mobile posting

From IndieWeb
(Redirected from Posting from mobile devices)


mobile posting is the act of using a mobile device to post to a site, including and especially replying to or sharing a web page, typically using your own personal indieweb site.

  • Related: mobile create regarding the challenges of writing, capturing, creating content on a mobile device.

In general, most web interfaces for allowing posting on desktop are easily used on mobile, but it is more challenging to share, like, bookmark, or repost material from one site or application to one's own site. This typically requires some mobile gymnastics of separately cutting and pasting quantities of text and URL's, not to mention after-the-fact editing to make the post look correct.

A number of bookmarklet tools exist for platforms like Known and WordPress (see also IndeWeb Press This) to make indieweb sharing and posting from desktop/laptops easy and straightforward, but things are a bit more complicated on mobile.

It's good to have a way to post from any mobile app to your site. Many mobile OS's have a cross-app or cross-document API for doing this kind of "sharing" and thus presenting a UI or at least an option to share to your own site, e.g. Aaron Parecki is working on "Share via Micropub":

One solution for sharing from mobile involves the ubiquitous share functionality on Android and other platforms which allows one to click a share icon on the mobile content to share it to another mobile application.

In the lack of native apps that make use of native API:s there are apps that can work as bridges to web tools, like eg. https://workflow.is/ on iOS. Pelle Wessman has recorded a screencast of replying through Workflow.app.

Currently there are at least two solutions which will scrape the URLs from a mobile site or application (eg: either the Twitter native app or http://m.twitter.com), and then push that data to an IndieWeb friendly mobile app like Known or WordPress. There are at least two mobile applications for Android that will accomplish this:

Previously there was an Android app "Bookmarklet Free" for this, but it appears it was unpublished in 2018 [1].

Fortunately, both work roughly the same and the setups aren't all too different from configuring other apps like Woodwind.

Known

Using one of the two above mentioned apps allows one to click the ubiquitous sharing icon in most Android apps that then triggers a pop-up allowing one to choose which app to share with. Selecting either Bookmarklet Free or URL Forwarder then takes one to an interstitial screen to allow choosing whether one wants to like, share, repost, bookmark, or reply to the particular content.

In most cases both bookmarklet apps do a reasonable and similar job, but typically they ended up sharing a section of unwanted text followed by a URL (and sometimes another chunk of text related to the original content). One may have to delete the extraneous "titling" text to leave the raw URL which Known then does a good job of reformatting properly to allow one to finish the post and send it off. Hopefully future updates to Known will fix this small glitch.

Since Ryan Barrett does a good job showing the configuration settings for Bookmarklet Free in this post, below are similar settings for URL Forwarder for those using Known.

  1. Install URL Forwarder
  2. Configure setting with the following details:

Action name | Filter URL:

One will need to replace "www.yoursitenamehere.com" with their appropriate site URL.

Here, the action name, which appears first, is what to put in for the "Filter name" (field 1). The URL which follows was what one uses for the "Filter url" (field 2). For each of these one should leave the "Replaceable text" field as "@url".

The Bookmarklet Free app can be set up and configured in a like manner.

Nota bene: Use the KnownReactions plugin to provide functionality for the like and repost types and that without it, these action types won't function properly on your Known installation.

Many of these details first appeared on Sharing from the #IndieWeb on Mobile (Android) with Apps and @WithKnown by Chris Aldrich

WordPress

Other Methods

MobilePub

Ben Roberts has created a mobile web app that allows for micropub posting via MobilePub. The URL for the app can be logged into at https://ben.thatmustbe.me/mobilepub/

Chatbot

Christian Weiske has a chatbot that bookmarks all URLs sent to it. From his mobile device, he uses the brower's "send to" function to share the URL with this chatbot XMPP contact.

Shortcuts

On iOS, the app Shortcuts can be used to make POST requests to a Micropub endpoint or some other API.

See Also