u-syndication

This article is a stub. You can help the IndieWeb wiki by expanding it.

u-syndication is a way to discoverably link from your original posts to syndicated copies on other sites like social media silos.

Why

Main article: syndication-link-use-cases

Why should an original post visibly hyperlink to syndicated copies?

POSSE threading

It enables those that that reply to your posts and POSSE similarly, to thread their POSSE replies to your POSSE copies.

If an Indieweb site supports POSSEing to one or more silo destinations, it should:

do u-syndication discovery on the original in-reply-to URL
for each such POSSE destination:
- choose the first u-syndication link that goes to that destination and save it
when POSSEing the reply post to each POSSE destination:
- if a u-syndication link was found for it
  - be sure to thread the POSSE copy of the reply as a reply to the respective u-syndication link

More use cases

For more use-cases see: syndication-link-use-cases

How to

How to publish

An original post should add a hyperlink to syndicated copies (e.g. per POSSE) with a class name of u-syndication inside their h-entry markup.

See the rel-syndication specification for more details.

How to link to Twitter

When linking to POSSEd copies of posts on twitter.com, make sure the link scheme is https:// for original-post-discovery as Twitter.com redirects to https.

How to link from WordPress

The best option is David Shanske's Syndication Links plugin. He took the functionality of the "WordPress Syndication" plugin below and merged it into this one so two things don't need to be maintained.

The following alternate plugins are unmaintained[1] and causes unknown error[2]:

User:Jihais.se's rel-syndication plugin. Integrates with other POSSE plugins; currently just Mailchimp Social.
User:Jihais.se's WordPress Syndication plugin is the github for the same plugin[3].

How to use

An Indie Web site that supports the ability to reply to posts should allow you to reply to any URL. As part of that reply UI, it should do u-syndication discovery for the POSSE threading use case described above by following this algorithm:

u-syndication discovery algorithm:

load the in-reply-to URL as a document
1. parse the document for microformats2
2. if there's a top level h-entry
3. then collect all of its syndication property values
end if
return whatever was collected

IndieWeb Examples

IndieWeb sites that implement rel-syndication links on their post permalinks, in rough order of implementation:

Aaron Parecki using p3k on aaronparecki.com (since 2013-04-10), e.g. [4] to Twitter
Tantek Çelik using Falcon on tantek.com (since 2013-06-23), e.g. [5] to Twitter
Ben Werdmuller using idno on werd.io (since 2013-06-23[6]), e.g. [7] to Twitter and Facebook
Shane Becker using Dark Matter on veganstraightedge.com (since 2013-07-17[8]) with automatic rel-syndication markup on manual POSSEing:
Frédéric de Villamil using publify on t37.net, e.g. [9] to Twitter
gRegor Morrill on gregorlove.com since 2014-??-?? (Fall)

See more thorough exploration of the UI / text of u-syndication links here:

posts-elsewhere

Examples in the wild

Hidden in the metadata for an episode of Meet the Press is a snippet of code: "sameAs":"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103396/" indicating that data for the episode has ostensibly sent to imdb.com. Unfortunately in this example the link both isn't marked up properly nor does it point to the correct page. While not technically an example with proper mark up, it is a good example from a major corporation attempting to internally keep track of their syndication links and data.

History

Previously, this page recommended using the rel="syndication" attribute on the syndication URLs. However, since rel attributes are page-scoped, this limits the usage to only on page permalinks. Using u-syndication allows syndication URLs to be included on h-entry posts within an h-feed.

Why