https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2022-11-18-le-retour-des-flux-web-et-pas-que-rss.html

https://snarfed.org/2022-12-03_48181

https://monocle.p3k.io/preview

https://btrem.com/2021/04-svg-microformats

https://aaronparecki.com/2015/04/26/22/html-is-my-api

I agree 100% with the author here. As I opined in my own article about gaming on Linux, I opined that you have to meet people where they are. To the extent people curate their own reading list, they use RSS/Atom readers, not microformats readers. Trying to force the adoption of microformats readers will only lead to people who rely on RSS/Atom ignoring microformats-only sites.

Microformats are neat and I an interested in their potential to add social functionality to individual websites. However, microformat parsers are far-less used than RSS/Atom feed readers, and there is too little awareness of RSS/Atom readers as it is.

Very interesting project to add IndieWeb blocks to WordPress's Gutenberg editor. I will be following it, although I am not keen on its adding custom post types - something I prefer to do with my own plugins.

An IndieWeb plugin for implementing IndieWeb functionality in WordPress blocks. I have added some IndieWeb functionality to my site, although it does not support it by default. I am curious how it would work on my theme - but I will wait until information about its effect on page speed and its options/database tables (if applicable) are available. Also not keen on its adding two custom post types - I prefer to not tie that to a plugin I may have to uninstall.

Where

My annotations broadly flow into two spaces:

Obsidian

My private Obsidian-based vault is where I collect the notes and actively work on, modify, edit, and expand them if and when necessary. This is also the space where I'm broadly attempting to densely interlink them together for future use and publication in other venues. If I could, I would publish these all on the web, but I've yet to find a set up with a low enough admin tax that I can publish them inexpensively in a way I'd like them to appear (primarily with properly linked [[WikiLinks]]) while still owning them in my own space.

I've been experimenting around with using Blot.im as a solution to display them here https://notes.boffosocko.com/, but at present it's a very limited selection of my extant notes and doesn't include Webmention or other niceties I'd like to add. As it's a very alpha stage experiment I don't recommend anyone follow or use it and it may disappear altogether in the coming months.

WordPress

My main website uses WordPress. To a great extent, this is (now) primarily a back up location and the majority of the annotations are unpublished to the public, but are searchable to me on the back end.

I do, however, use it occasionally for quickly publishing and syndicating select annotations which I think others may find interesting or upon which I'm looking for comments/feedback and don't expect that the audience I'd like these from will find them natively on Hypothes.is' platform. An example of this might be a paper I was reading this weekend on Roland Barthes which discusses his reasonably well documented zettelkasten-like note taking practice. The article can be found here: https://culturemachine.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/373-604-1-PB.pdf with the annotations seen here: https://docdrop.org/pdf/The-Card-Index-as-Creativity-Ma---Wilken-Rowan-upq8g.pdf/. To tip off others in the space, I made a post on my site with a bit of a puzzle and syndicated it to Twitter. A few hours later I posted a follow up with some additional details and links to my notes on hypothesis which got some useful feedback from Matthias Melcher on the Barthes paper as well as on a related paper I mentioned by Luhmann, particularly about German translation, with which I have little facility.

Another recent illustrative example was this annotation on the Library of Congress website about Vladimir Nabokov which was picked up by my website (though unpublished/not public) but which I syndicated to Twitter primarily to be able to send a notification to Eleanor Konik who I know is interested in the idea of World Building using historical facts and uses Obsidian in her work. (The @mention in the tweet is hiding in the image of the index card so that I could save text space in the main tweet.) Several others interested in note taking and zettelkasten for writing also noticed it and "liked" it. Not being on Hypothes.is to my knowledge much less following me there, neither Eleanor nor the others would have seen it without the Tweet.

Nabokov used index cards for his research & writing. In one index card for Lolita, he creates a "weight-heigh-age table for girls of school age" to be able to specify Lolita's measurements. He also researched the Colt catalog of 1940. #WorldBuildinghttps://t.co/i16Yc7CbJ8 pic.twitter.com/JSjXV50L3M

— Chris Aldrich (@ChrisAldrich) April 10, 2022

How

Obsidian

Getting annotations from Hypothes.is to Obsidian is a short two-step process which is reasonably well automated so that I don't spend a lot of time cutting/pasting/formatting.

