Aaron Parecki

Aperture consumes the u-photo property on posts. All 3 current Microsub clients (Monocle, Together, and Indigenous) also consume the property to display photos in the reader interfaces.

Interesting use case!

I feel like it's worth pointing out that the spec only needs to describe as much as is required for interop between clients and servers, and servers are free to do as many additional fancy things as they want.

I could picture it also being useful to record the timestamp when you read each entry for some kind of data analysis later

Sounds like it might not hurt to also have the client send a timestamp of when the item was marked read, in case the client is syncing a bunch of these read-marks after being offline. Of course servers are free to ignore that if they don't support tracking the timestamp of reads.

creators sometimes add or remove entries arbitrarily far back in the archive

Issue #24 could help in this case, being able to retrieve only the unread items in a timeline.

My current thought for this is to add a new property to the entry with the source's h-card info:

{
  "type": "entry",
  "url": "https://example.com/1000",
  ...
  ...
  "_source": {
    "url": https://example.com/",
    "name": "Example Feed",
    "photo": "https://example.com/photo.jpg"
  }
}

My main question is whether the url should be the home page URL of the feed or the actual feed URL. I'm almost thinking we need to be able to include both.

If you're following an Atom/RSS/JSONfeed, then the feed URL is not something you'd want to send a user to, so you'd want the "home page" URL instead. For HTML feeds, it would be fine to use the feed URL directly.

However from a security perspective, if the entry's URL is on a different domain than the URL the entry was found on, the UI may want to indicate this in some way, similar to how my webmentions display the source URL as "via ____" if the source URL domain is different from the entry's reported URL. The main case this might happen is an aggregator where the every item in the feed is from a different domain than the aggregator's feed. Also micro.blog feeds where the post's original URL is reported instead of the micro.blog URL.

So I'm thinking we might need two properties, feed URL and home page URL. Unfortunately this no longer maps well to h-card. Any ideas?

The majority of the use of this gem is for sending webmentions from sites that use h-entry, since it's expected that the receiver will go parse the page and find the h-entry on the sending site. Without the filter of only finding links inside the h-entry, this gem would end up sending a bunch of webmentions to pages such as links in navigation or the site footer, which is usually not the desired result.

I pushed an update to Aperture which allows you to toggle per-channel whether read state tracking is enabled. There are two modes, one where it returns the count of the number of unread items, and the other where it returns only true or false depending on whether there are new items.

For my super busy feeds, it wasn't useful having the counts, but I do like a subtle indicator there are new posts.

There are also some channels I don't want to be bothered about at all, so I've disabled read state tracking on those.

This means the Microsub API is now returning either an integer or a boolean for the unread property on channels, e.g.:

{
  "channels": [
    {
      "uid": "notifications",
      "name": "Notifications",
      "unread": 0
    },
    {
      "uid": "31eccfe322d6c48c50dea2c84efc74ff",
      "name": "IndieWeb"
      "unread": true
    }
  ]
}

This has been bugging me as well. I have Instagram as a channel, and there are almost always new photos there, so the unread count is pretty much meaningless.

I was also thinking of a third option which is to only track whether or not there are new posts, not the number of new posts. This could show up in the API as unread: true rather than unread: 24.