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.
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">
<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/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. <br />
<a href="https://bh-p.co/2N1xopV">bh-p.co/2N1xopV</a>
<p>
<a class="link" href="https://twitter.com/BigHistoryPro/status/1195385992728985600">
<img class="u-photo" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJbdObjXkAQ6QNw.jpg" alt="" />
</a>
</p>
</div>
</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?
Hey Chris. We are actually testing an improved layout for microblogs right now. It’s live in our beta, so you can give it a go whenever you like. Just open Inoreader Preferences and click the Beta link at the bottom. We are discussing it on Discord. You’ll see the link there too.
Hi Chris you should try the new html version of twitter-atom, it includes author photos! You should also try subscribing to your feed on unicyclic.com. I’m really happy with how it’s looking in my reader, and will put the challenge out there that it’s the nicest looking twitter display available in a feed reader. 🙂
Malcolm, thanks for the reminder. I’ve been meaning to circle around and test out Unicyclic’s reader. It’s very slick looking and wonderfully clean.
I do wonder where the html version of twitter-atom you mention is hiding? Do you mean the HTML output from granary.io? I tried that and indeed your Twitter output is one of the better looking ones out there. I piped it into Monocle as well and that has a pretty solid appearance too. One of the subtle differences that I notice between the two is whether the context that the tweet is a reply to another tweet is above (Monocle) or below (Unicyclic) the tweet content itself. I’m not quite sure which I personally prefer, though I suspect that if put to a vote, the majority of the public may think above makes more sense–especially since that’s the way Twitter works, though I think there’s a case to be made that the order should be changed in a feed reader. I really like the way you’re using the reply and quotation icons within the tweets to provide better visual context. It’s a really nice visual shortcut to quickly provide context.
I think my favorite part is that I can give you an OPML file to import feeds. I wish some of the microsub clients did this. (Of course I tried handing Unicyclic a huge OPML feed with 85 sources and it died just a few in, but still it’s way better than moving all my follow data over one at a time using cut and paste.) Keep up the good work!
Malcolm, I’m noticing you have both a
u-categoryand au-in-reply-towrapped on the URL of my post in your replies. I’m curious what function the category serves for you? As a result, the WordPress post-type discovery algorithm makes all of your “replies” show up in my set up as “tags” instead. I’m not sure if it’s a quirk on your end, or maybe if it’s something I should file as a bug to the WordPress plugin?hmmm yeah it’s just the way I store the in-reply-to url so I could probably fix that on my end. I think that WordPress should give precedence to u-in-reply-to over u-category when deciding the post type though?
Hi Chris you should try the new html version of twitter-atom, it includes author photos! You should also try subscribing to your feed on unicyclic.com. I’m really happy with how it’s looking in my reader, and will put the challenge out there that it’s the nicest looking twitter display available in a feed reader. 🙂
ah you’re right it is hiding a bit… I went through the process of regenerating my twitter feed to find it, but you don’t need to do that. Just change the url from starting with: https://twitter-atom.appspot.com/atom? to: https://twitter-atom.appspot.com/html? to get the microformats version.
thanks for the feedback as well! Having context above or below sounds like a good setting to add so that people can choose. Happy to look at why your OPML didn’t finish importing… is it a public list somewhere I can look at?
I should have guessed about Twitter-atom, but then when looking at it again I notice that the app itself actually has a radio button toggle for switching between the two! PEBCAK!
I keep a number of OPML files available on my website if you want to run some tests. I was honestly surprised that I could even put in a URL to any of them and have your reader begin to pull any of them in. As a caveat for troubleshooting, I’m using the older OPML v1(?) spec built into WordPress and not the more recent one and that may have caused the issue. There may also be some sites listed in some of the files that don’t actually have feeds associated with them and that may be another cause of the problem.
Comparing Inoreader’s user interface for their internal tweets versus RSS tweets
This morning, after reading a brief, but interesting snippet in the IndieWeb WordPress chat from last night, David Shanske made me think about an old itch I had to have a quicker and more stripped down posting interface for notes on my website. I immediately thought of WordPress’s P2 and 02 themes/products which had a built-in simple posting interface reminiscent of Twitter’s UI.
Not wanting to wait to see what David might come up with before the next couple of IndieWebCamps, I thought I’d at least do some research to see what was hiding in the good old WordPress repository. I found a few old plugins that were roughly the sort of idea I was looking for, but they were last maintained about 8-10 years ago.
