New feature! When adding feeds, you can now set posts to import to a blog instead of just showing up in the Micro.blog timeline. Great for keeping everything in one place or syncing between multiple blogs. Deserves a longer write-up, but for now here’s a screenshot.
@manton I would love the longer write-up. I can't think of a scenario when I would need this. It's a reverse syndication.
@amit I’m going to write some documentation for the help. Might benefit from a video too. Short answer, though, if you don’t think you need it, you probably don’t! 🙂
@SimonWoods Pretty much! But with some differences, like it currently doesn’t copy images like a real import tries to do. I plan on adding that, though.
@timapple Jumping in (sorry, @manton), but I just added/tested this. You can in fact delete the old method, and just import the feed and add it to your blog, if that’s what you want.
New status will be imported, published on both the blog and timeline, and syndicate to wherever you’re syndicating your blog.
@timapple Right. When choosing this option, there is no cross-posting because the post is going to “come back” to your Micro.blog feed too where you may already have cross-posting set.
@manton It is a very cool idea; makes sense considering the auto-archive feature for the Wayback Machine. 👍
@manton This is great! Was just thinking about this today WRT a project we’re starting up literally this week. (The project is around sharing personally curated album lists.)
@crossingthethreshold @amit @manton Off the top of my head, I can think of a near-constant worry for the blogging community; well-supported but temporary services.
For example, the omg.lol suite looks awesome and Adam is great and everything. However, one day it might not be around anymore and so it would be nice if your statuses were also posted to a blog of your own. Just in case, as with the Wayback Machine and GitHub features.
@manton That's great - been craving that functionality for ages. Hopefully can now kill off some of my IFTTT applets that forward feeds to Micro.blog. 👏
@SimonWoods I agree with you. With these various profile page services and status posting services, it seems like I could do a lot of that on Micro.blog, although I might have to set up a seperate MB blog. @manton came up with a theme that makes the index page a profile page. And as for statuses, Micro.blog seems like the perfect tool already for short status posts. I guess I don't get it.
@manton I didn't ever get my blog posts imported from my static site (Eleventy) blog - can I throw the feed in there and have it imported now?
@iChris It's not a good fit for that yet, because it can't handle really big feeds yet. Also it doesn't copy images, which is something I'll be adding soon. Remind me, did you try uploading your RSS feed to Posts → Import as a "WordPress" RSS file?
@manton I don't know if I tried it directly as WordPress file? Is it worth a shot or will it make a mess for you? :)
@iChris Try it in a test blog just in case. 🙂 Worst case it just won't be able to import some posts.
@manton Somewhat off-topic, but I’ve been wondering how to set up a test blog. Set up a new self-hosted blog? Or is there some way to do it in Micro.Blog as a subscriber?
@odd A test blog is free if you just need one. Click on Design → Edit Custom Themes → New Test Blog. Kind of buried, I guess.
@manton I can use a Finally on this news. Now my Letterboxd posts can be directly imported to my Micro.blog and can thus be available for filters and categories so I don’t have to wait for a movies version of Epilogue.
@pratik "Finally" is warranted! Yeah, Letterboxd is exactly the kind of thing that this would be a good fit for.
@pratik I have just done this for Letterboxd - I was using IFTTT to cross-post my Letterboxd feed into Micro.blog. One word of warning - it has imported the 50 most recent items from my Letterboxd feed into my blog, so now I do have a lot of duplicate 'watched' posts 🙂
@thedimpause As long as the posts correspond to the dates I had posted on Letterboxd, that’s a feature for me. I was going to ask @manton on how I can import my entire Watched history to Micro.blog.
BTW how did it duplicate? I thought in the earlier method, it only showed up on the timeline and not the actual blog.
@pratik It duplicated for me because previously I didn't add the Letterboxd feed to my Micro.blog timeline but instead used IFTTT to automatically generate a 'proper' blog post from my Letterboxd feed.
@manton Sounds like this would be perfect for importing Letterboxd - am I right in thinking review text doesn't come across right now for Letterboxd though right now? Just titles and rating?
@manton This is really great, thanks!
And here's the first feature request: I'd love is to define a category the imported posts get automatically assigned. 😉
@rknightuk The review text does come across, as does the film poster image (hosted externally) - see this example from my import. My (short!) review text is below the image. If there's no review text you just get, for example, Watched on Sunday September 25, 2022 below the image.
@rknightuk I haven't tested it myself but I believe the review text does come through. In the timeline, it only links the title, but the imported post on your blog should include the review text in the post content.
@muhh This might be a good reason for us to expand the category filters feature... For example, if you could set a category based on original URL, that would provide the most flexibility. Will think about it.
@SimonWoods Thank you for this explanation, Simon. I think that my brain has been on strike. I have read your response a few times and have just logged what you are saying. 🤦🏼♂️
@manton If I select to import posts, will all posts from when the feed was established be imported (ie all posts to date) or simply all posts from the time of selecting the import option and going forward?
@crossingthethreshold All posts in the feed, using the appropriate date for each post. I think this seems like the best default since most feeds only contain the recent 10-20 posts... For big feeds, I could see wanting some options.
@pratik ... I want to do that - but how?
How are you importing lettrboxd - as in what is the feed? All i can see is how to export your data - to a csv file?
@JohnPhilpin I found a feed at letterboxd.com/maique/rs... I guess replacing “maique” with your username should work.
@maique Thankyou so much … did just that and added the feed to NetNewsWire and it works … next stop... test site on micro blog 😎
@JohnPhilpin You’re welcome. I thought about it before, but never got around to figuring out what the feed URL was. So, thank you 🙂
@maique which begs the question .. how do you discover an RSS feed of a service that doesn’t publish it?
@JohnPhilpin In this case, I got the activity URL, and tried to add that to Reeder. When it failed, I removed the last bit, and it worked. Reeder shows the URL of the feed.
@maique @JohnPhilpin Letterboxd does show the link to the RSS feed via an icon. It's on your profile menubar on the extreme right.
BTW I just switched my feed to import posts to my blog but not seeing any. I thought the last 50-odd should show up, right? Status says, Downloading... Your feed will be checked for new blog posts. @dimpause @manton
@maique @pratik @JohnPhilpin How could you possibly miss the tiny icon in light-blue-gray against a background of dark-blue-gray 😂
@SimonWoods @pratik 🤣🤣 I went back for it, still couldn’t find it. Maybe not available on the mobile version, or I’m just too tired and missed it, again.
@JohnPhilpin @maique It's desktop-exclusive to the point wherein you can access the "Desktop version" of the site (the link is at the bottom of the site) and it looks as hilarious as you'd imagine on an iPhone. However, on an iPad it might sort-of work.
@SimonWoods gawd - another 20 minutes of my life down the drain ... but found it I have! Who EVA knew?
@JohnPhilpin You have to be unusually concerned with how websites look and work to get close to knowing. I wouldn't recommend it.
@manton So I have now imported my status.lol feed into my blog. On my website page I am seeing the latest three entries. Using MarsEdit I see all 13 status posts, looking as though they have all been imported. Do you know why I don't see all 13 on my website?
@crossingthethreshold Fixed. Looks like a caching problem interfered with this. All the statuses should be there now.
