David Bryant

IndieWeb Summit 2019 – Hack Day Recap

Today is day two of IndieWeb Summit 2019, emphasizing hands-on experimentation to learn more about the IndieWeb, improve your web site, and/or help other folks with their own projects.  My goal for the day was to resolve a number of the issues I was having getting core IndieWeb functionality working with my WordPress based blog. Thanks to some great help from David Shanske and Jack Jamieson (plus the power of hands-on tinkering), here’s what I accomplished:

  • Adopted a WordPress theme that’s both fully compatible with IndieWeb protocols and microformats and visually appealing to me.  Specifically I installed and switched to IW26 — David Shanske’s fork of the WordPress 2016 standard theme.
  • Enabled support for IndieAuth, WebMention and MicroPublish endpoints by adding the right <link> elements to my home page.  As part of that learned how to use the Microformats parser on microformats.io to examine and debug my own settings.
  • Set up an .htaccess file in my site’s home directory with rules to properly handle redirection to https: and to dereference  the www. prefix to site URLs.  Made the appropriate matching adjustments in WordPress and my Dreamhost admin panel.
  • Developed a better understanding of WordPress Post Kinds (after all, David wrote the plugin), customized the set to fit what I’m likely to use when I post, and tested a few.
  • Added rel-me connections to my blog for Flickr and Instagram using the WordPress widget.
  • Tested use of Quill as a micropublishing client. Successfully posted a note to my blog from Quill in Firefox on an Android phone.
  • Tested WebMention support thanks to Jack, resulting in a series of comments on our respective sites (and also highlighting a formatting bug he was able to fix on his custom WordPress theme with some help from David).
  • Added Syndication Link support and tested it by posting a review to TripAdvisor.com and a companion note on my blog reference that review.

This got me over the WordPress vs. IndieWeb theme problem I’d been struggling with and hoped to resolve today, and a lot more overall IndieWeb functionality as a bonus.  Thanks to David & Jack’s help I’m comfortable asserting that you can satisfyingly bring IndieWeb to a WordPress site, though more compatible themes and onboarding resources would both be big wins.

Check out another recommendation from me on TripAdvisor, this time for Peaked Pies in Whistler, British Columbia.   Loved their delicious Australian style pies…

(Oh, and this is a test of link syndication, another part of my IndieWeb Summit 2019 hack day experimentation.  That means you should see a small TripAdvisor icon (green binoculars) associated with this post.  If you click on that icon you’ll go to the full review on TripAdvisor.com)

Part of my ‘hack day’ project at IndieWeb Summit is getting more IndieWeb protocols working on my blog. This is a test of micropublishing on using Quill (and in this case with the web version on Firefox on Android).

Fiftieth Anniversary of Apollo 11

Apollo 11 lifted off on July 14th, 1969 so in three weeks we’ll be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of that historic mission.  I was thirteen years old in July 1969 and several years into a deep childhood fascination with the space program.  Not surprisingly I was glued to the television and newspapers for every aspect of the Apollo 11 mission and still remember how I felt watching and following along.

I’m looking forward to repeating that experience this July and am delighted to have the Internet to help me out.  For my own part I’ve taken a timeline of mission events from NASA, wrapped it in a bit of JavaScript, and created a simple web page that will help me keep track of the flow of the mission in real time (though fifty years after the fact).

I don’t have a rich collection of mission photos, videos, and artifacts, or the time to find and weave any into my mission timeline, something I knew other folks would be better positioned to accomplish.  Ben Feist and team have done precisely that in creating Apollo 11 in Real Time so I’ll also have that open continuously between liftoff on July 14 and splashdown on July 24.

Last night I watched Todd Douglas Miller’s “Apollo 11” documentary on CNN (which released it) and it brought back vivid memories of July fifty years ago.  I expect I’ll watch it several more times over the course of the next three weeks — highly recommended.

Happily both July 14th, liftoff day, and July 20th, landing/EVA day, fall on weekends so I expect I’ll set aside time both those days to reconnect with the event that was such a powerful and formative part of my youth. Might also be a good time to build a few space-themed model kits I’ve squirreled away, attend a Splashdown 50 event on the nearby USS Hornet (which recovered the Apollo 11 capsule and crew) or just listen to the official mission mixtape.

Room service Father’s Day treat ordered up for me by Michael and Camille (from far away). I sure do have marvelous kids! Love you both, always.

(This is a repost from my Instagram account back on Father’s Day, and appears here now as a test of syndicating my Instagram feed via my blog via the magic of OwnYourGram.)

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.  I think of my father every day, but Father’s Day is always special as it bridges the relationship I had with him with the indescribable joy of being a father myself.

My Dad
Me, aged six months, with my father in our house in Nashville, TN

If you have a chance to talk to your Dad today I hope you’ll take advantage of the opportunity.  Miss you Dad, love you always.

Attending IndieWeb Summit

The ninth annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, graphic artists, designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, create and improve their personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

IndieWeb Summit 2019 is happening the weekend of June 29-30 in Portland Oregon and I’m planning on being there. I’m not exactly ready, though, as I still haven’t figured out how to properly converge my exceptionally sporadic social posting habits and my WordPress-based (and decidedly old school) web site, but then that seems like a particularly good reason for attending IndieWeb Summit in the first place.  Wish me luck…
My Bavarian beer hall dinner tonight here in Berlin was "Leberkäse", which means"liver cheese" though it contains neither. Instead it’s corned beef, pork and bacon. And a fried egg on top. And some gravy. Oh, and a beer (of course). Delicious.