Jul 26, 2017
Posting to my site
I was idly thinking about the different ways I can post to adactio.com. I decided to count the ways.
Admin interface
This is the classic CMS approach. In my case the CMS is a crufty hand-rolled affair using PHP and MySQL that I wrote years ago. I log in to an admin interface and fill in a form, putting the text of my posts into a textarea. In truth, I usually write in a desktop text editor first, and then paste that into the textarea. That’s what I’m doing now—copying and pasting Markdown from the Typed app.
Directly from my site
If I’m logged in, I get a stripped down posting interface in the notes section of my site.
Bookmarklet
This is how I post links. When I’m at a URL I want to bookmark, I hit the “Bookmark it” bookmarklet in my browser’s bookmarks bar. That pops open a version of the admin interface tailored specifically for links. I really, really like bookmarklets. The one big downside is that they don’t work on mobile.
Text message
This is something I knocked together at Indie Web Camp Brighton 2015 using the Twilio API. It’s handy for posting notes if I’m travelling somewhere and data is at a premium. But I don’t use it that often.
Thanks to Aaron’s OwnYourGram service — and the fact that my site has a micropub endpoint — I can post images from Instagram to my site. This used to happen instantaneously but Instagram changed their API rules for the worse. Between that and their shitty “algorithmic” timeline, I find myself using the service less and less. At this point I’m only on their for the doggos.
Swarm
Like OwnYourGram, Aaron’s OwnYourSwarm allows me to post check-ins and photos from the Swarm app to my site. Again, micropub makes it all possible.
OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm are very similar and could probably be abstracted into a generic service for posting from third-party apps to micropub endpoints. I’d quite like to post my check-ins on Untappd to my site.
Other people’s admin interfaces
Thanks to rel="me" and IndieAuth, I can log into other people’s posting interfaces using my own website as the log-in, and post to my micropub endpoint, like this. Quill is a good example of this. I don’t use it that much, but I really should—the editor interface is quite Medium-like in its design.
Anyway, those are the different ways I can update my website that I can think of right now.
Syndication
In terms of output, I’ve got a few different ways of syndicating what I post here:
- RSS feeds for my journal, links, articles, and notes.
- JSON feeds for my journal, links, articles, and notes.
- Twitter accounts for my journal, links, articles, and notes (that one is my main Twitter account).
- I syndicate most of my my photos to my Flickr account.
- I syndicate most of my journal posts and articles to my Medium account.
- I used to syndicate my links to my Delicious account but at some point that became fairly pointless.
- Whenever I post a link, The Internet Archive gets pinged and makes a copy for the wayback machine. Here’s an example of a recent link.
- I syndicate just about everything to my Facebook account using If This, Then That recipes (RSS to Facebook posts). Facebook is a roach motel. I never post any original content there — everything starts here on my site.
Just so you know, if you comment on one of my posts on Facebook, I probably won’t see it. But if you reply to a copy of one of posts on Twitter or Instagram, it will show up over here on adactio.com thanks to the magic of Brid.gy and webmention.
This was originally posted on my own site.
