Okay, now I get what is the most fun thing about Inoreader, which is the ability to export both folders and tags in the form of HTML. This is a premium feature (currently $50/year), and to me it makes the whole service worth it. With the HTML export, you can take any folder or any tag and have Inoreader generate an HTML version of the contents, either the full contents, or a magazine view which has an image and a text snippet. Both export formats link the titles to the original source (i.e. blog post) so that readers can click on the title and see the content in its original context.
An Example of Inoreader HTML Embedded
To get a sense of how that works, take a look at my own personal homepage at MythFolklore.net. In the upper right there is a stream of my most recent blog posts across all my blogs. I usually have about four or five blogs where I'm actively publishing content at any given time; I've got an Inoreader folder with all my blogs in it (active, dormant, ALL my blogs), and whenever there is a new post, it shows up there on my homepage! Here's what it looks like at the moment; as you can see, I was working on Aesop last night, but when you click and go there now, you might see something different! This blog post will show up there, for example, as soon as I publish it.
https://www.inoreader.com/stream/user/1005987531/tag/Laura%20Blogs/view/html?cs=m&n=100&w=620
If you look through the URL there you can see how it works: width, number of items, and display style are parameters in the URL, and Inoreader is publishing the "Laura Blogs" content because I activated this feature. By default, content is not published, but when you publish the content, then anyone can access it via these HTML export views.
I embed Inoreader HTML content in webpages, inside Canvas, inside blog posts, and also inside my class wiki. It goes anywhere that you can use iframe, and you can also just link to the HTML pages directly as I did above. I'll explain in a separate post about the embedding; what I'm going to do here is explain how to activate the HTML export of a folder in Inoreader.
Activating HTML Export: Folders
By default, exports are not turned on, so you need to turn on the export for any folder (or tag) you want to export. (You can also export as RSS, OPML, and JSON; I'll say more about RSS and OPML later... I'm sure the JSON is very cool too, but that's not something that I know how to use.)
Start by clicking on a Folder in the left-hand navigation, and then you will see that folder name appear across the top horizontal navigation. Click on the little arrow pop open menu options for the folder:
As you make changes to the parameters, it alters the Link URL that is displayed there. You can click on the link anytime to see what the results look like based on the parameters you currently have set. Once you get used to how this works, you can actually edit the URL yourself without going through this dialogue panel; all the parameters appear as variables in the URL.
Okay, those are the basics of the HTML export, and next up I'll explain HTML Export for Inoreader Tags (basically the same, but I'll explain a bit more about differences between tags and folders).
