Aaron Parecki

#100daysofindieweb

100 Days of IndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Thu, Dec 22, 2016 9:25am -08:00

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!

Portland, Oregon

2 likes 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #100days #indieweb

Thu, Dec 22, 2016 9:25am -08:00

Day 100: A Website for my 100 Days of Music #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Thu, Mar 30, 2017 2:42pm -07:00

I wanted a way to quickly browse and share songs from my 100 Days of Music, so I thought I would make a page with links to each song. Clicking on any of the tracks opens up a video player with the description of the song.

I am curious to find out which songs people like the best, so to start with, I added some Google Analytics code to the page. I track events for each time a video is started, paused, when the video finishes playing completely, and if a video was interrupted by starting another. Hopefully this will provide some interesting data over time.

I want to add a more robust feedback mechanism, possibly even a simple "heart" button people can click, but I'm not sure how I want to handle that yet so that will have to wait until later.

I've made download links available for each track, in case you want to use these songs in your own projects! At the bottom of the page you'll see the copyright notice. I've decided to make these all available via a Creative Commons Attribution license, so feel free to use them for various projects! All I ask is that you let me know when you've used a song, preferably by writing a post about it and linking to the track on my website! That way it will show up as a comment on my post, like Marty's podcasts!

https://aaronparecki.com/2016/12/29/21/day-9

The URL of the website is:

100.aaronparecki.com

and because emoji are fun, I made an emoji subdomain redirect to it as well, for no practical purpose:

💯🎶.aaronpk.com

Portland, Oregon

1 repost 3 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #100daysofmusic

Thu, Mar 30, 2017 2:42pm -07:00
Day 99: Making Micropub implementation reports more discoverable #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Wed, Mar 29, 2017 9:46pm -07:00
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 am making the report summaries all live under micropub.rocks, rather than be split between micropub.rocks and micropub.net. I updated the URL structure for the summaries on micropub.rocks to be more consistent:
- https://micropub.rocks/implementation-reports/servers/
- https://micropub.rocks/implementation-reports/clients/
The corresponding URLs on micropub.net now redirect to micropub.rocks. I also added a header bar on the spreadsheet views so that you can navigate back to the home page as well as to the other set of reports while viewing the spreadsheet.

Hopefully this makes things a little easier to find!
Portland, Oregon

1 mention

#100daysofindieweb #micropubrocks

Wed, Mar 29, 2017 9:46pm -07:00
Day 98: Importing Past Checkins with OwnYourSwarm #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Tue, Mar 28, 2017 4:58pm -07:00

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.

When you click "Import", the processing flow for that checkin is started in the background. There is unfortunately no feedback in the UI on its progress yet, but in a couple of seconds you should see the checkin appear at your website. Shortly after, any coins, likes, and comments are sent via Webmention as well.

This is mostly laying the groundwork for adding the ability to backfill checkins that were made via the "offline" checkin feature, as well as the ability to do a mass import of your checkin history.

In the mean time, you can at least enter a checkin ID manually to trigger an import if any were missed because they were "offline" checkins.

Portland, Oregon

1 reply 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #ownyourswarm #swarm

Tue, Mar 28, 2017 4:58pm -07:00
Day 97: Updated Known's Micropub Support #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Mon, Mar 27, 2017 3:33pm -07:00

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.

I tried writing as little code as I could, and changing as little as possible about how it worked, so essentially I am just extracting the properties it knows about from the JSON request to the variables the plugin expects to find. This does mean that a few Micropub JSON features are still not supported, such as sending HTML content (Known seems to strip HTML tags from all content sent to it), and Known doesn't provide a mechanism for storing arbitrary nested JSON objects. However, I was able to get it to pass tests 200, 201 and 203 from the micropub.rocks test suite, which is enough for basic support.

It also is able to create checkins from the payload that OwnYourSwarm sends! I also made it download the photo that is attached to a checkin, rather than hotlink the Foursquare image URL.

Since I don't have commit access to the Known repo, I sent a pull request to Known with these changes. I tested everything with a local Known installation. Hopefully benwerd or mapkyca can merge the PR soon!

Hopefully this improves people's experience using tools like OwnYourSwarm and OwnYourGram with Known!

Portland, Oregon

2 likes 2 replies 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #known #micropub #ownyourswarm

Mon, Mar 27, 2017 3:33pm -07:00
Day 96: Documentation for OwnYourSwarm #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Sun, Mar 26, 2017 1:52pm -07:00
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:
Rather than repeat any of the information here, I will just send you off to read the docs! Please let me know if you have any questions! I hope to see some more implementations of people receiving checkins via Micropub soon!
Portland, Oregon

1 like 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #micropub #ownyourswarm

Sun, Mar 26, 2017 1:52pm -07:00
Day 95: Backfeeding Comments and Likes from Swarm #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Sat, Mar 25, 2017 10:45am -07:00

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

Thankfully, the Foursquare API is well documented, and has quite reasonable rate limits. It also seems to have a well-documented change policy, so is unlikely to arbitrarily change out from under me. I'm hoping this backfeed feature will be relatively stable.

