Notes – Disquisitional Peregrinations

Photo Gallery as Post

I take a lot of photos, certainly with the smartphone I always have in my pocket but also often with an actual camera (my well-traveled Sony a6000). Casual shots often end up being shared in isolation via SMS, Slack or social media, while special events or travels generally end up with an album of selected photos on Flickr. As part of exploring a more IndieWeb way of sharing what I’m up to via my own personal site, I began to wonder how to integrate into that my established photo workflows.

That turned into a lively discussion at this week’s IndieWeb Camp Amsterdam, with some great suggestions from folks already bringing their photos into their posting stream. IndieWeb post types include ‘photo’ which is perfect for casual photos taken along the way, but I didn’t want a collection of twenty of thirty pictures from an organized album to turn into a long string of individual photo posts. And there is no ‘photo gallery’, which could either directly represent an album of my photos on Flickr, or gather a set of ‘photo’ posts as a single, aggregate one. A simple compromise we reached during the IndieWeb Camp discussion is to create a general ‘note’ post that links to the Flickr album.

One happy by product of this conversation was hearing that many people like using Flickr for their personal photo collections, and that Flickr has an excellent API for scripted access. That offers possibilities for future more automated or micropub integration, but I’ll begin now with the manual way and see what I learn as I go. Stay tuned for my first test of that…

Road to IndieWeb – testing micropub

Testing another nifty IndieWeb service, this time “micropub”, which lets me publish blog posts from client applications like Quill (https://quill.p3k.io). It takes a little setup on my home page and blog, so I need to make sure I get it right. Let’s see if this works (he says, pushing the ‘Post’ button)…

…(seconds later) Hey, the post appeared here on my blog, and you’re looking at it. Success! Next step in my road to IndieWeb is using “microsub” and a client like Monocle to keep track of new posts from others in the IndieWeb community.

Earthquake – Sensed but not Felt

At 10:33am local time today a 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck Southern California near the town of Ridgequest, about 270 miles from my house. We didn’t feel it here, but my Raspberry Shake home seismometer recorded it, as you’ll see from the trace below:

Seismograph trace — 6.4 earthquake in California on July 4, 2019

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)

Further IndieWeb Summit 2019 hack day experimentation, this time testing Webmention interactions. Thanks for the help, http://jackjamieson.net!

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).

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.

The next step in my exploration of the wonders of the IndieWeb is being able to syndicate content from my blog (here) to social media. This is enabled by the IndieWeb plugins I’ve installed here via WordPress along with the syndication service Bridgy. Let’s see if this works…

I’m spending the day today at IndieWebCamp SF Decentralized Web Hackers Day hosted in Mozilla’s San Francisco office as a lead-up to this week’s Distributed Web Summit. My personal adventure today is getting up to speed on IndieWeb basics and enabling as many of them here on orangemoose.com as time (and trial & error) allows.

Decentralization is one of the core aspects of the IndieWeb, which aims at enabling a people-focused alternative to today’s very (if not alarmingly) centralized “corporate web”, but doing so by applying familiar, existing technologies in careful ways that keep the user in control of their data including identity, posts, code, created content, location, and more.

Happily today’s Hackers Day is set up to encourage hands-on experimentation and adoption, and the room is full of wonderfully knowledgeable people eager to help. Look for another post after the day is done, and we’ll see how well I do.