In reply to a post by Chris Aldrich
I’ll see you your blogroll and add in images and descriptions as well! … Perhaps what we really need is to give some love to that Link Manager in core to update it to OPML v2 and add in the rel attributes from XFN microformats to the links?
Chris Aldrich
Thank you Chris for pointing out your work on your own blogroll, and how WordPress itself might be of use here.
Adding images is a nice feature. I added faces in my blogroll in 2003, because I generally subscribe to people not sources, and showing them in my blogroll was a nice way to visualise my blogging peer network, and make blogs look more like the social tools they are.
My blogroll in 2003
Bringing that back would be cool. Especially if relying on gravatars where possible.
So if I understand your postings correctly, the Links manager in WordPress also creates a separate OPML file. Now if this OPML file could e.g. be automatically loaded into a microsub server like Yarns, that would be even better. Then it would all be under the same WP roof.
I notice that the Links Manager allows categories and multiple at that, but tags next to categories would be even better. To do ‘Berlin coders into gardening posts this week’ type of searches in a reader. Having all the tags as categories would look cluttered in WP. I have little use for the defined XFN fields, I’d rather have tags that concern various facets of a blogger’s profile (tech, Drupal, infosec, parent, Barcelona, French, Arabic, rock climbing) to enable fast and detailed cross sections of my feeds. Having those tags here would presumably more easily allow me to carry them over into my reader somehow. Basically trying to figure out if WP Links manager could be the source of such data.
In terms of my ideal feedreader lots of the other features could then happen in a microsub/pub client.
One other question to explore: is there a way to bulk load links into the link manager. It is likely easier to build a spreadsheet with all relevant info for my current 200 feeds or so first. Do you add link by link by hand, Chris?
One quick enhancement that everyone can make easily is to populate the element of RSS channels with, well, a description:
Mine says:
The personal weblog of Peter Rukavina, a Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada-based printer, writer and developer.
Ton, yours is:
by Ton Zijlstra
Which could be more descriptive 😉
There’s also an RSS channel-level element for which can be used to include an avatar for the channel, which could be pulled out to use as an avatar in the blogroll. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be populated in many of the blogs in my RSS feed.
‘by Ton Zijlstra’ comes from the blog’s tagline. I’ll see if I can switch it to the notes in my h-card.
I’m still tinkering away at pathways for following people (and websites) on the open web (in my case within WordPress). I’m doing it with an eye toward making some of the UI and infrastructure easier in light of the current fleet of Microsub servers and readers that will enable easier social reading without the centralized reliance on services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, LinkedIn, et al.
If you haven’t been following along, here are some relevant pieces for background:
The beginnings of a blogroll
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager
Was WP Links the Perfect Blogroll All Along? by Ton Zijlstra
Generally I’ve been adding data into my Following Page (aka blogroll on steroids) using the old WordPress Links Manager pseudo-manually. (There’s also a way to bulk import to it via OPML, using the WordPress Tools Menu or via
/wp-admin/import.php?import=opml). The old Links Manager functionality in WordPress had a bookmarklet to add links to it quickly, though it currently only seems to add a minimal set–typically just the URL and the page title. Perhaps someone with stronger JavaScript skills than I possess could improve on it or integrate/leverage some of David Shanske’s Parse This work into such a bookmark to pull more data out of pages (via Microformats, Schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, or Dublin Core meta) to pre-fill the Links Manager with more metadata including page feeds, which I now understand Parse This does in the past month or so. (If more than one feed is found, they could be added in comma separated form to the “Notes” section and the user could cut/paste the appropriate one into the feed section.) Since I spent some significant time trying to find/dig up that old bookmarklet, I’ll mention that it can be found in the Restore Lost Functionality plugin (along with many other goodies) and a related version also exists in the Link Library plugin, though on a small test I found it only pulled in the URL.Since it wasn’t completely intuitive to find, I’ll include the JavaScript snippet for the Links Manager bookmarklet below, though note that the URL hard coded into it is for
example.com, so change that part if you’re modifying for your own use. (I haven’t tested it, but it may require the Press This plugin which replaces some of the functionality that was taken out of WordPress core in version 4.9. It will certainly require one to enable using the Links Manager either via code or via plugin.)javascript:void(linkmanpopup=window.open('https://exanple.com/wp-admin/link-add.php?action=popup&linkurl='+escape(location.href)+'&name='+escape(document.title),'LinkManager','scrollbars=yes,width=750,height=550,left=15,top=15,status=yes,resizable=yes'));linkmanpopup.focus();window.focus();linkmanpopup.focus();Since I’ve been digging around a bit, I’ll note that Yannick Lefebvre’s Link Library plugin seems to have a similar sort of functionality to Links Manager and adds in the ability to add a variety of additional data fields including tags, which Ton Zijlstra mentions he would like (and I wouldn’t mind either). Unfortunately I’m not seeing any OPML functionality in the plugin, so it wins at doing display (with a huge variety of settings) for a stand-alone blogroll, but it may fail at the data portability for doing the additional OPML portion we’ve been looking at. Of course I’m happy to be corrected, but I don’t see anything in the documentation or a cursory glance at the code.
