Chris Aldrich

For the syndicated portfolio, you might want to take a peek at the PressForward plugin for WordPress [http://pressforward.org/]. While it is a stand-alone feed reader under the hood and could be used for creating an editorial flow, it will let you use a simple bookmarklet on your work published on another site to make a quick and complete copy of the post on your own site. Within the plugin settings you can set a "time to forward" (I use one second) such that people who visit that particular post will be automatically forwarded to the original (and canonical URL) on the commissioning outlet's site.

As an example, compare:
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/%F0%9F%94%96-feed-reader-revolution-its-time-to-embrace-open-disrupt-social-media/ (which is a bookmark with some commentary pointing to my post)
to
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/ (which is an exact copy of my post, which only I can see on my backend, that redirects the viewer to the original on AltPlatform).

This is beneficial as you can syndicate (POSSE) the post with your own URL to Facebook, Twitter, et al. and folks who click to read will be sent to your site for a moment before being forwarded on to the original. Thus you get a ping and the original outlet also gets a ping (as well as the advertising revenue for it.) And if, for any reason, the original outlet goes out of business, gets sold, or disappears, you've got a word-for-word copy of your original and can simply un-forward it so that it can appear on your site as it was originally published. Naturally if you prefer and the outlet doesn't stipulate otherwise, you could publish the original to your site and not forward it (or even forward it for an exclusivity window of time pre-agreed with the original publisher.)

Additionally, if you're using Brid.gy for backfeed, anyone who comments on your POSSE copies will have their commentary sent to your site. While others won't necessarily be able to see the commentary (if you're forwarding the URL to the publisher's original), at least you'll be aware of it and can reply to it and get your own replies in return. I suspect that in the future brid.gy may be able to scrape commentary based on the syndicated URL so that your personal version aggregates commentary from the publisher's original as well as mentions of it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

There are still some missing pieces I'd like to see in such a workflow for journalists, but it's slowly and surely getting somewhere.

(I've written about other parts of PressForward before at http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/ as I also have an off-label use-case to replace read it later apps like Pocket and InstaPaper.)

Colin and David, I've been a long time Feedly user myself and certainly feel your pain. (And in particular, I'm a bit irked that I can't seem to get Feedly to discover alternate RSS Feeds being broadcast from my site to provide consumers with more options about what content they'd like to consume from my site, see also: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/18/rss-feeds-a-follow-up-on-my-indieweb-commitment-2017/ )

While slowly hacking away at IndieWeb philosophies, one of the big issues I've always hated was using an outside feed reader that wasn't directly integrated into my own site. I've played around a lot with woodwind.xyz which has some great IndieWeb features, but doesn't have the massive developer team behind it that Feedly does.

Recently while doing some alternate research I also came across the WordPress plugin PressForward that was originally designed for journalists and academics, but in short is actually a built-in RSS feed reader that you can self-host as part of your WordPress install. I've been loving its general functionality and also use it somewhat like a self-hosted version of Pocket/InstaPaper as well, so it serves multiple uses. While it may not have everything that Feedly does, it's incredibly functional, and better, it's open on Github with lots of documentation, so you could potentially add the features you want. I've written a bit more about it (including some useful links) here if you'd like to explore it a bit more: http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/

Like both of you, I'm always eager to hear of other options should you come across them.

Checking again it appears that they're all still there, so it's not the case that even if they were set to flush via a later chron job that that event got triggered (or certainly not within the last two weeks).

I'm tempted to cut the storage time for feeds back to one month which will put them well within the time frame to try to get rid of them that way instead.

Out of curiosity as I don't see it documented, when the system flushes items longer than the "Months to retrieve and retain feed items", does it delete everything that hasn't been drafted, or does it keep items on which actions (star, comment, nominated/drafted) have been initiated upon? I ask this because for those using PressForward as a self-hosted version of webapps like Pocket/InstaPaper (which both you and @mAAdhaTTah appear to), this would be a very useful feature without needing to take the additional steps of nominating/drafting the particular post. Further, does marking as "read" save the date/time as it may be useful to have this data? (I looked around and didn't see any fields which would have indicated this as a potential feature.)

@geerlingguy Sorry Jeff, you're right that it should auto re-direct to your page as if it were a bookmark and the attribution should be different even in the case that anyone besides me should be able to see it. I've been making some changes to the code for those types of "I read this" posts since mid-December in an effort to own a personal version of something like Pocket or InstaPaper on my personal site.

Thanks for the note/error report.

@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!

@linklockerapp @jbwhaley Why create another me-too service? If #Instapaper is any indicator, maybe opensourcing is better idea? #indieweb

@sillygwailo Curious how you mean this from a use case perspective? Which part of Woodwind are you using to replace Instapaper? How?

@devonzuegel I came across your blog serendipitously and was impressed with some of the nifty tools you've implemented as well as the workflow you seem to have worked out vis-a-vis your website and miscellaneous tools. Thanks for sharing it all!

The idea of Instanote is intriguing to me, though I've been using MS OneNote instead of Evernote, which I've sampled several times. In addition to InstaPaper's API, I've previously used IFTTT.com to port over highlights. I've also been experimenting around with using http://hypothes.is (and their API) lately for notes/highlights as it seems to have a more scholarly bent among the highlight/note tools out there. You might find it interesting.

Given the way you use your website(s) for both identity and knowledge gathering (and owning your own data), I feel compelled to mention a group of hackers working in loose (but very open and very collaborative) concert at http://indieweb.org. You might find some of the tools and ideas over there interesting/useful.

Also given the terrific overlap in books we're reading/read, I might recommend physicist Sean Carroll's relatively new book The Big Picture (particularly part 4 on Complexity) which had some overlap on topics like Schelling's model of segregation as they relate to complexity and spontaneous organization which you may find interesting.

+Mark van Walraven To strip cruft (ads, widgets, and other distractions) off of blog articles and general web pages for a cleaner and easier reading/concentrating experience, you might consider using Readability, which has a handy bookmarklet that you can put in your browser toolbar for quick and easy use: https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets. If you're an avid Evernote user, they have a product called Clearly that's pretty good as well: https://evernote.com/clearly/. Similarly Pocket and Instapaper have this type of functionality (with bookmarklets as well), though they typically require one to save articles to one's account first prior to reading, though this is rather handy when skimming through G+, Twitter, and Facebook feeds for interesting material one wants to read later.

+John Baez For RSS, the heir apparent to Google Reader's old product is Feedly (http://feedly.com/). There are certainly a small handful of others, but I suspect most would say that Feedly is the clear winner. They use a freemium model in which they give the majority of their useful functionality away for free and charge a small and reasonably modest subscription fee for a set of advanced functionality that most probably don't need or use. If you want to add a simple Feedly button to your blog siderail (via widget), you can find details and instructions here: http://feedly.com/factory.html

In a past life and as a side hobby, I spent several years running and building a large portion of social media for Johns Hopkins, so I've played with nearly every platform in existence. I've been pecking away for a while at blog post describing how researchers and academics can best use blogging and social media presence to improve their work & speed up their workflow - a topic that could actually be a reasonable sized book. Some of the commentary here has motivated me to get back to it presently.