Aaron Parecki

Using the HTML <input type="url"> field is normally a good idea when you're asking the user to enter a URL. It doesn't make a huge difference on desktop browsers, but makes it a lot easier on mobile browsers. On iOS, when you've focused on a URL input field, the keyboard switches to a slightly different layout with different keys optimized for entering URLs.

IndieWeb Summit is soon, and is shaping up to be an exciting event! We're hosting IndieWeb Summit the same week as the (final) Open Source Bridge, in case you needed another reason to visit Portland! IndieWeb Summit will be Tuesday-Wednesday June 26-27th, with a pre-party the Monday evening before.

I have a new home on the internet. I don’t visit the Twitter home timeline or the Facebook news feed anymore. I don’t open the Instagram app except when I post a photo. I still have accounts there — I just don’t visit those sites anymore. Instead, I have my own new space on the internet where everything I’m interested in is consolidated, and I can read and reply to things from there. But before I go too far into my new online home — an IndieWeb reader — some background.

I’m always looking for fun and better ways to publish content to my website. There are several nice writing apps now, such as Byword for MacOS, which lets you write in Markdown and then converts it into HTML. Many of these kinds of apps have an option to publish to a Wordpress site, using Wordpress’ XML-RPC interface, which is more or less the MetaWeblog API.

Over the last several months, I've been slowly putting the pieces in place to be able to build a solid indieweb reader. Today, I feel like I finally have enough in place to consider this functional enough that I am now using it every day!

This release includes two new methods for quickly developing an IndieAuth client.

Just pushed a few changes to OwnYourGram this morning! Here's what changed:

It's very convenient to be able to quickly share a link to a code snippet, which is something I've mostly done using gist.github.com. While often the code snippets are sort of throwaway, I still feel bad that I'm posting them in a place that I don't control.

I've been wanting to improve the layout of my blog post archive pages for some time. Previously, the page just listed out the full contents of the last 20 posts, and you could continue navigating back 20 posts at a time. I realize that some people like reading the full posts on the archive page, rather than having to click into each one, but it wasn't easy to just skim the post titles to get a sense of what was on the page.

Ever since launching the new version of my website in 2016, I haven't had the special meta tags that Facebook, Twitter and Slack use for showing the nice preview of links shared. It's been annoying me a bit when I share a link to a blog post that they don't look good there.

Curious what I was up to in 2017? So am I! Thankfully I developed a pretty regular habit of writing short blog posts any time I finished something, so I have a nice collection of posts to draw from for this year-in-review post!

Transportation

I'm super happy to be able to add myself to the list of people who publish weather info in their posts!

Remember the old 80x15 badges we used to put on our websites? I just updated our IndieWebCamp badge with the new logo! You can use this on your own site by copying the HTML below! Feel free to download the image and host it yourself too.

My #newwwyear goal this year was to make my likes and reposts automatically POSSE to Twitter when I favorite a Tweet URL.

Swarm has had a feature for a long time where you can allow your friends to check you in. It's more than just tagging a friend in a checkin, since it actually creates a full-fledged checkin on the other person's account. It's an interesting feature of Swarm, and not something I've seen elsewhere.

At IndieWebCamp Austin, I was inspired by the discussion at the Payments session. In the session, we talked about the recent Patreon fee change disaster, and how creators could use their own websites to accept payments from their supporters.

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally published a proper IndieAuth spec!

This post is part of the IndieWeb Challenge to ship something every day of December!