Brid.gy has a cool feature for automatically posting blog posts to Twitter, which is interesting because it uses Webmentions to kick off the whole process. I.e. just including the link: <a href="https://brid.gy/publish/twitter"></a> The webmention sent to brig.gy triggers it to look back at the post, parse it and look for microformats indicating what content to publish, and then posts it to Twitter. Note that this also works for Facebook and Flickr, and you obviously need to authorize brid.

I just recently finished adding support for Twitter metadata to the blog, mostly motivaged by brid.gy’s ability to use Webmentions to automatically post my blog entries to Twitter. As I worked on the Twitter metadata I wondered if other silos had their own metadata they supported. Indeed they do, and Kevin Marks brilliantly demonstrates how ridiculous the situation is by creating a blog post that appears different in every silo.

This SingularityHub post brings a good perspective on the economics of asteroid mining: Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining Asteroids Besides, the idea of our gateway to becoming a space faring civilization being bootstrapped from a space gas station is so much more Expanse level scifi that I can’t help but like it.

Looks like Google Cloud Platform now has a Free Tier. I know Google App Engine has always had a free tier, it’s nice to see Cloud Platform offer something similar. That explains why my monthly bill for hosting my blog went from $9/month to around 0.75$/month. The only thing I exceed the free tier on is egress bandwidth.

There’s a road under that, somewhere.

As Chris suggested, I have gone beyond my minimal webmentions, and thanks to the heavy lifting of Will Norris, I got to avoid handwriting a microformats parser in the process. This is what they should look like in action:

Underdash is neat project in the same vein as my VanillaJS. While VanillaJS shows you how to build common web framework sample apps using just vanilla JS, the Underdash site shows you how to make the most of JS intrinsics without the need for a JS utility library.

The End of Crowdsourcing With Russian bots on Twitter, the attack on Rotten Tomatoes scores, the deluge of fake comments sent to the FCC, and even attacks on a DARPA Network Challenge, I think 2018 is the beginning of the end for crowdsourcing. There are two problems to solve, the first is that some of these systems are trying to extract a signal from noisy data, and it only takes a small number of bad actors to intentionally inject a strong signal into that data stream and overwhelm the real signal.

Michael Singletary Hoping this post, syndication, and backfeeding works as expected! Welcome!

Chris Aldrich has the honor of being the first sender of an organic incoming Webmention received on bitworking.org, which you can see on this post. I say “organic” because I’ve been using all the testing tools listed on the indieweb.org site to test my implementation.

Chris Aldrich I suspect that next, with a tad bit of parsing using microformats, you can add some display elements to your webmentions to indicate the author, their url, date/time, and actually include the reply text to have a better UI for them. Indeed, my current implementation just shows the validated Webmention links, and my plan is to slowly enhance them over time. I think, just like in the case of the basic Webmention support, Will Norris may have my back again and have already done the heavy lifting for Microformats and Go.

Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 Test 13 Test 14 Test 15 Test 16 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 21 Test 22 Test 23

Ryan Barrett celebrating over 1 Million Webmentions in the wild. Not bad for a specification that only became a recommendation a year ago.

Feel free to ignore, just testing WebMentions. Updated to include a second link,

Drew McLellan has gone WebMention-only. It’s an interesting idea, though I will still probably build a comment system for this blog and replace Disqus.

Via Joel Spolsky, I learned that Facebook was pivoting away from engagement. Meanwhile Twitter continues to be Twitter, and Uber continues to be an ethical cesspool.

Brent Simmons asks Ten years ago or more we had several blog-specific search engines and services: Technorati, BlogBridge, and others. One of the great things about these services was not just being able to search for something but being able to set up persistent searches: that is, you’d get a search as an RSS feed, and in your feed reader you’d get results from all over the place on the thing you’re searching for.

In A Decade of Silos Has Throttled Open Content Distribution Louis Gray says: To properly make the Web as desirable and viable a platform for publishing, we need to work together to fix the distribution and discovery gaps, make content fantastic on mobile for creation and consumption, and allow for engagement that is as simple as a Like. Totally agree. I’m in the process of implementing WebMention on the blog, in the hope that it gets more traction.

According to the Chrome dev console loading a single page of my blog takes 58 requests and loads 1.1MB, the majority of which comes from Disqus. I think it’s time to write my own comment system for the blog.

Updated Rules for Settlers of Catan. The card for Longest Road has been discontinued. Instead, Largest Settlement will be declared a player and may take a turn and collect resource cards on behalf of its builder. This rule, Catanians United, gives official personhood status to settlements and classifies rolls as speech. The whole list is great.