Why
Information Overload
As a member of more social sites that I have desire to count, I’m often overwhelmed with email, text, and other notifications from many of them. When I do dip into their streams, I sometimes find some reasonable value, but, more often that not, I’m presented with a melange of advertisements and somewhat meaningless and context-less posts that are more like addictive fat, sugar, and salt than healthy protein and complex carbohydrates.
I’ve read books like Clay Johnson’s Information Diet: a Case for Conscious Consumption and P.M. Forni’s excellent Thinking Life: How to Thrive in the Age of Distraction which describe an overwhelming media and online social atmosphere with some prescriptive measures for cutting down on the noise. More people obviously need this type of advice and I’m regularly thinking about how to cut down on the noise and get more valuable signal out of my online tools.
An Inventory of Sources
As a result of all this noise from too many sources and social platforms, I’ve found that having a manifest or complete inventory of all my online reading sources can be immensely valuable. It will make it easier to see what I’m reading and consuming on a regular basis and therefor easier to prune or update this list based on how often I’m reading these sources compared to the value I’m getting out of them.
I can look at the titles of the sources and better get a feel for exactly what I’m consuming and possibly how much. Those I don’t read as often can be pruned out of the list or can serve as a reminder of why I wanted to add them in the first place and what I wanted to get out of them. Better that I be nagged to read things I know I’ll get value out of than defaulting to the fast food-esque fluff that, like many others, I turn to on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because it’s “easy” to consume.
I’ve also now compiled a year’s worth of reading data for things that I’ve read online. I’ve saved links to literally everything I’ve read in the past full calendar year to my website (though I only choose to show a subsection of those links to the public). This has given me a more solid data set of what I’ve read and interacted with to better guide my decisions about what I should put on the list and what I shouldn’t.
Notifications
As for the notification overload, by moving some of my reading onto my site via the excellent PressForward reader, I can drastically cut down on the number of notifications I get in email or via phone. I can more directly control exactly which notifications (and when they’re sent) that are originating from my own website.
Fighting Algorithms (and winning!)
Over the past few years, we’ve seen the rapid rise of algorithms. In some cases they’ve provided worthwhile improvements to our lives, while in others they’re downright malicious and destructive. This has become drastically more apparent in the past year or so, and I invite those who aren’t aware of their dramatic effects on our lives to read Cathy O’Neil’s book Weapons of Math Destruction, which does a great job of outlining them for the lay person with no technical background.
Every day these black box algorithms are choosing more and more of what we read and consume. (The only thing worse than the lack of a free press coupled with government controlled media is a corporate algorithmically controlled media which gives you the illusion of freedom.) Because most companies that are using these algorithms in the social space are doing so to keep us more “engaged” and on their sites for longer and clicking their ads with out any transparency, I can no longer trust them. My goals and ideals when reading online content are drastically different than theirs. I want to become more informed, challenged, and made to think. I don’t want their programmatic “reversion to the mean” forcing me to read more memes, jokes, political vitriol, and useless content.
To fight these algorithms, particularly those found in Facebook and to a lesser extent in Twitter, I’m going to cut them off at the knees and consciously choose a set of specific streams to read and engage with. Because I control what goes in to the system, I’ll know exactly what comes out. To touch on the food analogy again, when I cook for myself, I know exactly what the ingredients are and can thus eat a more healthy and well-balanced diet compared to going out and eating fast-food where I’m not ever quite sure if the “beef” is really beef, much less if it’s safe. Yes, I’ll say it, I’m going to go both organic as well as farm-to-table in my online social life.
Twitter thought experiment
Initially I had contemplated declaring Twitter bankrupcy. It seemed like a brilliant and cathartic-ly wonderful idea! But cleaning out my Twitter feed to a much smaller subset ultimately seemed like way too much work. I can only think about the hours and hours of time I’ve spent even creating and categorizing Twitter feeds into lists on my account. (Fortunately others can also follow those curated lists to find some value, so it’s not a total loss.) Starting over again from scratch on my main feed seemed untenable. Even if I did clean it all out, I would potentially have a better feed, but it’s still a feed on a silo which I don’t own or control and it doesn’t have any effect on needing to repeat the same work on dozens of other silos. Heavy pruning and weeding within someone else’s walled garden seemed like a painful and unscalable time-suck that I would potentially need to repeat on an ongoing basis. It’s akin to the sharecropping of content that I had previously been doing for them and refuse to continue to do so.
The better option seems to be to use open web technologies to create and maintain my own personal list. It’s something I own and can control. I can update it as often as I want. Even better, I only need to do it in one place instead of dozens and the results can be distributed across multiple sites almost instantaneously!
As I’ll also discuss below, my open list is still easily shareable and modifiable by others. So I’m not accruing benefits just to myself, but my work can become scale-able and usable by others.
What
So I’ve gone back to some of the original web technology including blogrolls and OPML files. I’ve created a Following page where I’m going to share my data. Here’s that page: http://boffosocko.com/about/following/
Context
In creating my list I wanted to go above the traditional blogroll and add additional context that most of them often didn’t originally have. I’ve tried to add a photo, logo, or avatar of some sort for all the sources to provide some visual context. I’ve also added either a description of the site or a snippet from the site’s owner to give an idea of what it is about (in addition to categorizing them by one or more tags) as well as an optional reason why I’m following them. I’ve also included a link to the site as well as an RSS, atom, or h-entry feed for the site to make subscribing easier for others. Where appropriate, I’ve added the microformats XFN data to these sites as well so others will have an idea of my relationship to those entities or people I’m following. Disclosure is a good thing, right? Just ask a journalist. (Viewing this last part is currently only available via parsers or by viewing the page source within a browser, but it’s there for potential future use.) In aggregate, these bits of context are not only valuable for page viewers who are considering subscribing/following them for themselves, but they also make a statement about me as a reader, a topic I’ll touch on further below.
Promotion of position: from sidebar to a full page
Given the value of social following/friending in the past decade, it’s long overdue to promote the old-school blogroll, which was traditionally placed in a diminutive position in one’s sidebar, to a more prominent position on its own page (or others may even choose to span it over multiple pages).
Social media platforms do their best to hide our social graphs from us thereby making more of what they do seem magical. Many have even bent over backwards to prevent other possibly competing social startups from leveraging our own social graphs on their platform to help build them up. Just where do they think that data came from initially? It came from me! I own it and should continue owning it.
To that end, my follow list in some sense is an implicit statement of me owning that data once again. While it may take me a bit to import and arrange it all, I’ll have ownership and agency over it. Perhaps an outside service may want pieces or parts of it, and in some cases having it open and portable may provide continued future value to me.
As an analogy for what this means, think back to the days of arduously making mix tapes in the 80’s. You’d spend hours and hours diligently copying and pasting songs together onto a cassette tape to give to a favored someone. The gift usually meant more than just the songs on the tape. This type of thing is far easier now with digital music services to the point of devaluing part of the original meaning of a mix tape. However, almost no modern music service will allow you to take your hand-crafted playlists out of their service to other competing services to make it easier to switch from something like iTunes to Amazon Music or Google Music. It’s painful and annoying in an age chock full of digital exhaust. I’m hoping that my open following list might be a lot like the portable digital music play list I wish I had.
Identity
I’m placing my follow list as a submenu item underneath my “About Me” page. Why? On most social networks there are a few simple fields, typically in a profile or on an explicit profile page, which give others some basic data about who the account holder is and what they do. Often people use this data to make relatively quick decisions about whether they should follow (or follow back) another person. Sadly I’m of the opinion that the amount and richness of the data on these pages is too sparse to be of much use. Fortunately by owning my own site, I can remedy this problem for others who visit it.
My website has thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of posts. What data can I easily provide people who are interested in learning more about me without reading the whole book as it were? My About page is a good quick place to start, but it can’t necessarily give the whole picture. I’ve also got a few other sub-pages under my About page which helps to round out the snapshot picture of who I am. These include:
- my /now page, which tells others what I’m up to most recently, but at a higher level than reading a month’s worth of status updates;
- my /Favorites page, which is a list of some of my favorite things and things I use on a regular basis; it’s not dissimilar to a “What I’m Using” page or regular posts concept;
- my /Bucketlist page, which is a list of some things I’ve done or would like to do before I “kick the bucket”;
- my /Social Media (or as I call it, my rel=”me”) page, which is a list of my too-many-presences on other social platforms;
- I’ve also recently added an /AMA or Ask Me Anything page, so that if there’s something pressing you need to know that isn’t written or find-able on my site, you can easily ask it.
Finally, there’s now also a source for others to quickly see what I’m regularly reading and find valuable enough on the web to have created a list of it all.
I think that in evaluating others, this last page (the following page) may actually provide the most value, and so I hope it does to others in return. I can’t help noting here how I’ll often judge others by which books they have on their shelves at home, or this great judgmental quote from John Waters:
“If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em!”
I hope others I’m following will follow suit and create their own following pages as I’d honestly love nothing more than to know who and what they find valuable, and to be able to extract it quickly to add to my own list! The value of discovery here can be tremendous.
Intellectual Antecedents
I know that academics like to give credit to their sources when writing papers, though they often do so in explicit footnote form. Abstracted out to a more general form, I’m hoping that my following page can also help to provide some meta data about which sources I regularly find valuable and which ones are most likely influencing me even if they’re not explicitly footnoted within my writings.
Benefit of following members of the IndieWeb
Having been using a version of my following page for a while, I’ve found one particularly nice feature of following people who are adherents of the IndieWeb movement. Because they’ve chosen to post on their own site first (and optionally syndicate to other silos), their internet presence is far more centralized for subscription and consumption. I don’t have to follow them on dozens of multiple social silos to attempt to capture all their content. I can subscribe in one place and get as much or as little as I like! You can do much the same with my site, which I’ve discussed in the past.
Now of course this isn’t the case for everyone yet, and there can be some exceptions (since not everyone owns every post-type yet nor has quit all their silos), but it does tremendously cut down on the noise, cruft, and duplicated messages that live on multiple platforms.
I’ve experimented in the past with following even a subset of researchers and their work online. The amount of time needed to catalog them all, find their various presences in sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Academia, ResearchGate, etc., etc. was painful, but then setting up notifications and creating a workflow was even worse–particularly since I want to read or see everything they’re putting out over time. I think I’d have been better off building them all custom websites to publish their content instead.
OPML means sharing
OPML really stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It is an XML-based format and standard used for feed lists interchange. All this to mean that it’s a standardized specially formatted document that allows one to share all the data in it easily by means that make sense to certain machines that would want it.
The most common example is that most feed readers allow you to import and export OPML files (with the .xml extension) so that you can quickly and easily move all of your feeds from one reader to another. (This is kind of like the playlist analogy for music that I mentioned–it’s just a playlist, or readlist if you prefer, for feed readers.) This is great if you want to try out a or move to a new feed reader.
Even better, because you can find and save a copy of my list, others can easily port it into their feed readers and sample the things that I’m seeing and often reading.
