I’ve released my first hack from IndieWebCamp SF 2014! Let’s Talk is a userscript that renders h-cards in a standard format. When you go to someone’s web site, Let’s Talk shows you at a glance how to contact them and which methods they prefer.
We live in an app-focused world. When we want to talk to someone, we first have to choose an app to use. Some people prefer email, others text, others facetime or GitHub or a good old phone call.
Tantek has argued strongly for moving away from this and toward a people-oriented approach, and even started designing it. We’d all put our preferred contact methods on our web sites – email addresses, Twitter handles, etc. – and use those to contact each other.
I’m all for this! …except it’s not very good for muscle memory. I love that everyone’s web site looks different, but if you have to visually parse a different design every time you want to talk to someone, that’s not ideal. We could prevent that by making the “contact” sections of our web sites all look the same, but that’s not ideal either.
Let’s Talk fixes this. When you want to talk to someone, go to their web site, turn on Let’s Talk, and their communication methods appear in the top left corner, in the order they prefer, with standard icons and styling.
The source is on GitHub, and I happily accept pull requests. Thanks to Glenn Jones for his awesome microformat-shiv library, and to Automattic for their great Genericons font. Happy communicating!
@schnarfed Interesting! Adds discoverability. What do you think about wrapping it up in a browser extension? Icon in address bar + dropdown?
@voxpelli sounds great! this kind of thing isn’t my forte, but you’re welcome to try! otherwise i may get to it eventually.
@schnarfed Hey Ryan, You might find this semi-related and interesting: onename.io Heard about it from @danshipper this week.
@kacphl @danshipper hey kelly! that does indeed look interesting. thanks for the pointer!
snarfed.org/2014-03-14_8443
@schnarfed @t that’s a cool approach, too! I tinkered a bit with your CSS: github.com/snarfed/misc/p…