Indiereader

#indieweb goal: by 2014-01-01, no longer be using twitter.com to read+reply to my friends’ content.

It’s already possible to use web action toolbelt to add indieweb reply/bookmark buttons to twitter.com and weave to expand POSSEd copies into full posts, but I think that’s as far as the “progressively enhance the twitter UI for indieweb support” train goes. Remaining pain points:

• Ads and other UI noise
• Lack of good search
• Lack of control over timeline — lists, following and blocking are the only ways to control what you see
• Very weird in-timeline threaded conversation view

Pieces in place allowing a seamless transition from using twitter.com:

• A whole bunch of indiewebcampers publishing their notes+articles on their own sites using microformats2
• An open source microformats2 parser
• App.net mark up notes with microformats2 h-entry and h-card
• h-card and xfn for follow lists, e.g. my contact list
• Shim to parse twitter.com into microformats2 data
• twitter-activitystreams to consume personal twitter feed as microformats2

Pain points still to be resolved:

• How to fall back to subscribing to someone’s twitter feed if they don’t publish their notes on their own site?
• Whether or not to support ATOM+RSS — sure there’s a lot of it around, but it’s a nightmare, and I don’t want to encourage publishing invisible DRY-violating data. Perhaps superfeedr’s normalisation will be of use
• What to do about all the wordpress blogs around with half-baked microformats support — auto-detect and use their ATOM feed? Try to find a related twitter account?

Archiving some of my old email, I find this blast from the recent past (March 2012) in Mac app idea form:

Postflow: A tool for social media power-users. Interactively create automator-like 'postflows' that allow you to quickly and effectively post the same bit of content to lots of different social networks.

With useful features, such as:

• Real-time execution and editing: Work through a postflow step by step, changing it and the content you're posting as you go along.
• Floating Results window that displays text and links to everything you've posted so far in the flow. Automatically shorterns URLS.
• Preset Variables: Set a list of commonly used items e.g. your URL, @twitter_name, other social network profile page URL, etc.
• Fully automated postflows (?): Set up postflows that take one input and does everything else by it's self.
• Extensive library of posting actions
• Quick Post UI: For small updates that still need to go out to lots of people. Forego some of the fine-grained control of a full postflow for sheer speedyness.
• Ability to add other networks through a plugin creator (?) will work provided basic API types are supported.
• Automated admin work: Change profile photo, description, details on multiple networks simultaneously.

The Quick Post utility by it's self could be given away as a free sampler of the more advanced full Postflow — gives people the 'post to lots of networks intelligently' ability, but not the advanced features or customisation

Hmm, that sounds suspiciously like a certain Yahoo Pipes clone I’m working on…

Wondering if Yahoo! still #selfdogfood YQL — mentioned in 2010 (web archive link) that it powers their homepage amongst other things, therefore much less likely to get randomly shut down.

This evening: documented Yahoo! Pipes UI in case of sudden shutdown, built first mockup of web dataflow UI using jsplumbtoolkit.com — really excellent library, exactly the right balance between functionality and framework. It gives you a lot but doesn’t dictate how to use it.

Playing with Yahoo Pipes for the first time. This is the UI I’ve been dreaming of for years. The data sources are bogged down with nasty RSS/ATOM semantics, but that’s mostly irrelevant. The important things:

• Live, context-sensitive debugging. Want to know what the data looks like at a particular point in the graph? Click there. What if I change this parameter? It updates. WHY ARE PEOPLE NOT RAVING ABOUT THIS? THIS IS HUGE!
• All parameters are programmable, but with the ability to specify defaults
• Everything is declarative — not only textually, but visually.
• One-click publish and deploy, with facilities to create basic UI and pre-fill it
• Ability to clone and reuse pipes — each pipe is a module you can use in other pipes. Take someone elses pipe and view source, change it, reuse it.

I made a Pipe to convert #microformats2 h-feed/h-entry markup into RSS from scratch in about 15 mins, having never used the tool before (bear in mind also that this is not a tool built for consuming mf2 data structures): Convert Microformats to RSS. The tiny feedback loop the Pipes tool provides, both in deploying, sharing and debugging, enabled Tantek Çelik to find a bug in his site’s markup.

Again: WHY DOES NO-ONE KNOW ABOUT THIS? If it’s because processing stodgy, outdated, DRY-violating formats is its bread and butter, fair enough. Let’s rebuild this with microformats2.