But wait! There’s more…
Many modern feed readers are supporting OPML subscription functionality! (What’s that you ask?) It’s fine to download my OPML list and import it into your reader. But what happens when I update it next week with three new great sources and remove a dead feed that no longer works? You’re stuck missing out on the new stuff and have to manually find and remove the broken one yourself. Instead, if you’ve subscribed to my OPML in your feed reader, the reader knows the URL where my list lives and checks it frequently for updates so you don’t have to worry about syncing the changes yourself! Shazam! It’s now a lot like a shared/synced playlist for articles. For those who are familiar with Twitter lists and following those, it’s very similar to how those work, except in this case they’re open and work on multiple sites and apps instead of being stuck in a proprietary service.
How
Now the part you’ve been waiting for: How can I do this myself?
For those who are on WordPress, much of the base functionality is already built into WordPress core. Below I’ll provide a few means and tips for getting you most of the way while still having some flexibility in where and how you choose to display your particular version.
(For those not on WordPress, check out some of the details and documentation on the IndieWeb wiki and ask in their chat how you might go about doing it.)
Re-enable Links Manager interface
The code for the WordPress blogroll functionality was built into core and was known as the Links Manager, but it was removed in version 3.5 for new installs that didn’t have any pre-existing links. I’ll note that the functionality was removed in late 2012 long after social media had already begun to make functionality like blogrolls (and even blogs themselves) fall out of fashion.
Fortunately, while it’s now hidden for most, it can be brought back with one line of code. (Hooray for backwards compatibility!) You can bring this functionality back to your website by adding the following snippet of code into your theme’s functions.php file:
add_filter( 'pre_option_link_manager_enabled', '__return_true' );
You can do this manually in the administrative user interface of your WordPress install by going to Appearance » Editor, which will bring up your theme files. Then in the right hand sidebar there should be a link for editing your functions.php file. Cut and paste the line of code into the file on its own line and then click Update File.
That’s easy enough, but what do you do if you’re scared of code? (You shouldn’t be, by the way…) The same functionality can be brought back with the Link Manager plugin. Just download it in the admin UI under Plugins » Installed Plugins and click Add New at the top of the page. Search for the plugin name Link Manager to download and then activate. That’s it.
Note: some may worry at the fact that the details for this plugin include the warning words:
This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.
On a scale of 1-10 for warnings, this one is really less than a 1. This has to be one of the simplest plugins in all of WordPress because it really only includes the single line of code above. There’s really almost nothing with it that could change, break, or need to be updated. It’s old, but it will work.
You’ve now re-enabled the Links Manager which will put a Links tab into your admin UI. You can click on it to start adding your links, feeds, photos, and data. The WordPress codex has great documentation for how to do this: https://codex.wordpress.org/Links_Manager
Within the admin UI you can now display a blogroll widget by going to Appearance » Widgets and moving the Links widget into one of the widgetizable areas in your theme.
Put your following list onto a page by itself
Sadly, because the Links Manager is so old and is now hidden, development on it seems to have long since stalled. This means you’ll require some simple code to get things working a bit better in terms of display. I’ll do my best to give you instructions for cutting and pasting with as little code as possible.
Plugin and Code
There’s a convenient plugin called Links Page which will get us most of the way. Go ahead and download and activate it. From the plugin interface, click the edit link for the Links Page.
The editor will pop up with the code for the plugin, which looks like this:
function linkspage($text) {
if (preg_match("|<!--links-page-->|", $text)) {
$links = wp_list_bookmarks();
$text = preg_replace("|<!--links-page-->|", $links, $text);
}
return $text;
}
add_filter('the_content', 'linkspage', 2);
In between the parenthesis for the function wp_list_bookmarks(), you’ll want to add something like the following code snippet I’ve customized for my following lists:
'categorize=1&category_orderby=count&category_order=DESC&orderby=rating&order=DESC&show_name=1&between= - &show_description=1&category_before=<h2>&category_after=</h2>'
Yours doesn’t necessarily need to be exactly the same, but it should reflect how you’d like your own list to look. To accomplish this take a look at the documentation and examples for this function to pick and choose among the options you’d like to display. You’ll just string the options together between two single quotes and separate them with an ampersand (&) as in my example above.
Caveat: Since we’ve done some “cowboy coding” here and modified the code directly in the plugin, we run the risk of the accidentally updating the plugin and overwriting our changes. I would suggest that this risk is fairly low given the simplicity of the plugin and the unlikelihood that it would need an update. More advanced WordPress users will know that the better option is to roll up all the code in the plugin and all their changes and put it into their functions.phpfile or just fork the plugin with a new name and go from there.
CSS for styling and display
You may want to put in a bit of CSS to modify how our following list is displayed on the page. Without some tweaks or taking some extreme care when uploading or linking to the photos/avatars, we may run into some display issues.
As a result I’ve added the following snippet of CSS to my theme’s style.css file:
ul.xoxo.blogroll > li > a > img {
width: 20px;
height: 20px;
}
ul.xoxo.blogroll li{
list-style-type: none;
}
You can accomplish this by going to Appearance » Editor in the admin UI and editing the file by cutting and pasting the segment above into it and clicking Update file when you’re done.
The Page itself
We’ve now got all the big pieces in place. If you haven’t already, add some data into the Links Manager (documented here). You then need to create a new page on your site in the admin UI. I’ve named mine Following, but you can name yours Blogroll, Links, or anything you’d like really–it is your site after all.
Next, as described in the instructions for the Links Page plugin add the following text into the body of your post:
<!--links-page-->
When you’re done, save the page. The plugin will then replace the text above with your following list based on the output properties you specified.
Optionally you may want to go to Appearance » Menus to modify your menu to show your follow page in your menu structure so people can easily get to it.
Other Options
Those who’d like a different way of doing all of the above might also consider trying out other blogroll-related plugins in the WordPress repository. There are likely some other excellent options and methods to accomplish some of this functionality in a way that’s acceptable for your needs.
Future
So where do we go from here? This is certainly not complete by any means and there could be additional functionalities built on top of and even beside all of this.
I haven’t delved into it deeply, but I know there are developers like Dave Winer who have created services like Share Your OPML which allow you to upload your own file and then get recommendations of similar feeds in which you might also have some interest. Services like this that take advantage of my open data to provide me with value in return could be truly awesome.
I’m sure others smarter than I will come up with better UI. I’d personally love to have a bookmarklet similar to SubToMe that allows me to quickly and easily scrape a page and post the data from a person’s site to my following list (SubToMe currently redirects one to third party readers instead.)
I’ve also been enamored by Colin Walker’s “webmention roll” in which he creates a blogroll of all the people who have interacted with his website via Webmention.
New functionality
The future might also bring increased ease-of-use as well as expanded functionality. I’m curious what value might be extracted by adding microfomats like h-cards to my follow lists? What could parsers do with a microformat like ‘p-following’ to more quickly create social graphs like Ryan Barrett’s Indie Map?
What might we expect with simpler formats than OPML, which could likely be done with microformat classes the same way that h-entry and h-feed have made supporting clunkier specs like RSS and Atom far easier?
I’m feeling itchy with all the potential possibilities…
Comments
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts and comments on the usefulness of any of the above. Is it something you’d attempt to do yourself? (If you attempted it, did it actually work?) What would you change? How could it be extended? What UI/UX improvements could be added? Other interactivity suggestions? How can the discoverability of such a thing be improved? What could be built on top of it all?
Also feel free to share your following pages, blogrolls, and OPML feeds in the comments below. Have you added your examples to the IndieWeb wiki to help others improve?
Are there people or sources missing from my following page that you’d recommend? (Keep in mind I’m far from done adding sources…)
A final thanks
Here’s a big thank you and h/t to all those who’ve been working on their own versions of this type of technology (either recently or for decades) including: Dave Winer (thanks for OPML by the way), Richard MacManus, Colin Devroe, Colin Walker, Khürt Williams, James Shelly, Bryan Alexander, Aaron Davis, and many, many others.
OPML really stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It is an XML-based format and standard used for feed lists interchange. All this to mean that it’s a standardized specially formatted document that allows one to share all the data in it easily by means that make sense to certain machines that would want it.
Syndicated copies:
OPML really stands for Outline Processor Markup Language. It is an XML-based format and standard used for feed lists interchange. All this to mean that it’s a standardized specially formatted document that allows one to share all the data in it easily by means that make sense to certain machines that would want it.
Syndicated copies:
yes! i do roughly the same on snarfed.org/feeds. i’ve also thought along similar lines for fighting information overload with pruning and batching.
Technology is always adapting and evolving, here are a few of the recent changes to my digital workflows.
In a post discussing the setup of digital devices, applications and workflows, Clay Shirky explains how he regularly changes things up:
This disruption seems important in a time when platforms are designed to maximise our attention. As Shirky warns:
Change can take many shapes. Although I may not shake things up as much as Shirky, here are some recent tweeks that have kept things fresh:
Pocket
For a long time I have used Pocket to save links to come back to. It was one of the first applications I really took to. I use a range of methods to add content, whether it be via email, using an IFTTT recipe which saves my Twitter favourites or an extension in the browser. I then either read it later or listen depending on the device or context.
I started out listening using Lisgo, an iOS app. However, this functionality is built into the Android application so I scrapped the additional app when I changed phones. The only issue I had with listening via the Android app is the requirement to select a new article each time. A recent update completely changed that with the addition of continuous playback. This allows you to organise your various links in a playlist and listen to one after another. This new feature has lead me to rethink how I use Pocket and subsequently saving more and more links to listen to
In regards to other aspects of the application, I have never really used the tagging or archiving features. Instead I bookmark elsewhere and then delete the articles in Pocket once I have finished with it. The best functionality is still the ability to read a stripped back version of the text. AMP without all the other stuff associated with AMP. I wonder how Pocket will grow with the acquisition by Mozilla?
Inoreader
I love Feedly. I came to RSS Readers around the time Google pulled its reader from production. Before that, I relied on a combination of Pocket and social media. Feedly was perfect. I progressively built my feed over time getting to the point of following 200+ blogs. I also developed a a process which allowed me to capture a quote and share it out on Twitter.
I did not have any qualms, however when Chris Aldrich pointed out the limitation of storing your OPML file within the application I was intrigued. I didn’t really like how Feedly organised the various categories and always found it tedious to backup my OPML to share with others. The answer is to subscribe to an OPML Feed stored in the links of a WordPress site, rather than upload a static file. Feedly does not allow for this, but Inoreader does.
Starting afresh has been good. There are no features that I used in Feedly that are no replicated in Inoreader. Instead there are ways of working in Inoreader that I prefer, such as the ability to quickly mark posts as ‘read’ by pulling across, rather than swiping, as well as the potential to create my own filters. This maybe a start towards Aldrich’s idea of an #IndieWeb algorithm? At the very least, it helps in understanding how some of these things work and the infrastructure behind them.
Trello
I have written about the features and affordances associated with Trello before. One of the challenges that I have had with the application is how to get it to work for me. A lot of people talk about using the Kanban approach to support an agile way of working. This often involves allocating ‘points’ or colours associated with blocks of time, setting due dates and focusing on priorities. I tried this both personally and in my workplace. It did not work. I decided to leave it for a while and come back at a later point with fresh eyes.
In leaving the application alone, it quickly became apparent why I needed it. I had some documents in my Google Drive, PDF files sent to me via email, links to resources and notes that needed to be recorded somewhere. I therefore wondered if instead of a means of managing priorities that instead Trello could become something of a digital filing cabinet, Something of a ‘canonical URL’, where if you wanted to find something you would start there.
