I need and action or something, that if I favourite something in the micro.blog, it goes to my read it later. Someone get on that, prontamente ! 😅

@Gabz Ha! I’ve been thinking about something that would poll my favorites and then do stuff with them…but never done anything, mostly because there’s just enough missing on the micro.blog end to make it annyoing and expensive ;-)

Can you try a Sharing to your read-it-later instead of favoriting, or are you sometimes/often reading on a device without a Micro.blog app and a read-it-later app?

@Gabz I have two views of this. First, there’s always those accounts I follow on a RSS reader which can easily be sent to a read-it-later list.

The other is the idea we’ve been discussing here a lot, which is renaming Favorites as Bookmarks, because that’s mostly how I treat it anyway.

@sku\_b I guess I need to train my brain to instead of favoring, maybe I should just opened whatever link and either send it to read later or just add the feed to my rss. Probably the later is the most efficient way to go about it.

@Gabz It looks like they're available as a JSON feed: micro.blog/posts/favorites

You do need to be signed in to access the feed so I'm sure that makes it complicated but IDK if it makes it impossible. Perhaps somebody can come up with an IFTTT option, or a Shortcut or something. // @smokey @sku\_b

@simonwoods @Gabz Maybe we could notify other services via a webhook when something is favorited? Also, little-known fact, Micro.blog does have an experimental "read later" feature via Indiepaper that could be developed more.

@simonwoods Getting access to the Favorites JSON Feed is not (really) where the problem lies; it’s easy enough with Shortcuts or curl or whatever to pass the M.b token and get the JSON (though I’m not sure what the status of token-authenticated feeds is in common feed reader apps that support JSON Feed, which would otherwise also be another option). It’s dealing with an increasingly-large file over time (assuming you don’t delete everything) and keeping track of your place (which is not too hard if you’re reliably taking the most recent items and not deleting them, or deleting everything, but any other workflow starts to get iffy) that are the pain points.

I use an AppleScript based on one @johnjohnston wrote to help me process my Favorites every day; it works OK but there are some sharp edges. For what @Gabz wants to do, @manton’s idea of a webhook sounds great.

For what I do, it’s not as helpful; what (I think) I’d like for my daily-use use-case is the ability to ask the API for every item I’ve favorited in the last N days and only have to handle a smaller amount of JSON—and to not have to loop through the file checking published-date dates on articles and hoping that I didn’t favorite something too long after it was published (because the only date in the JSON is the article’s date-published-on-M.b, not the date I favorited it)…(in addition to keeping the current ability to grab the whole file every so often to search locally). Mine is admittedly a odd and limited use-case, but good APIs (like good AppleScript dictionaries) enable people with different needs to put together things to create their own solutions ;-) That said, in the 80/20 world, I think the webhook probably is the solution for 80 of the people/uses :-)

@smokey That's a good point about the feed not including the date a post was favorited. I'm going to add that as date_favorited in the _microblog fields.

@manton I’m happy to do some experimentation on Indiepaper along with you, if you think of ways we could make the experience even better. If you do a webhook for favorites, I could potentially auto-add favorites to a channel in a Microsub endpoint...

@manton Oh, that’ll be great; thanks so much!

Related question: how difficult would it be to also expose something like favorite_of that points back to the original Micro.blog post ID/URL? Micro.blog obviously knows that info to show or hide the stars/toggle the Unfavorite/Favorite action labels in Timelines and Conversations, but you can’t find it in the feed. Use-case here is favoriting an interesting post that also has a good follow-up Conversation; if you just favorite the intial post, you can’t get back to the Conversation based on info in the Favorites feed, only to the source post on the person’s blog, so you have to favorite both a post and a reply—not end-of-the-world, of course, but still a bit of extra work.

@smokey In hindsight, it might've been a mistake to give favorites their own IDs instead of using the post ID, but I think we can add something. Definitely an oversight. (The date change is live.)

@manton I figured you’d done it that way to make it easy to show the favorited posts in the order they were favorited, if for no other reasons, which made sense. Happy you think it’s possible to add something for the back reference—and thanks again for date_favorited; I’m off to play with it! :-)

@simonwoods @gabz Just doing a quick scan on IFTTT, there are some shared recipes for RSS to Instapaper. Pocket is also available there. Totally doable.