Manually adding microfomats markup.

An update to read posts for physical books by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

Because Post Kinds doesn’t (yet?) support percentage finished or number of pages read, I generally do read posts for books by hand as notes with the relevant data. So I decided to add some better mark up to my book-specific read posts and added microformats classes of h-cite, u-url, u-read-of, p-name, p-author, h-card and dt-published. I’m far from an expert on microformats, but hopefully the way I’m nesting them makes sense to parsers off in the future. (Suggestions for improvement are more than welcome.)

Manually marking up posts with microformat? No! It’s hurts too much. It isn’t worth that effort. #indieweb

An update to read posts for physical books by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

Because Post Kinds doesn’t (yet?) support percentage finished or number of pages read, I generally do read posts for books by hand as notes with the relevant data. So I decided to add some better mark up to my book-specific read posts and added microformats classes of h-cite, u-url, u-read-of, p-name, p-author, h-card and dt-published. I’m far from an expert on microformats, but hopefully the way I’m nesting them makes sense to parsers off in the future. (Suggestions for improvement are more than welcome.)

It's become painfully clear that the IndieWeb effort might not be worth it. I'm unsure of the solution, but it isn't the current approach. I want to devote less time to crafting a post. I want to focus on something other than the technical aspects of posting my thoughts.

I've hit some real frustrations trying to integrate certain social platforms with my blog. Foursquare? A no-go. Untappd? Yes, but only after investing significant time using another service such as Zapier.

SNAP Pro was a complete disappointment. I've removed it, finding myself back at square one. I continue to post on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Flipboard. At least now, I can use the Syndication Links plugin to add syndicated links. For Instagram, this means recreating my posts there. After publishing a post, I spend an extra 10 minutes just copy-pasting links. The technical side is overshadowing the content creation. I wonder if journalists would embrace this method of post-construction.

This process is more of a hindrance than a help. It's consuming far more time and effort than the value it returns.

Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale. #nobridge

15 thoughts on “Manually adding microfomats markup.”

  1. Pingback: Chris Aldrich
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  4. Khürt, I just noticed another example of this type of self-dogfooding/experimentation for read posts by Eddie Hinkle Owning my Reading and 100 Days of Reading Chapters. Hopefully we can all come to some type of interesting consensus that makes it easier for others in the future.
    On your quest for tracking things like what you’re drinking, you might be interested to know that Aaron Parecki has a micropub client called Teacup, though I don’t know if anyone has gotten it to dovetail nicely with WordPress yet.

  5. Publishing read posts is still pretty new, so there's a lot of experimenting and some more manual steps currently. That's definitely not the end goal, though. We want it to be as simple as possible for everyone to use, but we have to start somewhere.
    If you haven't seen it yet, Quill is an app that makes it easy to publish different types of posts to your site without manually writing any microformats. Earlier this year I made some progress on adding read posts to Quill, but ran into some issues that needed to be solved in the microformats first (I was getting a bit ahead of myself). Publishing manually for a while helps us iron things out, try new things more easily, and catch issues.
    cc http://boffosocko.com/2017/12/11/an-update-to-read-posts-for-physical-books/

    1. Hi gRegor, Akismet flagged your response as spam and I don't check that often enough.

      I tried Quill a few weeks ago. I see why you use it but ...

      I have a Goodreads account and I think I'll keep using that until something comes along that allows POSSE/PESOS ( I prefer to think of these as push/pull) between Goodreads and WordPress.

      View on

  6. Publishing read posts is still pretty new, so there's a lot of experimenting and some more manual steps currently. That's definitely not the end goal, though. We want it to be as simple as possible for everyone to use, but we have to start somewhere.
    If you haven't seen it yet, Quill is an app that makes it easy to publish different types of posts to your site without manually writing any microformats. Earlier this year I made some progress on adding read posts to Quill, but ran into some issues that needed to be solved in the microformats first (I was getting a bit ahead of myself). Publishing manually for a while helps us iron things out, try new things more easily, and catch issues.
    cc http://boffosocko.com/2017/12/11/an-update-to-read-posts-for-physical-books/

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  11. Khürt, you’re definitely seeing the sausage being made with this one! This is all very experimental stuff that only a small handful of people are working on or are interested in at the moment. Some of us want to recreate the functionality of silos like Goodreads, Library Thing, etc. I actually don’t think there are currently any tools that automate what we’re doing here, and of course it’s definitely part of your favorite expression: “manual until it hurts”. Eventually we’ll figure out how to work out the kinks/bugs, and there will be better and smoother UX/UI for all of it as well as automation, but you’ve got to start somewhere right? ? Research, documentation, tests, self-dogfooding, and continued iteration with a soupçon of WWTD. I’m doing it because I used to rely heavily on Goodreads and don’t want to anymore. I’d much rather own the data on my own site, so it’s worth it to me to make the attempt manually until I’ve got things working the way I’d like. You’ll notice that this is what gRegor is also doing as he mentions in his reply. Hopefully the work we’re doing will make it easier for others who are interested in these pieces in the future.
    I’m glad to hear that you’ve got Untappd squared away in a way you like. It does look really nice on your site! (Perhaps once I’m further along with reads, I’ll take a draught of it myself). If you get a moment, jump into the wiki and document what you’ve done so that others can not only see, but potentially not have to reinvent the wheel themselves. (Or at least add a link to your original post that outlines it.)
    I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble with some pieces. I will note that David Shanske, the creator of the Post Kinds Plugin has recently been working on it in conjunction with the Micropub plugin and OwnYourSwarm to make owning checkins more robust and easier to set up with WordPress. I don’t think he’s quite there yet, but I know he’s made some huge strides in the past month. If you’re interested, I recommend you catch him one evening in the chat (or via the GitHub issue queue) to let him know what problems you’re seeing/having so that things can improve. His chat handle is GWG. (Since you’re syndicating stuff to Untappd, you might also suggest he add the icon for it to the Syndication Links Plugin too since I don’t think it’s currently in the list of supported sites.)
    I’m not sure which version of SNAP you’ve been using, but I feel your pain as I know it’s not always 100% solid and it’s far more complicated than it probably should be. I’m still using the older 3.8.8 version and haven’t made the major recent upgrade(s) to 4.X.X as I haven’t had time to test it out on my development server yet. It’s working well enough for my present needs, so I’m letting updating it slide for a bit while they’re working out some of the bugs that the new version has surely introduced.
    I’m curious which Instagram methods you’ve tried from https://indieweb.org/Instagram? I know that many use OwnYourGram which works relatively well with most platforms including WordPress. I personally have been using DsgnWrks Instagram Importer which is somewhat similar, but as a WordPress plugin it adds a lot more WordPress specific customizations for the meta-data and data handling above and beyond OYG. I should spend some time and document what I’ve done to customize it. If that’s not your cup of tea, I know that Tantek made an Instagram export bookmarklet at IndieWebCamp LA last year that you might appreciate for cutting and pasting data more quickly to create posts.
    I’ve noticed that as more and more people are using all these tools, we’re finding more bugs and quirks and they’re improving incrementally more rapidly than before, so kudos for keeping up with the changes.
    I love the monkey photo you chose for the featured photo on your reply! It’s both awesome and looks how I often feel when doing these things myself.
    Keep fighting the good fight!

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