text, and showing images.