In the most ideal world, I’d love to be able to use the Post Kinds Plugin to create follow posts (see my examples). This plugin is already able to generally use bookmarklet functionality to pull in a variety of meta data using the Parse This code which is also built into Post Kinds.
It would be nice if these follow posts would also copy their data into the Links Manager (to keep things DRY), so that the blogroll and the OPML files are automatically updated all at once. (Barring Post Kinds transferring the data, it would be nice to have an improved bookmarklet for pulling data into the Links Manager piece directly.)
Naturally having the ability for these OPML files be readable/usable by Jack Jamieson’s forthcoming Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (for use with social readers) would be phenomenal. (I believe there are already one or two OPML to h-feed converters for Microsub in the wild.) All of this would be a nice end -to-end solution for quickly and easily following people (or sites) with a variety of feeds and feed types (RSS, Atom, JSONfeed, h-feed).
An additional refinement of the blogroll display portion would be to have that page display as an h-feed of h-entries each including properly marked up h-cards with appropriate microformats and discoverable RSS feeds to make it easier for other sites to find and use that data. (This may be a more IndieWeb-based method of displaying such a page compared with the OPML spec.) I’ll also note that the Links Manager uses v1 of the OPML spec and it would potentially be nice to have an update on that as well for newer discovery tools/methods like Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML Subscription list, which I’m noting seems to be down/not functioning at the moment.
Syndicated copies to:
Flipboard icon
Tumblr icon
WordPress
Twitter icon
Happy donderdag! Mensen volgen op sociale netwerken is wat we het liefste doen. Het is de backbone van het sociale internet, ooit gestart door de blogrolls. De meeste weblogs hadden in de zijbalk een lijst met favoriete blogs die ze volgden, al dan niet met een RSS feed er bij vermeld. Er lijkt een hernieuwde interesse te zijn in de blogrolls.
Het is allemaal nog pril en de discussie is soms wat technisch. Maar als je leest hoe Chris Aldrich en Ton Zijlstra over en weer pingpongen op hun eigen blog over dit onderwerp, ik word daar blij van!
De technologie is er (nog altijd) en iedereen heeft wel zijn lijstje met favoriete blogs en sites. Waarom deze niet op je site publiceren? Check de link hieronder als startpunt voor meer achtergrond.
Belangrijk leesmoment om de tijd voor te nemen
From Following Posts and Blogrolls (Following Pages) with OPML to Microsub Servers and Readers — boffosocko.com
I’m still tinkering away at pathways for following people (and websites) on the open web (in my case within WordPress). I’m doing it with an eye toward making
Lunchpraat
Glitch Podcast 18: Gaat het Indieweb het internet redden? — http://www.glitch.show
Toch nog wat zelfpromotie. Ik was recent te gast bij de Glitch Podcast, dat werd een fijn gesprek van dik een uur over De Digitale Stad, David Bowie en natuurlijk het Indieweb.
Marco Raaphorst legt uit dat je niets aan jaknikkers hebt. Doe je eigen ding! https://marcoraaphorst.nl/52624/tegengeluid/
Ik ben vrijdag op de Dutch Digital Day, eens luisteren wat o.a. Mike Monteiro en Jamie Bartlett over design, technologie en ethiek te vertellen hebben!
Blog on!
Interesting that most of the blogs I follow, the authors either don’t use Gravatar or any sort of “person” image. Many of these follows have never heard of the IndieWeb. My Gravatar image is a graphic.