March, 2020 | Chris Aldrich

Own Your Followers: Redirecting Feeds on the Web

Every four months or so I go through and tidy up many of my feeds. Invariably a dozen or so feeds die out, but I’m noticing a recurring quirk. Most of them are within my IndieWeb folder!

A lot of the changes seem to be related to people who are shifting from one shiny toy or project to another. They all seem to say something like:

Hey Mom! Look at my fancy new static site that builds in 0.001 seconds!
Can you believe what Drupal supports in the IndieWeb now? See ya!
I’ve moved back to good ol’ WordPress. Ahhh…
Micro.blog is awesome and requires such little maintenance. I migrated… while on vacation… in the wilderness… from my cell phone!!!
Wheee!

They’re often redirecting all their old URLs to the new site, but the one URL they commonly neglect is to create a redirect for their primary RSS, Atom, JSON or other feeds to their new feed structure. This means that the feed goes dead, and I (and others) have to notice it, then revive it. For some who simply have h-feed structures on their home page things may continue apace, particularly for the Microsub readers out there, though I haven’t been using those for as long to see as many issues.

Why are you doing all that work and making your followers do the extra manual work to go back and resubscribe?! Over the past four or five years there have been fifty or more people I’ve seen do this dance (some multiple times and even a few every 4 months or so). I totally get why they do it (because why not?!) But there should be a better way of keeping track of our major URLs and redirecting them properly.

From a continuity or even business perspective, this could be an even bigger thing as sites will likely spend a lot of time building an audience and could potentially throw it all away with the flip of a switch. I’ll be the first to admit that most of these people may not have a lot of people following them via RSS or similar means, but still?! It seems like at least once a week there’s some big newspaper, magazine, or corporate site I want to follow and I have to complain about finding their feeds. Why would you want to start all over again?

If a social media framing is easier for some, it’s the equivalent of changing your Twitter handle for your account with a hundred thousand followers to something new with no followers instead of creating a dummy account and swapping the usernames so you can have the new name, but keep all your followers.

There are also a few serial bloggers/writers who will start up a project for 3-6 months and build a following only to shut things down though they’ll keep the domain name. Why not redirect that primary domain to one of their other or newer projects and redirect those feeds as well? You’ve spent the time building an audience, why wouldn’t you want to keep it? Am I missing something fundamental here?

We often say, own your online identity, own your domain, and own your data. Perhaps we need to remember to also “own” our friends, family, followers, our community, or more broadly our audience?

Until then, I’m still flailing away out here. Manually changing your feeds in my reader…

A Micropub client idea: Liveblogging!

I’ve been thinking about Twitter threads, tweetstorms and liveblogging for the better part of the week, and last night I had an idea that has stuck with me.

With the idea of Micropub allowing the ability to create updates, why couldn’t one build (or even modify) a Micropub client to create an interface to write relatively short updates with (date and timestamps to appear in the text) that, when published, concatenated that new piece of content into a longer piece of running text to send an updated Micropub request to an article or note on a site to allow that article to become an updating liveblog post?

I’m a bit shocked that no one has done it before now, and I suspect that one of the pre-existing micropub clients out there could probably add the functionality as a one day project at an upcoming IndieWebCamp.

I don’t suspect it was the sort of Micropub functionality that Kevin Marks was thinking about doing this weekend, but Noter Live comes pretty close to having a lot of this sort of UI already. Instead of just doing a single Micropub post at the end of a Twitter thread, why couldn’t it do an initial post at the beginning and then update the site with subsequent updates as it goes along while also acting as a means of syndicating the posts to Twitter and then returning those Twitter permalinks as syndication links on the user’s own site?

Bookmarked Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: A reality rooted perspective by Frank Emmert-Streib, Olli Yli-Harja, Matthias Dehmer (arXiv.org)

We are used to the availability of big data generated in nearly all fields of science as a consequence of technological progress. However, the analysis of such data possess vast challenges. One of these relates to the explainability of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning methods. Currently, many of such methods are non-transparent with respect to their working mechanism and for this reason are called black box models, most notably deep learning methods. However, it has been realized that this constitutes severe problems for a number of fields including the health sciences and criminal justice and arguments have been brought forward in favor of an explainable AI. In this paper, we do not assume the usual perspective presenting explainable AI as it should be, but rather we provide a discussion what explainable AI can be. The difference is that we do not present wishful thinking but reality grounded properties in relation to a scientific theory beyond physics.

Checked into VONS

Definitely a lot of stockpiling going on here. All the shelf-stable foods, basic medicines, and paper goods have been looted. All the checkouts were open save one and all of the lines went the entire length of the store. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grocery store so busy or have such lines.