Toward this end I thought I’d double down on my use of Inoreader in my daily web consumption workflows. I wanted to make it easier to use my feed reader to post all these types of posts to my website which will still handle the notifications. In some sense, instead of relying on a feed reader supporting Micropub, I’ll use other (older) methods for making the relevant posts. As I see it, there are two potential possibilities using Inoreader:
(1) using a service like IFTTT (free) or Zapier (paid) to take the post intents and send them to my WordPress site, or
(2) using the custom posting interface in Inoreader in conjunction with post editor URL schemes with the Post Kinds plugin to create the posts. Using WordPress’ built-in Post This bookmarklet schemes could also be used to make these posts, but Post Kinds plugin offers a lot more metadata and flexibility.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
Below is a brief outline of some of the IFTTT recipes I’ve used to take data from posts I interact with in Inoreader and post them to my own website.
Likes
IFTTT has an explicit like functionality with a one click like button. There is an IFTTT recipe which allows taking this datum and adding it directly as a WordPress post with lots of rich data. The “then that” portion of IFTTT using WordPress allows some reasonable functionality for porting over data.
Favorites
IFTTT also has explicit favorite functionality using a one click starred article button. There is an IFTTT recipe which allows adding this directly as a WordPress post.
Since the “starred” article isn’t defined specifically in Inoreader as a “favorite”, one could alternately use it to create “read” or “bookmark” posts on their WordPress websites. I’m tempted to try this for read posts as I probably wouldn’t often use it to create favorite posts on my own website. Ultimately one at least wants an easy-to-remember 1 to 1 mapping of pieces of functionality in Inoreader to their own website, so whatever I decide I’ll likely stick to it.
Bookmarks
While there is no specific functionality for creating bookmarks in Inoreader (though starred articles could be used this way as previously mentioned), there is a “saved webpage” functionality that could be used here in addition to an IFTTT recipe to port over the data to WordPress.
Reads
While Inoreader has a common feed reader read/unread functionality, it is often not used tacitly and this is a means of reducing friction within the application. Not really wanting to muddle the meaning of the “starred” article to do it, I’ve opted to adding an explicit “read” tag on posts I’ve read.
IFTTT does have a “New tagged article” recipe that will allow me to take articles in Inoreader with my “read” tag and post them to my website. It’s pretty simple and easy.
Replies
For dealing with replies, there is an odd quirk within Inoreader. Confoundingly the feed reader has two similar, yet still very different commenting functionalities. One is explicitly named “comment”, but sadly there isn’t a related IFTTT trigger nor an RSS feed to take advantage of the data one puts into the comment functionality. Fortunately there is a separate “broadcast” functionality. There is an IFTTT recipe for “new broadcasted article” that will allow one to take the reply/comment and post it to one’s WordPress website.
Follows
Like many of the above there is a specific IFTTT recipe that will allow one to add subscriptions directly to WordPress as posts, so that any new subscriptions (or follows) within the Inoreader interface can create follow posts! I doubt many people may use this recipe, but it’s awesome that it exists. Currently anything added to my blogrolls (aka Following Page) gets ported over to Inoreader via OPML subscription, so I’m curious if them being added that way will create these follow posts? And if so, is there a good date/time stamp for these? I still have to do some experimenting to see exactly how this is going to work.
RSS feed-based functionality
In addition to the IFTTT recipe functionality described above, one could also use IFTTT RSS functionality to pipe RSS feeds which Inoreader provides (especially via tags) into a WordPress website. I don’t personally use this sort of set up, but thought I’d at least mention it in passing so that anyone who might like to create other post types to their website could.
Custom posting in Inoreader with Post Kinds Plugin
If using a third-party service like IFTTT isn’t your cup of tea, Inoreader also allows custom sharing options. (There are also many pre-built ones for Facebook, Twitter, etc. and they’re also re-orderable as well.) I thus used WordPress’ post editor URL schemes to send the data I’d like to have from the original post to my own website. Inoreader actually has suggestions in their UI for how to effectuate this generically on WordPress. While this is nice, I’m a major user of the Post Kinds Plugin which allows me a lot more flexibility to post likes, bookmarks, favorites, reads, replies, etc. with the appropriate microformats and much richer metadata. Post Kinds has some additional URL structures which I’ve used in addition to the standard WordPress ones to take advantage of this. This has allowed me to create custom buttons for reads, bookmarks, replies, likes, and listens. With social sharing functionality in Inoreader enabled, each article in Inoreader has a sharing functionality in the bottom right corner that has a configuration option which brings up the following interface:
Once made, these custom button icons appear at the bottom of every post in Inoreader, so, for example, if I want to reply to a post I’ve just read, I can click on the reply button which will open a new browser window for a new post on my website. The Post Kinds plugin on my site automatically pulls in the URL of the original post, parses that page and–where available–pulls in the title, synopsis, post date/time, the author, author URL, author photo, and a featured photo as well as automatically setting the specific post kind and post format. A lot of this data helps to create a useful reply context on my website. I can then type in my reply to the post and add any other categories, tags, or data I’d like in my admin interface. Finally I publish the post which sends notifications to the original post I read (via Webmention).
