Having watched the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work (2010) yesterday, it’s interesting to reflect on just how much of the television shows The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Hacks were lifted from Joan Rivers’ life.
Tag: hacks
Do you want to know when someone annotates your webpages? Do you want to follow somebody's annotations? You have come to the right place.
I’ve seen a few people in the wild using Hypothes.is as a blog commenting system.[1][2] Since they don’t yet have separate support for Webmention or require a bit of programming to get notifications, I thought I’d highlight this particular implementation as it has a simple, but relatively elegant user interface for creating feeds to provide notifications for just such a use case.
One could easily wire up the output from this through a service like IFTTT, Zapier, Integromat, etc. to push the notifications to email, or other modalities as desired.
It doesn’t give anything over and above what a Hypothes.is addict with some programming skills could already produce, but for those who are code averse, or just too busy with building other pieces of the Domain of One’s Own this could allow some simpler outputs.
If you are a tinkerer, there is a GitHub repo for the project.
While you’re at it, why not throw in the usernames of some of your favorite annotators and subscribe away in your favorite feed reader? Some of the best things I discover online are through colleagues’ annotations, I think, in part, because it’s a much higher level of engagement with the material than the pablum found in many Twitter feeds.
It could also be a good means of following annotations on some of your favorite hashtags in the system as well. Want to learn some new words? Follow wordnik in your feed reader. Want to know the state of the art in Open Education Resources? There’s a tag serious people are annotating with that you could follow in your reader.
A hack for using Hypothes.is to annotate on mobile
I do a fair amount of reading on my mobile phone and my addiction to Hypothes.is for annotating and highlighting what I read has finally driven me to the brink. I have typically added
via.hypothes.is to the URLs of articles manually so I can use Hypothes.is on my phone. I’ve finally had enough of the manual timesuck that I’ve gone in search of an answer since there is not yet a mobile app solution.
I’ve long been an Android user, so I broke out the URL Forwarder app which uses the ubiquitous share functionality of most phone platforms and adds a thin layer of program-ability.
In short I created a new filter and cleverly named it “Hypothesize”. Then I added the filter url “http://via.hypothes.is/@url” and left the replaceable text alone.
Now I can take an article from almost anywhere on my phone (reading services like Pocket, my feed readers, or even articles within the browser themselves), click share, choose “URL Forwarder” from the top of the list, select “Hypothesize” and the piece I want to annotate magically opens up with Hypothes.is ready to go in my default browser. Huzzah!
The three taps are ever so much easier than trying to tap a URL to edit it it and then typing. Why didn’t I think of this years ago?
Have you had this problem? Do you have a better solution or work around?