I took another look today, and noticed that my blog posts have been shared to my Micro.blog feed automatically (I added my RSS feed, then forgot about it). I didn’t have a blog active over there, because I want to have this site as my primary blog.
Still, I poked around a little, and took some time to make more sense of what this Micro.blog thing is all about. Brent Simmons described how he sees Micro.blog fitting into the broader Web ecosystem nicely when he said the following:
Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.
This talk at the recent IndieWeb Summit also offered a nice overview of where Micro.blog is at the moment, and some of the challenges that lie ahead:
While I’m on the topic of IndieWeb, this “State of the IndieWeb” keynote is a great overview of what’s been going on in the IndieWeb community in the last year or so:
How can I do that?
On yet another related note, I came across Chris Aldrich’s reply to a tweet from one of my colleagues. The reply is interesting, in itself, but what I’m particularly curious about is how to create replies like this that publish to the source site, and populate the syndication link fields.
I’ve installed a series of IndieWeb plugins on my site, including –
- Bridgy
- IndieAuth
- IndieWeb
- Microformats 2
- Micropub
- Post Kinds
- Symantic Linkbacks
- Syndication Links
- Web Actions
- Webmention
- Websub
The challenge, now, is figuring out how to use them to publish replies that cross-post, and so on. Installing the plugins is only part of the process. I’m pretty sure there’s a degree of configuration involved too to make it all work.
On the one hand, using these tools/extensions will transform your site from a “simple” blog into a pretty interactive, connected hub on the Web. On the other hand, this is not the sort of setup that mainstream users are going to want to configure.
This is where services like Micro.blog fit into the picture. It integrates a number of IndieWeb technologies to produce a pretty seamless experience.
RSS – Posts
What do you think?