I’m trying to adhere to the IndieWeb principals, as my homepage states. The first step was to get the ability to create notes, or micro-blogging, and then syndicate these to other silos.

The most popular one by far, and the one I interact with most actually, is Twitter. So that’s what I’m looking to achieve initially, and then I can integrate support for other silos. Currently things are going well.

My code is capable of syndicating notes to Twitter with a permashortcitaction. If the note is too long it will ellide at the appropriate word boundary and then add a permalink to the note.

Further I can specify the URL of a particular tweet and the syndicated tweet will then be a reply to the original tweet. Allowing for threading on twitter.

This is done by combining two pieces of software. The main code that runs my site. This is where the actual interaction with Twitter occurs. The preparation work is done in my POSSE library. This is what creates the correctly formatted tweet and works out the reply to status id. I don’t think it’s ready for other people to use yet though. And there are still some features to be added.

When you want to embed a map of a location on a webpage the first place to go is Google Maps. This process is slightly complicated for me as I am using the Maps Preview which removes the default sharing options. Maybe this is a plan by Google to move all developers onto the Google Maps JS API. Though how that benefits normal users who don’t know what Javascript is I don’t know. The original method however was to generate an <iframe> HTML block to put in your site. This was to me essentially undecipherable. All the options were cryptic URL parameters. Using a little Javascript is much simpler. You define all your options and then add your map to the relevant <div>. Here is an example:

See the Pen bfdLj by Jonny Barnes (@jonnybarnes) on CodePen

I’ve decided to stop using my DumbQuotes library on my site. I found that there were too many issues. Primarily with raw HTML and code-blocks. The straight-quotes in these sections all needed escaping so my library didn’t mangle anything. So I am now manually typing in curly-quotes using the appropriate keyboard shortcut. This is much simpler to maintain and keeps my markdown clean.

I have also slightly redesigned my site. I was using Skolar and Myriad Pro but found this a little clichéd. I am now using Prenton for titles and Livory for my body text. I’m liking the look so far. For readability I’ve also increased the font-size slightly.