Tag Archives: #indieweb

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For me, a handy bit of functionality I needed for my Idno powered personal lifestream site, is the ability to make posts via email.

Idno has a powerful mobile view, but sometimes even that is too bandwidth intensive, and quite often I like to be able to fire and forget; use the native apps on my phone or laptop that better handle disconnection.

So, I put together a quick plugin that allows you to make posts via email!

How it works

The plugin, once installed and configured, will let you generate a secret email address to which you send your email.

Out of the box the plugin will allow you to make status updates, long form posts (where the length of the subject and message body exceeds 140 characters), and even upload photos, and you can extend it further in your own plugins!

Installation

Installation requires you to have access to your own mail server (which if you’re a good indieweb / prism-breaking citizen you should be). You create an email alias that will pipe the email through a incoming email script, and then configure your email server to direct email to this handler for your domain.

The repository readme has some more detailed instruction (and of course there are many other techniques for firing email through the script).

» Visit the project on Github…

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opengraphlogo Open Graph is a technology that provides information about a website or a website object. Among other things, this is how Facebook and G+ gets details about the youtube video that you just posted.

Support for this was missing from base Idno, and since I wanted it for my other site, I wrote a quick plugin.

This plugin provides open graph headers for your idno site, and detailed descriptions for individual permalinks, but it also provides functionality to extract open graph details from other sites when you post links. This means that you’ll get some extra details displayed about a site when you post a link to it.

Hopefully this’ll be useful to you!

» Visit the project on Github…

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The other day I sketched out some notes on how friend/follow and subscribe might work in a distributed social network such as Idno (I have since hacked together some plugins based on those notes).

So, I thought I’d sketch up some thoughts on how private and friend only posts might work in a distributed social network:

Outline specification

  • On account creation (or if there isn’t a key present) a key pair is generated, this key pair is used to identify a user’s profile to that user’s friends.
    • I’m not sure exactly what kind of key this should be at this point, although I’m leaning towards a PGP key pair, although OpenSSL has its merits (of course, there is no reason why we can’t use multiple technologies).
    • We’ll probably have to have the private key stored on the server for the purposes of signing, although there’s no reason why these have to be your main keys.
  • When Alice follows Bob, as described in my previous post, they both pull the public keys from each other’s profile as part of that exchange, which have been marked up using Microformats 2. Any keys found are saved against the record of that user.
    • For security, we probably want to do some sort of key validation here; perhaps key fingerprint, or perhaps better some web of trust based on mutual friends…
    • How key revocation might work is an open question, but I think the easiest way might be for Alice to send another subscription request to Bob, and have that re-trigger this process, rather than (as happens at the moment), returning an error that Alice is already subscribed to Bob.
  • When Bob writes a friends only post he lists Alice’s profile UUID in a list of people who can view the post, then ping’s Alice’s endpoint.
  • When Alice visits Bob, or Alice’s site visits Bob’s permalink, it identifies itself by signing the request using her key. If the signature is valid and belongs to a key for a user for which Bob has allowed access to the permalink, the data is displayed, otherwise a HTTP 403 code is returned.

Just some rough thoughts for now, let me know your thoughts!