Monkinetic Weblog

Towards IndieWeb: POSSE and Notes

#posse #blogging #webmention #indieweb

https://t.co/15Q3wsMv9J

POSSE is the #IndieWeb acronym for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. It's something I'm playing with in Goldfrog.

A common idiom is to differentiate Notes (small microblog-like posts) from Articles (longer blog posts with a title). Right now Goldfrog has a basic blog Post type, with (ID, Title, Slug, Tags, Body). I'd like to keep the posting experience as simple as possible, so I'm thinking about how to handle something that literally just has a Body (and Tags, because I parse and attach any #hashtags - see? - in the content).

My Posts have an ID, though a uniqueness constraint on the slug means I could use that instead. But Notes don't have a title to "slugify" (it is too a word). Goldfrog also writes every post to the filesystem as a Jekyll-compatible markdown file, so I would need to figure out what format and filename/slug would be appropriate so that they get a permalink.

Url Options

• 2020/01/16/note-ab43f6 unique hash id
• 2020/01/16/note-13:25 HH:MM

Actual Progress

An upcoming build of Goldfrog will support new "kind" of Post, albeit only differentiated by the presence of a title. I've made a few UI and backend changes to support notes:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

• Notes get a slug that is constructed from the string "txt-" + a shortened hash based on the note's content, like txt-8213d2c
• Since notes are short enough to look weird on a typical post-detail page, I created a new "Daily Digest" page on the site that shows only the posts for a given day. This is the default target for the permalink for Notes. The slug is used as the id attribute on the note, so the link jumps directly to the note on the digest page. This results in a "permalink" like "YYYY-MM-DD/#txt-8213d2c"
• The Syndicate options (currently for Twitter and Mastodon) are now enabled by default for notes.
• Clicking the "post form" link takes me to a longer post form with options for a title, custom slug, tags, and a larger content area for writing.

Still to work out

• I'm thinking about implementing Webmentions for Goldfrog, since I control the code.
• I'm still pondering how to connect a post or note with it's syndicated version, to allow likes from this site to propagate to the syndicated site. That feels... harder than I want to dig into right now, but I'll be looking for ideas.