I’ve refined the process a bit in the last couple of weeks, and am becoming relatively happy with the overall output. For those interested, below is the general process/workflow I’m using:
- As I read a website, I use a browser extension (there’s also a bookmarklet available) linked to my Reading.am account to indicate that I’m currently reading a particular article.
- I have an IFTTT.com applet that scrapes the RSS feed of my Reading account for new entries (in near real-time) and this creates a new WordPress draft post on my blog. I did have to change my IFTTT.com settings not to use their custom URL shortener to make things easier and to prevent future potential link-rot.
- Shortly after I’m done reading, I receive a notification of the creation of the draft post to remind me to (optionally) post my comments/thoughts to the draft post. If necessary, I make any additional modifications or add tags to the post.
- I publish the post; and
- Optionally, I send POSSE copies to other silos like Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ to engage with other parts of my network.
Status updates of this type also have a pre-included O-embed with a synopsis of the content if the bookmarked site supports it, otherwise, a blockquoted synopsis stripped from the site’s meta-data is included.
Other near-term improvements may include custom coding something via the available Reading.am hooks to directly integrate with the WordPress Post Kinds plugin to use the URL post pattern http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=read&kindurl=@url to shorten the workflow even further. Post Kinds automatically handles the wrapping of the post data in the appropriate microformats automatically. I also want to add a tidbit so that when I make my post I ping the Internet archive with the URL of the article I read so that it will be archived for future potential reference (hat tip to Jeremy Kieth for giving me the idea at IndieWebCamp LA a few weeks ago.)
I had originally played around with using the Post Kinds bookmarklet method directly, but this got in the way of the immediacy of reading the particular article for me. Using a PESOS method allows me to read and process the article a bit first before writing commentary or other details. I may also integrate a Hypothes.is based workflow into this process in which I use the hypothes.is browser etension to highlight and annotate the article and then use the Hypothes.is Aggregator Plugin to embed those thoughts into the post via shortcodes. The following post serves as a rough example of this, though the CSS for it could stand a bit of work: Chris Aldrich is reading WordPress Without Shame.
I was a bit surprised that Reading.am didn’t already natively support a WordPress pathway though it has a custom set up for Tumblr as well as a half a dozen other silos. Perhaps they’ll support WordPress in the future?
These new read post types can be found at the following URL: http://boffosocko.com/kind/read/?type=status?type=link.
Read The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016 by Readability (Medium)
I really wish I’d heard about this before September! And certainly before today… I know I used it fairly frequently in the early days of the service. I do remember that they did have a some nice functionality for sending articles to the Amazon Kindle too. Not sure how much data I may have lost in this particular shutdown, but I do wish I’d had a chance to back it up.
I am glad that bookmarks are one of the post types that I’m now saving by posting on my own site first though. For more of my thoughts on these post types, take a look at:
Owning my Online Reading Status Updates
A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow
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@Chronotope Okay, so I’ve spent the majority of my time since your tweet playing with (read: drooling over) @pressfwd.
It is awesome and almost exactly what I’ve been looking for for ages without knowing it. I think that I’m not only an immediate convert, but an evangelist.
In fact, not just hours earlier in the day, I’d made this comment on the WordPress Reader Refresh (at https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/reader-refresh-2017/#comment-231762):
“Some nice visual changes in this iteration. Makes it one of the most visually pretty feed readers out there now while still maintaining a relatively light weight.
I still wish there were more functionality pieces built into it like the indie-reader Woodwind.xyz or even Feedly. While WordPress in some sense is more creator oriented than consumption oriented, I still think that not having a more closely integrated reader built into it is still a drawback to the overall WordPress platform.”
From the sound of your tweets and how I see it laid out, in some sense I suspect you’re personally almost also using it as a built in bookmark or to-read app like Pocket or InstaPaper? This is almost exactly the type of “off label” use case I’d like to bend it to–though it doesn’t really require that much bending given its current architecture. Are you displaying all the items you’ve read/commented on publicly (and where is it?) or are you just using the comment functionality and the nominated portions as a private “I’ve read this list” on your back end?
