Chris Aldrich

Jeremy, congrats on owning your reading! I'd recently seen your note about using reading.am, but I've been on holiday and not had a chance to get back to you.

In general it seems like you've found most of the salient pieces I liked about it. For the record these include:
* I like the idea of "bookmarking" everything I'm reading as I read it. Even for things I don't quite finish, I often will want to know what the thing was or how to easily find it at a later date.
* It has an easy to use desktop bookmarklet that makes the friction of using it negligible. (On mobile I use the ubiquitous sharing icon and use my account's custom email address to email links to my account which is quick enough too.)
* Its RSS feed is useful (as you've discovered), but I've integrated it into my WordPress site using IFTTT.com for porting the data I want over. In my case I typically save the post as a draft and don't publicly publish everything that my lesser followed reading.am account does. Generally once a day I'll look at drafts to add some notes if necessary, or do some follow up reading/research (especially when I've read something interesting via mobile and didn't have the time), and then publish a subsection of the captured reads as public.

I've filed an issue with the developer to see if he'd include the comment data within Reading.am into the RSS feed so that it could be included in the passed data, so that when commenting there, the commentary could also be passed across to my site as well.

While I typically prefer to default to POSSE when I can, this PESOS workflow is generally acceptable to me because it required very little effort and I like having the drafts to determine which I should post publicly/privately as well as for a nudge on potential follow up for some of what I've read.

One other small thing I had done was (via plugin) to have any links on my site auto-post to the WayBackMachine on archive.org as I read/post them that way there's a back up version of what I'd read so that in the future copies are available even if the site goes down at a future date. I suspect you could do this with a simple POST call, an example of which I think is documented in the wiki.

As a subtle tweak you may wish to take a look at https://www.reading.am/p/4MDd/https://www.wired.com/2014/08/handle_change/. I noticed that you bookmarked something as read a second time having clicked through via a reading.am link. This causes reading.am to mark the second one as "Jeremy Cherfas is reading this because of Jeremy Cherfas" which means the "because of Jeremy Cherfas" manages to sneak into your RSS feed in the title. I suspect this wouldn't happen often, so you could probably ignore it, but you could throw it into your Regex filter to trim it out when it does happen. (When you click on reading.am links, they process to show that you're reading something as a result of someone else having posted it, which could show some interesting network effects though the reading.am network is relatively small.)

I know you're always saying that you're not a developer, but you've puzzled out a regex filter, implemented it, and posted it to your site for others to benefit. I would submit that you could now proudly wear the title even if you have no intention to do it professionally. Neither of us may be at the level of people like aaronpk or snarfed, but then, really, who is?

I also love that you've got a Webmention form set up, working, and looking great. Congratulations! If you want a small challenge, perhaps you could massage it to create a Grav plugin so others could easily implement it? If you want less challenge (and obligation for support), perhaps submit what you've got as an issue to the Grav Webemention plugin https://github.com/Perlkonig/grav-plugin-webmention and see if they'd add it into the bigger plugin where it would also make sense having it. (They may also default to having it use their own webmention implementation instead of the heroku version.) If nothing else, consider linking/documenting it on the wiki page for Grav where others may find it more easily in the future.

Congratulations again Mr. Developer!

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.

Updated and works wonderfully! Thanks. (I was worried it would be worse as I've heard from colleagues that IG has been pulling developer API access recently.)

Given the philosophy behind this plugin and your Twitter plugin, I thought I'd take a moment to mention http://www.indiewebcamp.com which is a developer movement to assist people in owning all of their own content/data rather than relying on corporate silos/walled gardens. Your plugins sit squarely in this philosophical area.

There is a suite of related plugins (see http://indiewebcamp.com/wordpress, http://indiewebcamp.com/WordPress/Plugins, and http://indiewebcamp.com/Getting_Started_on_WordPress) that do additional types of similar data import and improved functionality. One particular function you (and your users) may appreciate is some of the plugins in combination with a service at http://brid.gy allow one to backport comments and likes from instagram, twitter, facebook, and google+ onto one's associated post on WordPress. As an example see the comments on: http://boffosocko.com/2016/05/24/55672775/. The combination of the your plugin and some of these allow users to own all of their instagram activity outright.

If you're interested and free this weekend, they're streaming a big annual meeting from Portland http://indiewebcamp.com/2016.

Drupal & #IndieWeb? @KevinMarks I'm making plans for @LADrupal #DrupalCamp in 2 weeks & was considering a #BoF session to introduce people to the movement.

I've dabbled in #IndieWeb for a while via WordPress and @WithKnown, but I'm curious if anyone can give me some advice/help/pointers with logistics from the IndieWebCamp side? It's been a while since there was something in the LA area (http://indiewebcamp.com/2013/Hollywood), but it would be nice to have the relatively large developer community here more engaged on a regular basis. Perhaps this meeting of about 500 at the UC Irvine campus can help to spill over into regular meetings in the Los Angeles and Southern California areas?

Is there anyone in the area who's available August 29th (preferably) or 30th that would like to join me in doing this?

#OpenSource