Within the last few weeks, Tim Owens (who was I think first among my network to manage it) David Wiley and Jim Groom have all written about using Known as a POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) hub.  I asked Tim as soon as I read his enthusiastic post whether a trusty WordPress install could be coaxed into doing the same thing with enough plugins.  I can now report that the answer is at least mostly yes.

To start, I installed the webmention and indieweb plugins,  This didn’t in and of itself do much, since I wasn’t using a theme that supports microformats.  However, before I got around to trying to install a microformat plugin I saw Ryan Barrett‘s comment on Mike Caulfield’s post about IndieWebCamp Portland, encourarging Mike to try brid.gy, a service which moves webmentions to and from silos like Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus. At first, I was skeptical.  Isn’t the point of IndieWeb to free yourself from third party services?  But there is a GitHub repository, so I figure If something were to happen to the site proper, I could at least try to self host,

I decided to start with just Twitter integration.  I’m a light Facebook user and tend to keep it segregated from the rest of my online identity.  I use G+ even less, On the one hand, I might use it more if I could integrate it,  On the other hand, the point of G+ was being able to easily target messages to different audiences,

Signing up was straightforward, with the usual two step of authorizing a Twitter app, and mentions began to flow in quickly.  Publishing out to Twitter wasn’t quite as easy. It involved putting a hidden link in the body of any post you want to publish.  It works, but it’s a hassle. I had considered using a plugin called Social, but this apparently overrides your blog comment settings and allows anonymous commenting.  I wasn’t quite ready for that.

After manually editing several posts to send them to Twitter, I discovered a second problem. My blog, which I think of as being at least hopefully for slightly longer form things, now had a front page full of tweets.. How could I make them less prominent?

The answer was two more plugins, both suggested by Ryan, who was very patient and helpful.These were Ultimate Category Excluder and IndieWeb Press This.  The former is a straightforward install from the plugin menu.  The latter is a manual install.  Tim helped me realize that I needed to download the ZIP archive from GitHub rather than the individual files.  There are also JavaScript bookmarklets that need to be manually edited.  D’Arcy Norman also mentioned his Ephemerator plugin, although I couldn’t get my WP install to recognize it,

There are just a few things I’m still working to improve:

• I don’t know how well the JavaScript bookmarklets will work on my mobile device
• You can’t reply to a tweet when you are in timeline view.  I had to click on the author’s profile link, find the tweet in their page, and then click Details to get the tweet on a webpage by itself before the Reply bookmarklet would work.
• I’m still stuck manually inserting the HTML when I want to publish something that doesn’t refer back to some other page or post,or refers to many, as this post does.

I’d be interested in putting together a feature comparison of Known with this setup if anyone with a Known instance would like to collaborate.