/feed/ to the end of those URLs), I’ve made a few custom feeds for aggregated content.
However, knowing that some feeds are broadly available from my site isn’t always either obvious or the same as being able to use them easily–one might think of it as a(n) (technical) accessibility problem. I thought I’d make a few tweaks to smooth out that user interface and hopefully provide a better user experience–especially since I’m publishing everything from my website first rather than in 30 different places online (which is a whole other UI problem for those wishing to follow me and my content). Since most pages on my site have a “Follow Me” button (courtesy of SubToMe), I just needed to have a list of generally useful feeds to provide it. While SubToMe has some instructions for suggesting lists of feeds, I’ve never gotten it to work the way I expected (or feed readers didn’t respect it, I’m not sure which?) But since most feed readers have feed discovery built in as a feature, I thought I’d leverage that aspect. Thus I threw into the <head> of my website a dozen or so links from some of the most typical feeds people may be most interested in from my site. Now you can click on the follow button, choose your favorite feed reader, and then your reader should provide you with a large list of feeds which you might want to subscribe. These now broadly include the full feed, a comments feed, feeds for all the individual kinds (bookmarks, likes, favorites, replies, listens, etc.) but potentially more useful: a “microblog feed” of all my status-related updates and a “linkblog feed” for all my link-related updates (generally favorites, likes, reads, and bookmarks).
Some of these sub-feeds may be useful in some feed readers which don’t yet have the ability for you to choose within the reader what you’d like to see. I suspect that in the future social readers will allow you to subscribe to my primary firehose or comments feeds, which are putting out about 85 and 125 posts a week right now, and you’ll be able to subscribe to those, but then within their interface be able to choose individual types by means of filters to more quickly see what I’ve been bookmarking, reading, listening to or watching. Then if you want to curl up with some longer reads, filter by articles; or if you just want some quick hits, filter by notes. And of course naturally you’ll be able to do this sort of filtering across your network too. I also suspect some of them will build in velocity filters and friend-proximity filters so that you’ll be able to see material from people who don’t post as often highlighted or to see people’s content based on your personal rankings or categories (math friends, knitting circle, family, reading group, IndieWeb community, book club, etc.). I’ve recently been enjoying Kicks Condor’s FraidyCat reader which touches on some of this work though it’s not what most people would consider a full-featured feed reader but might think of as a filter/reader dashboard sort of product.
Perhaps sometime in the future I’ll write a bit of code so that each individual page on my site that you visit will provide feeds in the header for all the particular categories, tags, and post kinds that appear on that page?That might make a clever, and simple little plugin, though honestly that’s the sort of code I would expect CMSes like WordPress to provide out of the box. Of course, perhaps broader adoption of microformats and clever readers will obviate the need for all these bits?
What you use for feed reading? Is there a reader that fits well with IndieWeb principles?
I dunno about “fits well with IndieWeb principles” but I do know that I’ve used Mozilla Thunderbird as my feed reader for many years now.
There are a lot of IndieWeb readers or Microsub clients that fit the bill pretty well. One of their key features for me is that they support Micropub functionality, so you can post your reply directly in the reader and it will send a copy of it to your own website which can also then send a webmention to the original post.
I’ve done some work to adapt Inoreader to support some more IndieWeb-like functionality which you may find interesting.
@c Last night as I realized my tag archives didn’t have their tag feed
links included and dove in to fix that, I had a similar thought to yours about making the page for a post include the feedlinks for the categories and tags to which that post belonged. A project to come…Bill, I’m not sure I follow your question. What problem are you trying to solve?
If take a stab and read it as “how could one subscribe to a subset of content from a WordPress website”, then it helps to know that the core functionality of WordPress automatically includes feeds for all the taxonomies (and a variety of combinations) on a site. This means that all your tags, categories, Post Formats, Post Kinds (if you have those) all have individual feeds. Thus if you wanted to separate your “featured” longer reads from your status updates, checkins, likes, or other post types, you could add a specific category or tag to those posts and they’d have a feed you could provide people with to subscribe. If you added “featured” as the tag, then the feed from your site would be:
https://billbennett.co.nz/tag/featured/feed/
Since you’re using post kinds, you already have an “article” feed at:
https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/article/
All of your top level menu items look like they have feeds associated with them, for example:
https://billbennett.co.nz/telecommunications/feed/
Post Kinds will also allow you to create aggregate feeds based on type so you could provide a linkblog feed of things you’ve liked, favorited, read, and bookmarked (if all of these are enabled on your site) with a link like:
https://billbennett.co.nz/kind/like,favorite,read,bookmark/feed/
It’s a bizarre hodgepodge of both Post Kinds and a category, but you can also specify exotic things like https://boffosocko.com/?kind=note&cat=945 which are things on my sites which are notes and categorized as reads. Simply throw in feed (to the right spot) for https://boffosocko.com/feed/?kind=note&cat=945/ et voilà! Something like this could allow you to tag/categorize your notes, likes, etc. and still not “spam” readers with them because they might be subscribed to your content with the taxonomies of “article” and “telecommunications”, for example.
Some additional illustrative examples include the fact that for most/all of the post kind links on my own homepage one could add /feed/ to the end of those URLs and get a subscribeable feed out of them. I also have some examples on my Subscribe page.
I’ve written a bit about some of this at “Cleaning up feeds, easier social following, and feed readers“, which also includes some links to prior work which may be helpful.
Here’s some additional detail from the WordPress Codex that may be helpful as well: https://wordpress.org/support/article/wordpress-feeds/#finding-your-feed-url