Update: Kyle Mahan has built this!
Kevin Marks had a great idea the other day: a micropub bridge service for hosted blog sites like Blogger, WordPress.com, and Tumblr, similar to Bridgy’s webmention service. If you have a hosted blog, you’d sign into this service, approve it to create/edit/delete your posts, add its micropub endpoint to your blog’s HTML, et voilà! Instant micropub support.
I don’t plan to take the lead on building this, but we do have a clear idea of what it would take, so I figured I’d throw together some notes like I did with indie stats. Many of the pieces are already available as libraries and services, so hopefully much of the remaining work is just glue.
Like Bridgy, the front page of the bridge site would have “sign in” buttons for the hosted blog providers we want to support, e.g. Blogger, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. Those buttons would start the OAuth dance and ask for the appropriate scopes to CRUD posts.
When the user approves the OAuth prompt, we’d store their silo access token and
show them instructions for adding the bridge’s micropub endpoint to their blog’s
HTML template.
(Here are example instructions.)
The endpoint should identify the silo and domain, e.g. /tumblr/mysite.com. We
should use IndieAuth’s token service to start,
so we’d include its endpoints too. Here’s an example block:
<link rel="micropub" href="https://micropub-bridge.org/tumblr/mysite.com">
<link rel="authorization_endpoint" href="https://indieauth.com/auth">
<link rel="token_endpoint" href="https://tokens.indieauth.com/token">
When a micropub request comes in, we’d extract the silo and domain from the path (or whatever), look up the access token, convert the request to a corresponding silo API call, make that call, and convert the response back into a micropub response.
Here are each silo’s API docs for CRUDding posts: Blogger, WordPress.com, Tumblr.
Who’s with me?
An idea for expanding micropub to hosted blogs, written up by @schnarfed https://snarfed.org/micropub-for-hosted-blogs #indieweb
Pingback: Ryan Barrett
Wee, thanks for linking to flask-micropub. It won’t be much help yet as right now it’s geared toward writing micropub clients (like Quill), rather than micropub providers, but this would be good motivation to fill in the missing half of its functionality.
Pingback: Tomáš Jakl
hmu if and when this is ever avail for blogger or tumblr. I dig the idea. I just learned about micropub from my twitter threads via thread reader. being able to add them to my blog would save so much hassel vs embedding the tweets with html.