Dividing and Conquering the IndieWeb Related Content on My Website

Both for my own benefit as well as for that of others who may be following along, I realize that I’ve been tagging a lot of material on my site with the broad category of “IndieWeb”. Some of it is definitely more significant and content rich than others, but in aggregate it may often seem like a firehose. If you’re following the community relatively closely already, you’ll probably be seeing a lot of redundant material.

As a result, and since it’s easy to do, I’m only going to categorize a much smaller segment of the richer material that I write or which is I deem to be extremely broadly appealing with the IndieWeb category. The remainder of smaller pieces by others, bookmarks, short replies, or other tangential related things (UX, UI, silos, silo quits, etc.) I’m going to use the alternate and separate IndieWeb tag.

Thus if you’re active in the IndieWeb community and only want my IndieWeb related materials then follow the category  and not the tag. If you’re not closely following the community and want everything then I recommend following the content from both the category and the tag. 

With the subtle change this may also help IndieWeb related planets like Aaron Parecki’s https://stream.indieweb.org/ or Malcolm Blaney’s https://unicyclic.com/indieweb/ pick up relevant data without needing to do heavy de-duplication for fear of spamming various channels.

In the coming days/weeks I’ll try to go back into my backlog of posts and re-categorize and re-tag things based on this general scheme.

My direct content:
Category Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/category/indieweb/feed/

Miscellaneous bookmarks, replies, other content I collect for my commonplace book, etc: 
Tag Only | feed: https://boffosocko.com/tag/indieweb/feed/

The firehose of everything IndieWeb related from my site:
Category AND/OR Tag | feed: https://boffosocko.com/?s=indieweb&feed=rss2

And of course I still try to  aggregate and orient most of the important pieces in my IndieWeb Collection.

👓 Customizing WordPress Feeds | Digging Into WordPress

Read Customizing WordPress Feeds | Digging Into WordPress by Jeff Starr (digwp.com)

WordPress feeds enable your visitors to subscribe to your content for use in their favorite feed-reader. For example, subscribing to the main-posts feed and/or the comments feed is a great way for your readers to stay current with all the latest news and content from your website.

With WordPress, you can deliver a wide variety of "Full-text" or "Summary" (partial) feeds in numerous formats, including Atom, RDF, and RSS2. This variety extends the reach of your content by enabling your feeds to be read in more apps, readers, and devices.

As awesome as the default feeds may be, they are also readily customizable using a variety of methods. In addition to WP's built-in ways of configuring your feeds, you can go even further with custom templates, functions, and plugins. In this DigWP post, you'll learn everything you need to customize your feeds with bonus content, recent posts, social media, and much more.

👓 Links, tags, and feeds | Adactio.com

Read Links, tags, and feeds by Jeremy KiethJeremy Kieth (Adactio)
Basically, if something on my site is a list of items, chances are there’s a corresponding RSS feeds. Sometimes there might even be a JSON feed. Hack some URLs to see. Meanwhile, I’ll be linking, linking, linking…

Reply to Tom Critchlow on feeds

Replied to a post by Tom CritchlowTom Critchlow (tomcritchlow.com)
This is a list of the feeds I'm reading. The page auto-updates every 10 minutes or so. Why? Because we need to resist the hyperfeeds and build our own small feeds in the open
I’m curious how you’re generating your particular feeds. For over a year now I’ve been using a simple bookmarklet system to post what I’m reading, listening to, and watching to my own website and providing it as various feeds (RSS, JSON, and a microformats-based hfeed/h-feed) for others as well as syndicating some of these to other sources. (For the RSS feeds just add /feed/ to the end of the links above. You can also chain them like so http://boffosocko.com/kind/read,listen,watch/ to get multiple feeds at once.)

I wish others were providing this type of data outside of the big silos as well, but it obviously needs to be much simpler.

Reply to a post by Ton Zijlstra

Replied to a post by Ton ZijlstraTon Zijlstra (Interdependent Thoughts)
Hey Brad, discovery is why I started publishing the feeds I read as opml for others to explore, and some I read do so too. In 2005 I used to have photos of blog authors I read. Do you publish your feed list somewhere? Tom Critchlow also shows all the content of the feeds he follows on his site. Works well as a discovery mechanism too I found. Maybe I’ll start doing that as well from my TinyTinyRSS instance I installed earlier this week.
Yes, discovery can be an issue, but if one is providing various feeds (RSS, Atom, JSON, or h-feed) of various post types, then it becomes easier to slice and dice the content coming out of particular websites. I’ve got my website set up so that nearly every post format, post kind, category, and tag has its own feed. Ideally, you should be able to extract almost anything you’d want from my site via a custom feed if necessary.

As an example if you want to follow what I’m reading, there’s a feed for that. Or you can listen to the things I’m listening to by subscribing to my fauxcast.

Separately, I maintain a following page which, similar to a blogroll, is a list of sites I’m following along with OPML of the full list or subcategories. Thus if you want to subscribe to the IndieWeb OPML list, it’s there for you. (Even more fun if you’re using functionality like OPML subscriptions as they’re done in Inoreader, so that when I update my list, yours automatically does too.)

