I spent yesterday working on a version of a blogger theme compatible with IndieWeb tools like webmentions. You can see an example here: https://drmacsspot.blogspot.com/

Then using IFTT I syndicate my notes to Twitter and the tweets get displayed back on my blog as comments. Here is an example: https://drmacsspot.blogspot.com/2019/02/blog-post_88.html

The best part is not relying on social media at all. If other websites send and receive webmentions their post just show up as comments and my replies will show up on their site (Currently manually sent using box below).

Blogger can be your Google+ replacement or for many of you who have to use Blogger as your tool du jour because of school policies you can play a bit with the cool #IndieWeb tools coming out.

What is #IndieWeb

What are microformats?

To make this all work you do need proper microformats in your HTML. This is like the metadata your website carries around that you may not know about. Microformats are slightly different because they are in the HTML to make sure they are always human readable.

You can do really cool stuff with microformats. The IndieWeb community has created all kinds of fun toys. So as a blogger you get metadata you control and access to new social social readers, webmentions, web rings, and so much more.

Can I do this?

To do this you either need to know a tiny bit of HTML or better yet be willing to learn. I will work on better tutorials later in the week.

To add this theme you need to select "edit classic theme." This is really improvement over the current Blogger themes. You get full control of your HTML and stylesheet.

Then cut and paste this theme template:

Change the information to your information. Then go to the website Bridgy and authorize your account. This enables the webmentions

• To publish a post use a title
• To publish a note use no title
• To publish a photo post at "u-photo" as a property to you img element so img class="u-photo"
• To publish a reply post add the property "u-in-reply-to" so a class="u-in-reply-to"
• To publish a like use not title and add the property "u-like-of" a class="u-like-of"

If you want to syndicate to Twitter you do need to create an IFTT account and choose the recipe. I set it up to only include post content and url.

You can't do all things IndieWeb with this approach. The new social readers require the use of new reading and writing APIs not supported, and you will have to touch HTML (a good thing) but if you wanted to get started on the Web you can use Blogger. .