PressForward as an IndieWeb WordPress-based RSS Feed Reader & Pocket/Instapaper Replacement

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).

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:

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.

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

  1. Open URL Forwarder
  2. Click the “+” icon to create a filter.
  3. Give the filter a name, “Nominate This” is a reasonable suggestion. (See photo below.)
  4. Use the following entry for the “Filter URL” replacing example.com with your site’s domain name: http://example.com/wp-content/plugins/pressforward/includes/nomthis/nominate-this.php?u=@url
  5. Leave the “Replaceable text” as “@url”
  6. Finish by clicking on the checkmark in the top right corner.

Simple right?

Nominating a post via mobile

With the configuration above set up, do the following:

  1. 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.)
  2. Choose to share through URL Forwarder
  3. Click on the “Nominate” option just created above.
  4. 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]

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, 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.

39 thoughts on “PressForward as an IndieWeb WordPress-based RSS Feed Reader & Pocket/Instapaper Replacement”

  1. As I was scrolling through Twitter this morning, I came across a recommendation in favor of Press Forward, a free software alternative to closed-source tools for journalists that can also act as a self-contained RSS reader and Instapaper/Pocket replacement for use on WordPress-powered sites. The above is to provide context for those who haven’t been following this conversation. Plus, I’m still figuring out this crafting replies on my own site thing.

    Anyway, I received some very helpful feedback from the author of the original post regarding my current installation, which included a link to the project’s Github. This is great, both because I’m really looking forward to using this since I really don’t like messing around with Pocket/Instapaper due to their accessibility issues, plus owning your bookmarks. So far the only problem I’ve found, other than the issue mentioned in the feedback, is one where the bookmarklet cannot be accessed with a keyboard. You have to use a mouse. So I’ll be filing an issue, and hopefully a pull request, because along with the Indieweb implications and uses for this, it also presents a great alternative for controlling the display of the lists of links we collect, allowing for the creatin of accessible user interfaces.

    Also, Twitter’s 140-character limit is extra frustrating when you realize that you can reply to tweets from your own website, not be stuck trying to fit things in 140-char chunks, and keep ownership of the content, which is why I replied here. I need to finish getting customerservant.com switched over to a theme with complete microformat/microformat 2 support, and am looking at how to do this with the Genesis framework if possible.

  2. @redcrew You're welcome. BTW you may want to check this out for compiling your roundups. https://t.co/vw3vWsmi8b&
    –via Twitter

    1. @cswordpress @redcrew Thanks for the recommendation Amanda!
      I’m guessing you installed PressForward directly on your production server without using a test environment? I can tell because all of your posts are trying to redirect, but are redirecting to themselves! It’s a known bug I mentioned here: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/#run+across+an+issue+with+the+automatic+redirect that Aram has apparently fixed in the Github repo and will push with the next update. https://github.com/PressForward/pressforward/issues/878
      Until then you may want to go to the settings and set the redirect time to “0” which will prevent all of your pages from continually re-loading OR you could uninstall it from your production site and run on a test server.
      I’ve been loving it since I installed and can’t wait for the forthcoming patch. I’m curious what others think of it for the off-label use I’ve proposed.

  3. Colin and David, I’ve been a long time Feedly user myself and certainly feel your pain. (And in particular, I’m a bit irked that I can’t seem to get Feedly to discover alternate RSS Feeds being broadcast from my site to provide consumers with more options about what content they’d like to consume from my site, see also: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ )
    While slowly hacking away at IndieWeb philosophies, one of the big issues I’ve always hated was using an outside feed reader that wasn’t directly integrated into my own site. I’ve played around a lot with woodwind.xyz which has some great IndieWeb features, but doesn’t have the massive developer team behind it that Feedly does.
    Recently while doing some alternate research I also came across the WordPress plugin PressForward that was originally designed for journalists and academics, but in short is actually a built-in RSS feed reader that you can self-host as part of your WordPress install. I’ve been loving its general functionality and also use it somewhat like a self-hosted version of Pocket/InstaPaper as well, so it serves multiple uses. While it may not have everything that Feedly does, it’s incredibly functional, and better, it’s open on Github with lots of documentation, so you could potentially add the features you want. I’ve written a bit more about it (including some useful links) here if you’d like to explore it a bit more: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/
    Like both of you, I’m always eager to hear of other options should you come across them.

  4. This Article was mentioned on boffosocko.com

  5. Thanks a lot for the hint, looks really interesting! Will give it a try, this weekend.

  6. Posted on 2017-02-182017-07-28 by davidmead
    Thanks for the heads-up on PressForward Chris. Your breakdown on it’s uses is very helpful. I think I’m going to look onto that in the coming months.
    I’ve heard of Woodwind.xyz (not sure why it’s returning a 502) from others on the IndieWeb Internet Relay Chat. I think I tried it a while ago.
    in reply to:
    http://stream.boffosocko.com/2017/colin-and-david-ive-been-a-long-time-feedly-user

    Categoriesread, reply, use, webTagsblogs, rss

  7. Chris, I stumbled upon your post on Press Forward whilst searching around your site. I really like the sound of it, especially in regards to better owning bookmarks and reading. Is that what you  use for your marginalia?
    I feel wedded to Inoreader/Pocket at this point in time. However, I might spin up a new instance of WordPress and test it there. Can see myself using it to support deeper research one day.

    Syndicated copies:

    1. Aaron I do use PressForward for a fair amount of marginalia and highlighting, but it typically tends to be for more academic research work which I hide as private posts on the back end of my site and which aren’t visible to the public. Most of this highlighting/marginalia happens as text and HTML in the original text itself with some custom CSS. A public example I’ve used in the past is this post on which the blue highlights are mine, but the yellow highlights are those of other Hypothes.is users who marked up the original on the New York Times and not necessarily on my own personal site. The nice part is that the way I’ve done the canonical URL, Hypothesis sees it and adds their highlights and marginalia to it as well.

      More of my public marginalia, notes, and highlights end up on my public facing read posts. To do those, I generally use the browser plugin for Hypothes.is to make the highlights and notes. I then add a custom tag to those notes and use Kris Shaffer’s excellent Hypothes.is Aggregator WordPress plugin to suck the data into my site. Since it’s pulling the data via shortcode and I don’t necessarily trust the plugin to be supported indefinitely or Hypothesis to exist forever, I preview a draft of the post and cut and paste the raw HTML into my own site so I physically own the data.

      I’m still tweaking around with better ways to do all of this, so I haven’t documented it all yet. I’ve been looking at Diigo lately, but they’ve stripped out a lot of their following functionality and they don’t seem to have permalinks for my content, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

      I encourage you to play around with ideas for doing any/all of this and let me know if you find something you really like. Ultimately I think there are better ways of doing all this in a more IndieWeb way, but it’ll be a while I think before they’re all worked out.

      Syndicated copies:

  8. A reader (AKA indie reader or social reader) in the context of the indieweb is the portion/feature integrated into an indieweb site that provides a way to read content from other indieweb sites, possibly including posts from the current site, and respond (like, comment, repost, etc) inline in the reading UI itself.

  9. IndieWeb for Education is the application of indieweb principles to one’s personal site with a particular emphasis on use cases for education, pedagogy, research, academic samizdat, and collaboration.

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