24 Dec 2021

Hey, Gramps, how did you use Yahoo Pipes?

And what was it, anyway?

Not that any of them will read it but what, I wonder, would young people make of my post from exactly ten years ago? Yahoo Pipes? RSS? Curating content in order to share it from my own site? Clearly the hallucinations of an old fart’s brain.

And yet, it brought back memories of real achievement. I figured out a way to breach the skin of a silo and withdraw what I had put in there in the first place. Makes me think I ought now to knuckle down and see whether I can’t make better use of my social reader. I’ve long felt I ought to be able to do this in Newsblur, which is my preferred feed reader and which is able to share content in various ways.

There has been a long, quiet campaign to add Micropub to Newsblur, although it does seem to have stalled. One objection from Samuel Clay, developer of Newblur, seemed to be that everyone would need a different URL. Newsblur already offers a whole slew of sharing services that must require individual information, such as Pinboard and Evernote. It must be possible to add another service based on microformats and Micropub. I suppose I could make a start by poking into some of those sharing services.

Photo by Kim F on flickr

Filed under | General |

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@jeremycherfas Tagging @cygnoir with this as she was the first person to suggest that Newsblur enable cross-posting to m.b and wondering what it would take to make either that or full-on micropub support happen.

cambridgeport90

@jeremycherfas Is that an app of some sort?

@cambridgeport90 Is what an app of some sort? Newsblur? Yes, a rather good RSS (and email newsletter) feed reader. Or is this a swipe at my comment about Pipes that I am failing to fully appreciate?

@jeremycherfas Every time I use NewsBlur (every day) I am irritated that there isn't a method to share stories directly from my feed reader to Micro.blog. Thanks for caring about it too!

Replied to Sharing to micro.blog by Samuel Clay (The NewsBlur Forum) Sure, I’d love to support it. What’s the URL you want NewsBlur to share to? I can have it auto-fill in the title and url. Also, for bonus credit, what’s the url of the favicon? There’s two different discussions happening here, one seemingly about posting to micro.blog and the other about posting to any website that has a micropub endpoint. Since micro.blog accounts all have micropub endpoints the second method subsumes the first. In general most micropub clients authenticate using an IndieAuth mechanism which micro.blog also supports and this allows apps (Newsblur in this case) to send formatted data (an article’s title, URL, and a person’s reply, for example) to be published on third party websites. Developers interested in the pieces might inquire in the IndieWeb chat about the quickest and easiest method for implementing or to see some other examples and find open sourced clients/servers that already do most of the heavy lifting: https://chat.indieweb.org/dev. It would be great to see Newsblur added to the growing list of clients that can publish to independent third party websites. Unless and until Newsblur were to support this, I notice that it does have IFTTT support, so one might be able to carefully write some recipes that allows some functionality to dovetail with any website that has a micropub endpoint. I’ve documented some similar work I did using IFTTT to get the Inoreader feed reader to post reads, bookmarks, and replies to others’ sites to my WordPress website using micropub. I would abandon Inoreader for a reader with good Micropub support. h/t to Jeremy Cherfas’ post for bringing this to my attention. Published by Chris Aldrich I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media. View all posts by Chris Aldrich Format StatusPosted on December 24, 2021 1:59 pmDecember 24, 2021Author Chris AldrichCategories Reply, Social StreamTags Micropub, NewsBlur, RSSSyndicated copies: Micro.blog Related Posts

There’s two different discussions happening here, one seemingly about posting to micro.blog and the other about posting to any website that has a micropub endpoint. Since micro.blog accounts all have micropub endpoints the second method subsumes the first. In general most micropub clients authenticate using an IndieAuth mechanism which micro.blog also supports and this allows apps (Newsblur in this case) to send formatted data (an article’s title, URL, and a person’s reply, for example) to be published on t

@jeremycherfas @cygnoir Unless and until Newsblur were to support Micropub, I notice that it does have IFTTT support, so one might be able to carefully write some recipes that allows some functionality to dovetail with any website that has a micropub endpoint. I’ve documented some similar work I did using IFTTT to get the Inoreader feed reader to post reads, bookmarks, and replies to others’ sites to my WordPress website using micropub. I would abandon Inoreader for a reader with good Micropub support.

@chrisaldrich @jeremycherfas @cygnoir this support would cause me to go back to NewsBlur from Inoreader

@jeremycherfas I’m not using it at the moment but if I remember right, Feedbin can share to M.B. Though not automatically. Not sure if that helps now.

@svenseebeck possibly so. The point that @chrisaldrich made in more detail than I did is that Micropub would enable sharing even more widely. Any of the current feed readers could do it if they chose to.

@chrisaldrich Thank you for joining the conversation at the NewsBlur forum. As a woman who isn't a tech professional, my voice doesn't carry very far in those forums, so I appreciate the signal boost. // cc: @jeremycherfas @toddgrotenhuis

@cygnoir @jeremycherfas @toddgrotenhuis I am the current developer of the official NewsBlur iOS app. If someone can point to a guide or code for posting to Micro.blog from an iOS app, that may be something I could add, if the platform owner sees the value.

@dejus Did a quick search of the NNW repo and from a layman's perspective it looks promising. I know Manton is always willing to offer help where he can with this kind of thing, plus there's the Snippets framework and the Posting API document. Sorry if this isn't helpful; just a few guesses from a non-programmer. 😅

@issimonwoods thanks, some good starting points there. I'll investigate further, and see what I can do.

@dejus @cygnoir @toddgrotenhuis That would be brilliant. As @chrisaldrich explained at boffosocko.com/2021/12/2... it would probably be more useful to consider Micropub as a bridge to many different kinds of CMS. That need not be restricted to iOS.

@dejus Even an RSS or Atom or JSON feed from one’s Blurblog would be a great help.

@dejus Hi there! I'm wondering if you've had time to take a look at this. Sign me, She who revives old M.b threads. 😆

@cygnoir I raised it with the owner, who said it will be addressed as part of planned changes for OAuth support. Here's the relevant issue (that also links to the closed issue where I raised Micro.blog), if you want to encourage him directly.

@dejus Thanks for the update.

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