Conclusion and future
With either of the above set ups, there are a few quick and easy clicks to create my posts and I’m done. Could it be simpler? Yes, but it likely won’t be much more until I’ve got a fully functional Microsub server and reader up and working.
Of course, I also love Inoreader and its huge variety of features and great usability. While I’m patiently awaiting having my own WordPress Microsub server, I certainly wouldn’t mind it if Inoreader decided to add some IndieWeb functionality itself. Then perhaps I wouldn’t need to make the switch in the near future.
What would this look like? It could include the ability to allow me to log into Inoreader using my own website using IndieAuth protocol. It could also add Micropub functionality to allow me to post all these things directly and explicitly to my website in an easier manner. And finally, if they really wanted to go even further, they could make themselves a Microsub server that enables me to use any one of several Microsub clients to read content and post to my own website. And of course the benefit to Inoreader is that if they support these open internet specifications, then their application not only works with WordPress sites with the few appropriate plugins, but Inoreader will also work with a huge variety of other content management systems that support these specs as well.
Whether or not Inoreader supports these protocols, there is a coming wave of new social feed readers that will begin to close many of these functional gaps that made RSS difficult. I know things will slowly, but eventually get better, simpler, and easier to use. Soon posting to one’s website and doing two way communication on the internet via truly social readers will be a reality, and one that’s likely to make it far easier to eschew the toxicity and problems of social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Which others are notable?
Jon, There is an actively growing group of about a dozen or so folks looking at these problems with particular respect to the fledgling Microsub specification. Microsub has two parts: a server and a reading client/interface and is built to abstract away the harder(?) problems and infrastructure of the plumbing of building a feed reader from the design/interface of the reader itself. There are about 6 reading interfaces or clients already built (some of them publicly available, including Android and iOS interfaces), and 3 servers (one publicly available) in existence with at least 4 others in development. All of these are being built within the IndieWeb community which has a pretty strong track record for iterating on and proliferating these types of open tools and specs for a variety of platforms and languages (see Micropub, Webmention, IndieAuth, etc.) I’m hoping that some of these ideas ultimately leak across borders to apply to other older and more traditional readers. I’ve seen at least some evidence to indicate that Feedly and Inoreader are watching this space for future growth.
One of the best descriptions for how some of this is set up can be found in Aaron Parecki’s post Building an IndieWeb Reader, which is related to Parecki’s other post that Aaron Davis mentioned on your blog. If you’re interested in delving further beyond the ideas and attempting to implement some of it, I’m sure many of the Microsub developers would be more than willing to help you attempt to set up some of it. I believe all of them can be found in the IndieWeb chat.
The best prior example of a reader actually implementing some of this functionality (pre-Microsub) is the Woodwind reader, which is open source on Github. (There was previously a nice hosted version, which has since been shut down.) I laid out some of the generic problem facing feed readers and social and included some examples of related functionality spread across several readers in Feed reader revolution in June of last year.
Another interesting possible candidate that is actively being developed and I’m following, but haven’t tried, is NetNewsWire 5.0 (fka Evergreen) by Brent Simmons, a decades long feed reader veteran. He recently reacquired the NetNewsWire name, app, etc. from Black Pixel. I know he is aware of some IndieWeb related philosophies though I’m unsure of how much he’s implementing in his rebuild presently.
I’ve also used PressForward as a built-in feed reader within my WordPress site, but it requires a little bit of additional manual work to get things working for the reactions the way I’d like to have them implemented. However, just the work of building an integrated feed reader into a WordPress site is more than half of the battle.
Hi Chris, in some ways, the Reader feature of WordPress.com implements some of this. The user can subscribe to websites, read the content, like the content, and respond via comments; all within the Reader.
I think with a bit of tweaking (and desire), Automattic could add the ability to make those comments available as new posts on the commenter’s website. It would make WordPress.com (and JetPack supported self-hosted WordPress) more like micro.blog.