I start with an IFTTT recipe that takes the RSS output of Hypothes.is and creates text files directly into my Obsidian vault. The results are quite rudimentary and only include the title of the document, the permalink of the Hypothes.is post, the highlighted text, and my annotation. It doesn't include the tags as RSS doesn't have a specification for these.

Second, I've set up Hypothesidian which has a much higher fidelity dovetail with the Hypothes.is API to get all the data and even the formatting set up I'm looking for. A reasonably well laid out set of instructions with a low/no code approach for it can be found at https://forum.obsidian.md/t/retrieve-annotations-for-hypothes-is-via-templater-plugin-hypothes-idian/17225. It allows importing annotations by a variety of methods including by date and by document URL. I've also made a small modification to it so that tags on Hypothes.is are turned into [[wikilinks]] in Obsidian instead of #tags which I only use sparingly.

All the IFTTT annotations will be ported individually into a specific Obsidian folder where I'll process them. I can then quickly use Hypothesidian to import the properly laid out version (using templates) of the notes with just a few keystrokes and then focus my time on revising my notes if necessary and then linking them to the appropriate notes already in my system. Finally I'll move them into the appropriate folder based on their content—typically one of the following: zettelkasten, wiki, commonplace, dictionary, or sources (for bibliographic use). Careful watchers will notice that I often use Hypothes.is' "page notes" functionality to create a bookmark-like annotation into which I will frequently post the URL of the page and occasionally a summary of a piece, these are imported into my system and are used as source/bibliographic information. I also have some dovetailing with Zotero as a bibliographic set up which feeds into this data as well.

This version which I've cobbled together works well for me so that I'm not missing anything, but there are definitely other similar processes available out there both for Obsidian (with plugins or scripts) as well as for other platforms. If I'm not mistaken, I think Readwise (a paid solution) has a set up for note transfer and formatting.

WordPress

As there isn't an extant Micropub client for Hypothes.is I initially used RSS as a transport layer to get my notes from Hypothes.is into WordPress. The fidelity isn't great in part because RSS doesn't include any tags. To get some slightly better presentation I set up a workflow using RSS output from Hypothes.is as input into an IFTTT workflow which outputs to a webhook that stands in as a Micropub client targeting my websites Micropub server. Some of the display on my site is assisted by using the Post Kinds plugin, which I know you've been working around yourself. The details may be above some, but I've outlined most of the broad strokes of how this is done in a tutorial at https://boffosocko.com/2020/01/21/using-ifttt-to-syndicate-pesos-content-from-social-services-to-wordpress-using-micropub/. In that example, I use the service Pocket as an example, but Hypothes.is specific information could easily be swapped out on a 1-1 basis.

A custom stand-alone or even an integrated micropub client for Hypothes.is would be a fantastic project if someone wanted to dig into the details and dovetail it with the Hypothes.is API.

Why

Ideally, I'm hoping that small pieces loosely joined and IndieWeb building blocks will allow me to use the tools and have the patterns I'm looking for, without a lot of work, so that I can easily make annotations with Hypothes.is but have and share (POSSE) my content on my own site in a way that works much the way many IndieWeb sites dovetail with Twitter or Mastodon.

I'm doing some portions of it manually at present, without a lot of overhead, but it would be fun to see someone add micropub and webmention capabilities to Hypothes.is or other IndieWeb building blocks. (I suspect it won't be Hypothes.is themselves as their team is very small and they're already spread thin on multiple other mission critical projects.)

In the end, I'm using Hypothes.is as a well designed and convenient tool for quickly making notes on digital documents. All the data is flowing to one of two other locations where I'm actually making use of it. While there is some social layer there, I'm getting email notifications through the Hypothes.is settings and the data from my responses just gets rolled back into my spaces which I try to keep open and IndieWeb friendly by default. At the same time, for those who want or need it, Hypothes.is' interface is a great way of reading, searching, sorting, and interacting with my notes in public, particularly until I get something specific and user friendly up to do it on my own domain.

As open source as Hypothes.is is, I do wish that it had some additional open IndieWeb building blocks to keep it from being a silo.