Creating a list for each of the key focuses, the cards broke down the various projects and activities. Each card then contains a description summarising what it is about and a list of resources associated with it. This is all done using Markdown. These resources are all added into one Google Drive folder and linked from there. The card comments are then used to provide a historical snapshot, documenting any developments, additions and meetings, while the checklists are used where applicable.
This new way of using Trello also led me to review my own use. A few years ago I set up multiple boards for all the things that I do personally, whether it be blogging, presentations or projects. Similar to my work experience, this failed. It was too busy and needed to be more efficient. After being reenergised by my use at work, I wondered if I could condense everything into one board? I therefore created lists associated with blogs, projects, ideas, interesting links, things to listen to etc and used the cards to unpack each of these areas. This has subsequently led me to crafting my blog posts using Markdown in the description section and adding links and notes in the comments. Although having its limitations, it is a much smoother process than writing Markdown in a Google Doc which I had started doing. When I want a more thorough writing space though I use Typely.
Typely
I remember reading a rant from Marc Scott a few years ago on the use of Microsoft Word, although it could have been about Google Docs as well. He ended with the plea:
I understand Markdown, but could never find the right reason or workflow. I kept stumbling upon different cases, whether it is Kin Lane’s use of Markdown with Jeykl and GitHub or Mike Caulfield’s Wikity WordPress theme with Markdown built into the bookmarklet. However, it was not until I started having issue with extra bits of code when copying text from Google Docs into my blog or newsletter that I realised why Markdown is so important.
I have been exploring a number of applications to support publishing of late, whether it is add-ons such as Grammarly and Pro Writing Aid or applications in general such as Google Docs and Trello. Initially I took to writing Markdown in Google Docs and pasting the text into a converter. This workflow though does not allow you to preview the text along the way. Using Trello allows you to work cross-platform. However the need to flick between preview and editing screen is tedious and not ideal. I recently came upon another application called Typely.
Typely is best understood as a beefed-up text editor. There are no hyperlinks or formatting. Instead you focus on writing. Other applications offer a similar experience, but where Typely differs are the various options to customise the experience, whether it be turning Markdown preview on or off, switching to a blog background or selecting rules to check for. The screen also adapts to the size of the screen, with panes collapsing if there is not enough space. It does not really work on a mobile screen though. Unlike Pro Writing Aid, the error highlights can easily be turned on and off or resolved. Although on a Chromebook, the combination for resolving issues (CTRL + Spacebar) is allocated to changing between languages. There is also the ability to open and save documents across different platforms if you sign in.
Noterlive
I have long used Twitter to share thoughts and findings at conferences, including quotes, reflections and links. This has gone through many iterations, whether it be retweeting what others shared or typing in a document first before sharing out. One of the challenges that I have always had though is how to meaningfully archive this content?
The obvious answer is to curate tweets and embed them. Like so many others, I have used Storify in the past. However, with its move to a paid product, other solutions are needed. I have also used Martin Hawksey’s TAGS script before to make collections of Tweets. Although these can be easily embedded into WordPress, this archive is broken if the original Tweet is deleted. Although Hawksey provided a link to another application for producing a full embed code, I could not get this to work.
Another option is Noterlive. This web app created by Kevin Marks was designed for making IndieWeb live noting (aka live tweeting/live blogging) easier and simpler. Chris Aldrich summarises it as follows:
Aldrich has also compiled some additional instructions. See an example here.
As an approach and application, Noterlive provides a means of recording snippets of text in a thread. However, it does not allow you to attach media or connect to the actual Tweet. You are also unable to include other Tweets directly in your archive. A solution to this is to add this content when you save the simple HTML archive. This can be a good point of reflection.
So there are a few of the recent changes to my workflows, what about you? Are there any applications that have made you rethink the way you work lately? As always, comments welcome.
Also posted on IndieNews
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About Latest Posts
Aaron
I am an Australian educator supporting the integration of technology and innovation. I have an interest in how collectively we can work to creating a better tomorrow.
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Building Digital Workflows by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (Chris Aldrich | BoffoSocko) The humble blogroll is long overdue for some updates in form and functionality on the open web. Chris is rebooting the blogroll idea. I used to have one but it got lost when I moved from pivot to WordPress. We held on to the links in GlowBlogs. The idea of giving the blogroll more importance is attractive, but would bring a deal of maintenance with it.
It is always good to be reminded about OPML, I’ve found Chris’s indieWeb one useful as well as Aaron’s Feeds. I subscribe to both in inoreader, so when they add a feed I do too.
Is there a worry that the already depreciated Links Manager feature in WordPress will go away altogether? I think I recall discussing this with the developers working on Glow Blogs and the links technology in WordPress is old and doesn’t really fit with the way WordPress is developed now.
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Chris is rebooting the blogroll idea. I used to have one but it got lost when I moved from pivot to WordPress. We held on to the links in GlowBlogs. The idea of giving the blogroll more importance is attractive, but would bring a deal of maintenance with it.
It is always good to be reminded about OPML, I’ve found Chris’s indieWeb one useful as well as Aaron’s Feeds. I subscribe to both in inoreader, so when they add a feed I do too.
Is there a worry that the already depreciated Links Manager feature in WordPress will go away altogether? I think I recall discussing this with the developers working on Glow Blogs and the links technology in WordPress is old and doesn’t really fit with the way WordPress is developed now. Share this: Click to share on Mastodon (Opens in new window) Mastodon
Chris Aldrich gives a thorough rundown and rationale behind his new /following page.
He has re-enabled the native Link Manager in WordPress (it was disabled in v3.5) and gone into detail about how he has used this and plugins to create the new page.
It’s well worth a look if you’re on WordPress and considering (re)adding a blogroll.
Taking the control of our connections and relationships back from social silos – where we control a single, canonical list – is growing in popularity and importance as those silos continue to lock us in ever further.
As Chris says: “there could be additional functionalities built on top of and even beside all of this” – especially from an #indieweb perspective.
I don’t think I’ll be using this method (as the link manager was previously removed there is always the potential for the underlying functionality to be stripped from WordPress core) but I will be implementing some form of explicit blogroll in addition to my webmention directory.
Listening to a podcast the other day and thinking about subscriptions lately, I was reminded that I ought to enable a JSON feed for a few experiments with my site.
Want to use it? Here you go: http://boffosocko.com/feed/json
Thanks Manton and Daniel.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
Though WP deprecated the Links Manager, it’s still in core, and as we all know, they’re BIG (maybe too big) on backwards compatibility. I suspect that if they did remove it altogether, they would abstract it out to a standalone plugin.
There are also newer updated plugins like https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-links/ for those who are more concerned.
Either way, I’m hoping that this sort of functionality “comes back to life” on the open web, so perhaps WP will not only bring it back, but put more resources into extending it.
Zolang ik online schrijf deel ik links met de buitenwereld. Dat begon al op mijn eerste blog en al die jaren merk ik dat die links het meeste op prijs worden gesteld. Daarom begin ik hier weer met wat ik vroeger al had, de Incredible Leesmap. Op het blog van http://incredibleadventure.nl (nu nog offline) had…
Amazing work from @chrisaldrich explaining how and why he’s gone about bringing his blogroll into the 21st century. I’m honoured to be on the list, with just one comment: the Vaviblog site, while still live, will not be updated, until it reverts to its original purpose. I have not yet found a way to import all the data from that instance of Known to my current instance, as I would like, so for now that site is a relic of my first steps onto the IndieWeb.
De leesmap
Ik begeef me al weken weer meer op het originele web zoals we dat kenden voor plusminus 2005. Voor de sociale netwerken veel van onze tijd en aandacht overnamen. Misschien is het valse nostalgie, maar als ik lees hoe Chris Aldrich zijn blogroll naar een nieuw niveau brengt, dan word ik blij en zie ik weer nieuwe projectjes voor mezelf….
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
Rondom de IndieWeb community wordt veel geschreven over de rol van Facebook en Twitter in de toekomst van het web. Hoe zij onherroepelijk schade aanrichten en een steeds meer gesloten web maken. In plaats van de creatieve vrijplaats die het was. En nog steeds is. Al lijkt die meer en meer verborgen in moeilijker vindbaar. Hopelijk zien we de komende jaren een beweging de andere kant op.
Translated roughly:
The reading folder
For weeks now, I’ve been moving more towards the original web as we knew it before the end of 2005. For the social networks, much of our time and attention took over. Maybe it’s false nostalgia, but when I read how Chris Aldrich takes his blog to a new level, I’ll be happy and see new projects for myself ….
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
Around the IndieWeb community much is written about the role of Facebook and Twitter in the future of the web. How they irrevocably do damage and make an increasingly closed web. Instead of the creative sanctuary it was. And still is. Although it seems more and more hidden in more difficult findable. Hopefully we will see a movement in the other direction in the coming years.
@peteptel @rsnijders dit is leuk voor jullie: over de rol & vorm van blogrolls boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f… via @frankmeeuwsen (check ook diggingthedigital.com/leesmap-week-4…)
Last week I wrote about creating my following page and a related OPML file which one could put into a feed reader to subscribe to the list itself instead of importing it. I haven’t heard anyone mention it (yet), but I suspect that like I, some may be disappointed that some feed readers that allow OPML subscriptions don’t always respect the categorizations within the file and instead lump all of the feeds into one massive list. Fortunately there’s a quick remedy!
WordPress in its wisdom used a somewhat self-documenting API that allows one to create standalone OPML files by category. Thus if you only want to subscribe to just the feeds categorized as IndieWeb related in my OPML file, you can append the category id to the end of the URL to filter the others out.
The main OPML file: http://boffosocko.com/wp-links-opml.php
The IndieWeb only file: http://boffosocko.com/wp-links-opml.php?link_cat=1521
So in general, for WordPress sites one can append
?link_cat=[category id](with or with out the brackets) to the main URL for the OPML file typically found athttp://www.example.com/wp-links-opml.php.I was going to post about this later this week after running across it this weekend, but by odd serendipity, while I was subscribing to Henrik Carlsson’s site I noticed that he posted a note about this very same thing recently! Thanks for the unintended nudge Henrik!
For quick reference, below are links to the specific OPML files for the following categories within my larger OPML file for those who’d like to subscribe to subsections:
Bloggers
Entertainment Industry
Higher Education
Indieweb
IndieWeb and Education
Information Theory
ITBio
ITBio Related Conferences & Workshops
ITBio Related Research Groups
Mathematics
News
Open Education
Podcasts
Sampling
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A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) – The humble blogroll is long overdue for some updates in form and functionality on the open web @ChrisAldrich boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f…
Aggregating the Decentralized Social Web by Jason Green (þoht-hord)
Some brief thoughts:
I might submit that posting is possibly the easiest of the three and that the reader problem is the most difficult. This is based on the tremendous number of platforms and CMSs on which one can post, but the dearth of feed readers in existence.
Something akin to a following list could help this. Or a modified version of OPML subscription lists could work. They just need to be opened up a tad. Some are working on the idea of an open microsub spec which could be transformative as well: https://indieweb.org/Microsub-spec
You’ve already got a huge headstart in doing this with your own website. Why bother to have thousands of accounts (trust me when I say this) when you could have one? Then, as you suggest, password protected RSS (or other) feeds out to others could allow you to control which audiences get to see which content on your own site.