Like bridgy, I implemented proxy pages for individual likes and comments on Swarm. The page is marked up with h-entry, and includes the author name, photo, URL, as well as the comment text. Swarm also has the ability to send "sticker comments", which I render as an <img> tag in the comment body.

Regular comments look like you'd expect.

Likes look similar, and have fallback text in the comment body.

I took advantage of specific behavior I've seen on my checkins in order to build a polling schedule that won't overload my server. For the most part, people only like and comment on recent checkins. After a couple days, a checkin is unlikely to get any new comments.

When a new checkin is posted, the user's polling interval is reset. OwnYourSwarm will check for new responses after 30 seconds. If none are found, it will wait 60 seconds, then 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, then finally a few more long-term tiers: 1 day, 2 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days. Of course as soon as you post a new checkin, your polling interval will be reset to 30 seconds and will start the cycle over. This hopefully will provide a good balance between quickly sending feedback for recent checkins, while also finding feedback on older checkins as well.

The nice thing about the Foursquare API is they provide an endpoint for retrieving the last N checkins for a user, and the data returned includes the number of likes and comments. This means I only need to hit one API endpoint to retrieve the last 100 checkins and can tell if there is new activity on any of them. I then make another API request to retrieve the checkin details only when there are new comments.

Portland, Oregon

3 replies 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #ownyourswarm #swarm #backfeed

Sat, Mar 25, 2017 10:45am -07:00
Day 94: Webmentions for Coins in OwnYourSwarm #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Fri, Mar 24, 2017 2:01pm -07:00

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

Here's a checkin on Swarm:

Here's how it looks on my website:

OwnYourSwarm creates a web page for each coin award on your checkin, then sends a webmention to your post!

Here's what one of the comments above looks like on the OwnYourSwarm web page:

Of course it's marked up with the Microformats2 h-entry, so that my website can parse out the icon, text and number of coins!

To get my website to recognize the number of coins awarded, I used a vendor-specific Microformats2 property, "p-swarm-coins". Based on the recommendations for vendor-specific properties in Microformats2, I chose the prefix "swarm" and the property "coins".

This is consumed by p3k, and added to a new property of the comment. I had to also add support for this property to XRay and webmention.io since they are part of the chain of how I receive comments.

Now I'm excited about getting points on Swarm again!

Portland, Oregon

2 replies 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #checkins #swarm #ownyourswarm

Fri, Mar 24, 2017 2:01pm -07:00
Day 93: Polling for Photos in OwnYourSwarm #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Thu, Mar 23, 2017 11:51am -07:00

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.

Since OwnYourSwarm uses Foursquare's realtime API, it will receive a POST request almost immediately, often before the photo exists at the API. This means the initial Micropub request might be missing the photo.

Today I made OwnYourSwarm send a Micropub update request to update your post after the photo is uploaded. When you post a checkin, if there is no photo, then OwnYourSwarm queues a background job on a 15-second delay. It will then check after 15 seconds to see if a photo exists, and sends an update request with the photo URL if so. If still no photo is found after 15 seconds, it will wait another 30 seconds and try again. This continues for the following schedule: 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour. We'll see if this is too much polling, but the rate limits on Foursquare are relatively high. (500 requests per user per hour). This does mean that every checkin with intentionally no photo will be requested from Foursquare 8 times.

I had originally planned on using this same polling schedule to later pull back responses to your checkins (likes, and comments), but Ryan pointed out that I can probably use a simpler and more efficient polling schedule since the Foursquare API provides a method to return the last N checkins.

Portland, Oregon

1 like 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #micropub #ownyourswarm #foursquare #swarm

Thu, Mar 23, 2017 11:51am -07:00
Day 92: Indicating the Audience of Posts #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Wed, Mar 22, 2017 9:40am -07:00

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.

Today I added a new property to my posts to indicate the context in which I posted the message, and I indicate it in the top of the post where the reply context lives.

Here's an example of my latest post that I sent to a mailing list. It is now much more obvious that this post is not directed at the general audience of my website, but instead is directed at a different audience.

I've chosen to store this in a new Microformats2 property in my posts called "audience", the value is an h-card describing the audience of the post.

Here's a post from last year when I originally pointed out the problem with not showing the context of the post. I've updated the post to indicate the audience it was sent to.

