Link previews

The way a link to some URL is shown on a web page is central to the social interaction between sites. Simple highlighted words alone will not be sufficient. Readers need more textual information and preview content. In some cases (read: microblogging) this link preview might show all the content of this page.

Here are two examples. First is the output of the Visual Link Preview plugin, second is a Twitter Card.

Team Demi Office Set
An impeccable reissue of a classic, designed by Naoto Fukasawa. A portable office set, in a case, given a 2021 makeover. Inside the magnetically closed case you will find: • scissors, ruler, tape dispenser, knife, tape measure, glue, stapler, Sim card pin. Each tool is magnetic, so they click into p…

What content would a perfect link preview need?

  • Site owner’s Profile image, website icon or similar
  • Site owner’s name
  • URL (not sure about this so far as it might get long and ugly, even if truncated)
  • Preview text (character limit?)
  • Preview image (one of more? A useful simple responsive layout for image(s) of different ratio is tough. Most social sites us some way of cropping, which has lots of downsides.)
  • Timestamp (?)
  • Number of links aiming at that page
  • Number of comments on that page
  • Likes (? ☠️)

Untitled

Experimenting with responding to a post on another website with a post here on this WordPress blog. Let‘s see how this goes!

Homebrew Website Club #2

There will be another Homebrew Website Club next week on Wednesday! Good thing I get some company dabbling on this website. Don‘t underestimate the effect of meeting like-minded folks!

If you care about personal websites, live somewhere around Nuremberg, please attend! I want to meet you! And if you are NOT around Nuremberg, please attend as well, because you can easily join us online …

Homebrew Website Club Nuremberg on IndieWeb Events

Also, here is photo from last week (photo: @jkphl)

Björn, Frank, Tilman, Saskia and Joschi sitting in front of the tollwerk office (outdoor)
Björn, Frank, Tilman, Saskia and Joschi sitting in front of the tollwerk office (outdoor)

Another CMS: Known

On my way to create a “social” personal website and dabbling with IndieWeb software I tried out Known. I used my new tilmn.uber.space for that. It‘s a lightweight microblogging system with the most important IndieWeb stuff already built-in. The downside is that the currently available themes for Known are very basic and lack in visual design. Well, the DESIGN is something I could improve easily. Although looking under the hood of “Getting started writing Known Themes” did not really motivate me to get into that.

Also, I‘m not yet convinced to leave WordPress. Gut feeling so far: Known is best for IndieWeb compatible microblogging, WordPress is best for Non-Micro-Blogging in general. What about using both for the time being?

Themes and Plugins

You can say many negative things about WordPress, but it still is easy to set up, very usable and highly extendable. The new standard theme Twenty Twenty-One is a minimal pleasure to look at. Let‘s keep this for now.

I installed the IndieWeb Plugin, and with the help of this many more IndieWeb-related plugins. After these simple steps it gets a lot more complicated. Many different promising open standards, but in practice rather confusing for the uninitiated. Seemingly everything is documented in detail on the IndieWeb Wiki, but not very readably. I understand that most is optional and the setup depends on your own purposes and opinions, but the result is a very steep learning curve. I hoped to find a best practice that just works out of the box. I guess this is where my design work starts? Make all this accessible to newbies?

Run⏎

This is my playground to experiment with personal publishing on the web – Welcome! Here I will try out practical ideas and code from the IndieWeb movement. In the long run I am going to work on getting back my digital sovereignty over my contents, which are currently locked up in the silos of the digital giants. In the end I hope to contribute to find better alternatives to the social networks of today. That is all for now!