WordPress has lots of ways to syndicate content too. Ideally if everyone had their own website as a central hub, the idea of syndication would ultimately die out altogether. At best syndication is really just a stopgap until that point.
I’ve written some thoughts about how feed readers could continue to evolve for the open web here: http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/
Having a variety of ways to chop and dice up content are really required. We need more means of filtering content, not less. I know many who have given up on chronological feed reading. While it can be nice, there are many other useful means as well.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
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I recently wrote a post exploring the power and potential of RSS and the revival of the blogroll. One critique I received was that a ‘blogroll’ is meant to be the Top of the Pops. Maybe I am unwilling to get off the fence or am simply unable to wittle my list down. I like how Chris Aldrich breaks down his list into various categories and think that is something I will get to at some stage. However, in the interim, somebody asked me for a list of educational leadership blogs. Here then is a shorter list that will also work in the free version of Feedly. Although I would encourage uploading to your blog and subscribing with Inoreader. If you are using Global2, then import the OPML file using the Import sub-menu (Tools > Import). A link to the OPML can then be accessed by adding ‘/wp-links-opml.php’ to the end of the URL. See for example:
https://readwriterespond.com/wp-links-opml.php
NOTE: If you already use the links function to show a reduced blogroll, then you may wish to categorise them and only show a particular category in the links widget.
It’s not the bigger Twitter quit I’ve been debating for a while, but I’ve just taken the intermediate step of removing the Twitter app and its notifications from my phone. I’m going to be using a handful of feed readers to more purposefully consume curated content in the coming year.
I’ll still syndicate content into Twitter and can use my own website to receive @mentions, comments, and likes, so I won’t really be going anywhere. But I will be leaving behind a lot of the curation, maintenance, poor trained/engrained behaviors, as well as a lot of content that really isn’t doing me much good.
In particular, leaving behind a lot of the toxic content makes me feel lighter and happier already.
h/t Richard MacManus and Jonathan LaCour in the past few hours among many, many others in the near past.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
This is a collection of code that I often turn to when working with WordPress
Every time that I feel comfortable with my level of knowledge associated with WordPress, there is a problem that leads me to discover a particular attribute that I don’t know how I lived without. This time it is the code seemingly obfuscated beyond the WYSIWIG editor and the dashboard.
For some this code is about command line, while others it is about the bashing out the building blocks. My interest here is the everyday code, the little snippets that find there way in here or there while I work with WordPress, many of which have come from wandering through Chris Aldrich’s commonplace blog:
Webmentions
Webmentions are the building block for conversations across the web. However, with WordPress, they often get caught in moderation and/or flagged as spam by Akismet and other spam filter plugins. To prevent this, you can add this PHP snippet to your theme’s functions.php file:
function unspam_webmentions($approved, $commentdata) { return $commentdata['comment_type'] == 'webmention' ? 1 : $approved; } add_filter('pre_comment_approved', 'unspam_webmentions', '99', 2);
Alan Levine has documented the process of creating a child theme, which is useful when customising the code, while Gregor Morrill has developed code to approve webmentions from domains previously approved.
Microformats
Microformats is a data format built upon adopted standards and prior developments. There are a number of specifications, which can be manually added within the existing HTML. It provides the foundation for software to automatically process information. People like David Shanske and Matthias Pfefferle have developed plugins and themes to mark-up content in the backend. You can also use this site to check the microformats on your site, while for a more extensive introduction, listen to Tantek Çelik on the future of web apps.
Two microformats I have worked with are comments and rel=me.
Comment
Although the appropriate microformats are usually built into the Webmentions plugin. The plugin for theaded comments can be a bit more tempremental. Chris Aldrich recommends manually adding the reply class and URL just to make sure:
<a class="u-in-reply-to" href="http://www.example.com"></a>
I have come to do this out of habit for replies now.
Rel-me
Another microformat incorperated into many Indieweb sites is Rel-me. It is used to consolidate identity, as well as domain sign in.
<ul> <li><a href="https://twitter.com/aaronpk" rel="me">@aaronpk on Twitter</a></li> <li><a href="https://github.com/aaronpk" rel="me">Github</a></li> <li><a href="https://google.com/+aaronpk" rel="me">Google</a></li> <li><a href="mailto:me@example.com" rel="me">me@example.com</a></li></ul>
Chris Aldrich has taken rel-me to its extremes by creating a page in which he records all his accounts. I have also started my own. For more on rel-me, watch Ryan Barrett’s keynote at IndieWeb Summit 2017.
Page Bookmarks
I remember coming across in plugin in Edublogs that allowed you to add a table of contents. This reminded me of the functionality in Google Docs and one of the things I noticed in both was the presence of a hashtag at the end of the URL. (Interestingly, now every heading in Google Docs has a unique identifier automatically created.) In Docs, this is something that can be added using the Bookmark feature, I wondered if the same could be done in WordPress. I discovered that within the tags, you insert ‘name=”unique-name”‘:
<a name="unique-name">Target Text</a>
This can then be used to guide readers to a specific point in your text.
Custom URLs for Post Kinds
Using the Post Kinds plugin provides a list a unique urls associated with the kinds of posts on the site. Chris Aldrich provides some guides in how to use these to create custom urls to generate a specific post screen. This can then be used to create a bookmarklet:
http://example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?kind=bookmark&kindurl=@url
Dariusz Kuśnierek provides some other examples of custom URLs, which help in U deratamding the way urls work in general.
RSS Feeds
RSS provides a means of following a site without checking in all of the time. To access a feed to follow in WordPress, you simply add ‘/feed/’ to the end:
http://www.example.com/feed
As some feeds can contain a range of content, it is possible to hone down to particular categories by adding ‘?cat=[category id]’ to the end.
http://www.example.com/feed?cat=[category id]
This can be useful if you only want to follow a specific subject or area.
Taking this a step further, you can also produce an RSS based on Post Kinds. Although not all blogs use these, for those that do it can be a useful demarcation. Similar to categories, you add ‘?kind=type’ to the end of the feed.
http://www.example.com/feed/?kind=bookmark
For more on RSS feeds, see this post from Chris Aldrich.
OPML
Where as RSS is used for a single feed, OPML allows a user to aggregate. I have written about them before. It is possible to store an OPML in WordPress. To access this you add the append ‘/wp-links-opml.php’ to the end.
http://www.example.com/wp-links-opml.php
In addition to this, Chris Aldrich has documented how to split a file into categories:
?link_cat=[category id]
I have yet to categorise my links, however Aldrich provides an extensive example.
So what about you? What little bits of code do you use? As always, comments welcome.
If you enjoy what you read here, feel free to sign up for my monthly newsletter to catch up on all things learning, edtech and storytelling.Share this:EmailRedditTwitterPocketTumblrLinkedInLike this:Like Loading…
Hidden in the Code by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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Within the social media space there’s a huge number of services that provide a variety of what I would call bookmark-type functionality of one sort or another. They go under a variety of monikers including bookmarks, likes, favorites, stars, reads, follows, claps, and surely many quirky others. Each platform has created its own semantics which don’t always overlap with the others.
Because I’m attempting to own all of my own data, I’ve roughly mapped many of these intents into my own website. But because I have the ultimate control over them, I get to form my own personal definitions. I also have a lot more control over them in addition to adding other metadata to each for better after-the-fact search and use within my personal online commonplace book. As such, I thought it might be useful to lay out some definitions (both for myself and others) for how I view these on my website.
At the basest level, I look at most of these interactions simply as URL permalinks to interesting content and their aggregation as a “linkblog”, or a feed of interesting links I’ve come across. The specific names given to them imply a level of specificity about what I think exactly makes them interesting.
In addition to a bookmark specific feed, which by itself could be considered a “traditional” linkblog, my site also has separate aggregated feeds for things I’ve liked, read, followed, and favorited. It’s the semantic reasons for saving or featuring these pieces of content which ultimately determine which names they ultimately have. (For those interested in subscribing to one or or more, or all of these, one can add
/feed/to the ends of the specific types’ URLs, which I’ve linked, for an RSS feed. Thus, for example, http://boffosocko.com/type/link/feed/ will give you the RSS feed for the “Master” linkblog that includes all the bookmarks, likes, reads, follows, and favorites.)On my site, I try to provide a title for the content and some type of synopsis of what the content is about. These help to provide some context to others seeing them as well as a small reminder to me of what they were about. When appropriate/feasible, I’ll try to include an image for similar reasons. I’ll also often add a line of text or two as a commentary or supplement to my thoughts on the piece. Finally, I add an icon to help to quickly visually indicate which of the types of posts each is, so they can be more readily distinguished when seen in aggregate.
In relative order of decreasing importance or value to me I would put them in roughly the following order of importance (with their attached meanings as I view them on my site):
Favorite – This is often something which might easily have had designations of bookmark, like, and/or read, or even multiple of them at the same time. In any case they’re often things which I personally find important or valuable in the long term. There are far less of these than any of the other types of linkblog-like posts.
Follow – Indicating that I’m now following a person, organization, or source of future content which I deem to have enough regular constant value to my life that I want to be able to see what that source is putting out on a regular basis. Most often these sources have RSS feeds which I consume in a feed reader, but frequently they’ll appear on other social silos which I will have ported into a feed reader as well. Of late I try to be much more selective in what I’m following and why. I also categorize sources based on topics of value to me. Follows often include sources which I have either previously often liked or bookmarked or suspect I would like or bookmark frequently in the future. For more details see: A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) and the actual Following page.
Read – These are linkblog-like posts which I found interesting enough for one reason or another to have actually spent the time to read in their entirety. For things I wish to highlight or found most interesting, I’ll often add additional thought or commentary in conjunction with the post.
Like – Depending on the content, these posts may not always have been read in their entirety, but I found them more interesting than the majority of content which I’ve come across. Most often these posts serve to show my appreciation for the original source of the related post as a means of saying “congratulations”, “kudos”, “good job”, or in cases of more personal level content “I appreciate this”, “you’re awesome”, or simply as the tag says “I liked this.”
Bookmark – Content which I find interesting, but might not necessarily have the time to deal with at present. Often I’ll wish to circle back to the content at some future point and engage with at a deeper level. Bookmarking it prevents me from losing track of it altogether. I may optionally add a note about how the content came to my attention to be able to better remember it at a future time. While there are often things here which others might have “liked” or “favorited” on other social silos, on my site these things have been found interesting enough to have been bookmarked, but I haven’t personally read into them enough yet to form any specific opinion about them beyond their general interest to me or potentially followers interested in various category tags I use. I feel like this is the lowest level of interaction, and one in which I see others often like, favorite, or even repost on other social networks without having actually read anything other than the headline, if they’ve even bothered to do that. In my case, however, I more often than not actually come back to the content while others on social media rarely, if ever, do.
While occasionally some individual specimens of each might “outrank” others in the category above this is roughly the order of how I perceive them. Within this hierarchy, I do have some reservations about including the “follow” category, which in some sense I feel stands apart from the continuum represented by the others. Still it fits into the broader category of a thing with a URL, title, and high interest to me. Perhaps the difference is that it represents a store of future potentially useful information that hasn’t been created or consumed yet? An unseen anti-library of people instead of books in some sense of the word.
