h-entry Microformat for Indieweb Posts

In which I go overboard with Hugo and Python for a quick Sunday task

Sunday, 26 April, 2020 — by Brian Wisti
Post — Tools — IndieWeb microformats hugo python site
Around 1,500 words, or 7 minutes of reading

looking at the interpreted microformats for a post, in bat

h-entry?

Like h-card, h-entry provides an attribute vocabulary. While h-card focuses on people and organizations, h-entry describes shared content — blog posts and comments in particular, but you could expand it as far as you like. Want to generate a feed of git commits? You could use h-entry to describe a commit!

Fine. Let’s get on with it

IndieWeb entries identify themselves with the h-entry class. e-content marks the content of the entry. You could always mark the same element as both. In fact that’s basically what I’ve been doing for a while.

I’m trying to move away from that though. Let’s give it a little structure.

<article class="h-entry">
  <header>
    ... metadata like title and tags ...
  </header>
  <section class="e-content">
    ... my insightful post ...
  </section>
  <footer>
    ... supplemental content like social links ...
  </footer>
</article>

Time to focus on putting useful metadata in the article header. Might as well expose some of the Hugo templating as well.

layouts/_default/single.html

{{ define "main" }}
  <article class="h-entry">
    <header>
      {{ .Render "article-header" }}
    </header>
    <section class="e-content">
      {{ .Content }}
    </section>
    <footer>
      {{ .Render "social" }}
  </article>
{{ end }}

The bare minimum

For IndieWeb purposes, we need to know at least two things about every entry:

u-url: where it was published
dt-published: when it was published

I’ll put both in a time element.

layouts/post/article-header.html

  <time class="dt-published"
    datetime="{{ .Format $.Site.Params.TimestampForm }}"> 
  <a class="u-url" href="{{ .Permalink }}">
    {{ .Format $.Site.Params.DateForm }} 
  </a>
</time>

$TimestampForm is set in config.toml as "2006-01-02T15:04:00-07:00"
$DateForm is set to "Monday, January 2, 2006"

time lets me include a machine-readable timestamp and a human-readable date string. I play a lot with what I consider “human-readable,” so a consistent format for machines is good.

My blog follows mundane convention, assigning a title to every post. I also like to add a description to clarify the topic. These are good candidates for p-name and p-summary.

<h1 class="p-name">{{ .Title }}</h1>

{{- with .Params.Description -}}
  <p class="p-summary">{{ . | markdownify }}</p>
{{- end -}}
⋮

Let’s see that in action with my post on weighing files in Python.

Who wrote this, anyways?

Seems a bit silly on my single-author site, but explicit authorship does make things clearer to casual visitors.

Fortunately I have a canonical h-card that I can link to.

⋮
— by
<a class="p-author h-card" rel="author"
   href="{{ .Site.BaseURL }}">{{ .Site.Author.name }}</a>

How do I classify my entry?

Now to sprinkle some p-category items in to help folks understand where the post fits with the rest of my site.

I organize my Hugo content by type — currently Note or Post — and then add optional details with categories and tags. The post should probably show each of those as a p-category.

{{- with .Type -}} 
  <br>
  <a class="p-category"
     href="/{{ . | urlize }}">{{ . | title }}</a>
{{- end -}}
{{ with .Params.category }} 
  — <a class="p-category"
       href="/categories/{{ . | urlize }}">{{ . | title }}</a>
{{ end }}
{{ with .Params.tags }}
  —
  {{ range . }}
    <a class="p-category tag"
       href="/tags/{{ . | urlize }}">{{ . }}</a>
  {{ end }}
{{ end }}

.Type is a Hugo page variable
Category and tag taxonomies get set in front matter.

What about cover images?

Many — but not all — of my posts include a cover image. Cover images should almost definitely be u-photo. There’s a lot of image processing with it though. To make a long story short — too late! — I’ll just show the microformat-specific addition.

⋮
<img {{ if $isCover }}class="u-photo"{{ end }}
⋮

Yep, that’s a post header all right. What about validation? Did I get the microformats right?

Examining my microformats locally

I know I can validate my h-entry at IndieWebify or copy and paste to https://microformats.io, but I want to look at this stuff from the shell. Preferably with a single command. Ideally with something I can stash in my tasks.py file.

mfpy and mf2util provide microformats2 handling for Python code.

I mainly want a dump of microformats found in a given URL, in a format easier for me to read than JSON. Here’s what I came up with.

I got carried away. This could have been its own post. Oh well. It’s like a two-for-one deal!

import json
import textwrap

from invoke import task
import mf2py
import mf2util
from ruamel.yaml import YAML
import toml

I need different formats for different purposes, so I import Python libraries for YAML and TOML along with the standard library JSON support.

def shorten_properties(d, width=80):
    """Find text in `d`, shortening it to fit in `width` columns"""
    if d is None:
        return

    if isinstance(d, dict):
        for key, value in d.items():
            d[key] = shorten_properties(value)
    elif isinstance(d, list):
        d = [ shorten_properties(i) for i in d ]
    elif isinstance(d, str):
        d = textwrap.shorten(d, width=width)
    return d

Sometimes microformat info is a wall of text. Quite often, in fact, since e-content includes the full content of any post. shorten_properties uses textwrap to keep large text properties from overwhelming me.

