Concluding my All-In IndieWeb WordPress 14 Day challenge
Over the last few months I have engaged in 14 day challenges to learn something new or hack on stuff I already do. This past two weeks I decided to go all in on WordPress IndieWeb. I found the experience full of joyful frustrations, new understandings, and a community of wonderful people trying to build a better web.
Even though just having your own space or domain is all you really need to make a site part of the IndieWeb there are tools you can use to connect to a larger community.
This revolves around a type of markup called microformats2. This is a special bit of code added to the HTML on websites. This allows sites to talk to each other and share information about an author using tools called APIs.
I wanted to see if I could just use WordPress.
My Previous Set-Up
I ran my blog on WordPress for long-form writing. Most of my IndieWeb interaction used my Known blog https://quickthoughts.jgregorymcverry.com.
In fact I spin up Known instances like most people add clothes to a wardrobe. Each MOOC or pop up learnign expericne I do requires a new set of clothes.
Yet I found my self intrigued at David Shanske and Chris Aldrich’s set up where all life gets documented from one canonical domain.
So two weeks ago I set out to do the same.
What Did I Accomplish?
I began by first trying out my current theme Hueman. It has an on and off again working relationship with IndieWeb. After getting some help I realized I needed to try a new theme for the full experience.
I tried SemPress, ZenPress and then settled on David Shanske’s 2016 fork. These themes all have the correct micoformats but the 2106 fork had the post kinds I liked.
IndieWeb, using microformats 2, has a taxonomy of different types of user generated content called post-kinds. These can range from RSVPs, notes, articles, to the latest jam you checked out.
I then added the post-kind menus by copy them from Chris’s page. You can see the list of all my different posts on my homepage.
I also continued my UX research with users completing two more interviews. The WordPress cognitive labs project will continue even though my 14 day challenge is over and regardless of where my workflow ends up.
Finally I took Alan Levine’s Dimension theme, forked it, and then added microformats. I have to tweak how some of the code works. This was my first time editing a WordPress theme beyond a few header changes. I want to thank Alan for all his help. I will continue to make sure a pretty web based business cards has the semantic markup to be “just as pretty on the inside.”
What I Didn’t Finish?
I never got micropub working. That’s a bummer. Micropub is a special API, one of those tools that allow two websites or sevres to talk, that allows you to publish to your website using different apps I got a tease how awesome writing and hanging out became with a micropub client. No matter how hard so many people tried we just could not figure out a solution. I want to thank Tim Owens, David Shanske, Michael Bishop, Aaron Pernacki, and Mathais Pfefferle for many tireless nights trying to get me going.
I am a WordPress user so I am used to this. One plug-in breaks another and you don’t know why something stops working until you play a round of plug-in whack-a-mole.
Bummed but I was never broken. WordPress builds resilience. You know at any given time something some where will break something else over there.
I never finished the edits to the Press This plugin to make it compatible with Post-Kinds. This was a just never got around to it and was supposed to account for the lack of micropub.
What Did I Learn?
A major goal of this porject was to see if I could roll out IndieWeb WordPress for my students. I can’t, and that is okay. Most of my students are starting their first website. Just getting them online is enough,
I also learned so much about how we can do outreach and what kind of support the IndieWeb WordPress community needs.
What Do I Believe?
First the folks behind the IndieWeb Community are amazing. The entire house of cards is built by 3–4 people. They all rock.
I also believe a larger focus should be put on bringing more themes in microformat2 compliance rather than trying to maintain new themes.
I believe we need to move away from trying to propo up a plug-in palace and raise forking armies to invade existing WordPress spaces. Sure some plug-ins have to be there to run off site like Webmentions, micropub and others. I just wonder if we would be better off trying to get semantic linkbacks and microformats into existing themes.
The IndieWeb community needs to think about a release cycle for all plugins. Again this entire project is supported by a few people. They give up almost every weekend. In many cases each plugin is maintained by one person.
This can cause issues. One plugin may introduce a conflict in another plugin. We need extensive plugin beta testing before releasing in the wild.
A lack of an “unofficial” release cycle also makes documentation difficult. You don’t know if you should use the README.md file in GitHub or the native “More Details” page included in WP.org. As a nontechnical contributor I want to help with documentation but its hard when change is the only constant.
What Will My Future Entail?
I do not know. My old workflow was better. Mainly because the flow worked. It didn’t on WordPress. Trying to keep up with Twitter chats while syndicating each tweet from the WordPress editor was impossible. When I was doing this with Known the process worked. I knew how each post-kind would display and a change to the Bridgy plug-in or my theme would have zero effect. I do love predictability.
Yet I know my IndieWeb community (remember its a domain and community not a set of tolls and compliance) all live on WordPress. Hard to be the teacher when you don’t model tool use.
I also loved the idea of housing everything I do in one space. Yet I also thought about my different audiences and collapsing contexts.
Up next is my 14 day Drupal IndieWeb experiment. You can see me launch it tomorrow night the Virtual Homebrew Website Club.