I’ve been thinking about the topic for a while since just before InstaPaper’s acquisition by Pinterest and recently written a few things including about Owning My Online Reading Status Updates: http://boffosocko.com/2016/11/20/owning-my-online-reading-status-updates/
I’ve even thought about using the Wallabag self-hosted version of something similar to this, but I’d prefer something more closely integrated with WordPress and PressForward has almost everything one could dream for.
If you have a few minutes next week to chat via phone about some of these uses, I have a feeling you could expand your user base a bit as a result. I also know of a few folks working on similar WP-based readers who might be encouraged to merge their work into your much more polished project.
My thanks to the whole team for not only a beautiful plugin, but for some well written and spectacularly documented code on Github!
As many know, for the past 6 months or so, I’ve been slowly improving some of the IndieWeb tools and workflow I use to own what I’m reading both online and in physical print as well as status updates indicating those things. [1][2][3]
Since just before IndieWebCamp LA, I’ve been working on better ways to own the articles I’ve been reading and syndicate/share them out to other social platforms. The concept initially started out as a simple linkblog idea and has continually been growing, particularly with influence from my attendance of the Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News conference at UCLA in October. Around that same time, it was announced that Pinterest was purchasing Instapaper and they were shutting down some of Instapaper’s development and functionality. I’ve been primarily using Pocket for several years now and have desperately wanted to bring that functionality into my own site. I had also been looking at the self-hostable Wallabag alternative which is under heavy active development, but since most of my site is built on WordPress, I really preferred having a solution that integrated better into that as a workflow.
Enter PressForward
I’ve been looking closely at PressForward for the past week and change as a self-contained replacement for third party services like Pocket and Instapaper. I’ve been looking around for this type of self-hosted functionality for a while.
PressForward was originally intended for journalists and news organizations to aggregate new content, add it to their newsroom workflow, and then use it to publish new content. From what I can see it’s also got a nice following in academia as a tool for aggregating content for researchers focused on a particular area.
It only took a minute or two of looking at PressForward to realize that it had another off-label use case: as a spectacular replacement for read-later type apps!
In an IndieWeb fashion, this fantastic WordPress plugin allows me to easily own private bookmarks of things I’d like to read (PressForward calles these “Nominations” in keeping with its original use case). I can then later read them on my own website (with Mercury f.k.a Readability functionality built in), add commentary, and publish them as a read post. [Note: To my knowledge the creators of PressForward are unaware of the IndieWeb concept or philosophies.]
After some playing around for a bit and contemplating several variations, configurations, and options, I thought I’d share some thoughts about it for others considering using it in such an off-label manner. Hopefully these may also spur the developers to open up their initial concept to a broader audience as it seems very well designed and logically laid out.
Examples
The developers obviously know the value of dogfooding as at least two of them are using it in a Pocket-like fashion (as they many not have other direct use-cases).
Aram Zucker-Scharff
James Digioia
Pros
PressForward includes a beautiful, full built-in RSS Feed Reader!
This feature alone is enough to recommend using it even without any other feature. I’ve tried Orbit Reader and WhisperFollow (among others) which are both interesting in their own rights but are somewhat limited and have relatively clunky interfaces. The best part of WhisperFollow’s premise is that it has webactions built in, but I suspect these could easily be added onto PressForward.
In fact, not just hours before I’d discovered PressFoward, I’d made this comment on the WordPress Reader Refresh post announcing the refresh of WordPress.com’s own (separate) reader:
Additionally,
It’s IndieWeb and POSSE friendly
It does automatic link forwarding in a flexible/responsible manner with canonical URLs
Allows for proper attributions for the original author and content source/news outlet
Keeps lots of metadata for analyzing reading behavior
Taggable and categorizable
Allows for comments/commenting
Could be used for creating a linkblog on steroids
Archives the original article on the day it was read.
Is searchable
Could be used for collaboration and curation
Has Mercury (formerly known as Readability) integrated for a cleaner reading interface
Has a pre-configured browser bookmarklet
Is open source and incredibly well documented
One can count clicks to ones’ own site as the referer while still pushing the reader to the original
Along with other plugins like JetPack’s Publicize or Social Networks Auto-Poster, one can automatically share their reads to Twitter, Facebook, or other social media silos. In this case, you own the link, but the original publisher also gets the traffic.
