Today I upgraded my Processwire installation. Since I've not done that very often I wasn't quite sure if everything would work as expected after the upgrade.

After installing the new version, everything seemed to work fine until I tried to use the micropub endpoint I set up. The problem: I couldn't upload images anymore.

At first I suspected the upgrade to be the reason for the issue but then I discovered that I had made a mistake in my upload script (which I fixed immediately). Long story short: upgrading Processwire is very seamless and there's no reason to hesitate in keeping it to the latest version. That's what I learnt today.

Ever since I set up a micropub endpoint, I used OwnYourGram to syndicate photos I post to Instagram back to my own site. This evening I tried to post a delicious photo as usual but nothing showed on my site.

I started investigating immediately and found OwnYourGram throwing an authentication error. Then I checked my micropub endpoint script to find my site still configured as http instead of https. I changed it to the proper protocol and I also had to change the URL on my Instagram profile page.

I guess switching to HTTPS works really well, as long as you remember to change all your configuration files and profile pages accordingly. I’ll surely need to remember that. At least that’s what I learnt today.

I recently implemented a notes section on this website which accompanies the regular articles. There are currently three different types of notes: short text notes, photos and tweets. All of these notes are either published using the Processwire backend interface or syndicated via micropub endpoint. Each note then becomes a page in Processwire and therefore has it’s own URL.

I wanted to make adding these notes as easy as possible for me. One thing I had to consider was the fact that Processwire won’t let you create pages without a title. The title is also automatically translated into the URL for that page.

I didn’t want to enter a title each time I posted a note. I also wanted to create a consistent URL scheme that represented the date of the note’s creation. So I wrote a module that prefills the title field of a page with a configurable date string when the page is created.

The code is available on Github. It’s currently tailored to my needs, but I think it’s easily adaptable to other scenarios as well.

The last two days have been packed with interesting discussions and ideas on how to own the stuff you put online. But I guess what intrigued me most are the things that can be done by people who really care about something.

I’ve seen and learned so much about the building blocks of the indie web. I managed to implement a micropub endpoint in Processwire thanks to Jeremy’s code. Using IndieAuth, I can now use any micropub interface (e.g Quill) to post to my own website. I use OwnYourGram to post photos to my Processwire installation via the Instagram app and finally—and with tons of help from Tabea—I am able to post from Processwire to Twitter now.

I was pretty impressed by how much people got done. At the final demo session, everyone had something he or she had done to update their website – although I’m pretty sure that the end of this event will not be the end of their efforts to try and own their stuff online.

If you would like to read more, Bastian and Jeremy wrote a very good summary on the IndieWebCamp.