If you’re interested in recreating portions of some of this I’ve tried to document a lot of it (for WordPress at least) at https://boffosocko.com/research/indieweb/.

On the topic of RSS audio feeds for The Gillmor Gang

I’ll start off with the fact that I’m a big fan of The Gillmore Gang and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the very bleeding edge of the overlap of technology and media. I’ve been listening almost since the beginning, and feel that digging back into their archives is a fantastic learning experience even for the well-informed. Most older episodes stand up well to the test of time.

The Problem

In the Doc Soup episode of The Gillmor Gang on 5/13/17–right at the very end–Steve Gillmor reiterated, “This isn’t a podcast. This was a podcast. It will always be a podcast, but streaming is where it’s at, and that’s what we’re doing right now.” As such, apparently Tech Crunch (or Steve for that matter) doesn’t think it’s worthwhile to have any sort of subscribe-able feed for those who prefer to listen to a time shifted version of the show. (Ironically in nearly every other episode they talk about the brilliance of the Apple TV, which is–guess what?–a highly dedicated time shifting viewing/listening device.) I suppose that their use of an old, but modified TV test pattern hiding in the og:image metadata on their webpages is all-too-apropos.

It’s been several years (around the time of the Leo Incident?) since The Gillmor Gang has reliably published an audio version, a fact I find painful and frustrating as I’m sure many others do as well. At least once or twice a year, I spend an hour or so searching around to find one, generally to no avail. While watching it live and participating in the live chat may be nice, I typically can’t manage the time slot, so I’m stuck trying to find time to watch the video versions on Tech Crunch. Sadly, looking at four or more old, wrinkly, white men (Steve himself has cautioned, “cover your eyes, it’ll be okay…” without admitting it could certainly use some diversity) for an hour or more isn’t my bailiwick. Having video as the primary modality for this show is rarely useful. To me, it’s the ideas within the discussion which are worthwhile, so I only need a much lower bandwidth .mp3 audio file to be able to listen. And so sadly, the one thing this over-technologized show (thanks again TriCaster!) actually needs from a production perspective is a simple .mp3 (RSS, Atom, JSON feed, or h-feed) podcast feed!

Solutions

In recent batches of searching, I have come across a few useful resources for those who want simple, sweet audio out of the show, so I’m going to document them here.

First, some benevolent soul has been archiving audio copies of the show to The Internet Archive for a while. They can be found here (sorted by upload date): https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22Gillmor+Gang%22&sort=-publicdate

In addition to this, one might also use other search methods, but this should give one most of the needed weekly content. Sadly IA doesn’t provide a useful feed out…

To create a feed quickly, one can create a free Huffduffer account. (This is one of my favorite tools in the world by the way.) They’ve got a useful bookmarklet tool that allows you to visit pages and save audio files and metadata about them to your account. Further, they provide multiple immediate means of subscribing to your saves as feeds! Thus you can pick and choose which Gillmor Gang episodes (or any other audio files on the web for that matter) you’d like to put into your feed. Then subscribe in your favorite podcatcher and go.

For those who’d like to skip a step, Huffduffer also provides iTunes and a variety of other podcatcher specific feeds for content aggregated in other people’s accounts or even via tags on the service. (You can subscribe to what your friends are listening to!) Thus you can search for Gillmor Gang and BOOM! There are quick and easy links right there in the sidebar for you to subscribe to your heart’s content! (Caveat: you might have to filter out a few duplicates or some unrelated content, but this is the small price you’ll pay for huge convenience.)

My last potential suggestion might be useful to some, but is (currently) so time-delayed it’s likely not as useful. For a while, I’ve been making “Listen” posts to my website of things I listen to around the web. I’ve discovered that the way I do it, which involves transcluding the original audio files so the original host sees and gets the traffic, provides a subscribe-able faux-cast of content. You can use this RSS feed to capture the episodes I’ve been listening to lately. Note that I’m way behind right now and don’t always listen to episodes in chronological order, so it’s not as reliable a method for the more avid fan. Of course now that I’ve got some reasonable solutions… I’ll likely catch up quickly and we’re off to the races again.

Naturally none of this chicanery would be necessary if the group of producers and editors of the show would take five minutes to create and host their own version. Apparently they have the freedom and flexibility to not have to worry about clicks and advertising (which I completely appreciate, by the way) to need to capture the other half of the audience they’re surely missing by not offering an easy-to-find audio feed. But I’m dead certain they’ve got the time, ability, and resources to easily do this, which makes it painful to see that they don’t. Perhaps one day they will, but I wouldn’t bet the house on it.

I’ve made requests and been holding my breath for years, but the best I’ve done so far is to turn blue and fall off my chair.

👓 Changes to Improve Your Instagram Feed | Instagram

I’ve got to think that this may not be the best week for making substantive changes to feeds on Facebook owned companies? This doesn’t seem too terribly intrusive as a change, but it still isn’t the linear ordering I wish they’d go back to.