This is a little rant born from the frustration of trying to connect and setup a couple of indieweb applications for subscribing to and reading RSS feeds, saving to a read later service, and posting commentary from either the RSS reader or the read later service, kind of like a social reader.

After logging into Aperture using my micro.blog hosted domain, I added it’s microsub endpoint to the head of my website, then added a few Channels, some RSS feeds to those Channels, and they seemingly pull in the entries from each of them…looks like progress!

Then I jumped over to Monocle, logged in via my domain again, and could see that the channels I added into Aperture were there, but none of the articles. Hmm. I wondered if Monocle might be playing up as I saw that it’s creator was using a different reader, so I tried Together and end up with the same result…hrmm

Back to IndieWeb I go, more reading, starting to think I need a service like Watchtower to poll the subscriptions, but I’m not certain as the directions aren’t super clear as to whether it’s needed or not.

So back to my micro.blog hosted domain, return the microsub endpoint back to the micro.blog default, log back in to Aperture and now the channels I added earlier are gone. Curiosity piqued, I logged into Monocle and confirmed the channels from Aperture are not just gone, but they’ve been replaced by micro.blog’s standard channels (Timeline, Mentions, Bookmarks, Discover). I do the same on Together, yep, same result.

My next question is, can you have multiple microsub endpoints in your website’s head? I couldn’t find a clear answer, but my own testing leads me to believe that it can, however, it’s not clear how you define what goes where (at least on micro.blog) so that’s a dead end.

Ugh! I give up!

All I want is an app / service where I can;

  • subscribe to RSS feeds
  • read those subscribed RSS feeds (replacing Feedly)
  • save articles of interest to read later (replacing Pocket)
  • share / post commentary from those saved articles to my website

It needs to be pretty seamless, easy to setup and maintain, and needs work on iOS and either MacOS or in a browser. It’s pretty much the indieweb reader that Aaron describes in his Building an IndieWeb Reader article.

Some things I’ve already tried;

NetNewsWire (RSS subs) shared to Micro.blog (both iOS and Mac) - was hit and miss whether the link was passed over, I couldn’t ever get any copied or highlighted text across. Also, on iOS it only works the first time with both apps freshly installed, but subsequent shares do nothing.

I had similar experiences sharing from anywhere iOS to Micro.blog’s iOS app, it works the very first time the app is opened from a fresh install, then it never works again. Delete the app, re-authenticate with Micro.blog, share to the Mb iOS app once and then it stops working again.

I also tried sharing from Feedly to Drafts to Micro.blog’s api, it works but it was a janky feeling workflow that I just couldn’t make part of my read / share / post routine. I would also forget how I was formatting things, and I’ll be honest, I was also too lazy to setup templates in Drafts for each type of post I wanted to share. This is probably an option I should revisit seeing as Drafts is essentially the same app no matter if it’s on iOS or MacOS and the workflow would be the same no matter the device I’m on.

What’s your workflow? Do you have any suggestions for me?

To be continued…