Readwise Reader as a Blogging Assistant

I’ve been blogging for 27 years now. Give or take, blogging has been a thing for just a bit longer than that.

Over that quarter century of this new medium, we’ve developed precious few tools that assist with the things that are unique to blogging, things like “quoting and linking to something someone else wrote.” I decided to try to solve that.

After using Readwise Reader as my RSS reader of choice for several years, I decamped back to FreshRSS this spring, partially from an accumulation of minor frustrations with Reader’s UI, and partly because I wanted to be able to support Lisa’s RSS reading in a self-hosted way.

But I came back to Reader last month: I missed its full-text search, its ability to receive email newsletters, its highlighting and tagging abilities, and, more than anything else, its API.

My holy grail, as I said, was wanting to be able to highlight a passage in something and have a blog post here automagically created: quoting the work of other writers and posting a short comment is something I do a lot, and I wanted to streamline the process (see also The Three Virtues of a Great Programmer).

The enabling glue for this turned out to be the reader.document.tags_updated webhook, which fires whenever a document’s tags are updated. I wrote a webhook receiver module for Drupal which looks for the presence of the “blog” tag, and, if it finds it, does the following:

Creates a new blog post here, optionally using title and text added to the passage as a note, and the highlighted text as a block quote.
Applies any additional tags added to the highlight as topics for the blog post.
Sends a webmention to the original source.
Sends me an email summarizing the process.

Here’s what it looked like when I created this post.

First, I highlighted a passage from Wouter’s blog post:

A screen shot from Readwise Reader showing a passage of text highlighted

Next, I tap on the “Note” icon and write a note about the passage, using Markdown as needed (with the title preceded by a Markdown “#”):

Screen shot from Readwise Reader showing me writing a note attached to a passage of text.

Finally, I tap the “Tags” icon and apply tags, finishing with the “blog” tag, which fires the webhook and does the magic:

Screen shot from Readwise Reader showing tagging a highlighted piece of text.

A few seconds later I receive an email with the details:

-------------------------------------------------- NEW ARTICLE GENERATED -------------------------------------------------- Title: Wouter Turns his Blog into a Book Local ruk.ca URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book Webmention Debug Info: Source URL: https://ruk.ca/content/wouter-turns-his-blog-book Target URL: https://brainbaking.com/post/2026/06/the-archivist-in-me-turned-this-blog-into-a-book/ Step 1: Commencing endpoint structural lookup request... -> Header discovery empty. Scanning body markup structure via patterns... Result: Aborted. Target page did not expose or advertise any valid Webmention endpoints.

The process automatically adds the topic From Readwise Reader, so I can see all the posts I’ve made using this mechanism.

Here’s what showed on my blog as a result of all of this:

Screen shot of a web browser showing a blog post.

I take inspiration from Ton in building a tool like this: he’s built a system of home-cooked apps that lets him do similar things.

After 27+ years, we’ve a lot to continue to explore here.