2019/own-your-mobile-experience
Own Your Mobile Experience
Own Your Mobile Experience was a keynote by 
Marty McGuire at IndieWeb Summit 2019.
Watch: ▶️12:14s
Photos
Transcript
First, thank you, all, for giving me the opportunity to speak up here with all of these other great keynotes. Thanks for taking a chance on this. And, thanks, in advance, for going on a journey that's probably going to be a little bit weird and intimate.
Like, you're coming into how I use the internet and I do that as much as I can through building blocks that the IndieWeb community has made, that in my -- I guess three or four years of digging into IndieWeb trying to understand it, trying to build tools and things for myself, that I've been able to sort of cobble together and I think in some sense, Tantek is right. These tools exist and once you've kind of plugged the right things together, it works.
But in another sense, this is a very organic thing that I have slowly accrued over time and it has sharp edges. It has bruises. It has bleeding edges.
Okay.
Welcome to my phone. Oh, gosh. All right.
I would like to start things off with some posting. So, this is an app called Indigenous. It's built by Eddie Hinkle. Like most of the things I use, this is someone else's work. So Eddie, I hope I'm not doing you wrong by showcasing this here and how I happen to have learned how to use it.
I'm going to start with a photo post. I want to thank Jacky for posing with me earlier. Let's see, I'm excited to have an IndieWeb Summit day. We'll get that sent off. And, what this is doing, in the background, is doing two uploads. One, it's sending that photo off to a service I've built, that stores media for me and just serves it back and the other is actually making a post on my website. So, we're going to let that post. It takes about a minute. Meanwhile, I'm going to show you the more interesting parts of Indigenous.
Indigenous is what we're calling an indie reader.
Nice, Jacky blowing it up over there.
A lot of folks, myself included, like to say we miss Google Reader. You could follow all the things you care about and nothing else. Seeing it in a reverse chronological timeline and one of the things that was missing is the actual social aspects, being able to do something with that. So, this is how Indigenous shows my feeds.
I have a group called IndieWeb that are basically just people that I have learned of through events like this.
I think I like Jacky's post here. These are being pulled from the feeds on peoples' sites.
I really thought there would be a photo there.
>> [Away from mic].
>> It's cool. You don't need to apologize. I don't know why I called you out. This is a nice mobile experience. This is an app, it's native. You can see, at the bottom of the screen, we have some options. These all will actually create new posts on my site.
There's -- I will call Eddie out for this a little bit. If you click the button, there's very little feedback that anything happened. In theory, a like is being made on my site right now and will show up for Jacky later. Let's see, I skipped a step here. So, posting a photo. One thing we talk about on the IndieWeb is POSSE. You post stuff on your site, but most people don't read your site. I want to take that photo that I just posted and also put it on Twitter so we get some reach. So, we're going to make a photo post. So excited for an IndieWeb Summit Day. And this is one of the kind of uglier parts of my personal site flow.
Other folks have automated this. I haven't. So I post to my site, I post to Twitter. If I want to experience some of the cooler parts of the IndieWeb, where things on -- oh, no. Oh, y'all. My site might be broken now. This is going to be very awkward. Cool. Here's what
I can do, we can go to some pre-cooked example posts.
One of the most important things you can do is post places where your community still is. If that happens to be Twitter, you know, also post things to Twitter and through tools like Bridgy, which Tantek mentioned, you can have responses come back. So, here's an example of a post I put on my site. And if I click through the see also link,
It's also got a tweet. A lot of folks have asked questions on Twitter, retweeted it and replied. Because I have set up my site with Bridgy, I actually get those back. So, we can see, a lot of these are Twitter likes, reposts and then the actual questions, themselves, come in as mentions.
If my website was working right now, we'd be doing a live version of this. Trust me, it sometimes works.
Since we're off the rails, let me check my notes here. Um, right. The -- this reader is great for following IndieWeb folks, but I also use if for a lot of other stuff. I don't use Instagram, but I have an Instagram. I have a lot of friends that I follow on there and through another tool, build by Ryan Barrett, called Granary, I'm able to take my Instagram feeds, pull them in through my reader and check them out here and if there's something that I like,
I can like it on my site. If there's something I want to reply to, I can do that on my site.
And if I want to do that on Instagram, as well -- oh, yeah, let's see. It's one of my pirate friends in Baltimore. I can look at all this stuff without having to load up Instagram. Without having to have Facebook cook as tracking me around and it feels like a little step more free. And, you know, it takes some effort, but I think it's worth it.
Okay. With my site broken, I can't do these things. But, I can get into some of the other weirder stuff. One thing that is still very bleeding edge is more exotic ways of posting. There are wonderful tools. We'll look at Monocle here. This is another piece of Aaron's work. It's an indie reader that runs in the browser.
So I can use this instead of or in addition to a native app. It also has -- do we have posting tools here? Oh, I like this very much. I do like this very much.
[Laughter].
That one. That one gets a like. Maybe these will show up some day. Gosh, what did I want to do? It's really tough when you break your website while you're trying to do a live demo.
Oh, that was it.
Right. I did -- I did myself a good thing here. So, one thing I want to do, I was on Good Reads and I wanted to stop. I built a thing to post reads on my site and a lot of this was inspired by Gregor, who built indiebookclub.biz.
But I thought it would be even faster if I could basically like post something I want to read from my phone. And this is where the work of Sebastiaan Andeweg and Rosemary Orchard came in handy.
If you have an iOS device, especially once iOS 13 comes out, you're going to want to play with shortcuts because this is where IndieWeb building blocks actually come into your hands. You kind of have to be the IndieWeb building block in order to move things around. But, through some of their work, I was able to create shortcuts that can use the same IndieWeb building blocks --
Micropub -- to post to my site. I have shared a GoodReads URL to my shortcut. It's asking me whether I want to mark this as something I want to read, am reading, or finished reading.
I want to say it's to read. It's going to create a Micropub post and off it went to my site. The next time I get my site compiling, it'll be up there and we can see -- /reads -- sorry. /tag/books. We can see, like, these are things that I used to post to GoodReads, but now I can track them all on my site. Other folks on the IndieWeb can book club it up. See what other folks are reading, try to read things together.
One last thing I will show before I hop out of here. That photo that Jacky and I took is a live photo and this is where you get into the kind of stuff that you can only build when it's your website, like, this -- this kind of thing is, like, new and hot on Boomerang and apps you send to people and it disappears.
I like this little bouncy loop, so --
[Laughter].
I'm going to share it to my website. And, I do that through another shortcut I made called Live Photo to Micropub Video. It takes that loop, let's you -- this is all part of iOS so far. That was weird. Uploads it, put a caption -- we're going to call this the IndieWeb Dance, that's official now.
[Laughter].
And, it will post that to my site and I do have -- I have a pre-baked --
>> Can you make that face?
>> Make that same face?
[Laughter].
[Away from mic].
>> In a moment, yes. I can do this one.
[Laughter].
Oh, my hand. All right. So, to wrap this up and not take too much of y'all's time -- dang, where did my notes go? I've lost them. That's okay. We will -- going to my pre-baked demo.
Um, this is an example of what these look like on my site. So, they -- they're little looping videos that play silently. They animate for one second. This is the kind of thing that's pretty hard to put out and I find there's a lot of creativity where if you're willing to dig in and get your hands dirty and understand these building blocks, which get easier months by month, year by year, you can start to really own your own experience. There are things I can do now with my phone, with my website, on the social web, that I would have never imagined a few years ago and, if I lost this, I'd be very sad.
We'll leave this there. Thanks very much.