Syndication
This week I re-wrote the Jekyll portion of a syndication solution, and devised the server based matching solution. At the moment I’m using Zapier to syndicate over to Twitter via an XML RSS feed.
This is the poor man’s quick solution. It works, but I’m relying on another provider to facilitate everything. Next week I will begin to implement true syndication over to Mastodon, and then Twitter.
My solution works by adding frontmatter in to a page such as: twitter: true If this is contained, I add it to an RSS feed. Zapier watches the feed and when new items are added it POST’s them to Twitter.
The end-goal is to embrace the frontmatter mechanism, but replace it with a similar mechanism to how I send Webmentions. Which brings me to…
Webmentions
I need a more robust solution to sending Webmentions and I think I’ve found it. Currently the process can be quite brittle. It either works perfectly or it malfunctions and loops endlessly. This is because I am using the Post date frontmatter to add it to the queue for it being sent. However Mastr Cntrl has no knowledge of this and is using the source target URL to discern the date. It’s less than elegant and needs upgrading. I hope to implement a better way of doing this next week, and I’ll document it in full if it works.
User Research
Much of this week was spent in listening mode for my day-to-day job, user researching how certain health professionals carry out their daily tasks. I’ve found documenting their processes using decision trees to be a good way to document this and not infer interface decisions. Additionally, the trees are a good way to check later on if a designed interface is likely to work in a real world scenario.
RSVP
I added responding to events in to the website. It seems to work ok so far.
Intended Audience
I became aware of a growing trend this week to specify upfront in blog posts who your intended audience is. I can’t decide if I like this idea or not. On the one hand I see what it is trying to achieve hoping to reduce the amount of additional context a post may need to people outside of its day-to-day usage. But it puts me off that people who could learn something new or get engaged in a topic that they may otherwise have missed may never discover the content. This needs to sit with me for a while.
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