I might also include the Reply post type toward the top of the list, but for some time I’ve been categorizing these as “statuses” or “note-like” content rather than as “links”. These obviously have a high priority if lumped in as I’ve not only read and appreciated the underlying content, but I’ve spent the time and thought to provide a reasoned reply, particularly in cases where the reply has taken some time to compose. I suppose I might more likely include these as linkblog content if I didn’t prefer readers to value them more highly than if they showed up in those feeds. In some sense, I value the replies closer on par to my longer articles for the value of not only my response, but for that of the original posts themselves.
In general, if I take the time to add additional commentary, notes, highlights, or other marginalia, then the content obviously resonated with me much more than those which stand as simple links with titles and descriptions.
Perhaps in the near future, I’ll write about how I view these types on individual social media platforms. Often I don’t post likes/favorites from social platforms to my site as they often have less meaning to me directly and likely even less meaning to my audiences here. I suppose I could aggregate them here on my site privately, but I have many similar questions and issues that Peter Molnar brings up in his article Content, Bloat, privacy, arichives.
I’m curious to hear how others apply meaning to their linkblog type content especially since there’s such a broad range of meaning from so many social sites. Is there a better way to do it all? Is it subtly different on sites which don’t consider themselves (or act as) commonplace books?
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Syndicated copies:
Within the social media space there’s a huge number of services that provide a variety of what I would call bookmark-type functionality of one sort or another. They go under a variety of monikers including bookmarks, likes, favorites, stars, reads, follows, claps, and surely many quirky others. Each platform has created its own semantics which don’t always overlap with the others.
Because I’m attempting to own all of my own data, I’ve roughly mapped many of these intents into my own website. But because I have the ultimate control over them, I get to form my own personal definitions. I also have a lot more control over them in addition to adding other metadata to each for better after-the-fact search and use within my personal online commonplace book. As such, I thought it might be useful to lay out some definitions (both for myself and others) for how I view these on my website.
At the basest level, I look at most of these interactions simply as URL permalinks to interesting content and their aggregation as a “linkblog”, or a feed of interesting links I’ve come across. The specific names given to them imply a level of specificity about what I think exactly makes them interesting.
In addition to a bookmark specific feed, which by itself could be considered a “traditional” linkblog, my site also has separate aggregated feeds for things I’ve liked, read, followed, and favorited. It’s the semantic reasons for saving or featuring these pieces of content which ultimately determine which names they ultimately have. (For those interested in subscribing to one or or more, or all of these, one can add
/feed/to the ends of the specific types’ URLs, which I’ve linked, for an RSS feed. Thus, for example, http://boffosocko.com/type/link/feed/ will give you the RSS feed for the “Master” linkblog that includes all the bookmarks, likes, reads, follows, and favorites.)On my site, I try to provide a title for the content and some type of synopsis of what the content is about. These help to provide some context to others seeing them as well as a small reminder to me of what they were about. When appropriate/feasible, I’ll try to include an image for similar reasons. I’ll also often add a line of text or two as a commentary or supplement to my thoughts on the piece. Finally, I add an icon to help to quickly visually indicate which of the types of posts each is, so they can be more readily distinguished when seen in aggregate.
In relative order of decreasing importance or value to me I would put them in roughly the following order of importance (with their attached meanings as I view them on my site):
Favorite – This is often something which might easily have had designations of bookmark, like, and/or read, or even multiple of them at the same time. In any case they’re often things which I personally find important or valuable in the long term. There are far less of these than any of the other types of linkblog-like posts.
Follow – Indicating that I’m now following a person, organization, or source of future content which I deem to have enough regular constant value to my life that I want to be able to see what that source is putting out on a regular basis. Most often these sources have RSS feeds which I consume in a feed reader, but frequently they’ll appear on other social silos which I will have ported into a feed reader as well. Of late I try to be much more selective in what I’m following and why. I also categorize sources based on topics of value to me. Follows often include sources which I have either previously often liked or bookmarked or suspect I would like or bookmark frequently in the future. For more details see: A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) and the actual Following page.
Read – These are linkblog-like posts which I found interesting enough for one reason or another to have actually spent the time to read in their entirety. For things I wish to highlight or found most interesting, I’ll often add additional thought or commentary in conjunction with the post.
Like – Depending on the content, these posts may not always have been read in their entirety, but I found them more interesting than the majority of content which I’ve come across. Most often these posts serve to show my appreciation for the original source of the related post as a means of saying “congratulations”, “kudos”, “good job”, or in cases of more personal level content “I appreciate this”, “you’re awesome”, or simply as the tag says “I liked this.”
Bookmark – Content which I find interesting, but might not necessarily have the time to deal with at present. Often I’ll wish to circle back to the content at some future point and engage with at a deeper level. Bookmarking it prevents me from losing track of it altogether. I may optionally add a note about how the content came to my attention to be able to better remember it at a future time. While there are often things here which others might have “liked” or “favorited” on other social silos, on my site these things have been found interesting enough to have been bookmarked, but I haven’t personally read into them enough yet to form any specific opinion about them beyond their general interest to me or potentially followers interested in various category tags I use. I feel like this is the lowest level of interaction, and one in which I see others often like, favorite, or even repost on other social networks without having actually read anything other than the headline, if they’ve even bothered to do that. In my case, however, I more often than not actually come back to the content while others on social media rarely, if ever, do.
While occasionally some individual specimens of each might “outrank” others in the category above this is roughly the order of how I perceive them. Within this hierarchy, I do have some reservations about including the “follow” category, which in some sense I feel stands apart from the continuum represented by the others. Still it fits into the broader category of a thing with a URL, title, and high interest to me. Perhaps the difference is that it represents a store of future potentially useful information that hasn’t been created or consumed yet? An unseen anti-library of people instead of books in some sense of the word.
I might also include the Reply post type toward the top of the list, but for some time I’ve been categorizing these as “statuses” or “note-like” content rather than as “links”. These obviously have a high priority if lumped in as I’ve not only read and appreciated the underlying content, but I’ve spent the time and thought to provide a reasoned reply, particularly in cases where the reply has taken some time to compose. I suppose I might more likely include these as linkblog content if I didn’t prefer readers to value them more highly than if they showed up in those feeds. In some sense, I value the replies closer on par to my longer articles for the value of not only my response, but for that of the original posts themselves.
In general, if I take the time to add additional commentary, notes, highlights, or other marginalia, then the content obviously resonated with me much more than those which stand as simple links with titles and descriptions.
Perhaps in the near future, I’ll write about how I view these types on individual social media platforms. Often I don’t post likes/favorites from social platforms to my site as they often have less meaning to me directly and likely even less meaning to my audiences here. I suppose I could aggregate them here on my site privately, but I have many similar questions and issues that Peter Molnar brings up in his article Content, Bloat, privacy, arichives.
I’m curious to hear how others apply meaning to their linkblog type content especially since there’s such a broad range of meaning from so many social sites. Is there a better way to do it all? Is it subtly different on sites which don’t consider themselves (or act as) commonplace books?
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When I read Shanske’s post, I really liked the idea, but was concerned about having an old-school blogroll. Of course this may have been misreading it.
A few years back I had a go at organising my blogroll using Sheets and representing it dynamically. The problem with this is that there is not much I can do with it and it is tedious to maintain, especially as my current workflow involves updating two spaces.
I really like your idea about having a ‘directory’. This reminds me of Chris Aldrich’s following lists. Like Aldrich, I just wish there was an easier way of adding a link/site and having this automagically added to the page. I assume that in part that is what you have?
It feels like there has been a bit of resurgence when it comes to RSS lately. I wrote about it last year, Alan Levine has been doing alchemy, Aral Balkan has been reclaiming it, Tom Woodward has been doing jujitsu and Chris Aldrich has created his own feeds.
My takeaways have been:
Store your feed somewhere else. I store mine in WordPress and also sign up to some of Chris Aldrich’s feeds.
Use a reader that allows users to subscribe to an external OPML (I use Inoreader)
Create custom feeds based on tags and categories (or Post Kinds)
Another post that might be worth diving into is Chris Aldrich’s Feed Reader Revolution.
Replied to No Good WordPress Blogroll Plugins by Brad Enslen (Brad Enslen)
Apologies Brad. I just saw your follow up post and had meant to reply to your earlier one when I saw it last week, I just didn’t have the time to write a quick response. I had hoped you might have found something even better than what I’ve put together previously or perhaps started building a newer and shinier edifice.
There is actually an excellent and solid “plugin” for creating a blogroll, but it’s actually been hiding in WordPress core for ages: the original Link Manager. Use of it declined so much it was programatically “removed”, but all the code is still in core, it still works wonderfully, and it only requires a single line of code (or the simplest plugin ever written) to re-enable it.
It was very solid and didn’t need much iteration, so it should work fine with current versions of WordPress–it certainly does on mine.
I’ve written up a bunch of details on how and what I did (as well as why), so hopefully it’ll give you a solid start including some custom code snippets and reasonably explicit directions to make some small improvements for those that may be a bit code-averse. Hint: I changed it from being a sidebar widget to making it a full page. Let us know if you need help making some of the small code related changes to get yourself sorted.
Even if you just want a plug and play plugin, there are details for that in the post as well, you’ll just be stuck with putting the blogroll into a traditional sidebar position. (With conditional statements in the sidebar widget, you could restrict the blogroll widget to only displaying on a “Following” page, for example.)
I do think there is still a more IndieWeb way of doing this, potentially by making follow posts with mark up that could be parsed by microsub readers perhaps? Certainly dovetailing something with microsub seems to be a laudable goal. I would like to eventually dive into the Link Manager code and add some additional microformats as well as update the OPML to v2, but there’s enough back compatibility that the older version is fine for most use cases I’ve run across. I know David Shanske has some ideas about some changes he’d like to see in the future as well. You could always also go super low tech the way Greg did and have a blogroll post that you update over time, though perhaps a page is a better way to go? Updating things to be more automated is certainly a reasonable goal though.
Give it a spin and see what you think. Here’s my Following page (aka blogroll) with details at the very bottom for subcategories of OPML subscription. I’ll try to update the IndieWeb blogroll page with some of these details to make them more imminently findable as well.
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After much discussion I came up with a new blogroll. Ta da!
Not perfect but a bit easier to maintain. I used the Links Shortcode plugin to resurrect the “Links” function in WordPress and let me put the links on a Page rather than a Widget. I still have not fully figured out the formatting for the links lists but I got the core: clickable links, a description automatically arranged in alphabetical order. Good enough.
I borrowed a lot of suggestions from Chris Aldrich. Even though I didn’t use it, I like his use of the term “Following” page. I think it fits better. I stuck with “blogroll” because that’s what I’m used to. I used a different plugin to resurrect the Links function but it gets the job done. I copied his menu taxonomy and made my Blogroll Page a sub-page under “About”, not to hide it but to to personalize it and show ownership of it – that it is my list and should be equated with me.
Now I’m free to add blogs to the roll, so It will grow.
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Replied to This Indispensable Digital Research Tool, We can Say, Without Lying, Saves Time by Alan Levine (@cogdog) (Extend Activity Bank)
RSS is incredibly valuable as is OPML.
