Bookmarks API and date published for the bookmarked post

Developers
1

I’m working on making my bookmarks public based on @sod plug-in and this customization for the plug-in. Works great.

I’d like to display the published date (year) of a post. For older posts, I thought I would add good context. My question is, is this at all possible?

From what I can gather from JSON API: Bookmarks and the plug-in implementation, date_published refers to the date I bookmarked the post, not the post’s published date. I don’t see any other dates available, so I’m guessing its not possible to display a post’s published date?

2

Hey, thanks for checking out my plug-in, Jason. I think you will get the actual post publish date when you bookmark a post via the Micro.blog timeline.

But you’re right, when using the bookmarklet or the Add a bookmark input form date_published gets set to the date you bookmarked the URL instead.

Not all URLs expose them, of course, but in theory, the bookmarking feature could scrape all incoming pages, looking for a published date. Something for @manton to consider.

1 Like
3

I read this and had to admit that I was pretty skeptical that there’s a notion of “published date” that is appropriate for bookmarking URLs.

But I guess Micro.blog could read if the page has dt-published microformat2…

1 Like
4

I’m looking into this and agree that we should set date_published to the post date wherever possible. There is a separate date_favorited field if you want to know when it was bookmarked. (Probably should be date_bookmarked now for consistency.)

5

Did some more experiments with this. Will roll out the change tomorrow for when a bookmarked URL does have Microformats for when it was published.

1 Like
6

Thank you for the clarification!

I’m having a great time on micro.blog and appreciate everyone’s feedback. And thanks again for the plug-in, its been a great inspiration and tool for curation.

7

Awesome news! Thank you so much.

Not to press my luck or anything (lol) but does Micro.blog have thoughts on using the bookmarks feature as a tool for public curation? Or offering features that encourage it?

Ever since I learned we could publish our bookmarks publicly, the wheels have been turning— blogrolls, topic-specific lists, old web, indie web, boutique search engines, etc. Love the tags feature for this. I have almost 3,000 bookmarks in Raindrop.io. Most are indie blogs, old web relics, oddities, manifestos, etc. that I would like to share as highly-curated lists. “Blogmixes” if you will.

Thanks again for your help. Enjoying my time on micro.blog. Just finished the indie micro blogging book last night and thought it was excellent and helpful.

8

Thanks! Yes, I think we can do a lot more with bookmarks. For blogrolls, I’ve been thinking about making that a separate feature, although I could see having blogrolls and bookmarks tied together, e.g. an easy way to “promote” a blog bookmarked to highlight as a recommended blog on your site.

Tags are relatively new, so if anyone has ideas about how to use them when shared publicly, let us know.

1 Like