I will be in Amsterdam in the near future.
Monday afternoon 17 October, at the Open State Foundation’s offices.
This is my first experimental micropub based Dopplr style posting.
I will be in Amsterdam in the near future.
Monday afternoon 17 October, at the Open State Foundation’s offices.
This is my first experimental micropub based Dopplr style posting.
I have been thinking about how to share check-ins or announcements of upcoming travel, and wrote that down in the wiki section: Individualised Plazes. Previously I imported my Swarm check-ins into this site, but I do not want to use such apps anymore.
The purpose for me of sharing location information usually was to enable serendipitous meetings. When I’m at or just left some place, or will be in some city. Crossing paths between me and people in my network have led and can lead to serendipitous meetings. Such meetings are valuable.
Another purpose can be sharing a little review of a place where I’ve been that day.
I’ve named check-ins Plazes (after the first social location sharing service I used), and travel plans Dopplr (the service that used to do this so well in the past). The forms are really simple at the moment, and I’ll gradually make them more useful to me. At the linked page I’ve added some considerations on how to make such posting more useful outside this blog as well, by determining location and location related information beforehand, and by enabling discovery after posting. For now just posting is a start.
I’ve posted an example of a check-in, and an example of a future location. I draft postings through a simple form on my device that uses micropub to post it directly to this site. The forms can be extremely simple because I only need to cater to me and my habits. My personal preferences are predictable to me, and thus easy to code into a function with a handful of variable parameters. Depending on the input of the form it adds the various microformats to make the posting semantically interpretable by machines.
I think there’s no risk for RSS readers of over-sharing (nor for site visitors as the postings won’t show on the site for now). Only when I think there might be an opportunity for meeting someone I’d otherwise not meet, will I share my location. Or when I want to post a review of a place. Unlike in Swarm/Foursquare there’s no gamification going on, nor a leaderboard each week, to nudge me to check-in as often as I can to score more points. No locations to be ‘mayor’ of. Just me going about my days.
A screenshot of my check-in form, and of my ‘dopplr’ form for future locations. Both extremely simple.
Also on IndieWeb News
I hadn’t really looked, but it turns out that Mastodon has incorporated microformats. It has h-feed and h-card, h-entry (a status), and h-cite (a boost). Plaint text properties (p-), e-content, and link properties (u-) are implemented. Indeed, they all surface when looking at a profile’s HTML source. This is what makes it possible to e.g. follow Mastodon feeds as h-feed, next to the existing RSS output and ActivityPub, and that e.g. Brid.gy can do its work to carry over any interaction on a Mastodon post to a blogpost here.
What I haven’t found was what I was looking for.
The ActivityPub protocol in its specs has several so-called Activity Types that drew my attention:
Announce, to well, announce things, such as any of the following
Arrive, which can be used to check-in at a location
Leave, to check-out, or as I sometimes do, to announce I’ve been somewhere after the fact.
Travel, which can be used to announce ongoing or planned travel.
In short ActivityPub supports FourSquare and Dopplr like check-ins and travel plans. I’ve recently added that to my site in terms of microformats and was still wondering how to create a useful stream for it. I’ve been thinking about an OPML outline with schema.org attributes, or a dedicated RSS feed or h-feed. An ActivityPub stream might be of interest too, or even more. There’s a PHP implementation of ActivityPub that includes these Activity Types as well, meaning there’s potential to experiment for me.
I wonder, are there any actual implementations of these ActivityPub types currently?
In reply to How can my posts integrate better with ActivityPub? by Chris Aldrich
I’m trying to add AP to my site here to be able to provide streams to approved followers of otherwise unlisted content in my site. E.g. travel plans like Dopplr did, or Swarm style check-ins (normally posted to WP with micropub, e.g. here). Both those activities exist in ActivityStreams and thus in AP. That would be possible to follow with various existing AP clients. If more people do it, it might be useful to create a client surface to combine the various travel plan streams of others I follow and show crossing paths etc.
In reply to Who do I know in …? by Lloyd Davis There’s a static part here (who is usually in which city) and a…