I had used Feedly for several years, but made the switch to Inoreader last year, in part because it has one additional useful feature that Feedly doesn’t: OPML subscription. While it’s nice to be able to import and export OPML files, needing to remember to update them can be an unnecessary step, particularly if 20+ people need to do the update to capture all the new RSS feeds added. (As an example, say one or two students join a class late and everyone has already got the original OPML export and now needs to update to add a few more feeds to keep track of classroom activity.) OPML subscription improves this by allowing the subscription to an OPML link with multiple feeds in it. If the original OPML file updates with new feeds, then the reader automatically updates them and pushes them out to everyone subscribed to that OPML file!
Think of an OPML subscription as an updating subscription to a bundle of RSS feeds which all also provide their own individual updates. Instead of subscribing to a bunch of individual feeds, you can subscribe to whole bundles of feeds.
For those looking for some sample OPML links to subscribe to, try some of mine which are listed at the bottom of the linked page. For some ideas about building your own data stores with OPML links for WordPress, try my Following Page solution. WordPress’s old Link Manager described on that page will provide the ability to store the data and provide the OPML links, the rest of the page discusses publishing it on one’s site so that it’s publicly available if you wish. URL schemes for sub-categories are discussed separately.
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@photomatt I recall the jokes made about crusty blogrolls when we deprecated the links manager. Now, folks are exhuming it for use as their canonical OPML source to feed OPML subscriptions.
boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f…
Replied to a tweet by Ryan Boren (Twitter)
Oh there’s just so much to say about the start of this thread, and it gives me so much hope for the open web as well as potential growth for WordPress.
Link Manager Update
The Link Manager still seems relatively solid and much of the infrastructure still works well, despite the warnings and lack of updates over the past several years. It would be nice to see it make a comeback and I can personally see many ways it could come back as a means of allowing people to better own their personal social graph as well as dovetail with readers. (This could also be the cornerstone of helping to make WordPress it’s own decentralized social network so that those who want to leave Facebook, Twitter, et al. could more easily do so and maintain their own data and infrastructure.)
If it were being updated, here are a few things that I might suggest as being imminently useful:
Update to the latest version of OPML; While the old version still works, there are some new toys that folks like Dave Winer have been iterating on including OPML subscription1,2 as well as some discovery tools.
Add in additional microformats support, particularly for display. Things like h-card, u-url, u-photo, etc. could make displaying these more useful for the growing number of microformats parsers. I also suspect that having OPML subscription support could be a major boon to the feed reader resurgence that is happening with the split of the server side/display side split occurring with the improving Microsub spec which now has one server implementation with several more coming and at least three front end implementations. I know of one person building a Microsub server for WordPress already.
It’s non-obvious where one’s OPML file lives within the plugin or that one can have or target OPML files by category. Making this more apparent from a UI perspective would be both useful and help adoption.
Provide a bookmarklet or browser extension to make it easier to scrape data off of someone’s homepage (or any page for that matter) and put it into the Links Manager data fields. This would allow people to do a one (or two click) solution for quickly and immediately following someone, saving their data into their site, and then via OPML subscription, they’ll automatically be following that feed in their reader of choice.
For doing the parsing portion of this, I might recommend the parsing algorithm being used by the Post Kinds Plugin, which parses a web page and searches for microformats, open graph protocol, and one or two other standards to return all or most all of the data that would be needed to fill out the data Links Manager can take. As I recall, this parser was being discussed by Kraft for potential inclusion into the Press This bookmarklet functionality to expand on what it had already provided.
From a UI perspective this would allow people to follow friends or others via a WordPress workflow almost as easily as any of the social media silos.
Another UI approach for comparison can be found by looking at the SubToMe universal follow button which was developed by Julien Genestoux (also of PubSub/WebSub fame). This version also uses some of the standard feed discovery mechanisms which a bookmarklet would want to be able to do as well.
As I’d written, following/subscribing has become more central to the social space, so upgrading the humble blogroll from a widget to a full page would certainly be in order. Having the infrastructure (short link perhaps?) to easily create a WordPress page out of the data would be quite helpful.
As Ryan indicates, the planet-like features that OPML subscriptions provide are immensely valuable in general, but also solves a tough problem that some of the best minds in the educational tech space have found perennially problematic.3
As for the title-less post types that are proliferating by the independent microblogging community (including the recent micro.blog as well as post types in the vein of likes, favorites, reads, replies, etc. which mimic functionality within the broader social space), the so-called
(no title)problem can be somewhat difficult since so many things are built to expect a title. Many feed readers don’t know how to react to them as a result. The Post Kinds Plugin faced a similar issue and recently pushed an update so that within the admin UI at/wp-admin/edit.phpthe title field would still indicate (no title) but it would also include a 28 character synopsis fromthe_bodyorthe_excerptto provide at least some indication of what the post was about. This also seems to be a potential issue in other areas of WordPress including widgets like “Recent Posts” which want to display a title where none exists. As the aside post format can attest, not all themes deal with this well, though there are other alternate methods for displaying some useful data.References
1.
OPML subscriptions. Inoreader blog. https://blog.inoreader.com/2014/05/opml-subscriptions.html. Published May 26, 2014. Accessed July 18, 2018.
2.
RSS Reader InoReader to Support Dynamic OPML Subscriptions. CleverClogs. http://cleverclogs.org/category/opml-subscriptions. Published May 26, 2014. Accessed July 18, 2018.
3.
Groom J. Will Work for Feed Syndication Framework. bavatuesdays. https://bavatuesdays.com/ds106-will-work-for-feed-syndication-framework/. Published August 5, 2013. Accessed July 18, 2018.
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A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f… by @chrisaldrich
Built my following page using @chrisaldrich’s IndieWeb tutorial. boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f… Now to add in all my feeds, then add the, to Aperture so they show up in my reader. (jgregorymcverry.com/6215-2/)
Built my following page using @chrisaldrich’s IndieWeb tutorial. https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-following-page/ Now to add in all my feeds, then add the, to Aperture so they show up in my reader. (http://jgregorymcverry.com/6215-2/)
It may still be a while before I can make the leap I’d love to make to using Microsub related technology to replace my daily feed reader habits. I know that several people are working diligently on a Microsub server for WordPress and there are already a handful of reader interfaces available. I’m particularly interested in the fact that I can use a reader interface integrated with Micropub so that my reactions in the reader (likes, bookmarks, replies, etc.) are posted back to my own personal website which will then send notifications (via Webmention) to the mentioned websites. Of course it’s going to take some time before I’m using it and even more time after that for the set up to become common and easy to use for others. So until then, I and others will need some tools to use right now.
Toward this end I thought I’d double down on my use of Inoreader in my daily web consumption workflows. I wanted to make it easier to use my feed reader to post all these types of posts to my website which will still handle the notifications. In some sense, instead of relying on a feed reader supporting Micropub, I’ll use other (older) methods for making the relevant posts. As I see it, there are two potential possibilities using Inoreader:
(1) using a service like IFTTT (free) or Zapier (paid) to take the post intents and send them to my WordPress site, or
(2) using the custom posting interface in Inoreader in conjunction with post editor URL schemes with the Post Kinds plugin to create the posts. Using WordPress’ built-in Post This bookmarklet schemes could also be used to make these posts, but Post Kinds plugin offers a lot more metadata and flexibility.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
Below is a brief outline of some of the IFTTT recipes I’ve used to take data from posts I interact with in Inoreader and post them to my own website.
The trigger interface in IFTTT for creating new applets using Inoreader functionality.
Likes
IFTTT has an explicit like functionality with a one click like button. There is an IFTTT recipe which allows taking this datum and adding it directly as a WordPress post with lots of rich data. The “then that” portion of IFTTT using WordPress allows some reasonable functionality for porting over data.
Favorites
IFTTT also has explicit favorite functionality using a one click starred article button. There is an IFTTT recipe which allows adding this directly as a WordPress post.
Since the “starred” article isn’t defined specifically in Inoreader as a “favorite”, one could alternately use it to create “read” or “bookmark” posts on their WordPress websites. I’m tempted to try this for read posts as I probably wouldn’t often use it to create favorite posts on my own website. Ultimately one at least wants an easy-to-remember 1 to 1 mapping of pieces of functionality in Inoreader to their own website, so whatever I decide I’ll likely stick to it.
Bookmarks
While there is no specific functionality for creating bookmarks in Inoreader (though starred articles could be used this way as previously mentioned), there is a “saved webpage” functionality that could be used here in addition to an IFTTT recipe to port over the data to WordPress.
Reads
While Inoreader has a common feed reader read/unread functionality, it is often not used tacitly and this is a means of reducing friction within the application. Not really wanting to muddle the meaning of the “starred” article to do it, I’ve opted to adding an explicit “read” tag on posts I’ve read.
IFTTT does have a “New tagged article” recipe that will allow me to take articles in Inoreader with my “read” tag and post them to my website. It’s pretty simple and easy.
Replies
For dealing with replies, there is an odd quirk within Inoreader. Confoundingly the feed reader has two similar, yet still very different commenting functionalities. One is explicitly named “comment”, but sadly there isn’t a related IFTTT trigger nor an RSS feed to take advantage of the data one puts into the comment functionality. Fortunately there is a separate “broadcast” functionality. There is an IFTTT recipe for “new broadcasted article” that will allow one to take the reply/comment and post it to one’s WordPress website.
Follows
Like many of the above there is a specific IFTTT recipe that will allow one to add subscriptions directly to WordPress as posts, so that any new subscriptions (or follows) within the Inoreader interface can create follow posts! I doubt many people may use this recipe, but it’s awesome that it exists. Currently anything added to my blogrolls (aka Following Page) gets ported over to Inoreader via OPML subscription, so I’m curious if them being added that way will create these follow posts? And if so, is there a good date/time stamp for these? I still have to do some experimenting to see exactly how this is going to work.
RSS feed-based functionality
In addition to the IFTTT recipe functionality described above, one could also use IFTTT RSS functionality to pipe RSS feeds which Inoreader provides (especially via tags) into a WordPress website. I don’t personally use this sort of set up, but thought I’d at least mention it in passing so that anyone who might like to create other post types to their website could.
Custom posting in Inoreader with Post Kinds Plugin
If using a third-party service like IFTTT isn’t your cup of tea, Inoreader also allows custom sharing options. (There are also many pre-built ones for Facebook, Twitter, etc. and they’re also re-orderable as well.) I thus used WordPress’ post editor URL schemes to send the data I’d like to have from the original post to my own website. Inoreader actually has suggestions in their UI for how to effectuate this generically on WordPress. While this is nice, I’m a major user of the Post Kinds Plugin which allows me a lot more flexibility to post likes, bookmarks, favorites, reads, replies, etc. with the appropriate microformats and much richer metadata. Post Kinds has some additional URL structures which I’ve used in addition to the standard WordPress ones to take advantage of this. This has allowed me to create custom buttons for reads, bookmarks, replies, likes, and listens. With social sharing functionality in Inoreader enabled, each article in Inoreader has a sharing functionality in the bottom right corner that has a configuration option which brings up the following interface:
Custom sharing functionality in Inoreader. I’ve added set up to post reads, bookmarks, likes, replies and listens to my personal website.