Khürt, you’re definitely right. I’ve already pinged the designer of their reader to see if they might start hacking away at it. We’ll see what transpires.
cross-reference: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/28/reply-to-jan-cavan-boulas-about-wordpress-microsub-feed-reader/
Thank you very much for this write-up. Do you know how ifttt connects to WordPress? Is it through xmlrpc?
Ton, I haven’t looked into it directly myself, but based on this article from 2015, it would seem that it was being done via xmlrpc at that time. If I recall correctly, individual platforms are responsible for building an maintaining their integrations on IFTTT now, so it may be done via WordPress API now, particularly since the API is much more mature now compared to 2015. Possibly worth digging into or asking IFTTT or WordPress directly.
Like: Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader
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Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich Chris Aldrich It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’…
Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich Chris Aldrich It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’…
Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich Chris Aldrich It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’…
Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich Chris Aldrich It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’…
2018/12/04 20:59
️ ♥︎
in praise of my body
Web as Social Network
I Watch Movies Microcast
poetry
mini communities
Now and Then
Federated Wiki
0.39% of the web.
Inoreader as an IndieWeb feedreader
IndyWeb frustrations
Syndicated copies:
️ ♥︎
in praise of my body
Web as Social Network
I Watch Movies Microcast
poetry
mini communities
Now and Then
Federated Wiki
0.39% of the web.
Inoreader as an IndieWeb feedreader
IndyWeb frustrations
Syndicated copies:
Ik onderzoek weer hoe ik deze pagina’s beter kan gebruiken als een commonplace book, een plaats waar ik allerlei gedachten, ideeën en losse flodders kan plaatsen met minimale barrieres. Het is een rode draad in mijn blog-ontwikkeling en ik denk dat het een belangrijk element wordt op de IndieWebCamp barcamp voor me. In de tussentijd zie ik dat de standaard bookmark functie van WordPress best prima werkt. Bijvoorbeeld Chris Aldrich’s artikel om Inoreader als een betere feedreader te gebruiken? Die bookmark ik hier. Jullie zien automatisch een korte introductie, terwijl ik slechts een URL plaats in de editor.
Replied to a tweet by Laura Gibbs (Twitter)
I’m curious if you use Inoreader’s OPML subscription functionality at all? It’s kind of like Twitter lists in a sense, but a lot more open and distributed.
Much like your version piped into an LMS, it could be used used to create a planet of all of the participants in a course, but set up in such a way that only one person needs to create and maintain an OPML file that everyone else can use instead of needing to manually find and subscribe to a bunch of feeds or worry about missing out on that one feed of the student who joined the course two weeks late.
As an example, here’s an OPML file on my own website (through my following page) of all the educators I’m following who are tangentially involved in the IndieWeb movement. If you subscribe to the OPML file in Inoreader, when I update it with additional feeds, you get all the changes synced automatically.
I’d be interested to see exactly how you’re using Inoreader–particularly the off-label methods. Have you written up any of the details anywhere? It looks like you’re using tags in Inoreader and piping those details back to the LMS so that you can filter portions of the class content?
I recently documented some of my personal use here: Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader. A big portion of it is about being able to use Inoreader to interact within its interface, but also have those interactions reflected on my own website (aka digital commonplace book) which sends notifications to the original content on the web instead of just leaving it siloed within Inoreader.
Chris one thing that frustrates me about my Inoreader workflow is subscribing to multiple OPML files leads to some people/posts multiple times. I am wondering if I need to bring everyone into my own OPML file, but I like the serendipity of new finds via others.
Not sure if this makes sense and if it is something you have experienced?
I know the feeling, but typically I arrange everything into a variety of folders using OPML files, so I’ve got sub-categories of my own OPML file that I import into particular folders for reading. As a result I try to only categorize each feed into one category (usually based on how often I read particular ones). Then there are others’ OPML files that I subscribe to (like yours) which go to their own separate folders. Often these I read more for discovery, so I just skip over the duplicate feeds (or rearrange the duplicates to the bottom of their respective folders to mitigate.) From my discovery feeds, when I find myself regularly reading particular feeds, I just move them to my own categories and derank them from my discovery feeds to mitigate the duplication.