Portland, Oregon

1 like 2 replies 2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #p3k

Wed, Mar 22, 2017 9:40am -07:00
Day 91: Video and Audio for Micropub.rocks tests #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki
Tue, Mar 21, 2017 10:16am -07:00

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 updated the test suite to allow video and audio uploads for test 104, 203, and 300.

Marty was quick to test his podcast client Screech with it, so his client now passes test 300! When an audio file is uploaded to the test suite, the post preview shows an audio player with the uploaded file.

Portland, Oregon

2 mentions

#100daysofindieweb #micropubrocks

Tue, Mar 21, 2017 10:16am -07:00

Day 90: Person-tags for OwnYourSwarm Checkins #100DaysOfIndieWeb

Aaron Parecki

Mon, Mar 20, 2017 11:51am -07:00

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.

If any of the people in your checkin also use OwnYourSwarm, then their URL is sent as their personal URL instead of their Foursquare profile. (Swarm doesn't provide a field to enter your website, so I can't make it look there.)

Here's a test checkin I made with two person-tags (myself and some spam account that friended my test account.) Swarm always includes the "with x, y, z" text in the checkin text when you tag someone in the checkin.

Notice that the checkin comment in this one is sent as HTML! When the checkin text includes mentions of people, OwnYourSwarm now sends the content as HTML with the appropriate hyperlinks. Here's what this checkin looks like in the JSON request that OwnYourSwarm sends, including the person-tags and HTML content.

{
  "type": [
    "h-entry"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "published": [
      "2017-03-20T11:05:57-07:00"
    ],
    "syndication": [
      "https://www.swarmapp.com/user/10827223/checkin/58d01a050acb6a497ee585e4"
    ],
    "content": [
      {
        "value": "with aaronpk, Asha",
        "html": "with <a href=\"https://aaronparecki.com/\">aaronpk</a>, <a href=\"https://foursquare.com/user/80541223\">Asha</a>"
      }
    ],
    "category": [
      {
        "type": [
          "h-card"
        ],
        "properties": {
          "url": [
            "https://aaronparecki.com/",
            "https://foursquare.com/user/59164"
          ],
          "name": [
            "aaronpk"
          ],
          "photo": [
            "https://igx.4sqi.net/img/user/300x300/QREPPTELDVOJ5CE5.jpg"
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "type": [
          "h-card"
        ],
        "properties": {
          "url": [
            "https://foursquare.com/user/80541223"
          ],
          "name": [
            "Asha"
          ],
          "photo": [
            "https://igx.4sqi.net/img/user/300x300/80541223-EKXLLRPVBJ4GI2A0.jpg"
          ]
        }
      }
    ],
    "checkin": [
      {
        "type": [
          "h-card"
        ],
        "properties": {
          "name": [
            "Hollywood Theatre"
          ],
          "url": [
            "https://foursquare.com/v/42814b00f964a520db211fe3",
            "http://hollywoodtheatre.org",
            "https://twitter.com/hollywoodtheatr"
          ],
          "tel": [
            "(503) 281-4215"
          ],
          "latitude": [
            45.535709269884
          ],
          "longitude": [
            -122.62089771776
          ],
          "street-address": [
            "4122 NE Sandy Blvd"
          ],
          "locality": [
            "Portland"
          ],
          "region": [
            "OR"
          ],
          "country-name": [
            "United States"
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

If you just mention someone in your checkin without tapping the + icon to actually check them in, then no person tags will be created, but the content will still be sent as HTML.

{
  "type": [
    "h-entry"
  ],
  "properties": {
    "published": [
      "2017-03-20T14:32:24-07:00"
    ],
    "syndication": [
      "https://www.swarmapp.com/user/10827223/checkin/58d04a684287c97a80e5da53"
    ],
    "content": [
      {
        "value": "With aaronpk",
        "html": "With <a href=\"https://aaronparecki.com/\">aaronpk</a>"
      }
    ],
    "checkin": [
      {
        "type": [
          "h-card"
        ],
        "properties": {
          "name": [
            "Hollywood Theatre"
          ],
          "url": [
            "https://foursquare.com/v/42814b00f964a520db211fe3",
            "http://hollywoodtheatre.org",
            "https://twitter.com/hollywoodtheatr"
          ],
          "tel": [
            "(503) 281-4215"
          ],
          "latitude": [
            45.535709269884
          ],
          "longitude": [
            -122.62089771776
          ],
          "street-address": [
            "4122 NE Sandy Blvd"
          ],
          "locality": [
            "Portland"
          ],
          "region": [
            "OR"
          ],
          "country-name": [
            "United States"
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}