Replied to INTERTEXTrEVOLUTION by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
Reduced post to micro.blog by trying to be intentional as I play. Assume folks who want know have me in readers. And syndicated replies or threaded conversations from other networks make little sense. Wonder if this is better approach of if all the content goes everywhere.

Hi Greg,

i think it is a better way. I am trying to do that here. My main RSS feed doesn’t have status formatted post. Only post categorised micro go to microblog (I think I’ll change to just using categories soon).  The category for this post ‘reactions’ doesn’t go anywhere, unless I forget to take off publicise to google or post to Twitter via The friction should help with the intentionality.

It gets complicated as replies through micro.blog don’t, as yet, get posted here and replies here don’t point, AFAIK, at a particular micro.blog post.

Replied to Experimenting with turning on comments for a week (Doug Belshaw's Thought Shrapnel)
I noticed a general downwards trend in the quality of online comments.

Hi Doug,
Glad to see this. There has a been consistent drift to twitter & other social for comments. I think this is a pity for several reasons.

I am responding to this with a webmention, which it looks like you have adopted. I’d hope that the quality of comments received via webmention might be better given that the comments will be published on the commenter’s own site. These might be less knee-jerk or throwaway than a tweet or toot?

There are still a few wrinkles to be ironed out of webmentions but I have high hopes that they will be more widly adopted and be a good thing.

Replied to Searching for my #IndieWeb WordPress Exit Plan by Greg McVerryGreg McVerry (jgregorymcverry.com)
It maybe some time before I start th move from WordPress. This is about developing the exit plan. Not jumping from the plane while I try to put on the chute.

Hi Greg,

I’ve had my own struggles with getting IndieWeb working here too. I’ve a fair bit I still need to sort out.

I wish I had a bit more time to play/work with this stuff, I don’t think I’d fix any problems but I might get things here working more to my liking.

I do think that WordPress is the best chance of getting the IndieWeb working for the rest of us. The other approaches seem to technically daunting for me.

On getting webmentions to work I found the WP Crontrol plugin useful. It lets you see the webmentions queueing up and you can run them manually. That might be worth a punt.

Anyway, good luck and I’ll be very interested to see what you come up with.

I am sure I’ve read/heard @manton stating the same thing, he is in favour of other micro.blog like communities.

I’ve been a member of a few educational communities and projects built round aggregations of blogs. I’ve even set up one or two wee ones.

There folk need to go out from the central hub to individual sites to join the conversation. If, and it is a big if at the moment, all the sites had webmentions enabled I am sure it would be possible to reply straight on the hub, but the reply would be sent to the original post.

This would need a bit of work on the hub, it would incorporate something like quill as a method of replying. Perhaps it would be simple to do with FeedWordPress just adding a link to pop the quill editor up… But the harder part if for community members.

For most people installing and configuring the themes and plugins needed for WordPress is a bit of a barrier. Setting up another system would be too I think.

In the future, when hubs like micro.blog abound, I’ll be able to be part of many communities using this site, categories or an other taxonomy will direct posts to one or more hubs when needed.

Replied to Extending The Spaces You Need To Innovate (Further considerations) by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (Read Write Collect)
P.S. If comments are the cassette tape of the digital world, not sure what metaphor you would recommend for a comment syndicated from your own site?

Fascinating post Aaron, and an great example of why comments, linking and blogging. Just starting to follow the links in this comment took me into both familiar and new; people, places and ideas.

Just on the comment quote, your post, a comment exemplifies the power of commenting from your own site. A comment on Tom’s would probably have tripped the too many links flag for spam detection.

I do wonder how you approach commenting on sites with out webmentions, like Tom’s? Do you regard them as notes to yourself and your readers rather than replies?

Reposted Frances Bell on Twitter (Twitter)
“@suebecks @suewatling @catherinecronin @ambrouk @LTE_Hull Could I gently encourage you Sue to publish your reflection as a blog post where it can be commented and found, possibly curated in future? :) It's great having this conversation on the Twitter stream but it's more likely to disappear under the surface than bob along on top :)”

I think this every day about a tweet, so I am posting to my blog.