It would be nice if readers recognized the same feeds in multiple folders and marked them as read when matching posts were finished. There definitely needs to be some work/research into making some of this manual work easier…
High on my wish list for readers is to be able to tag feeds, not (just) categorise them into folders. This as I follow people not ‘media’, and people have multiple facets. They never blog solely about e.g. tech or cat pics. The feeds I follow represent people, so I put them in folders roughly equivalent to the social distance between them and me (from significant other to total stranger basically). Tags on feeds (not articles, which various readers allow), make it possible to do things like “what are the German coders I know talking about this week”, so things based on interests, geography, and communities.
This Article was mentioned on kimberlyhirsh.com
Read Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich Chris Aldrich (BoffoSocko) Share this:ShareClick to print (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)Click to share on Telegram (Opens in new window)Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window)Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)Like this:Like Loading…
Read “Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader”
by Chris Aldrich
I think that it would be good to be able to store OPML subscriptions externally. This is what Inoreader allows users to do.
I also imagine that allowing users to subscribe would mean that one could use any form of storage, whether this is Google (as referred to in this request) or WordPress.
For a long time I’ve been consuming the majority of my Twitter feed within various feed readers. My most frequent feed reader is Inoreader, though I’ve been experimenting with and using some IndieWeb influenced microsub-based feed readers for quite a while.
Earlier today I thought I’d try out Inoreader’s Twitter integration and subscribe to some of my twitter lists using that instead of importing feeds directly from outside services. (I’ve been a big fan of using Ryan Barrett’s Twitter-Atom and related tools.) One of the things that had always bothered me about third party RSS feeds into most feed readers is that the author of the post is in such tiny text and there is no avatar indicator of who wrote the post. As a result I’m stuck spending a lot more cognitive load trying to discern the author of a tweet before or after reading it. It just boils down to less than optimal user interface.
Fortunately Inoreader seems to have a slightly better method for doing this (since they control the user interface and are presumably using the Twitter API). Within their reader, Tweets look a tad bit more standard with respect to the usual Twitter client and include an avatar and the name of the author in larger font. Sadly, though they have control over the UI, they’re still including a bolded version of the the text of the tweet as a title and thereby needlessly duplicating some of the content. It would be far better for notes, status updates and other content that typically doesn’t have (or need) a title if they would simply just leave it out. They could then use the extra space to have a larger font for reading the short status update. In fact, most of the IndieWeb-based feeds I read in Inoreader have these unnecessary titles included which typically not only look bad from a UI perspective, but they again needlessly duplicate content I don’t need.
Below I’m including screenshots of the two different methods of reading Tweets via Inoreader. I’m also including a screenshot of how Tweets look like in Monocle when fed in via the same Atom feed that was used in the Inoreader case. In Monocle’s version, it’s got a nice larger and easier to discern author name, but it too is missing the author photo (or avatar), in part because the feed doesn’t include it as a default. I suspect that if the feed included it, Monocle would display it properly though the Inoreader version probably wouldn’t. The Monocle version also includes a copy of the photo in the Tweet twice because the feed adds it in a second time as an enclosure.
UI example of a tweet within Inoreader using their native Twitter support.
UI example of a tweet within Inoreader imported using a third party RSS-based client.
UI example of a tweet within Monocle imported using a third party RSS-based client.
For completeness, I’m including the text of the Atom feed for this particular tweet so that we can see what is or isn’t being included in the Inoreader and Monocle versions.
<entry>
<author>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/person</activity:object-type>
<uri>https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro</uri>
<name>Big History Project</name>
</author>
<activity:object-type>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/note</activity:object-type>
<id>https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600</id>
<title>In an ideal world, you’d have 1-on-1 time with every student to discuss every…</title>
<content type=”xhtml”>
In an ideal world, you’d have 1-on-1 time with every student to discuss every aspect of every writing assignment. With BHP score, you come close.
bh-p.co/2N1xopV
</content>
<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/html” href=”https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600″ />
<link rel=”ostatus:conversation” href=”https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600″ />
<link rel=”ostatus:attention” href=”https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV” />
<link rel=”mentioned” href=”https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV” /> <activity:verb>http://activitystrea.ms/schema/1.0/post</activity:verb>
<published>2019-11-15T17:00:04+00:00</published>
<updated>2019-11-15T17:00:04+00:00</updated>
<link rel=”self” type=”application/atom+xml” href=”https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600″ />
<link rel=”enclosure” href=”https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJbdObjXkAQ6QNw.jpg” type=”image/jpeg” />
</entry>
In sum, I generally like the UI of the Inoreader version, though they could still do with removing the redundant and unnecessary title. The Monocle version is likely the best, but I’d need to find a feed method that also includes the avatar to have a better representation of the original Tweet. Even with these differences, I think I tend to prefer Monocle at the end of the day because it also automatically includes Micropub functionality which means that I can post my reactions (likes, reposts, or comments) directly to my website and syndicate copies directly to Twitter. (This is also in consideration of my previously having set up some separate functionality for forcing Inoreader to allow me to post some of this same sort of data to my website by other means.)