Once made, these custom button icons appear at the bottom of every post in Inoreader, so, for example, if I want to reply to a post I’ve just read, I can click on the reply button which will open a new browser window for a new post on my website. The Post Kinds plugin on my site automatically pulls in the URL of the original post, parses that page and–where available–pulls in the title, synopsis, post date/time, the author, author URL, author photo, and a featured photo as well as automatically setting the specific post kind and post format. A lot of this data helps to create a useful reply context on my website. I can then type in my reply to the post and add any other categories, tags, or data I’d like in my admin interface. Finally I publish the post which sends notifications to the original post I read (via Webmention).
Screencapture of Inoreader’s interface highlighting some of their social features as well as the custom sharing interface I’ve added. The article shown here is one lamenting the lost infrastructure of feed readers and hopes for future infrastructure from Jon Udell entitled Where’s my Net dashboard?
Conclusion and future
With either of the above set ups, there are a few quick and easy clicks to create my posts and I’m done. Could it be simpler? Yes, but it likely won’t be much more until I’ve got a fully functional Microsub server and reader up and working.
Of course, I also love Inoreader and its huge variety of features and great usability. While I’m patiently awaiting having my own WordPress Microsub server, I certainly wouldn’t mind it if Inoreader decided to add some IndieWeb functionality itself. Then perhaps I wouldn’t need to make the switch in the near future.
What would this look like? It could include the ability to allow me to log into Inoreader using my own website using IndieAuth protocol. It could also add Micropub functionality to allow me to post all these things directly and explicitly to my website in an easier manner. And finally, if they really wanted to go even further, they could make themselves a Microsub server that enables me to use any one of several Microsub clients to read content and post to my own website. And of course the benefit to Inoreader is that if they support these open internet specifications, then their application not only works with WordPress sites with the few appropriate plugins, but Inoreader will also work with a huge variety of other content management systems that support these specs as well.
Whether or not Inoreader supports these protocols, there is a coming wave of new social feed readers that will begin to close many of these functional gaps that made RSS difficult. I know things will slowly, but eventually get better, simpler, and easier to use. Soon posting to one’s website and doing two way communication on the internet via truly social readers will be a reality, and one that’s likely to make it far easier to eschew the toxicity and problems of social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
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Replied to a tweet by Dries Buytaert (Twitter)
Happy birthday Dries! If I may, can I outline a potential web-based birthday present based on your wish?
Follow posts
With relation to your desire to know who’s subscribed and potentially reading your posts, I think there are a number of ways forward, and even better, ways that are within easy immediate reach using Drupal as well as many other CMSes using some simple web standards.
I suspect you’ve been following Kristof De Jaeger’s work with the Drupal IndieWeb module which is now a release candidate. It will allow you to send and receive Webmentions (a W3C recommendation) which are simple notifications much the way they work on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve written a bit about how they could be leveraged to accomplish several things in Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet.
Not mentioned in that article for brevity is the ability to send notifications via Webmention when one makes follow or subscription posts.
As an example, I’ve created a follow post for you for which my site would have sent a Webmention. Unfortunately at the time, your site didn’t support receiving it, so you would have missed out on it unless you support older legacy specs like pingback, trackback, or refback.
I also created a larger related Following page of people and sites I’m subscribed to which also lists you, so you would have received another notification from it if you supported Webmention.
I’m unaware of anyone actually displaying these notifications on their website (yet!), though I’ve got some infrastructure on my own site to create a “Followed by” page which will store and show these follows or subscriptions. At present, they’re simply stored in my back end.
Read Posts
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As for Rachel’s request, this too is also possible with “read” webmentions. I maintain a specific linkblog feed (RSS) with all of the online material I read. All of those posts send notifications to the linked sites. While it’s not widely supported by other platforms yet, there are a few which do, so that online publications can better delineate and display the difference between likes, bookmarks, reads, etc. There’s at least one online newspaper among 800+WordPress websites which support this functionality. I suspect that with swentel’s Drupal module and some code for supporting the proper microformats, this is a quick reality in the Drupal space as well. Because the functionality is built on basic web standards, it’s possible for any CMS to support them. All that’s left is to ramp up adoption.
A quick note on Microsub and feed readers
Dave Winer in his reply to you linked to a post about showing likes on his site (presumably using the Twitter API) where he laments:
Interestingly, swentel’s module also supports Microsub, so that reader clients will allow one to like (bookmark, or reply to) posts directly within readers which will then send Micropub requests to one’s website to post them as well as to potentially send Webmention notifications. These pieces help to close the circle of posting, reading, and easily interacting on the open web the way closed silos like Facebook, Twitter, et al. allow.
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This Article was mentioned on kimberlyhirsh.com
Replied to a tweet by Dr LJ (Twitter)
I like that old school Blogroll you’ve got! I wish I could have kept mine small enough for a sidebar:
https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-following-page/
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Replied to My Human Readable OPML Blogroll by Ton Zijlstra (zylstra.org)
Ton, this is great! Though perhaps you’re reinventing the wheel a bit more than you may have needed to?
I’ll see you your blogroll and add in images and descriptions as well! https://boffosocko.com/about/following/
A while back I did something similar to what you and Peter have done, I just did it with the old built in Link Manager feature of WordPress. The primary difference is that I’ve got some meta data about what the site/feed is about in addition to an image. I left out the feed in the human readable version as it’s less likely to be used, while it’s more valuable to the computer readable version. I’ve also figured out the a URL query parameter for breaking my blogroll up by category, so that folks can copy smaller subsections of it.
Another added bonus is that I’m using Inoreader which supports OPML subscriptions so that any time I update my OPML file, my feed reader auto-updates for me without needing to manually upload the new OPML file! This means I just add the follow in one place and everything else follows without any additional work.
Here are the details for how I did most of it:
The beginnings of a blogroll
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager
Perhaps what we really need is to give some love to that Link Manager in core to update it to OPML v2 and add in the rel attributes from XFN microformats to the links?
When you have a moment, be sure to add your example to the OPML and blogroll pages on the IndieWeb wiki, where you may find some additional inspiration.
Thanks for experimenting to bring back the blogroll! (And thanks for sharing, there are a few of your feeds I see that I ought to be following and I also recognize those we have in common of many educators I already do follow.)
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I’m still tinkering away at pathways for following people (and websites) on the open web (in my case within WordPress). I’m doing it with an eye toward making some of the UI and infrastructure easier in light of the current fleet of Microsub servers and readers that will enable easier social reading without the centralized reliance on services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Medium, LinkedIn, et al.
If you haven’t been following along, here are some relevant pieces for background:
The beginnings of a blogroll
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll)
OPML files for categories within WordPress’s Links Manager
Was WP Links the Perfect Blogroll All Along? by Ton Zijlstra
Generally I’ve been adding data into my Following Page (aka blogroll on steroids) using the old WordPress Links Manager pseudo-manually. (There’s also a way to bulk import to it via OPML, using the WordPress Tools Menu or via
/wp-admin/import.php?import=opml). The old Links Manager functionality in WordPress had a bookmarklet to add links to it quickly, though it currently only seems to add a minimal set–typically just the URL and the page title. Perhaps someone with stronger JavaScript skills than I possess could improve on it or integrate/leverage some of David Shanske’s Parse This work into such a bookmark to pull more data out of pages (via Microformats, Schema.org, Open Graph Protocol, or Dublin Core meta) to pre-fill the Links Manager with more metadata including page feeds, which I now understand Parse This does in the past month or so. (If more than one feed is found, they could be added in comma separated form to the “Notes” section and the user could cut/paste the appropriate one into the feed section.) Since I spent some significant time trying to find/dig up that old bookmarklet, I’ll mention that it can be found in the Restore Lost Functionality plugin (along with many other goodies) and a related version also exists in the Link Library plugin, though on a small test I found it only pulled in the URL.Since it wasn’t completely intuitive to find, I’ll include the JavaScript snippet for the Links Manager bookmarklet below, though note that the URL hard coded into it is for
example.com, so change that part if you’re modifying for your own use. (I haven’t tested it, but it may require the Press This plugin which replaces some of the functionality that was taken out of WordPress core in version 4.9. It will certainly require one to enable using the Links Manager either via code or via plugin.)javascript:void(linkmanpopup=window.open('https://exanple.com/wp-admin/link-add.php?action=popup&linkurl='+escape(location.href)+'&name='+escape(document.title),'LinkManager','scrollbars=yes,width=750,height=550,left=15,top=15,status=yes,resizable=yes'));linkmanpopup.focus();window.focus();linkmanpopup.focus();Since I’ve been digging around a bit, I’ll note that Yannick Lefebvre’s Link Library plugin seems to have a similar sort of functionality to Links Manager and adds in the ability to add a variety of additional data fields including tags, which Ton Zijlstra mentions he would like (and I wouldn’t mind either). Unfortunately I’m not seeing any OPML functionality in the plugin, so it wins at doing display (with a huge variety of settings) for a stand-alone blogroll, but it may fail at the data portability for doing the additional OPML portion we’ve been looking at. Of course I’m happy to be corrected, but I don’t see anything in the documentation or a cursory glance at the code.
In the most ideal world, I’d love to be able to use the Post Kinds Plugin to create follow posts (see my examples). This plugin is already able to generally use bookmarklet functionality to pull in a variety of meta data using the Parse This code which is also built into Post Kinds.
It would be nice if these follow posts would also copy their data into the Links Manager (to keep things DRY), so that the blogroll and the OPML files are automatically updated all at once. (Barring Post Kinds transferring the data, it would be nice to have an improved bookmarklet for pulling data into the Links Manager piece directly.)
Naturally having the ability for these OPML files be readable/usable by Jack Jamieson’s forthcoming Yarns Microsub Server for WordPress (for use with social readers) would be phenomenal. (I believe there are already one or two OPML to h-feed converters for Microsub in the wild.) All of this would be a nice end -to-end solution for quickly and easily following people (or sites) with a variety of feeds and feed types (RSS, Atom, JSONfeed, h-feed).
An additional refinement of the blogroll display portion would be to have that page display as an h-feed of h-entries each including properly marked up h-cards with appropriate microformats and discoverable RSS feeds to make it easier for other sites to find and use that data. (This may be a more IndieWeb-based method of displaying such a page compared with the OPML spec.) I’ll also note that the Links Manager uses v1 of the OPML spec and it would potentially be nice to have an update on that as well for newer discovery tools/methods like Dave Winer’s Share Your OPML Subscription list, which I’m noting seems to be down/not functioning at the moment.
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My OPML Domains Project
Not being able to attend Domains 2019 in person, I was bound and determined to attend as much of it as I could manage remotely. A lot of this revolved around following the hashtag for the conference, watching the Virtually Connecting sessions, interacting online, and starting to watch the archived videos after-the-fact. Even with all of this, for a while I had been meaning to flesh out my ability to follow the domains (aka websites) of other attendees and people in the space. Currently the easiest way (for me) to do this is via RSS with a feed reader, so I began collecting feeds of those from the Twitter list of Domains ’17 and Domains ’19 attendees as well as others in the education-related space who tweet about A Domain of One’s Own or IndieWeb. In some sense, I would be doing some additional aggregation work on expanding my blogroll, or, as I call it now, my following page since it’s much too large and diverse to fit into a sidebar on my website.
