Specialty Post Kinds

Manually adding a new post kind to the Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

Naturally, some people may want to display particular exotic kinds which might not extend to the broader public. A chicken post type certainly falls under this umbrella as I wouldn’t expect that other than for novelty, obsessive IndieWeb post kinds completeness, or for a very small handful of specialized farming, juggling, or comedy websites that anyone else in their right mind would really want to be doing a lot of posting about chickens on their site.

David Shanske, the plugin’s creator, has made it possible to create a sub-plugin of sorts so that one can add one-off support to these types using a variety of filters and functions. This could be useful so that updates to the plugin don’t overwrite one’s work and require adding the pieces outlined above back in again. Sadly, this is a tad beyond my present abilities, so I won’t address it further at the moment other than to say that it’s possible and perhaps someone might document it for others to use a similar template in the future.

Chris, when I have some free time, I think I'll add a beer kind to use with my Untappd activity.

IndieWeb-ifying ColoradoBoulevard.net

IndieWeb-ifying ColoradoBoulevard.net by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko)

I’ve spent some time over a few days this month to help IndieWeb-ify my local Pasadena online newspaper ColoradoBoulevard.net. They can now send and receive webmentions and can backfeed their comments, likes, and other responses from their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

They can stand to improve their support for microformats v2 and do some more work on their h-cards and other related metadata, but the editor seems thrilled with the initial results–particularly having their conversations in other areas of the internet come back to the original article.

I know that individual journalists have brought their personal websites into the IndieWeb fold, but this may be one of the first online newspapers/magazines I’m aware of to begin using some of these principles and tools. With any luck and some testing, they could be one of the first journalistic enterprises to begin receiving “Read” posts of their articles via webmention! Update: read posts are working! See the first example here.

This is great news Chris! Our local print newspaper is moving online and perhaps I can convince the owner to build for the IndieWeb. I may not be able to help them but it’s worth a try.

You’ve inspired me to contact another online paper, Planet Princeton, to do the same. The owner Krystal Knapp hosts her website on WordPress.