Show Navigation
Conversation
Notices
-
!Hubzilla Support Forum
I was thinking how Hubzilla might be more usable as a blog. A couple of things might be:
custom posts, or a way to differentiate between a "status" and a (blog) post, and then the ability to display only blog posts, all together, without the detritus of umpteen statuses appearing among them.
Wordpress has a "More" tag that you can put after the first sentence or two of a blog post, or alternatively an excerpt box, where you can summarize a post. Then it enables you to display a blog page based on excerpts.
-
Really? I'll have a look.
-
@Andrew Manning Thanks. This, together with what @Sean Tilley has written enabled me to understand the feature. It looks simple but effective. I'm supposing that widgets could be incorporated on the articles page and elsewhere in the system to present a list of articles, etc. Are we there with that yet?
If the articles feature is now stable, it may be possible to think about creating import tools from what Mike was referring to - already a few years ago during Red Matrix days - as "legacy" systems like WordPress.
When reading through the list of add-ons, I didn't realize this was intended also for blog posts. It said something about "interactive articles" so I was thinking it must be something like a Google Docs replacement.
In the Facebook universe, I guess this would be our equivalent of Notes.
-
Regarding importing a blog: it does not seem possible to back-date articles when publishing them.
-
@Mike Macgirvin I'm sure it's easy to resolve, but I was thinking it must be something in the code, as I haven't found it in the settings. Dates before today's dates are greyed out for me and can't be entered manually.
Did you manually import your blog? I remember when I asked about this, a few years back, you said you were thinking to develop a tool to import blogs from legacy systems like WP.
Thanks.
-
Thanks again. I found out (accidentally) that we can at least import someone else's blog, even without a script, when I added the RSS feed of Christopher Webber's blog. I was expecting it to add just recent or future articles as would a feed aggregator, but it's added 11 years, so far. And presumably back-dated these blog posts as my archives widget has accrued a few more years. As of now, I still can't read the articles but I suppose when my system has managed to digest it all, I 'll be able to read them.
What I learn from this is that If the articles module had the ability to import an RSS feed in the same way, we would have a way to import blogs.
-
@h.ear.t | tobias I understand what you are saying. That would be adding it to the regular timeline and not to the articles module. But that isn't necessarily bad. I was thinking that another way to tackle the differentiation of blog posts from regular statuses would be to create a category like "blog" and then either create a menu item for that category page, or, for example, create a listing of these on the profile page.
Ideally, there would be in the repositories a script similar to the one that Mike used to import his blog. Especially now that there is a dedicated articles module into which a blog can be integrated. Maybe if it were capable of handling rss or atom feeds, it would not need to be specific to WordPress, but could handle imports from other blogs that have a feed.
-
@Jens (public) What I was meaning was simply to be able to list articles by date, category, etc. on the article page. I see that it lists categories by default (see https://hub.vikshepa.com/articles/hosh) Under the advanced page layout editor, under settings, display settings, content settings, I went to "articles" and tried to add an archive widget. So far unsuccessfully (it doesn't influence the display of the articles). I still need to read through the Comanche help article to see if there are any pointers there.
-
@Jens (public) Yes, I mentioned having read what Sean Tilley had written above - just didn't add the relevant link. Thanks. I don't see that he carried through with anything so far, but I'm sure he'll do some nice work on this once he turns his hand to it. There's another approach to all this that I'm exploring in parallel - that of the indie web. The advantage there is that it relies upon one's own web site as the basis of identity across multiple networks. I like that idea. However it depends on many modifications or plugins and the sum total may be clunkier than what hubzilla can achieve natively. Also, they haven't as yet managed to achieve federation with gnu social, friendika, pleroma and maybe other instances.
-
@h.ear.t | tobias I gave your suggestion or idea a try. I created a new channel, added the rss feed for my blog to the channel. It imported everything. However, then I had difficulty adding the new channel as a channel source (settings/Channel Sources) for my regular channel. First of all, it refused to recognize the channel at all, unless I added the channel as a normal connection. After creating connections between/friending the channels i was then able to add the channel as a channel source. I added a category ("blog-post") and checked the box for "Resend posts with this channel as author". Under Channel Sources, the other channel is shown as a "new source" for the normal channel. So it looks OK, but isn't: no content gets sourced. Nothing is added. I thought it might be a permissions thing, so gave the channel with the blog posts the most generous permissions. But this has no effect.
-
@M. Dent Okay - so that's not a shortcut to importing an existing blog. Any other ideas to import a blog to either the articles module or the regular channel feed? Another thing I tried was to export the content from the channel that has the RSS feed from my blog, then import that content into my normal channel. But nothing gets imported in that case. Update: that anyway actually wouldn't achieve much, as it wouldn't give the imported blog content the same identity as the channel. My head hurts. It seems like the only way to import a blog is to have a dedicated script, such as Mike described.
-
I was thinking again: if this feature of adding a channel source (and then "resending posts as author") could really be usable as a hack for adding a blog (through its RSS/Atom feed), then it might be possible to modify the file responsible so that it doesn't only add future posts.
-
"Expire other channel content after this many days" was set as 0 / blank. However, at one stage I had it set to expire after a couple of weeks, and still when I imported someone's RSS feed, it brought in everything from the last 10 years (which surprised me). So I don't think that's the issue. I still haven't given it 24 hrs, but previously when importing things, it's been fairly zippy. I'll be interested to see what happens with your test, @h.ear.t | tobias
-
I'm going to be importing my blog manually (Goodness. Yes) into the channel wall. That's OK, I'm a plodder. The articles feature doesn't as yet give the kind of usability required of a blog (as discussed above). Also there's no normal way to import a blog. And if one would like to have a blog under articles, I think there should be a way also to automatically share (federate) an article and/or* place it on the wall. These are things for coders to do. I'm just a (1 horse) power-user.
*One thing I like about hubzilla, by the way, is the #NoFed addon. That's something I've always wanted in a social network! Lots of other stuff to love on this amazing piece of software that is hubzilla. But it needs more documentation. Is there a wiki somewhere that one can contribute to?
-
Here's another idea I've had: Separate content by (manually) importing the blog into Articles, and continuing to use this for blogging. Use Cards (which are almost identical to Articles) as a links blog (for non-original content). Then merge both into the Wall, and federate if desired. The Wall would just be a microblog; a few words and links to content. The Wall would also archive content by date, filling in for the absence of that feature in Articles and Cards. By the way, the only way to backdate content is to make the change that Mike has mentioned above.
If links are placed in a links blog, Hubzilla's "Bookmarks" could be used in the manner of what used to be known as (maybe still is?) a blog roll (i.e., a list of links to related or favourite sources). I don't think that Bookmarks are suitable as a links blog (for example, there is no date).
-
Fuzzy dates (which seem to be called here "brief" dates) aren't always suitable and make it harder to know when exactly an article was written. What file(s) need to be modified in order to obtain non-fuzzy dates please?
-
@Mike Macgirvin face palm. thanks.
-
Despite @Mike Macgirvin 's caution not to use summaries in posts, in the test that I made, Mastodon handled a summary OK, without a content warning. Maybe something has changed on the Mastodon side? (I made a test user on Mastodon.cloud)
hosh
All Jonkman Microblog content and data are available under the