I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly for those who are interested in the topic, but may not have been following as closely:
- Inoreader has been working on a beta product that will make following social feeds in Twitter, Micro.blog, the Fediverse, and even IndieWeb sites with h-entry easier and prettier.
- Kicks Condor has been iterating and doing some interesting work on the FraidyCat reader over the past few weeks.
- Malcolm Blaney has a fantastic little feed reader in his Unicyclic site (not to mention that he’s also got a cool looking IndieWeb as a Service site with i.haza.website that I desperately want to have time to try out).
- The volume of different and interesting content going into IndieWeb.xyz as a discovery hub has been increasing lately.
- I’ve been admiring the discovery/aggregation work of Terry Greene on his OpenLearnerPatchbook and OpenFacultyPatchbook sites within the education space.
- CJ Eller and others have been contributing to Blogging Futures as an extended online conversation in the form of an aggregated blogchain.
And none of this even touches on the excellent continuing work on Microsub readers which continues to astound me. Even with all of this activity, I’m sure I’m missing some fun little gems, so please don’t hesitate to mention them.
A heads up on #indieweb & associated communities by veteran indiewebber Chris Aldrich @ChrisAldrich
Great wrap-up of current IndieWeb/Reader development from Chris!
I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb & related communities, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly for those who are interested in the topic [more…] boffosocko.com/2019/11/21/som…
https://twitter.com/ChrisAldrich/status/1197694536299888640
Great wrap-up of current IndieWeb/Reader development from Chris!
https://t.co/HgxafvRRm5
Chris Aldrich writes, “I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately, so I thought I’d highlight it briefly.” In this post he lists a number of nascent resources, including Inoreader, which will make following social feeds a lot easier, the FraidyCat reader, and continuing work on Microsub readers, among other things. Image: Indieweb.
Great work! Love the concept. I’m testing it out now. Finally gotten around to installing the addon on Firefox. Chris made a nice reference to FraidyCat in his post https://boffosocko.com/2019/11/21/some-recent-work-in-the-feed-reader-and-discovery-space/
via @oldaily boffosocko.com/2019/11/21/som…
Some recent work in the feed reader and discovery space boffosocko.com/2019/11/21/som…
Replied to Five RSS feeds I followed today by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
Jeremy, it’s great to see someone else following peoples’ content directly from their own websites! I was surprised (but maybe not really) to see that some of the feeds you had followed were those from the IndieWeb community! Did you happen to catch Tantek’s talk at WordCamp US (▶️) just before the State of the Word?
Coincidentally, I came to your post while playing some feed reading catch up post-WordCamp US and ran across a status update on Helen’s site:
I noticed one other person (you) had “liked” it and clicked myself down the rabbit hole that led me to your post. There are still apparently some interesting old-school discovery methods on the open web.
If you like following interesting sites, I often find Kicks Condor’s HREFHUNT an great regular source for discovery.
I’m curious what feed reader you use for subscriptions? I wrote a short note the other day about some interesting new developments I’ve been seeing in the feed reader and discovery space.
If you’d like a crash course on IndieWeb, particularly as it’s applied within WordPress, I’m happy to donate some time to get you up to speed on the next few steps beyond what Tantek outlined. If you’d like to follow more, I have a following page which has a large number of IndieWeb-related developers, designers, and sites including an OPML file for following many of them quickly.
In any case, welcome to the IndieWeb! I can’t wait to see how your explorations there turn out; I’d love to hear about your experiences in that space. There are a lot of friendly people around to help you get started or chat if you need it.
And thanks again for tacitly sharing your list of RSS sources. I’d bookmarked Weinberger’s book a short while ago and can’t wait to read it. I’m looking at your other links presently.
Syndicated copies to:
Twitter icon
Some recent work in the feed reader and discovery space boffosocko.com/2019/11/21/som…
Read Publicly Sharing RSS Libraries i.e. My RSS Feeds are Yours by Kevin Smokler (Kevin Smokler)
–highlighted December 08, 2019 at 04:26PM
This is the third time I’ve heard about RSS coming back in almost as many days, and this not long after highlighting some recent advancements in feed readers. (One of the others was Jeremy Keith at this weekend’s IndieWebCamp in San Francisco.) Kevin highlights a fantastic reason why using a feed reader can be important and more healthy than relying on the social aggregation algorithms in your not-so-friendly-neighborhood social media platforms.
Like Kevin and Matt, I think it’s a nice thing to share one’s sources and feeds. A while back I created a following page where I share a huge list of the people and sources I’m following regularly via RSS feeds, Atom Feeds, JSONFeed, and even h-feed. Everytime I follow or unfollow a source, the page auto-updates. I also provide OPML files (at the bottom of that page) so you can import them into your own feed reader. If you’re using a feed reader like Inoreader that supports OPML subscription, you can input the OPML file location and your copy of my feeds will automatically update when I make changes.
Happy reading!
Syndicated copies to:
Twitter icon
Reading.am
<!-- Generator: Sketch 60.1 (88133) - https://sketch.com -->
Hypothes.is icon
Created with Sketch.