Cons
No clear path for nominating articles on mobile.
This can be a dealbreaker for some, so I’ve outlined a pretty quick and simple solution below.
No direct statistics
Statistics for gauging ones’ reading aren’t built in directly (yet?), but some scripts are available. [4][5][6]
No larger data aggregation
Services like Pocket are able to aggregate the data of thousands of users to recommend and reveal articles I might also like. Sadly this self-hosted concept makes it difficult (or impossible) do have this type of functionality. However, I usually have far too much good stuff to read anyway, so maybe this isn’t such a loss.
Suggested Improvements
Adding the ability to do webactions directly from the “Nominated” screen would be fantastic, particularly for the RSS reader portion.
Default to an unread view of the current “All Content” page. I find that I have to filter the view every time I visit the page to make it usable. I suspect this would be a better default for most newsrooms too.
It would be nice to have a pre-configured archive template page in a simple linkblog format that filters posts that were nominated/drafted/published via the Plugin. This will prevent users from needing to create one that’s compatible with their current theme. Something with a date read, Title linked to the original, Author, and Source attribution could be useful for many users.
A PressForward Nomination “Bookmarklet” for Mobile
One of the big issues I came up against immediately with PressForward is ease of use on mobile. A lot of the content I read is on mobile, so being able to bookmark (nominate) articles via mobile or apps like Nuzzel or Twitter is very important. I suspect this may also be the case for many of their current user base.
Earlier this year I came across a great little Android mobile app called URL Forwarder which can be used to share things with the ubiquitous mobile sharing icons. Essentially one can use it to share the URL of the mobile page one is on to a mobile Nomination form within PressForward.
I’d suspect that there’s also a similar app for iOS, but I haven’t checked. If not available, URL Forwarder is open source on Github and could potentially be ported. There’s also a similar Android app called Bookmarklet Free which could be used instead of URL Forwarder.
PressForward’s built in bookmarklet kindly has a pre-configured URL for creating nominations, so it’s a simple case of configuring it. These details follow below for those interested.
Configuring URL Forwarder for PressForward
Open URL Forwarder
Click the “+” icon to create a filter.
Give the filter a name, “Nominate This” is a reasonable suggestion. (See photo below.)
Use the following entry for the “Filter URL” replacing
example.comwith your site’s domain name:http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/pressforward/includes/nomthis/nominate-this.php?u=@urlLeave the “Replaceable text” as “@url”
Finish by clicking on the checkmark in the top right corner.
Simple right?
Configuring URL Forwarder Sharing from a web page to URL Forwarder Choose “Nominate” to share to PressForward
Nominating a post via mobile
With the configuration above set up, do the following:
On the mobile page one wants to nominate, click the ubiquitous “share this” mobile icon (or share via a pull down menu, depending on your mobile browser or other app.)
Choose to share through URL Forwarder
Click on the “Nominate” option just created above.
Change/modify any data within your website administrative interface and either nominate or post as a draft. (This part is the same as one would experience using the desktop bookmarklet.)
What’s next?
Given the data intensity of both the feed reader and what portends to be years of article data, I’m left with the question of hosting it within my primary site or putting it on a subdomain?
I desperately want to keep it on the main site, but perhaps hosting it on a subdomain, similar to how both Aram Zucker-Scharff and James Digioia do it may be better advised?
I’ve also run across an issue with the automatic redirect which needs some troubleshooting as well. Hopefully this will be cleared up quickly and we’ll be off to the races.
