rel-syndication

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rel-syndication is a way to discoverably link from your original blog post permalinks to syndicated copies of it on other sites, e.g. silos.

Contents 1 Why 1.1 POSSE threading 1.2 More use cases 2 How to 2.1 How to publish 2.2 How to link to Twitter 2.3 How to link from WordPress 2.4 How to use 3 IndieWeb Examples 4 See Also

Why

Why should an original post visibly hyperlink to syndicated copies?

POSSE threading

It enables those that that reply to your posts and POSSE similarly, to thread their POSSE replies to your POSSE copies.

If an Indie Web site supports POSSEing to one or more silo destinations, it should:

• do rel-syndication discovery on the original in-reply-to URL
• for each such POSSE destination:
  • choose the first rel-syndication link that goes to that destination and save it
• when POSSEing the reply post to each POSSE destination:
  • if a rel-syndication link was found for it
    • be sure to thread the POSSE copy of the reply as a reply to the respective rel-syndication link

More use cases

For more use-cases see: syndication-link-use-cases

How to

How to publish

An original post should hyperlink to syndicated copies (e.g. per POSSE) with a rel value of syndication.

Additionally the microformats2 class name u-syndication should also be placed on such hyperlinks from original posts (inside their h-entry markup/object) to their syndicated copies.

See the rel-syndication specification for more details.

How to link to Twitter

When linking to POSSEd copies of posts on twitter.com, make sure the link scheme is https:// for original-post-discovery as Twitter.com redirects to https.

How to link from WordPress

Install this plugin:

• David Shanske's Syndication Links plugin. He took the functionality of the "WordPress Syndication" plugin below and merge it into this one so two things don't need to be maintained. This code is now being moved into the Indieweb Plugin. [1]

Unmaintained[2] and causes unknown error[3]:

• User:Jihais.se's rel-syndication plugin. Integrates with other POSSE plugins; currently just Mailchimp Social.
• User:Jihais.se's WordPress Syndication plugin is the github for the same plugin[4].

How to use

An Indie Web site that supports the ability to reply to posts should allow you to reply to any URL. As part of that reply UI, it should do rel-syndication discovery for the POSSE threading use case described above by following this algorithm:

rel-syndication discovery algorithm:

1. load the in-reply-to URL as a document
2. collect all the rel-syndication link href and a href URLs.
3. if none are found,
   1. parse the document for microformats2
   2. if there's a top level h-entry
   3. then collect all of its syndication property values
4. end if
5. return whatever was collected

Any algorithm that has the same result as this algorithm may be used. E.g. as part of step 2 your code could parse the entire document simultaneously for both rel values and h-entry microformats rather than the separate parsing step in 3.1.

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb sites that implement rel-syndication links on their post permalinks, in rough order of implementation:

• Aaron Parecki using p3k on aaronparecki.com (since 2013-04-10), e.g. [5] to Twitter
• Tantek Çelik using Falcon on tantek.com (since 2013-06-23), e.g. [6] to Twitter
• Ben Werdmuller using idno on werd.io (since 2013-06-23[7]), e.g. [8] to Twitter and Facebook
• Shane Becker using Dark Matter on veganstraightedge.com (since 2013-07-17[9]) with automatic rel-syndication markup on manual POSSEing:
  • articles: http://veganstraightedge.com/articles/2013/09/07/rorschach-and-roomba to Medium and WordPress
  • notes: http://veganstraightedge.com/notes/2013/10/23/of-irons-and-fires to Twitter
  • videos: http://veganstraightedge.com/videos/2013/5/30/backyard-squirrel-buddy to Vine
• Frédéric de Villamil using publify on t37.net, e.g. [10] to Twitter
• gRegor Morrill on gregorlove.com since 2014-??-?? (Fall)

See more thorough exploration of the UI / text of rel-syndication links here:

• posts-elsewhere

See Also

• syndication
• POSSE
• original-post-discovery
• in-reply-to
• comments
• posts-elsewhere
• syndication-brainstorming