Then I came across the Narwhal Microblogging plugin from Billy Wilcosky, which is being actively developed/maintained and has almost exactly what I’m looking for!
Apparently the plugin itself had an early simple start before the developer came across Jon Smajda’s plugin Posthaste which was apparently repurposed for the Prologue/P2 code that WordPress used for that product/theme. He’s since rewritten a large chunk of it based on Posthaste’s original code and added in some basic formatting options and the ability to add media, so one can post a quick note along with a photo.
Settings for the plugin are hiding in
Settings << Writingadmin interface (or at the path/wp-admin/options-writing.phpon your website) which includes the ability to choose which pages to display the “widget” and allowing one to hide the title, tags, categories, draft seclector, one’s Gravatar, and the Greeting and Links. I’d personally pare my version down to just provide tags, categories, and the draft options to keep the interface as clean as possible.Finally the developer notes that within the user interface “if you leave the ‘Category:’ box at its default setting it posts to your default category. However… If you have a category named ‘asides’, it will put posts with empty titles into the ‘asides’ category even if you do not explicitly specify the ‘asides’ category in the dropdown. You can then style them as asides.”
This is the view of the posting interface on my site after paring it down to my personal bare minimum.
Benefits
I’ve already discussed some of the immediate benefits for easily and quickly posting directly from my own website. Just below I’ll add a few others.
Most importantly for me at the moment, the plugin works with the Classic Editor in WordPress. The interface also only shows up when one is logged into their website, so visitors won’t ever see it.
Titleless posts
The plugin automatically takes the first 40 characters of your note and posts that into the title field, so you don’t have to bother with it. Sadly, this means that feed readers and other services will take your status updates and give them a title. (Though in the wild, most feed readers do something like this anyway. I am hearing strong rumors that Inoreader is about to have better support for social media-like posts soon.) For those using the plugin for IndieWeb use and prefer to keep their notes/asides/status updates titleless, you can spelunk into the code pretty easily and make a quick change which the developer kindly documents in his support page:
In my case, I think I’ll just decrease the character limit to 0 and then rely on the Post Kinds plugin to add it’s customary pseudo-title to the admin interface on my back end so that I can distinguish my posts in the posts pages.
UI suggestions
The category chooser could be a little cleaner and provide a dropdown of all my pre-existing categories with the ability to select multiple ones. I suspect that somewhere in the WordPress universe there’s a way to do this even if it means swiping a snippet of code from core’s editor.
The basic text box for entering text could be a bit smaller on the page to accept 2-4 lines of text since it’s meant for short posts. As it stands now, it defaults to 10, but it also smartly already has a slider that appears when you type more than the available number of lines and it also has a handle in the corner to allow you to increase the boxes size.
I’ve mentioned doing natively titleless notes above, but to make things a bit more user friendly, it would be nice to have the ability in the settings page to enter a number for the text excerpt, so that users could configure it without needing code. I suspect that most in the IndieWeb space would set the title excerpt to zero so as to not have titles on their notes.
It will take me some time to dig into it, but it would be nice if the developer had some notes about the CSS classes used in the plugin so that one might more easily style the display of the output on one’s website. Fortunately the defaults to match one’s current theme seem relatively solid.
At present, there isn’t any UI for including syndication targets to external services like Twitter, Mastodon, etc. It would be nice if there was some tie into syndication services or functionality like that provided with Syndication Links plugin and brid.gy publish or brid.gy fed if those pieces are present.
The last dovetail that would be nice to have, particularly within an IndieWeb framing, would be to have better direct integration of this plugin with the Post Kinds plugin. This could extend to auto-setting the post kind to “note”, which should in turn allow the automatic setting of Post Formats to either “status” or “aside”.
Summary
In sum, this plugin is really fantastic for allowing a simple and lightweight means of posting quick status updates or notes to one’s WordPress website! It’s the next best thing to using any of the variety of Micropub clients, particularly when you already happen to be at your own site.
I suspect this plugin is the sort of thing that many within the IndieWeb and WordPress communities will love using–and at least one person in the chat has already said they think it’s a great find. There are currently less than 10 active installations of the plugin, but I think it deserves a magnitude or more. Let’s see what we can do about that!
Have you tried it? What do you think of the idea?
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