Has anyone found better/prettier or more useful ways of consuming Twitter in third party means while allowing one to own their data?
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Read Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader by Chris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)
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Chris, thanks for sharing this post. Reading this article in combination with the IndieWeb – Inoreader article really helped me to assemble a working version of this approach quickly.
How did you manage to insert the icons in the Inoreader custom interface? Did you have to post them yourself and point to the URLs? This might seem like a minor consideration but I thought it would make a big difference in usability.
Will, yes I believe I uploaded them to my own website first, and then I put the URLs for them into the “icon” field. (Note that you might have to click on the “more settings” option in the Inoreader interface to see the field for the icon.) I’ve mentioned micropub to the developers of Inoreader and hope they’ll add support for it sometime soon. If you get a chance, email support, tweet, or otherwise contact them and suggest you’d like micropub support too. I’m sure the more demand they’ve got, the more likely they are to add it.
I’m giving Inoreader a quick go, based in part on Chris’s experiences using it as a Social Reader. The idea of hooking into IFTTT to create various posts on this blog based on what I read appeals to me. Inoreader allows subscribing to OPML feeds instead of importing a static file – allowing for dynamically managing my subscriptions. Chris manages this through his Following page, and I’m planning to do something similar with my Links page, although to get this working I’m going to have to go back through my list and add any RSS feed URLs to the entry.I should take the time to get all my “followings” back in sync during the exercise. I dropped Feedly last year, and I’ve never quite finished porting everything I had there to Aperture/Monocle, or to the Links page. I’ve not synced everything I’ve added to Aperture back to the Links page either. So much housekeeping to catch up on.
Keep in mind that sometime in the coming weeks, Inoreader should be rolling out some updates that will tend to make social posts (especially notes and other titleless posts) display a bit better in their reader. I’ve mentioned it to them and they may also add micropub support in the future. fingers crossed
I really need to think about using IFTTT for pulling back in more content, especially from Inoreader. Chris Aldrich has written a useful post exploring this.
Replied to a tweet by Tournez à gauche | alt-wrong (Twitter)
I’d definitely go up to the $75/year range for a solid full-featured reader like Feedly or Inoreader but that included Micropub and Microsub infrastructure. (See also Using Inoreader as an IndieWeb feed reader.)
Looking at the current responses it seems like most respondents don’t have a very solid conceptualization of how to define “indieweb”. Almost none of the products mentioned in your thread are IndieWeb from my perspective. Most of them are corporately owned data silos.
To me IndieWeb needs to have a focus on allowing the user to keep and own big portions of their data. Things like read status and old articles history should be owned by the user and not by a third party. Readers that do this are just as bad as Google Reader which took that data down when they closed.
If you’re using the IndieWeb.org definition of a reader, would you be considering building a Microsub server, Microsub client, or both?
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Doug, it is funny thinking about my Read Write Collect site. In some ways I was inspired by you and your many sites.
I have documented my workflow before, however this focused more on my long form writing. Here then is my attempt to summarise my workflow.
Clearly I collect pieces from around the web, including various newsletters. However, the majority of my content comes from Inoreader through which I have subscribed to my feeds. From there, I either respond or save posts to Pocket to read and respond later.
If I am responding on my phone, I use URL Forwarder to populate the Post Kinds field. On the laptop, I just create a new post in WordPress.
Although I have tinkered with Micropub clients, I have not found one that fits with what I want in a post. For example, I like have titles with emojis, therefore I actually populate the slug. John Johnston has some code to strip this out, but I am yet to tinker with this.
I really like the possibility using IFTTT and webhooks to generate posts from Pocket and Inoreader, which Chris Aldrich has documented here and here. However, that is still an itch.
In regards to writing my actual posts, I use Post Editor Button to add HTML snippets, such as embedding audio and adding in Microformats where required.
I also use a range of sites to capture quotes and evidence. Whether it be Hypothes.is, Diigo and Quotebacks. I know I should be more structured with this, but I am not.
In regards to POSSE, I use a range of methods, including SNAP, Bridgy for Micro.Blog. However, more often than note I manually write responses and add the corresponding link to my list of syndication links.
Hope that helps.