References
[1]
C. Aldrich, “A New Reading Post-type for Bookmarking and Reading Workflow,” BoffoSocko | Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 22-Aug-2016. [Online]. Available: http://boffosocko.com/2016/08/22/a-new-reading-post-type-for-bookmarking-and-reading-workflow/. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
[2]
C. Aldrich, “Owning my Online Reading Status Updates,” BoffoSocko | Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 20-Nov-2016. [Online]. Available: http://boffosocko.com/2016/11/20/owning-my-online-reading-status-updates/. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
[3]
C. Aldrich, “Notes, Highlights, and Marginalia from E-books to Online,” BoffoSocko | Musings of a Modern Day Cyberneticist, 24-Oct-2016. [Online]. Available: http://boffosocko.com/2016/10/24/notes-highlights-and-marginalia/. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
[4]
A. Zucker-Scharff, “Personal Statistics from 3 Months of Internet Reading,” Medium, 05-Sep-2015. [Online]. Available: https://medium.com/@aramzs/3-month-internet-reading-stats-f41fa15d63f0#.dez80up7y. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
[5]
A. Zucker-Scharff, “Test functions based on PF stats for collecting data,” Gist. [Online]. Available: https://gist.github.com/AramZS/d10fe64dc33fc9ffc2d8. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
[6]
A. Zucker-Scharff, “PressForward/pf_stats,” GitHub. [Online]. Available: https://github.com/PressForward/pf_stats. [Accessed: 31-Dec-2016]
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Hi Chris, do you know wether there is a post type alike “I have read this book” for CMS Known? It´s only because of journaling. There is no need of a current status like “just reading”, “done” etc.
Andreas, The best way I’m aware of to do read posts with #WithKnown currently is to post a status update to the effect. I’ve been considering doing a plugin similar to Jonathan LaCour’s Watching https://github.com/cleverdevil/Known-Watching but for books. In fact, other than some cut and paste work and changing the microformats, it should be a simple thing. I’d almost feel guilty for “stealing” it.
I’ve started hacking away at a Read plugin similar to the bookmark or like functionalities that simply bookmarks articles which I’ve read online, but it’s got some quirky upstream issues that need to be solved before I can finish it. Ultimately it’s really for online content more so than books (or even magazines) though. I may circle back around to it sometime toward the end of the summer as I’m trying to finish up some last pieces on my Reading workflows for WordPress.
Notes, as much for my own memory as for anyone following along, on a couple of recent tweaks
Reading
I read a lot, on and offline, and forget almost as much, so I have various places where I try to save bookmarks, notes and what have you. Then I noticed that someone whose footsteps I have been dogging uses a thing called Reading. The premise is “Not what you like. Not what you find interesting. Just what you’re reading,” with an emphasis on not censoring yourself. I confess I’m not fully on board with that. There are some things that I start reading and then discover that they just are not what I am looking for. No point marking those. There’s a social element, in that you can build up a little community and comment on what you’re reading. It is also super-easy to read what you and your community are Reading, IYSWIM, because there are RSS feeds for it all. Also, it is easy to share to other places like Instapaper and Pinboard — which has a handy “reading.am” tag. I haven’t yet tried the other sharing options.
At this point, I am consuming my community’s RSS and using my own RSS to feed the sidebar here. So no permanent storage yet. It would be an interesting project to see whether I could automate something from my RSS feed to, say, my stream on Known.
Coding 1
Sticking stuff from reading.am into the sidebar was easy enough, thanks to the superb Twigfeeds plugin for Grav, but through no fault of the plugin, there was an awful lot of guff, to whit Jeremy Cherfas is reading in front of every entry. To begin with I thought of going through a few loops to get rid of that, but then I had a little eureka moment. You can use filters to do all sorts of things to Twig variables in Grav. A few minutes later, I stuck this
{{ item.title | regex_replace(['/Jeremy Cherfas is reading /'],['']) }}in the Feeds section of
sidebar.html.twigand all was good. I was quite happy with that.Coding and commenting
Having managed to get webmentions and comments working here a couple of things needed fixing. One is the ability to moderate comments. If a human being is taking the trouble to make a comment, I don’t want to bother them with having to prove that they’re a human being, so there are things in place to deter bots (I hope) but not people. Alas, this means that anyone who can be bothered is free to spam me, and as yet the plugin that does comments in Grav has no way to deal with individual comments. I have to go to the web server, find a particular file and edit it. Not, so far, a huge problem, but it seems to me that automating this process could be another useful learning exercise.
