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HOWTO – Setting up the Selfoss Feed Reader with microformats support

This post will show how to install the Selfoss feed reader with Aaron Parecki’s additions to support reading weblogs and websites that include support for microformats. This post assumes that you have a hosting account with PHP support.

To begin, download the Zip file for Aaron’s fork of the Selfoss reader (https://github.com/aaronpk/selfoss). You can either unzip the file locally and then upload the separate files, or upload the Zip file to your hosting account and unzip the file there (although the actual files are two levels down in the folder structure).

I decided to unzip the file locally. Next, I created a folder within the public_html folder of my hosting account (let’s use “selfoss” for this example, and assume that the URL of your reader will be http://yoursite.com/selfoss). Before I uploaded the files, I copied the file defaults.ini to config.ini and then uploaded all of the files to the selfoss folder. The Selfoss site says that you should be able to upload and go, and this is certainly the case. After uploading the files, I went to the URL for my site (http://andysylvester.com/selfoss/) and saw the main reader display:

Reader01

Now that the Selfoss reader is installed, it’s time to add some feeds from some Indieweb sites. I downloaded a subscription file from Amber Case by saving the file selfoss-subscriptions.xml from this post:

http://caseorganic.com/articles/2014/02/13/1/indiereader-subscribe-to-people-from-your-own-site

I then clicked on the cloud in the lower left hand corner and saw the following screen:

Reader02

 

I then clicked on the “import opml file” link at the top of the page, leading to this page:

Reader03

 

I clicked on the Choose File button, and got a dialog box for selecting a file:

Reader04

 

After I selected the file, I clicked on the “Deliver my OPML!” button. After a few seconds, the following screen appeared:

Reader05

 

I clicked on the “update now” link. After about 40 seconds, I saw the following screen:

Reader06

I then reloaded my reader site and saw some feeds!

Reader07

 

I then decided to try adding my website to the list. I clicked on the cloud icon in the lower left corner, then clicked on the “Add source” link on the next page and entered information for my site:

Reader08

 

I did an update by going to the update URL (http://andysylvester.com/selfoss/update), but I did not see any items. I then went back and changed it to read my RSS feed (http://andysylvester.com/feed/). After doing an update again and a refresh, I was able to see items from my site:

Reader09

Maybe the microformats plugins I am using aren’t effective enough in creating microformats. I’ll have to do some more testing….

The last step I did was to activate the username/password option, since with the default setup, anyone could change your subscriptions list. To set this up, first go to the password URL for your reader (http://andysylvester/selfoss/password/ for my reader):

Reader10

The Selfoss reader uses a hash of a your password as the password entry in the config.ini file. To get this hash, enter your password in the text field, then click the “generate password” button. The page will update with a long text string in the text field. Copy the contents of the text field to the password item in config.ini. It should look something like this:

password=fjkddspeignjgvklsnvlrsvnlsvndlsj54343njl433

Add an entry for the username in config.ini, like this:

username=myusername

Save config.ini, then upload it to the reader directory in your hosting account. Go back to the reader home page, you should then see a login screen like this:

Reader11

 

Enter your username and password, and you should see your feed reader again.

Reader12

 

You can now see two icons in the lower left corner. The cloud icon leads you to the page to add more feeds. The second icon (“person”) logs you out of the reader.

Enjoy!

 

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  2. @aaronpk, thanks! I am planning to do some testing of my microformat support in WordPress with the Selfoss reader, will post my results.

  4. I do not know of any way to have a second user log into a Selfoss install. To me, it is pretty much a single-user application.

  6. Am I missing something or does the article completely miss the point of the title? You said yourself this doesn’t work with microformats, and revert back to RSS, so why put microformats in the title? Or am I being dense?

Webmentions

  • Dave Winer wrote a post with the title “IndieWeb should love RSS” recently, with one of the themes being that the IndieWeb has a lack of support for RSS. I would like to provide a little background from my participation in the IndieWeb community.

    In January 2014, I attended a Homebrew Website Club meeting. This was (and still is) a gathering of like-minded people to discuss personal websites and making updates to them. The lead person was Aaron Parecki, one of the IndieWebCamp co-founders. We all introduced ourselves, and shared various opinions on web site development and talked about our individual sites. One of the things mentioned was the use of microformats as a technique/technology for building websites. I had not heard of this before, and looked into it more after the meeting. I then wrote a post on what I was interested in exploring, and one of the items was “following other sites”. What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application. Aaron Parecki even did a hack on the Selfoss feed reader application to allow it to parse microformats-based sites and present site updates like a RSS feed reader would. I even wrote up some instructions on how to set this up (after the fact). In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

    Sometime after that, I noticed that both Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik started providing a feed for their sites, although it was really a feed generated by some other application that was parsing their microformats stuff. For the next several years, though, the general trend in the group of websites that considered themselves to be part of the IndieWeb community focused on microformats and technologies that built on microformats as a building block. Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

    The more active IndieWeb members (Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik leading the way) have created a number of standards based on technologies grown from implementations on Indieweb websites (Webmention, Microsub, and Micropub). Time will tell if these develop into more mainstream technologies. I think Webmention (supporting site-to-site communication/commenting) is the furthest along (I have it enabled through WordPress plugin on my main site), but I am interested in exploring the others. RSS, though, has stood the test of time, and is still powering feed readers and podcast clients throughout the world. Dave Winer should rightly feel proud of his contributions in this area. RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences. My hope is that they can coexist and at times even work together, but always with respect (as the IndieWeb code of conduct states: “Be respectful of other people, respectfully ask people to stop if you are bothered….”).

  • Srikanth Perinkulam

    Liked: HOWTO – Setting up the Selfoss Feed Reader with microformats support

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