Excursions avatar

Excursions

It was great listening to @EddieHinkle and @macgenie talk about all things IndieWeb on this episode of Micro @monday. It was nice knowing about the journey of Indiegenous too. A good listen 👍🏽

Though I agree with Sundar here, I think the sentiment is missing the core issue EU raises - “rapid innovation, wide choice and falling prices” is for a market where Google isn’t competing - handsets. However it kills competition to it’s core services.

Changing Date Format in Blot

So, in one of the recent posts on indiewebifying the blot.im site, I was faced with a roadblock.

I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.

Well, I had reached out to David and apparently there is a yet-to-be-documented way.

As per the official document for developers, the standard way to get the post’s publish date is with property { { date } }1. However, if so inserted, it inserts the date in a default format - MMMM DD, YYYY. Even though it is a format that displays well, it does not provide the complete information on date, up to time level. For the microformats2 dt-published time tag, it is important that the post publish date is inserted as valid ISO-8601. So to do that, just use the below code snippet instead of { { date } }.

{ { # entry } } { { # formatDate } } MM YYYY DD { { /formatDate } } ... { { / entry } }

Make sure you remove spaces in between the curly brackets (refer footnote 1). Wherever the snippet { { # | / formatDate } } is added, it would be replaced by post’s publish date in the format defined in between the tags.

In David’s own words, “any of Moment.js’ date formatting tokens work (formatDate is basically Moment.js behind the scenes)”. So you should be able to customise it completely as per your need.

  1. As clarified by David in an earlier open queries post, there is at this point no way to escape the parsing of the code references for properties that Blot uses. It ends up replacing them with the value. So adding spaces is my way to work around that limitation at this point.↩

I have been following a daily evening routine these days to refresh my user recommendations. And I have started following so many new people whose updates I was missing out on. Pretty stoked, I think I have got a working system here!

Email indeed is the perfect, and oldest, decentralised social network for communication. You do not need a particular platform to be part of it. But that is also what makes it terrible. If you can’t control the inlet, it has to flood the house - bring it to stand still.

That’s the one reason that completely negates all the positives for the e-mail as communications platform. So many smarter people have tried making this a usable system. Alas. No success till now. Getting a decentralised platform up and taking it mainstream with its innate complexities is a huge ask, especially amidst the pull of the simplicity of silos. Just look at mastodon.social.

Simplicity matters. I struggled for days explaining to my dad why he need not have a “www” in his e-mail address. And not have a “@” while typing in the webaddress for Gmail. After a point, he stopped using e-mail, nudging me every now and then on why I wasn’t on Facebook where he could just @ me. Apparently, “it’s a closed silo” is not a reason enough.

Update - IndieWebifying the Blot site

Given the recent focus on the working on Micro.threads, I hardly had any spare time for working on exploring Blot. Micropub remains a distant dream. In line with the first update, I thought the best way to get going would be to IndieWebify the site first.

So I took some time out today and started with incorporating the basic principles. Some were addressed without much hiccup. Some have left me with some questions.

  1. Web Sign In is enabled. However, it did throw a curveball. Given that I already have my primary site active, how can I include rel=me links point to any of the Twitter/Github services? Concern is primary as I cannot link my Twitter/Github profiles to multiple homepage. May have to identify a different unused profile?
  2. h-card microformat is incorporated; so the site provides information on me now.
  3. h-entry microformat is added to all the post entries. There is one issue though. I could not find any way to format the published date that gets displayed on the posts. The post properties exposes just , which gets the default format of MMM DD, YYYY. And I do not think it’s a valid ISO-8601 as expected by the microformats2.
Update: I did sort out the way to format the published date.

Stuff to sort out next

  • Webmentions, both send and receive. I think I may keep this for later. I do not think I want to bring in the interactions at this point
  • Support for different posts types - replies, likes and reposts. I need to be able to add these posts type. However, more I think about it, I come to realise biggest benefit is going to be once Micropub is setup and site is able to send the Webmentions at the least. So even this might take some time.