Indieweb

It's about time for a write-up of the latest tweaks and developments on my site to get this note/status posting and syndicating over to twitter working, which is still a little bit messy, a mixture of plugins and self-made hacks.

There's still plenty to do, but slowly it is coming together:

- I am using normal WordPress posts, but with the custom post format of 'status' for the 'tweets'. Maybe I'll switch this to a custom post type, which will make excluding these posts from the 'normal' loop and rss feeds easier.

- I use brid.gy's 'publish' ability to send them over to twitter. Initially I wrote all the mf2 markup in each post by hand, but then I spent the better half of a sunday to hack together something for my theme's function.php. It basically did what I needed; it added the links and classes to the post's content on save. But it wasn't able to detect changes and added happily duplicate links and classes on each save. D'oh. In an attempt to learn how all this hooking and filtering works, I discovered the "bridgy publish" plugin by David Shanske. It lacked some functionality I wanted to have, so I forked & tweaked it, and the modded version now drives my current status-post to twitter via bridgy flow. :-)
Now includes options for the inclusion of backlinks

- Currently I am testing a second plugin by the same author, "syndication links", which, according to how I read the source code, should get back and store the link of the generated tweet on twitter as a post-meta-data. I already tweaked my theme to include and display this information, but currently the post-meta data does not get populated and needs some manual copy/paste once the tweet has been published.
I don't know why it is not working automatically, I need to look deeper into the code and see if my implementation is missing a little detail, I'd really like to have this without the need to manually check for the tweet-url.

One thing I want to change soon: The post of the 'status' type don't need nice titles, since I don't show their titles on my site. It would be nice if a title like "status-[post-id]" could be generated on save. Currently I'm adding this by hand.
Another idea I have: I'd like to have a selection field in the bridy publish meta-box where another 'status' posts can be selected and then it's corresponding tweet is used as a reply-to target. Plus an input for any url I want to reply to (this was one of the functions in my functions.php hack which actually worked and it was nice - I think I will add this to my forked version of the bridgy publish plugin).

Of course all of this wouldn't work without the webmention implementation that I added two years ago at the Indiewebcamp workshop at the Border None conference in Nuremberg at the core of which the plugins by Matthias Pfefferle, "wordpress-webmention" and "wordpress-semantic-linkbacks", happily purr along.

Yay for @indiewebcamp -- I haven't fiddled that much in my site's innards for a very long time, and it feels good. :-)