For some brief background, my following page is built on some old functionality in WordPress core that has since been hidden. I’m using the old Links Manager for collecting links and feeds of people, projects, groups, and institutions. This link manager creates standard OPML files, which WordPress can break up by categories, that can easily be imported/exported into most standard feed readers. Even better, some feed readers like Inoreader, support OPML subscriptions, so one could subscribe to my OPML file, and any time I update it in the future with new subscriptions, your feed reader would automatically update to follow those as well. I use this functionality in my own Inoreader account, so that any new subscriptions I add to my own site are simply synced to my feed reader without needing to be separately added or updated.
The best part of creating such a list and publishing it in a standard format is that you, dear reader, don’t need to spend the several hours I did to find, curate, and compile the list to recreate it for yourself, but you can now download it, modify it if necessary, and have a copy for yourself in just a few minutes. (Toward that end, I’m also happy to update it or make additions if others think it’s missing anyone interesting in the space–feedback, questions, and comments are heartily encouraged.) You can see a human-readable version of the list at this link, or find the computer parse-able/feed reader subscribe-able link here.
To make it explicit, I’ll also note that these lists also help me to keep up with people and changes in the timeframe between conferences.
Anecdotal Domains observations
In executing this OPML project I noticed some interesting things about the Domains community at large (or at least those who are avid enough to travel and attend in person or actively engage online). I’ll lay these out below. Perhaps at a future date, I’ll do a more explicit capture of the data with some analysis.
The largest majority of sites I came across were, unsurprisingly, WordPress-based, which made it much easier to find RSS feeds to read/consume material. I could simply take a domain name and add
/feed/to the end of the URL, and voilà, a relatively quick follow!There are a lot of people whose sites didn’t have obvious links to their feeds. To me this is a desperate tragedy for the open web. We’re already behind the eight ball compared to social media and corporate controlled sites, why make it harder for people to read/consume our content from our own domains? And as if to add insult to injury, the places on one’s website where an RSS feed link/icon would typically live were instead populated by links to corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In a few cases I also saw legacy links to Google+ which ended service and disappeared from the web along with a tremendous number of online identities and personal data on April 2, 2019. (Here’s a reminder to remove those if you’ve forgotten.) For those who are also facing this problem, there’s a fantastic service called SubToMe that has a universal follow button that can be installed or which works well with a browser bookmarklet and a wide variety of feed readers.
I was thrilled to see a few people were using interesting alternate content management systems/site generators like WithKnown and Grav. There were also several people who had branched out to static site generators (sites without a database). This sort of plurality is a great thing for the community and competition in the space for sites, design, user experience, etc. is awesome. It’s thrilling to see people in the Domains space taking advantage of alternate options, experimenting with them, and using them in the wild.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
I’ll note that I did see a few poor souls who were using Wix. I know there was at least one warning about Wix at the conference, but in case it wasn’t stated explicitly, Wix does not support exporting data, which makes any potential future migration of sites difficult. Definitely don’t use it for any extended writing, as cutting and pasting more than a few simple static pages becomes onerous. To make matters worse, Wix doesn’t offer any sort of back up service, so if they chose to shut your site off for any reason, you’d be completely out of luck. No back up + no export = I couldn’t recommend using.
I also noticed a few people had generic domain names that they didn’t really own (and not even in the sense of rental ownership). Here I’m talking about domain names of the form
username.domainsproject.com. While I’m glad that they have a domain that they can use and generally control, it’s not one that they can truly exert full ownership over. (They just can’t pick it up and take it with them.) Even if they could export/import their data to another service or even a different content management system, all their old links would immediately disappear from the web. In the case of students, while it’s nice that their school may provide this space, it is more problematic for data portability and longevity on the web that they’ll eventually lose that institutional domain name when they graduate. On the other hand, if you have something likeyourname.comas your digital home, you can export/import, change content management services, hosting companies, etc. and all your content will still resolve and you’ll be imminently more find-able by your friends and colleagues. This choice is essentially the internet equivalent of changing cellular providers from Sprint to AT&T but taking your phone number with you–you may change providers, but people will still know where to find you without being any the wiser about your service provider changes. I think that for allowing students and faculty the ability to more easily move their content and their sites, Domains projects should require individual custom domains.If you don’t own/control your physical domain name, you’re prone to lose a lot of value built up in your permalinks. I’m also reminded of here of the situation encountered by faculty who move from one university to another. (Congratulations by the way to Martha Burtis on the pending move to Plymouth State. You’ll notice she won’t face this problem.) There’s also the situation of Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins whose institutional website was taken down by his university when the National Security Agency flagged an apparent issue. Fortunately in his case, he had his own separate domain name and content on an external server and his institutional account was just a mirrored copy of his own domain.
Also during my project, I noted that quite a lot of people don’t list their own personal/professional domains within their Twitter or other social media profiles. This seems a glaring omission particularly for at least one whose Twitter bio creatively and proactively claims that they’re an avid proponent of A Domain of One’s Own.
And finally there were a small–but still reasonable–number of people within the community for whom I couldn’t find their domain at all! A small number assuredly are new to the space or exploring it, and so I’d give a pass, but I was honestly shocked that some just didn’t.
(Caveat: I’ll freely admit that the value of Domains is that one has ultimate control including the right not to have or use one or even to have a private, hidden, and completely locked down one, just the way that Dalton chose not to walk in the conformity scene in The Dead Poet’s Society. But even with this in mind, how can we ethically recommend this pathway to students, friends, and colleagues if we’re not willing to participate ourselves?)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ_htuCMCqM?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent&w=840&h=473%5D
Too much Twitter & a challenge for the next Domains Conference
One of the things that shocked me most at a working conference about the idea of A Domain of One’s Own within education where there was more than significant time given to the ideas of privacy, tracking, and surveillance, was the extent that nearly everyone present gave up their identity, authority, and digital autonomy to Twitter, a company which actively represents almost every version of the poor ethics, surveillance, tracking, and design choices we all abhor within the edtech space.
Why weren’t people proactively using their own domains to communicate instead? Why weren’t their notes, observations, highlights, bookmarks, likes, reposts, etc. posted to their own websites? Isn’t that part of what we’re in all this for?!
One of the shining examples from Domains 2019 that I caught as it was occurring was John Stewart’s site where he was aggregating talk titles, abstracts, notes, and other details relevant to himself and his practice. He then published them in the open and syndicated the copies to Twitter where the rest of the conversation seemed to be happening. His living notebook– or digital commmonplace book if you will–is of immense value not only to him, but to all who are able to access it. But you may ask, “Chris, didn’t you notice them on Twitter first?” In fact, I did not! I caught them because I was following the live feed of some of the researchers, educators, and technologists I follow in my feed reader using the OPML files mentioned above. I would submit, especially as a remote participant/follower of the conversation, that his individual posts were worth 50 or more individual tweets. Just the additional context they contained made them proverbially worth their weight in gold.
Perhaps for the next conference, we might build a planet or site that could aggregate all the feeds of people’s domains using their categories/tags or other means to create our own version of the Twitter stream? Alternately, by that time, I suspect that work on some of the new IndieWeb readers will have solidified to allow people to read feeds and interact with that content directly and immediately in much the way Twitter works now except that all the interaction will occur on our own domains.
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
As educators, one of the most valuable things we can and should do is model appropriate behavior for students. I think it’s high time that when attending a professional conference about A Domain of One’s Own that we all ought to be actively doing it using our own domains. Maybe we could even quit putting our Twitter handles on our slides, and just put our domain names on them instead?
Of course, I wouldn’t and couldn’t suggest or even ask others to do this if I weren’t willing and able to do it myself. So as a trial and proof of concept, I’ve actively posted all my interactions related to Domains 2019 that I was interested in to my own website using the tag Domains 2019. At that URL, you’ll find all the things I liked and bookmarked, as well as the bits of conversation on Twitter and others’ sites that I’ve commented on or replied to. All of it originated on my own domain, and, when it appeared on Twitter, it was syndicated only secondarily so that others would see it since that was where the conversation was generally being aggregated. You can almost go back and recreate my entire Domains 2019 experience in real time by following my posts, notes, and details on my personal website.
So, next time around can we make an attempt to dump Twitter!? The technology for pulling it off certainly already exists, and is reasonably well-supported by WordPress, WithKnown, Grav, and even some of the static site generators I noticed in my brief survey above. (Wix obviously doesn’t even come close…)
I’m more than happy to help people build and flesh out the infrastructure necessary to try to make the jump. Even if just a few of us began doing it, we could serve as that all-important model for others as well as for our students and other constituencies. With a bit of help and effort before the next Domains Conference, I’ll bet we could collectively pull it off. I think many of us are either well- or even over-versed in the toxicities and surveillance underpinnings of social media, learning management systems, and other digital products in the edtech space, but now we ought to attempt a move away from it with an infrastructure that is our own–our Domains.
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I’m giving Inoreader a quick go, based in part on Chris’s experiences using it as a Social Reader. The idea of hooking into IFTTT to create various posts on this blog based on what I read appeals to me. Inoreader allows subscribing to OPML feeds instead of importing a static file – allowing for dynamically managing my subscriptions. Chris manages this through his Following page, and I’m planning to do something similar with my Links page, although to get this working I’m going to have to go back through my list and add any RSS feed URLs to the entry.I should take the time to get all my “followings” back in sync during the exercise. I dropped Feedly last year, and I’ve never quite finished porting everything I had there to Aperture/Monocle, or to the Links page. I’ve not synced everything I’ve added to Aperture back to the Links page either. So much housekeeping to catch up on.
A Following Page (aka some significant updates to my Blogroll) boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-f… via @instapaper
follow is a common feature (and often UI button) in silo UIs (like Twitter) that adds updates from that profile (typically a person) to the stream shown in an integrated reader, and sometimes creates a follow post either in the follower’s stream (“… followed …” or “… is following …”) thus visible to their followers, and/or in the notifications of the user being followed (“… followed you”).
Miguel, I use Inoreader. I like the ability to subscribe to a feed that I store on my own site.
I have so many ideas about this. The first one being that it’s awesome.
While WordPress is about websites, it’s also got a lot of pieces of social media sites hiding under the hood and blogrolls are generally precursors of the following/followed piece.
Blogrolls were traditionally stuck on a small widget, but I think they now deserve their own full pages. I’d love to have one with a list of all the people I follow (subscribe to) as well as a similar one with those who follow me (and this could be implemented with webmention receipts of others who have me on their blogroll). I’ve got versions/mock ups of these pages on my own site already as examples.
Next up is something to make these easier to use and import. I’d love a bookmarklet or a browser extension that I could use one click with to have the person’s page imported into my collection of links that parses the page (perhaps the h-card or meta data) and pulls all the data into the link database.
I always loved the fact that the original generated OPML files (even by category) so that I could dump the list of data from my own site into a feed reader and just go. Keeping this would be awesome, but the original hasn’t been updated in so long it doesn’t use the updated OPML spec
If such a curated list is able to be maintained on my site it would also be cool if I could export it in such a way (similar to OPML) as to dovetail it with social readers like Aperture, Yarns, or other Microsub servers to easily transport or mirror the data there.
Here are some related thoughts: https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/10/a-following-page/
I’m happy to chat about other useful/related features relating to this any time!
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follow is a common feature (and often UI button) in silo UIs (like Twitter) that adds updates from that profile (typically a person) to the stream shown in an integrated reader, and sometimes creates a follow post either in the follower’s stream (“… followed …” or “… is following …”) thus visible to their followers, and/or in the notifications of the user being followed (“… followed you”).