More generally, there’s been a renewed discussion of the value or otherwise of comments. In general, I’m all for civilised discussion. ADN had that, but not integration with other sites. 10C has it, and is integrated with its own blogging platform, but not much else. Micro.blog seems to be making it easier and easier. Responding on your own site almost certainly promotes civilised discussion, and webmentions make it relatively easy to ensure that the other members of the conversation are aware of the whole discussion. But there was one piece missing in my own implementation: a way for people without webmentions to let me know that they had mentioned a post of mine.
At first I thought it would be really difficult and involve a script on my web pages, something entirely new to me. However, chums in the IndieWeb IRC assured me that it gould be done with a simple POST form. That I almost understand. So I went off, plagiarised a couple of forms that I saw on other people’s sites, tweaked sources and targets to suit my own, and ended up with something that, to my amazement, actually works. And it really wasn’t that difficult.
If you’re running a blog on Grav and want to let people ping you with their responses, this is the snippet you need.
<form id="webmention-form" action="https://webmention.herokuapp.com/api/webmention" method="post"><p>
<label for="webmention-source">If you write something on your own site that links to this post, send me a <a href="http://indieweb.org/webmention">Webmention</a> by putting your post's URL in here:</label>
<input id="webmention-source" type="url" name="source" placeholder="URL/Permalink of your article">
</p>
<p>
<input style="background-color: #22ff9b; text-align: center; width: 6rem;" id="webmention-submit" type="submit" name="submit" value="Do it!">
</p>
<input id="webmention-target" type="hidden" name="target" value="{{ page.permalink }}" >
</form>
If I were to be hypercritical I’d complain that the styling is clunky and not the same as the other form, but it is definitely good enough.
<a href="https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/tag:Geeky" rel="nofollow">Geeky</a>
Owning my Online Reading Status Updates by Chris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
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<em>Related</em>
Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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Reply to IndieWeb Press This bookmarklets for WordPress by Aaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
Aaron, the IndieWeb PressThis version bookmarklets are certainly a laudable solution for bookmarking things (even as WordPress moves the functionality of the original out of core), but I suspect you may find a more robust solution given some of your current set up.
Post Kinds Bookmarklets
A screen capture of my browser bookmarklets for my WordPress site with emoji for easier visual use.Since you have the Post Kinds plugin set up, you might consider using that for a lot of the distance it can give you instead. I’ve written up some basic usage instructions for the plugin along with screenshots, but you’ll probably be most interested in the section on Bookmarklet Configuration. I’ve created a dozen or so browser bookmarklets, with handy visual emoji, for creating specific bookmark types for my site.
As for mobile posting, I’ll mention that I’ve heard “rumors” that David Shanske has a strong itch for improving the use of Post Kinds with a better mobile flow, so I would expect it to improve in the coming months. Until that time however, you can find some great tips on the wiki page for mobile posting. I recommend reading the entire page (including the section on Known which includes tools like URL Forwarder for Android that will also work with WordPress in conjunction with Post Kinds and the URL scheme described in the Bookmarklet Configuration section noted above.)
Using these details you should be able to make bookmarklets for your desktop browser and an Android phone in under an hour. If for some reason the documentation at these locations isn’t clear enough for you to puzzle out, let me know and I can do a more complete write up with screenshots and full code. (It’s still a piece of the book I need to expand out, or I’d include it here.)
Email
WordPress has the option of setting up an email address by which to post to your site. You can configure this pretty quickly, especially for mobile use to send URLs to your website that way. I typically use this method for quickly bookmarking things to my site for private use at a later date.
PESOS Options
There are also services that do bookmarking and include RSS feeds to your content which you could also potentially use to trigger IFTTT.com actions to post to your website. I have something similar to this set up for Reading.am which I’ve described in the past. You could certainly use this in combination with Diigo, which I see you use. Again, here more often than not I use these methods when I post things to my site as drafts or private posts.
cc: Indieweb Press This Bookmarklets for WordPress
@mrkrndvs This link may also be somewhat relevant to some of your recent questions if you haven’t come across it: http://boffosocko.com/2016/11/20/owning-my-online-reading-status-updates/
Read posts are somewhat like bookmarks, just for things that I’ve read. I suspect you could use this for Radio3/Diigo as well.
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