I've been doing some work to find a better, easier, and cleaner way to share content, likes, replies, bookmarks, and reposts on mobile. In part it's what prompted me to write my post the other day about "Configuring the #IndieWeb RSS Reader Woodwind for Known."
In part, I want to keep a complete record of posts that I "like", "share", "retweet", etc. on my own site, in keeping with the principles of the indieweb. Between separate indieweb installs of both WordPress and Known that I've been using for roughly the last two years, this hasn't been difficult on my laptop computer, primarily making use of a bevy of bookmarklet tools in my browser. In fact, on my laptop, it's down-right simple.
But not so on my Android mobile phone! In fact there, it's actually a really painful experience, and as a result I sometimes retweet, like and carry on in the Twitter app like the IndieWeb movement is dead to me. As a result I feel continually guilty and carry around a lot of #IndieWebShame. So I put out a call for help and got a few responses [1] [2] with some ideas.
After playing around for a few days with two different apps, I thought I'd post some thoughts about the two different solutions, which to me are roughly the same.
Bookmarklet Free, which I found on Ryan Barrett's site which included some generally excellent instructions wasn't too bad.
URL Forwarder, was recommended by Tino Kremer, didn't include any instructions or hints at all.
Fortunately, both work roughly the same and the set ups aren't all too different for some of the set up for configuring Woodwind, mentioned above. Testing them out with Known allowed me to click the ubiquitous sharing icon in most Android apps that then triggered a pop-up allowing me to choose which app I want to share with. Selecting either Bookmarklet Free or URL Forwarder then took me to an interstitial screen to let me choose whether I wanted to like, share, repost, bookmark, or reply to the particular content.
In most cases both bookmarklets did a reasonable and similar job, but typically they ended up sharing a section of unwanted text followed by a URL (and sometimes---depending on the app---another chunk of text related to the original content). Typically I had to delete the extraneous "titling" text to leave the raw URL which Known then did a good job of reformatting properly to allow me to finish the post and send it off. (Kyle, Ryan, and Kevin had a short discussion on the handling of the "title" back in the day, which Known apparently hasn't implemented, but Ryan proffers some Github code to remedy the issue within the CMS.)
Between the two, I generally prefer the UI and set up for URL Forwarder a bit better. Both are roughly equivalent.
Since Ryan did a good job showing the configuration settings for Bookmarklet Free in his post, I'll include the similar settings for URL Forwarder for those using Known:
- Share http:/
/ www.yoursitenamehere.com/ share?share_url=@url&share_title=&share_type=note - Reply http:/
/ www.yoursitenamehere.com/ share?share_url=@url&share_title=&share_type=reply - Like http:/
/ www.yoursitenamehere.com/ share?share_url=@url&share_title=&share_type=like - Repost http:/
/ www.yoursitenamehere.com/ share?share_url=@url&share_title=&share_type=repost - Bookmark http:/
/ www.yoursitenamehere.com/ share?share_url=@url&share_title=&share_type=bookmark
One need only to replace `www.yoursitenamehere.com` with their appropriate site URL.
Here, the action name, which appears first, is what I put in for the "Filter name" (field 1). The URL which follows was what I used for the "Filter url" (field 2). For each of these one should leave the "Replaceable text" field as "@url".
Nota bene: I'm using the KnownReactions plugin to provide functionality for the "like" and "repost" types and that without it, these action types won't function properly on your Known installation.
Those at Known, are more than welcome to freely cut/paste/modify this for potential inclusion into their documentation for future use.