Sadly, I've never had the time, nor the technical expertise and facility with their code to implement the pieces, but I have outlined a bit of what might be done to make the platform a bit less silo-like: https://boffosocko.com/2019/04/08/ideas-for-indieweb-ifying-hypothes-is/

Fortunately it is open enough for me in other respects that I can bend portions of it to my will and needs beyond what it offers a la carte.

http://blog.sparna.fr/2020/02/20/semantic-markdown/

Some general spitballing for adding semantic markup to markdown.

https://david.shanske.com/2022/03/14/meta-tags-to-microformats/

A pretty solid overview of meta tags from OGP, Dublin Core, et al. to microformats.

On first blush, this might appear to be the case, but u-photo implies that the post is primarily about a photo and experience indicates that this is not how og:image is used in practice. A better mapping for og:image would be u-featured.

https://sanlive.com/quiet-web-obsessions/

An early statement for the desire to add semantic and structural data to the web.

https://www.amitgawande.com/2018/07/18/223800.html

Details for adding date/time microformats to Blot.im.

https://www.amitgawande.com/2018/07/17/195200.html

Amit Gawande outlines some of his work to IndieWebify his Blot.im website.

Another potential method (or an additional filter) for finding posts with photos, or more specifically posts whose main purpose is a photo or image is to use use the post type discovery algorithm. Given that Micro.blog is built on a variety of IndieWeb building blocks, most photos could/should have a class of u-photo on their img tags, so you could search for these instead or in addition to. I believe there are a set of parsers and tools out there that do this in a few languages already and someone in the IndieWeb Dev chat can direct you to them if they’re not linked to the page above.

https://indieweb-search.jamesg.blog/about

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/12/08/owning-hashtags/

This sounds like a really cool extension of the micropub spec. I would definitely appreciate it.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/36091

I'm wondering exactly what problem that LOUD standard is meant to be solving exactly? It doesn't appear that any of the meta data they're listing is over and above anything that's already extant?

If you're going to propose a new set up, why not add some bits to fix the newer problems that have popped up like for paying creators? Being able to inject ads? Better track the number of listens? How far into the file did the listener get? How many ads did they hear?

And let's not forget:

https://github.com/microformats/h-entry/issues/27

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2021/08/01/books-microformats/

This is awesomeness!

h-book is an experimental microformat at best.

I might recommend for minimizing the vocabulary that one might use the existing h-product instead and allow parsers to find an ISBN, Library of Congress book number, ASIN, UPC, or other product code to determine "bookness".

This looks like a great IndieWeb friendly WordPress theme.

Colin has indicated that it's got microformats support with more to come.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Colin Devroe</span> in Colin Devroe (<time class='dt-published'>03/12/2021 04:58:57</time>)</cite></small>

This is cool to see. Now I'll have to take a look and test it out.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Amanda J. Rush</span> in Amanda J. Rush on Twitter: "Add Microformats 2 to #GenesisWP child themes with a plugin by @remkusdevries https://t.co/8dBUvh0Rs0 #indieweb" / Twitter (<time class='dt-published'>02/24/2021 20:38:22</time>)</cite></small>

It is crucial to have an open standard, and I think the people from indieweb already did a lot of the work. Webmentions are just the communication layer, but. microformats may be a great tool to keep in mind.

Michael Bishop may have a solution for you on this: https://miklb.com/blog/2017/04/12/microformats2-wordpress-and-featured-images-classes/

I love this!

It’s a great meta meta example, but the IndieWeb movement uses microformats to mark up portions of web pages with metadata that gives machines the idea of the semantics of a particular post. Thus, I could reply to this web page with a traditional social media “like” as a means of annotating it on my own website. The microformat “u-like-of” would be added to my page’s metadata that allows the web page I’m replying to to read that like intent and potentially display it—though traditionally they’re shown under the text in question.

Something about this sentence and its lead up reminds of this particularly great section of the Microformats wiki about why not email: http://microformats.org/wiki/wiki-better-than-email

This makes me wonder what else one might do with microformats and structured data that could be redacted this way?

These are some valid points.

I have been seeing some interesting use cases for microformats getting stronger recently.

There are other options out there, though in many cases distribution is uneven. There are new specs like JSONFeed which many sites and feed readers support just in the last year.

There are also simpler methods than RSS now including the microformats-based h-feed which one can use to create a simple feed that many feed readers will support.

Part of RSS's ubiquity is that it is simply so prevalent that most common CMSs still support it. The fact that the idea of RSS is so old and generally un-evolving means there isn't a lot of maintenance involved once it's been set up.

But it's still an additional side file to maintain versus something simpler like microformats' use of an h-feed.