Now that I have the support code I need, it’s time for the Pyinvoke task.

@task(
    help={
        "url": "Web address to examine",
        "format": "preferred output format",
        "interpret": "whether to interpret the parsed entries",
        "everything": "whether to display items only or everything parsed",
        "shorten": "whether to shorten text found to 80 characters",
    }
)
def mf2(c, url, format="json", interpret=False, everything=False, shorten=True):
    """Display any microformats2 data from `url`"""
    entry = mf2py.parse(url=url)
    wants_json = format == "json"

    # Usually I just care about the h-* items
    if not everything:
        entry = {"items": entry["items"]}

    # Sometimes I want mf2util's summarized version
    if interpret:
        entry = mf2util.interpret(entry, url, want_json=wants_json)

    # I usually don't want a wall of text
    if shorten:
        entry = shorten_properties(entry)

    if format == "yml":
        YAML().dump(entry, sys.stdout)
    elif format == "toml":
        print(toml.dumps(entry))
    elif format == "json":
        print(json.dumps(entry, sort_keys=True, indent=2))
    else:
        raise KeyError(f"Unknown format '{format}' requested")

I could have made this a small script, but I’m pretty sure I’ll check microformats routinely while working on the site. Makes sense to have it readily available.

Let’s try out my new mf2 task.

$ invoke mf2 http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python/ -f yml

items:
- type:
  - h-entry
  properties:
    name:
    - Weighing Files With Python
    summary:
    - I want to optimize this site’s file sizes, but first I should see if I need
      to.
    published:
    - '2019-06-01T00:00:00+00:00'
    url:
    - http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python/
    author:
    - type:
      - h-card
      properties:
        name:
        - Brian Wisti
        url:
        - http://localhost:1313/
      value: Brian Wisti
    category:
    - Post
    - Programming
    - python
    - site
    - files
    photo:
    - http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python/cover.png
    content:
    - html: <div class="sidebarblock"> <div class="content"> <div [...]
      value: Updates 2019-06-02 adjusted a couple clumsy property methods with [...]
    syndication:
    - https://hackers.town/@randomgeek/102199106551447993
    - https://twitter.com/brianwisti/status/1134977256684761089

What about default JSON output and letting mf2util interpret the results?

$ inv mf2 http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python -i

{
  "author": {
    "name": "Brian Wisti",
    "url": "http://localhost:1313/"
  },
  "content": "<div class=\"sidebarblock\"> <div class=\"content\"> <div [...]",
  "content-plain": "Updates 2019-06-02 adjusted a couple clumsy property methods with [...]",
  "name": "Weighing Files With Python",
  "photo": "http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python/cover.png",
  "published": "2019-06-01T00:00:00+00:00",
  "summary": "I want to optimize this site\u2019s file sizes, but first I should see if I need to.",
  "syndication": [
    "https://twitter.com/brianwisti/status/1134977256684761089",
    "https://hackers.town/@randomgeek/102199106551447993"
  ],
  "type": "entry",
  "url": "http://localhost:1313/2019/06/01/weighing-files-with-python/"
}

Nice. I can tidy it up a bit later. Probably end up using those mf2util functions. But this works great for now. And my h-entry looks good!

Examine microformats on other sites

Oh hey I can grab any URL. This handles another issue I had: trying to examine microformats on other sites.

Let’s grab Jacky Alciné’s h-card!

$ inv mf2 https://v2.jacky.wtf -f toml

[[items]]
type = [ "h-card",]

[items.properties]
name = [ "Jacky Alciné",]
photo = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf/media/profile-image",]
url = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf",]
[[items]]
type = [ "h-feed",]
[[items.children]]
type = [ "h-entry",]

[items.children.properties]
author = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf",]
url = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf/post/a53bb7c4-2831-4666-ad85-75433ab2b1c3",]
published = [ "2020-04-26T08:57:39-07:00",]
[[items.children.properties.in-reply-to]]
type = [ "h-cite",]
value = "https://twitter.com/tiffani/status/1254438450897530882"

[items.children.properties.in-reply-to.properties]
url = [ "https://twitter.com/tiffani/status/1254438450897530882",]
[[items.children.properties.in-reply-to.properties.author]]
type = [ "h-card",]
value = "https://twitter.com/tiffani"

[items.children.properties.in-reply-to.properties.author.properties]
name = [ "Tiffani Ashley Bell",]
url = [ "https://twitter.com/tiffani",]
[[items.children.properties.in-reply-to.properties.content]]
html = "Definitely need to take a long walk today. Staying in the house all day is [...]"
value = "Definitely need to take a long walk today. Staying in the house all day is [...]"

[[items.children.properties.content]]
html = "<p>Just came back from one and I felt so much better about this with the [...]"
value = "Just came back from one and I felt so much better about this with the way [...]"


[items.properties]
name = [ "Last Note",]
uid = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf/stream",]
url = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf/stream",]
author = [ "https://v2.jacky.wtf",]

Neat. Now I can collect more h-cards for a blogroll idea I had. Better post this first.