So I installed the IndieWeb plugin and it authenticates me on Indielogin – I only had to enter my domain name learningwithmoocs.com. Also other members of the IndieWeb-universe were able to comment on this site just by commenting on their own site. So far so good, but it’s still useful to consult the Getting Started […]

So I installed the IndieWeb plugin and it authenticates me on Indielogin – I only had to enter my domain name learningwithmoocs.com. Also other members of the IndieWeb-universe were able to comment on this site just by commenting on their own site.

So far so good, but it’s still useful to consult the Getting Started on WordPress on indieweb.org. They suggest a handy testing tool, indiewebify.me.

Several things were not functioning as they should. The explanation is not always easy to follow for a beginner, for instance: “A h-card was found on your site, but it’s not marked up as the representative h-card! Add a u-url property which matches a rel=me link on the same page so this h-card can be identified as the h-card which represents the page.” Rather than complaining, I studied the tutorial.

• I learned about microformats, which are semantic classes added to HTML tags. There are currently not many WordPress themes which properly implement microformats, the tutorial recommends starting out using either Sempress or Independent Publisher – I use Sempress for now.
• rel-me links to my other profiles on the web seem to be important. This will enable web-sign-in and IndieAuth using my domain as my identity. The Indieweb plugin adds several common social media site fields to my “Edit User” page in the admin panel. I also have to log into those services and include the URL of my site in the appropriate website fields of my profile so that they point back to my website in return.
• Now the dreaded h-card, which is like a business card. The tutorial explains in simple terms what I have to do.
• “Post on your own site, syndicate elsewhere” is a cornerstone of the IndieWeb community, so it is being explained. The quickest and easiest of them is to enable WordPress’s JetPack plugin. However, I prefer to do this manually. I don’t have a huge production and I like to post mindfully on the silos.
• Webmentions are very cool: “In IndieWeb, we use an open protocol called webmention, which is a W3C recommendation, to allow independently operated sites to interact with each other just the way @mentions do on Twitter and other services.” It’s part of the plugin-bundle.
• Backfeed. In addition to sending one’s content to silos, ideally one would also like to accept comments, replies, likes, and other replies to these copies back on one’s own site. This is known in the IndieWeb community as backfeed and it is handled by the plugin Bridgy (part of the bundle). There is a separate tutorial for this. Also Bridgy allows for publishing on social media, I decide to allow it for my Mixed_Realities account on Twitter.