Syndicated copies:
I love that WordPress has some built-in functionality within WordPress.com and many themes to allow one to easily build and display a social media menu on a website. Frequently these are displayed in headers, footers, or even sidebars of websites. I have one in the footer of my website that looks like this:
The RSS icon and links are automatically generated for me by simply putting in any RSS feed that has a
/feed/path in its URL.While this is great, clicking on the RSS icon link goes to a page with a hodgepodge of markup, content, and meta data and typically requires multiple additional steps and prior advanced knowledge of what those steps should be to do something useful with that link/page. In other words the UI around this (and far too many other RSS icons) is atrocious, unwelcoming, and generally incomprehensible to the general public. (Remember those long and elaborate pages newspapers and magazines had to define RSS and how to use it? It’s a HUGE amount of cognitive load compared to social media following UI in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. which just works™.)
Fortunately Julien Genestoux and friends have created an elegant solution in SubToMe, described as a Universal Follow button, that is open, non-intrusive, protects privacy, and works with virtually any feed reader. It uses some JavaScript to create a pop-up that encourages users to use any of various popular feed readers (or the one of their choice). The UI flow for this is far superior and useful for the casual web-user and has the potential to help along the renaissance of feed readers and consumption of web content in a way that allows readers more control over their reading than social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram that mandate their own proprietary reading algorithms.
While one can embed SubToMe directly into a website (I do this with a Follow button in my site’s top right sidebar, for example) or using Julien and Matthias‘ WordPress plugin, I suspect it would be far easier if some of this functionality were built directly into WordPress core in some way. Or alternately, is there an easy way to put data into one of the common fields (or wrap it) in these social links menus, so that when a user clicks on the relatively ubiquitous RSS icon in those social links menus, that it triggers a SubToMe-like subscription workflow?
I would suspect that WordPress.com might try something like this and naturally recommend their own beautiful reader, which was relatively recently redesigned by Jan Cavan Boulas et al., using a bit of functionality which SubToMe kindly provides.
I think that the simplification of this RSS reader subscription workflow would go a LONG way toward making it more successful and usable. It could also provide massive influence on increasing the use of feed readers in general and the WordPress Reader in particular.
I do note that there is a form of follow functionality built into WordPress.com-based websites, but that’s locked into the .com platform or needs a plugin for self-hosted sites. It also only benefits the WordPress.com reader rather than other readers in the space. Some of the issue here is to fix the NASCAR problem of needing dozens of plugin solutions and widgets to have what amounts to the same functionality on each platform in existence. I think it’s far more important for the open web to be able to do these sorts of simple functionalities in a more standardized way to give users more freedom, flexibility and choice. The standardization makes it easier for competition in a market economy to gradually improve this sort of user interface over time.
If someone did undertake some development in this area, I’d give bonus development points on this for:
Is there a way to do this without JavaScript to get around the js;dr potentiality?
Is there a way for this to find not only the common main and comments feeds for posts, but also for the affiliated
/category/feed/and/tag/feed/ taxonomy feeds on posts to allow for subscriptions to niche areas of websites that cover multiple broad topics? I know David Shanske has done some work on feed discovery in WordPress recently for the Yarns Microsub Server that may be useful here.Is there a way to talk major browsers into adding this into their products?
I wonder if Jeffrey Paul, Jeremy Felt, Matthias Pfefferle, Jeffrey Zeldman or others may have some ideas about broader implementation and execution of something like this for improved UI in these areas?
Syndicated copies to: Twitter icon
Deze week vloog voorbij voor me. Er speelde een hoop buiten het scherm dus ik hou het kort hier. Kijk in elk geval nog even naar de video van Sacha Baron Cohen die de Silicon Valley Cowboys op hun plaats zet. Een krachtig statement!
Zet het in je agenda, Open Belgium, 6 maart in Hasselt. Een jaarlijks event over open data en open kennisdeling.
On with the show!
Uit de geweldige presentatie Rage Against The Content Machine.
Check in elk geval dit artikel! 👇
Principle 7 – Be creators and collaborators on the Web – Contract for the Web
Ja ja ja… Ik vind het ook vreemd dat het Contract for the Web is ondertekend door onder andere Facebook en Google. En ik vraag me af wat de consequenties zijn als je je niet aan dit contract houdt. Maar soit, het initiatief is de moeite waard en ik hoop dat het een breder gevolg krijgt!
Meer toffe links 🔗
Nostalgia Is Gross, But That’s What I’ve Got Now That I’m Blogging Every Day — Elan Morgan — elanmorgan.com
Herkenbaar! Met al dat bloggen wat ik om me heen zie, hoe langzaam weer kleine netwerkjes ontstaan. Het brengt wat nostalgie. Dat is niet erg.
Some recent work in the feed reader and discovery space — boffosocko.com
I’ve noticed a lot of quiet, but very interesting and heartening feed reader and discovery work going on in the IndieWeb and related communities lately.
[tweet https://twitter.com/bb/status/1196267156268298241%5D
Dear so-called “social” websites.
Your catchword is “share”, but you don’t want us to share. You want to keep us within your walled gardens. That’s why you’ve been removing RSS links from webpages, hiding them deep on your website, or removed feeds entirely, replacing it with crippled or demented proprietary API. FUCK YOU.
You’re not social when you hamper sharing by removing feeds.
Get your shit together: Put RSS/Atom back in.
Je kunt zelf aan de slag met de open source software RSS Bridge, of je gebruikt mijn installatie. Bouw je eigen RSS feeds van Twitter, Instagram en Pinterest accounts!
Of gebruik Fraidycat
Fraidycat is a browser extension for Firefox or Chrome. (Just those right now – it’s brand-new, quite experimental.) I use it to follow people (hundreds) on whatever platform they choose – Twitter, a blog, YouTube, even on a public TiddlyWiki.
Volgende week weer meer! Tot die tijd, blog on!
<!–
–>