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Didn't realize I was doing "ledgers" way back at the University of Minnesota.  As you can see we weren't that excited writing line-of-business apps.  Also funny how Privacy Enhanced Mail never took off.  Pity that.

Here's the executive summary for Forms Nirvana from an old design doc:

This document describes an open-architecture forms routing and approval system suitable for routing requests through a multi-person authorization chain. Once a request has been authorized, the completed request can be automagically submitted to another system (for example, the financial system for posting to the general ledger). While WWW is initially envisioned as the vehicle for user interaction with the system, the request routing logic is separated from user presentation so that other technologies (such as E-mail with digital signatures) can be used as well. Provisions are also made for entities other than human signers to be part of the authorization chain, so consistency checks can be automatically applied to the form's content.

You can read more about Forms Nirvana in this Minnpost article.

Tagged: #throwbackthursday

I'm still pretty happy my indieweb publishing experiment.

Content is flowing in all the right ways.  Posts end up as Posts.  Photos are uploaded native with backlinks. POSSE via brid.gy just works.  You can see that Brid.gy polls Google+, and then saves what it finds back to the original post by sending Webmentions.  The result is a full archive of activity around this content.

Oh and cross posting to SoundCloud worked perfectly.  And so do embeds..

After a fix from the Known Team WebHooks are working.  I get a POST whenever content changes.  To test this out I send the URL to the Internet Archive Save Page.  Voila!  Instant archiving of my content.  [Next up, backups in IPFS]

I was able to set up the Known open source software on my own server.  Next step is to pull a backup from the hosted version I'm using so I can experiment further and contribute back to the project.

Mobile Posting via Chrome on Android is working well.  You can access the Camera and a rudimentary file picker.  HTML editing is workable, but not great.  I installed the Url Forward app so I can also have native sharing intents.

Bumps

Of course there are some issues encountered...

Spelling errors mean you Publish Once, Edit Everywhere.  Or if you messed up the URL, Publish Once, Delete Everywhere

I tried using a native web mention to reply to another post, but it didn’t appear on the target site.  There wasn't any visible UX feedback.

I found that there’s no UI support for backdating posts.  Okay, I’ll try Micropub to post.  Nope, very rough implementations, but Quill seems nice.  Eventually I wrote a stub post in Wordpress, exported, imported and edited.  Phew!

But.. it appears that brid.gy doesn’t syndicate to old posts like this.  Even when I went back and pointed links at each other.  I’ll have to followup on that.

Also, I lost the first version of this post due to a CSRF error since I left it sitting too long in the browser.  Oops.

TinyMCE still is a pain and loves using &nbsp; and CMD-9 is bound to <address>..   I might have to use Markdown instead.

I miss @ mentioning people, and wish there was a UI for that.

Native Google+ support in brid.gy needs an API.

But still overall quite happy with the way this is going.  I hope you're enjoying the journey with me.

Tagged: #indieweb #withknown

End of day #1 with Known.  I'm quite pleased with the results.

Good Stuff

• brid.gy is awesome.  Having +1's, likes and comments consolidated is so nice.
• Webhooks!  I'm thinking of writing one to automatically archive pages to archive.org.
• PuSH appears to be fully working.  Again, could extend things there..
• Google+ renders images well.
• The editor saves drafts.
• Lightweight page editor should be useful.
• AMP support is there (add ?_t=amp to any page)  Some validation issues, but works.
• Real anchor tags and hyperlinks.  No more writing [1] [2] in posts with multiple links (like lynx)

Rough Edges

• The built-in Photo type doesn't send the permalink to Twitter, so now I have a weird post without context.  Flickr, Facebook working perfectly, might try another setting.
• I need to get to writing a Google+ outbound connector.  I'm doing those by hand now.
• TInyMCE sucks.  It has always sucked!  If only Medium would open source their editor.  At least markdown is an option.
• Looks like syndicated Google+ links are using profiles.google.com instead of plus.google.com.
• Some profile pics cloned from G+ are coming back with size 0.  This shows as broken images.
• Long status posts have extra long permalink URLs.
• Built-in analytics are weak.  Would rather avoid using GA for that.
• Limited import options.  Will need to convert Typepad export file to Wordpress format.
• Bulleted lists line-height is tight, tight, tight.

Overall I'm pretty happy and excited about getting more content in place.

And who knew that a post on SSL/TLS certs would be soooo exciting?

Tagged: #indieweb

This is an experiment.  Can I take control of my online life and move it to a place where I have more control?  Can I pull my content out of multiple silos?  And can I import existing content from other platforms and keep it (somewhat) synced over time so I have a full record of my public online life?

We're going to find out..

The trigger for me was an article about my early days working with the Internet Gopher Community.  I had saved most of the email from back then and it was quite easy to reconstruct and remember what happened.  I don't think I'll have the luxury for much of what's happening recently.  The digital ephemera is spread out too far and wide to reconstruct and reflect.

To get there I'm experimenting with the hosted version of Known, a publishing platform that supports the things that matter to me.  I like that it's open source, interoperable and respectful of human effort -- it also supports a number of Indieweb technologies out of the box like WebMention, and brid.gy to pull back content from the Silos.

So.. you're going to see more content in more places as I'll be syndicating out to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.  And I'll be sharing more as I document this process.

Silos by Doc Searls / CC BY 2.0

Tagged: #indieweb