It’s obviously the meaning of online writing, the blogiverse, and everything (because of the issue number: https://github.com/samwilson/twyne/issues/42 ) — so I’ve added support for “syndications” to Twyne. Each post can have a list of URLS (with labels) at which the post is duplicated. This is the first stage to making Twitter and Flickr imports work, so that each post can point back to where it came from (although, the import process will switch things around and pretend that the posts originate on my own site, even though that’s not stricktly the case). Hopefully this will work.

One key indieweb idea is that one can create a post wherever and syndicate that post to other sites. I’m attempting to switch completely to first posting on my own site, and then syndicating (i.e. duplicating my posts) on places such as Twitter and Flickr, as well as (for photos) Wikimedia Commons. It’s sort of coming into shape, the database that I’m using for all this. It’s got a great number of bits that I want to improve, and so sometimes I feel like I’m wasting my time — but then, when I think of all the time I’ve wasted trying to wrangle other systems into the shape that I want, I think I’m actually moving much faster with this and that it’s completely worthwhile.

I seem to be building a blogging system here that’s interspersing blog posts, status updates, photos, and files all together in one timeline. That was my intention of course, but at some point I’m going to have to figure out good ways to create separate streams of things. I’d been thinking that this could be done just with tags, and I think that’s probably central to it, but there needs to be some better layouts for different tag results I think. I’m going to start, at least, with a timeline navigation sidebar (sort of akin to Flickr’s ‘camera roll’ page, I guess).

The rain continues, even back in Perth. It’s good coding weather.

I’m trying to upload photos from Yallingup, but predictably feel like fixing some of the metadata handling first, and so might not get anything uploaded today. I do like the new system though, and am looking forward to having a better way to copy select photos to Commons.

So Twyne now supports tags. That’s good. Bit by bit this is is becoming enough indiewebish for me to actually be able to use it. Can’t log in on the phone yet, nor upload photos and have their EXIF data read. But I think possibly I want to add a feed-reader before doing those things, and perhaps geotagging. I dare say it’d be easy to also now add some better POSH/microformats, but actually until I need to consume other sites’ HTML I don’t feel motivated to improve my own. Certainly higher on the todo list than that is a way to track old URLs (most of which currently lie broken, notably the feed ones which is pretty poor form on my part).

It’s the middle of the morning here, but that doesn’t matter. I’m attempting to add tags to Twyne (I’d link that, but still haven’t implemented hyperlinks in my Sam-flavoured Markdown). It’s going fine, it’s not a complicated thing to do really, but I’m bumping skulls with Doctrine ORM. I’ve used it before for a couple of projects, but not for a while, and I’d forgotten how frustrating it is to be poking at DQL or a query builder and trying to make it work — when the equivalent SQL is simple and easy! I wouldn’t mind if this was something complicated, but ordering by the count of a joined table shouldn’t take an hour to figure out.

I’m adding a new url field to Twyne’s posts. The idea is that even though a post already has its own URL, oftentimes it’s useful to include posts from other websites, and the canonical URL should be used where appropriate. I’m experimenting with making the URL the actual link: so that, for example, a posts’ link in on the homepage post-list will go directly to the other site, even though there’s a sort-of equivalent local URL for it. Also, in the RSS feed, the link will point to the external URL. Whether this is a good idea I’m not sure, but it does feel like it’ll deflect attention from the local site for posts that are really just “retweets” or placeholders for reposts.