Chris Aldrich

@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!

To Live and Write in LA - Share Your Blog: Los Angeles Bloggers (Los Angeles, CA) | Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Share-Your-Blog-Los-Angeles-Bloggers/messages/boards/thread/50202990/#129703401

Leo, I find it tough to keep up with even one or two sites, so I'm impressed that you're wrangling 3 (or maybe even more)...

http://toliveandwriteinla.com/
I love the magazine style set up you've got here and with a humongous amount of well-written and well thought out content. My one note here is that stylistically, the theme is probably getting a bit long in the tooth. As you'd commented to me, something that's responsive would certainly be cool.

Some small things you might consider:
On the next/last links under articles, articles with longer titles aren't properly buffered which causes the text from one to overwrite the other.
Notify me of comments/new posts renders oddly with some quirky overlap that could be tweaked.

http://leosopicki.com/
Personally I was never a fan of the "masonry" movement (I always felt it was too "busy", though here it does help to highlight a larger number of articles to help get the first time visitor into a topic they might enjoy.

On individual articles, I like the way you intersperse the visuals to change up the flow. However your line lengths are a bit too long to read as comfortably. If you added some more white space on the sides of your text blocks, things would be much more readable. (Try to shoot for 58-70 characters per line for ease of reading -- I'm guessing you're running almost as high as 125 in full-width which makes it harder to move one's eyes from one line to the next. Notice it's easier to read, especially for longer periods of time, with the left/right aligned photos because they shorten the line lengths.)

You really have a great voice in most of your posts that draw the reader into the experiences you're sharing. The captions on the photos really add to the experience too. You've obviously been doing this for a while and are good at what you're doing (which is also seen in some of the great feedback you've given to others here on meetup... thanks by the way.)

Your "Writer" menu link just goes to the homepage, which I understand to some extent as everything on the site is writer-centric, but I might have expected something a bit narrower and focused on screenwriting posts perhaps.

I would more likely have suspected to find a Twitter account, but was a bit surprised to see you pull out Pinterest in the left rail. Further I was shocked that there was some interesting stuff to be seen on Pinterest! I'm sure you can't do too much about the Pinterest widget, but the content shown there was so small and the vertical slider was a bit weird, you might see if you can either dig into it and fix it or perhaps find a better one.

Though speaking of Twitter accounts, I know you've got one, but one's really got to dig for it. Perhaps you could be leveraging the social media portion of things to help your work find more eyeballs?

Overall:
I know that changing themes can be difficult with lots of potential pitfalls and work (especially with a large portfolio), but as a writer, you might consider some themes with more white space and really fantastic readable typography to make your words a bit more front and center (without minimizing your great use and placement of photography). Even if you don't completely change themes, you might consider just punching up the typography and adding some extra whitespace to make things more readable.

Given that you're a photographer, you might also consider finding something that allows for adding some larger photos to better feature your work there. (I wish I knew of something to recommend that does a great job of melding both pictures and words, they're hard to come by.) Often I was disappointed that some of the photos were relatively so small and wished I could have seen full res versions.

The reply to site won't be visible to most as it was a private message, but someone asked about how to get started on building their own Little Free Library branch. My reply:

I wrote a little bit about my building process here: http://lfl8424.boffosocko.com/our-story-history-and-building-process/

You can find most of the details for set up and registry on http://www.littlefreelibrary.org. (They actually just updated their website over the weekend.) They have libraries that you can buy and they'll ship to you, though part of the movement is encouraging people to be creative in building and designing their own. I'm happy to help give you some ideas if you need the help, but their website and examples they have on their Facebook & Pinterest sites will surely help too. Visiting a few in the Glendale & Pasadena Areas might help as well - you can find a map at http://littlefreelibrary.org/ourmap/. I notice that several of the Glendale City LFL's aren't on the map, but can be found by googling "Glendale" and "Little Free Library" where you'll find the city's Library, Art and Culture page with addresses for all of them. There are several at nearby city parks as well as at city hall.

There's also a nice little book about building and hosting your own as well. You can find it on Amazon at http://amzn.to/1gtCPKP

The BookCrossing.com and GoodReads.com portion I've integrated into mine are unrelated websites that are used for releasing and tracking books out in the wild, but that both work with the LFL concept really well.

I've done a lot of research on the upfront side, so I do know quite a lot about the overall concepts, but obviously have only just opened my own. I'm happy to provide as much or as little help as you might need, just let me know.

Best,
Chris

#LittleFreeLibrary #LFL8424

+1 from me on this feature request. (It would be cool to see an awesome theme like this also support microformats v2 as well. Sempress is the only theme out there that does this already see: https://github.com/pfefferle/SemPress, so it would certainly set the theme apart.)

@raumzeit77 As a temporary fix for the IndieAuth piece, you could add a text widget to your site that helps you get compliance with some of the IndieWeb Specs. You can also repeat some of the social icons with "invisible" links so that they don't actually display on the page, but are machine readable for IndieWeb purposes. It's not the best fix/workaround as you'll need to remember that the "invisible" code is there at some later date, but it should get you over the hump. Keep in mind that not all providers work with IndieAuth, though platforms like Twitter and GitHub do.
Try putting the following into a text widget (some portions will be visible others, link tags for example, will not):

<pre><code>
&lt;div class="h-card"&gt;
&lt;link href="https://facebook.com/USERNAME" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;link href="https://twitter.com/USERNAME" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;link href="https://plus.google.com/+USERNAME1/posts" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;link href="https://www.pinterest.com/USERNAME/" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;link href="sms:+12125551212" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;link href="mailto:me@emailaddress.com" rel="me"&gt;
&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;img rel="me" class="u-photo" src="http://domainname.com/site_icon.png" alt="" width="200" height="200" /&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
email: &lt;a class="u-email" href="mailto:me@emailaddress.com"&gt;me@emailaddress.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
phone:&lt;span class="p-tel"&gt;&lt;a rel="me" href="tel:+12125551212" &gt;+12125551212&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/span&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
&lt;p class="p-note"&gt;
&lt;span class="p-job-title"&gt;President&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class="p-role"&gt;CEO&lt;/span&gt; at &lt;a class="p-org" href="http://domainname.com" target="blank" &gt;Company Name&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;br/&gt;
&lt;span class="p-locality"&gt;ANYWHERE, NY &lt;/span&gt;&lt;span class="p-country-name"&gt;United States&lt;/span&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
</code></pre>

Some of the code will also qualify you for some additional levels within the IndieWeb identification space relating to h-card.

#IndieWeb